The ship was called the Resurgam, meaning “I shall rise again,” which proved to be a slightly unfortunate name, as the ship sank in a storm in the Irish Sea three months after it was launched in 1878 and never did rise again. Neither, come to that, did Garrett. Discouraged by his experiences, he gave up preaching and inventing, and moved to Florida, where he took up farming. That, too, proved a disaster, and he finished his disappointing and relentlessly downhill life as a foot soldier in the American army during the Spanish-American War before dying of tuberculosis, in New York City in 1902.
