Originally called the Leviathan it was the brain child of engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Though he probably planned for the ship to be solely steam powered worries of the time caused it to be equipped with six masts in addition to the two paddlewheels and a huge screw. The Great Eastern was the largest ship afloat and was not exceeded in length until 1899 by the Oceanic. It weighed 18,000 tons, was 700 feet long, and 85 feet wide.

The building and operation was a series of disasters. The ship was so heavy that it took four tries to get it launched. On the first shakedown sail in 1859 an explosion blew off the forward funnel. Soon afterward Brunel died of a stroke, many say it was contributed to by the stress of building the gigantic ship.

Though it was intended for the long Australia and Far East route with Britain with few stops it was put on a New York and South Hampton one after the opening of the Suez Canal. It never had enough paying passengers. In 1864 it was sold and converted to lay transatlantic cable. It did a good job at this task and from 1865-1874, the Great Eastern submerged 5 Atlantic lines and repaired 4 of them in mid-ocean.

In the end it was falling into disrepair and was sold for scrap in 1885. The breaking up took 18 months. One finally interesting note, a body was found between the ship's double hulls. This macabre find was blamed by the superstitious for the Great Eastern's bad luck over the years.

It's 11:35 Newfoundland Standard Time. Stay tuned for the Great Eastern: Newfoundland's Cultural Magazine, with Paul Moth. You are listening to the Broadcasting Corporation of Newfoundland, 520 on the long wave.

The Great Eastern was the flagship radio programme of the Broadcasting Corporation of Newfoundland until it was cancelled in 1999 after an illustrious run of many years. As Newfoundland's "cultural magazine", it was the programme's mandate to keep a finger on the cultural pulse of its home dominion, and it did so in many ways, from broadcasting local music to airing radio plays by Newfoundland authors, documentaries about colonial Newfoundland's imperialist activities overseas, and coverage of local events like the annual Royal St. John's Regatta.

The show was named in honour of the ship that laid the first successful trans-Atlantic cable in 1866. The ship was designed as a passenger vessel but never met with much success in that regard; her only runs as a passenger ship were plagued by bad luck and near-disaster. She was sold in 1885 for a pittance and used as an enormous floating billboard for three years, then sold to a scrapping firm for even less and dismantled. Buried inside the ship's double hull—constructed that way for sturdiness—was the skeleton of one of the workers who had built her. According to legend, he was the source of the ship's bad luck, having cursed her when he realised he would die inside her hull.

The radio programme by the same name had much better luck. From its inception until July 15, 1995—when the old technology was replaced—it was broadcast from the BCN's coal-powered transmitter; after that day the consensus is that the show was never as warm-sounding, and that this was the beginning of the end. After nearly a century of keeping Newfoundland up-to-date on her cultural goings-on, the show ended its run to great disappointment in 1999. It is sorely missed.

Also, the entire thing was an elaborate joke.

At times, the Great Eastern certainly sounds a lot like some of the more pedestrian daytime programming you can hear on CBC Radio 1. It has an in-house book reviewer; it has a political panel to discuss hot-button issues; it has a contest, "What's That Noise In Newfoundland?"; its content is interspersed with plugs for programmes to be broadcast later in the day; it has all sorts of correspondents to keep its audience abreast of the province's cultural goings-on; and it has a pleasant-voiced host, not unlike Jeff Collins or Hal Niedzviecki.

But the reviewer only discusses books that don't exist. The political panel is made up of shady characters who hold ludicrous positions on ridiculous issues. The contest is all but unwinnable, its noises unidentifiable. The programmes that are plugged are fake, the correspondents cover fictitious events that are impossibly outlandish, and the host is absolutely straight-faced as he introduces every bit of nonsense.

The show's parallel universe is based in fact; there was a Broadcasting Corporation of Newfoundland, but it was incorporated into the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1949. One of the old station's last acts was to cover the referendum that led to its demise.

The Great Eastern was broadcast on CBC Radio from 1994-1999. Its creative team featured Ed Riche (who has written two very fine novels set in Newfoundland), Mack Furlong (who acted in the film version of Rare Birds, one of Riche's novels), Glen Tilley, and Steven Palmer. All of them also played various characters on the show, with Furlong starring as host Paul Moth.

Some of the Great Eastern's finer moments include exposing the popular pseudo-science "economology" for the cult that it is—even though, at a séance, it appeared to be endorsed by the spirit of Karl Marx; covering a campaign to have stupidity recognised as a disability; exposing the creation of flesh-eating proto-humans at the Newfoundland Eugenics Institute; a celebrity testing facility to employ seal hunters who are out of work; appraisal workshops with an unscrupulous antique dealer; and Paul Moth's shoe fetish, alluded to repeatedly in ways that become more and more painfully awkward to listen to.

I've never heard anything else like it.

I was born and raised in western Canada, so Newfoundland is mostly a mystery to me. My high-school history classes have stood me in good stead during conversations about Québec and French-Canadian nationalism, or the Numbered Treaties and the settlement of the West, or absentee landlords in the Maritime colonies and the politics at the Confederation conferences in 1867. But Newfoundland declined entry into Confederation in the 1869 election and remained independent from Canada for the next sixty years, a period that my high-school history classes glossed over. It was a British colony until 1907 and an independent dominion from then until 1934, at which point it returned to British hands, under the control of the Commission of Government.

A referendum in 1948 had 52% of Newfoundlanders voting to enter Confederation with Canada. Many of the "for" votes were solicited by Joey Smallwood, who became the province's first premier. Whether he was a hero who salvaged his faltering country or a villain who betrayed it seems to depend upon whom you ask.

Recent Canadian history is full of well-intentioned attempts to compensate for past injustices. Not long ago, for instance, the federal government signed a deal with survivors of abuse in residential schools and their families, giving them financial compensation for the ordeal. In the late 1980s, a compensation package was given to survivors of the Japanese internment camps in World War II. More recently, Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology to Chinese-Canadians affected by a head tax that was levied against them from 1885 to 1923. We entertain Québec separatists in Parliament and abide by that province's draconian language laws when we visit, in the name of preserving their culture.

Newfoundland, while not precisely much-maligned, is often misunderstood or dismissed as backward. The federal government declared a moratorium on cod-fishing in Atlantic Canada in 2003, leaving many fishermen unemployed; the seal hunt, a long-time viable alternative source of income for the impoverished, is universally denounced by animal-rights activists who characterise Newfoundlanders as barbaric. The province's economy is a terrible mess, and it accepts annual equalisation payments from the federal government; columnist Margaret Wente thinks this makes Newfoundland "the world's most scenic welfare ghetto". And Newfoundlanders are often the punch-lines of jokes to that effect—you've heard of how to confuse a Newfie; you put his welfare cheque in his boot.

Newfoundland's independence—its otherness—is all over the Great Eastern. One of its running jokes it its broadcast to Iceland; many shows begin with separate salutations for Canadian listeners, Icelandic listeners, and Newfoundland listeners, each greeted in his own language. The show is broadcast "from coast to coast in Newfoundland"—as opposed to the CBC radio broadcasts it parodies, which are heard "from coast to coast". The Newfoundland noises are hilariously unrecognisable. Hardly anyone outside Newfoundland would know or care that the BCN hadn't existed as such for years. And one of the reasons cited for the Great Eastern's demise is that it was not accessible enough, that keeping up with the in-jokes and satire asked too much of its listeners.

The more I listen to old episodes of the show—and I am currently listening to very little else—the more I want to apologise to its creators and their province on behalf of the rest of the country for having missed the point again. (It's hard to make amends when amends aren't being asked for.) It was broadcast before my time—I never heard it on the radio, only as mp3s archived online—but its absence makes me melancholy, even though it's also made me laugh harder than anything else I can remember.

"To the lifeboats, Seeker! We're staying with the Ship." -- from the Great Eastern creative team's final message to their listeners, 1999.

The entire series is archived online here, along with a lot of supplementary material. Go listen to it right now. I'll wait.