CHAPTER XX.

THE SUEZ CANAL. “Let the wide world his praises sing Where Tagus and Euphratus spring, And from the Danube’s frosty banks to those Where, from an unknown head, great Nilus flows.” —_Roscommon._ The greatest artificial waterway constructed up to the present time has been the Suez Canal. Longer canals have been made both in Europe and in the United States, but no canal hitherto completed has been built of the same large dimensions, nor has any other canal cost so considerable a sum of money. It is not too much to say that no other waterway has been more important to commerce, nor has any other been attended with the same momentous and permanent political consequences. It is satisfactory to be able to add that few waterways of modern times have been so successful from a financial point of view. The story of the Suez Canal has been often told. It has always, however, lacked completeness, which indeed is impossible of attainment in reference to an undertaking that is making history at the same rapid rate that this has done, and is still doing. It is remarkable that some of the earliest canals of which we have any record were constructed between Suez and the Nile during the existence of the eighteenth dynasty (about fifteen centuries before Christ). But the communication thus opened was not apparently found of much service, seeing that the canals were allowed to fill up and fall into such decay as to compel their abandonment.[138] Another canal, probably over the same route, was opened some centuries later by Pharaoh Necho, with a view to facilitating the communication between Assyria and Egypt, which was then frequent and considerable. This canal was open, and in regular use, during the reign of Darius. Ptolemy Philadelphus, finding the waterway neglected, reopened and completed it from the Pelusiæ, or Eastern Branch of the Nile, near Bubastes, to Arsinoe, on the Red Sea. This canal is stated by Strabo to have been 50 yards wide and 1000 stadia in length. The Romans, to whom this highway was known as the Trajanus Amnis, improved and widened it. At a later period the Arabs, after conquering Egypt, developed the canal for the purpose of carrying grain from Egypt to the holy cities of Mecca and Medinah, and it was so employed for a century and a quarter. It has been contended, as an argument against the Suez canal, that if it were practicable to keep open a great waterway between the two oceans, the canal which passed through so many vicissitudes would not have been allowed again and again to become obliterated, nor would cargoes have been discharged at Myos Hormos, the great port at the entrance to the Gulf of Suez, and carried overland to the Nile, a distance of some 80 miles, at a time when the canal appears to have been available, if it had been entirely satisfactory. But there are several considerations entering into the question of transport at that time that cannot be very readily appreciated now. The camel was then the ship of the desert to a much greater extent than it has been in more modern times. The knowledge of navigation was far from perfect, and the dangers of the Red Sea, which are now trifling, were then deemed so formidable that vessels discharged their cargoes in the harbour of Massowah, whence they were sent 1500 miles across the desert on the backs of camels, rather than face the Red Sea route _viâ_ Suez, although, as the canal was then open, a vessel from the east might have made use of it and reached Alexandria or Ostia without breaking bulk. To our own times, and in the light of our fuller knowledge, this seems to be little short of incredible. Many centuries later than the time of which we write, St. Jerome, in speaking of the Red Sea, declared that mariners who had been six months at sea deemed themselves fortunate if they had traversed its full length, and reached a port of safety.[139] The first recorded attempt at the construction of a canal was made in this very region, Neco, the son of Psammiticus, having connected the Gulf of Heroopolis with the Pelusiac branch of the Nile at Bubastis (Zigazig).[140] The narrow channel which here connected the Gulf of Heroopolis with the Red Sea, appears to have been closed by an upheaval of the soil. At the southern end of the gulf (Bitter Lakes) goods were landed and carried onward to the Red Sea. Darius subsequently dug a canal along the line of the ancient junction of the Gulf of Heroopolis with the Red Sea, as shown in the annexed sketch by the letters A A. This canal, which was also called the canal of the Pharaohs and of Trajan, is understood to have finally disappeared in the eighth century. [Illustration: THE CANAL OF RAMESES.] The last attempt at a passage from the Red Sea to the Nile was made by Amru ibn el Aas, the general of the Caliph Omar, who conquered Egypt in the seventh century. A great famine reigning in Mecca, Amru was ordered to take measures for forwarding thenceforth grain from Egypt by the quickest route. “He dug a canal of communication from the Nile to the Red Sea, a distance of 80 miles, by which provisions might be conveyed to the Arabian shores. This canal had been commenced by Trajan, the Roman emperor,”[141] who, the Pelusiac arm of the Nile being no longer navigable, joined his canal to the river at Cairo, instead of Bubastis or Zigazig. This occurred in the year of the great mortality A.D. 639, and in 767 the Caliph Abou Giaffar el Mansour, to prevent food being sent to the insurgents of Medina, caused the canal to be destroyed by filling up the junction of Neco’s canal and the Bitter Lakes. The winds and the sands completed the work, and produced the ridge of Serapeum, which is believed by some to cover the site of the ancient city of Heroopolis. The engineers of Ptolemy II. advised him not to cut a canal across the isthmus, because the land, being lower than the level of the Red Sea, would be laid under water; but that prince turned the difficulty by causing flood-gates to be erected at proper points, in order to keep back the waters of the sea at high tides, and those of the canal at low ebb, so that navigation became possible both ways. Now, this opening, in as perfect state of preservation at certain places, according to M. de Lesseps, as it was in the eighth century, really forms part, to the extent of four kilometres, near Shaloof, of the present canal, which opens into the Red Sea by means of sluices having a fall of three metres (9 feet), being the altitude of the mouth above the average level of the sea. This seems to prove that eleven centuries ago the sea was about as much higher as it is now, so that the isthmus has, indeed, experienced an upheaval. At the time that the Hebrews quitted Egypt the rock of Shaloof, the last offshoot of the Geneffay Hills, must have been entirely under water. When, by the gradual rising of the land, the top of this rock emerged from the water, it became covered with an accumulation of earthy or sandy matter, brought by wind and tide, until a barrier was formed which could only be swept over at high water. The lakes were consequently precluded from experiencing any ebb or flow. The slow upheaval of the soil continuing, the _terra firma_ of Shaloof assumed a permanent shape, and the requirements of navigation led to the idea of cutting a canal. Herodotus speaks of it as having been open in his time: this fixes its date at 450 years B.C. It was repaired under the Ptolemies, improved during the Roman domination by a supply of water from Cairo, dredged by the Caliph Omar in the seventh century, and abandoned to decay in the eighth. From this period, to the beginning of the present century, save for half-hearted projects of the Venetians, and, later, of the Porte itself, we hear no more of the question till Napoleon invaded Egypt, and ordered an immediate survey of the isthmus with a view to the establishment of a maritime canal.[142] Napoleon was himself no mean engineer, and he employed on this work a man who seems to have possessed a remarkable grasp of the problem presented for solution, but who, nevertheless, shared the then common impression that the Red Sea was at a higher level than the Mediterranean, and that to join the waters of the two seas would be to submerge a great part of the country. This man was M. Lépère. He made a survey of the route between the two seas, and declared that he had found the Red Sea to be 30 feet above the Mediterranean.[143] When Napoleon Buonaparte, at the time of the French expedition to Egypt, ordered a complete survey to be made of the isthmus between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea by M. Lépère, the latter proposed that vessels should ascend the Nile to Bubastis, and pass by a canal, 18 feet deep and 77 miles long, to the basin of the Bitter Lakes. Thence, a second canal, 13 miles in length, was to lead to the Red Sea. The cost of this undertaking was calculated at 691,000_l._, but additional works in the mouth and bed of the Nile, and the restoration of the canals of Faroumah, Chebri-el-Koum, and Alexandria, was estimated to raise the cost to 1,200,000_l._ Surveys of the country were afterwards made by Captain Chesney, in 1830, and by Mr. Robert Stephenson in 1847, with a view to the opening up of a waterway between the two seas. Captain Chesney reported on the Isthmus of Suez as offering great facilities for the construction of a canal. “There are,” he said, “no serious difficulties; not a mountain intervenes, scarcely what deserves to be called a hillock.” Stephenson, however, who personally examined the ground, considered that any canal made across the isthmus should be provided with locks, as the absence of current would otherwise allow of silting. Admiral Spratt, ten years later, came to the same conclusion as Stephenson, but both were opposed by M. de Lesseps, who, in his final plan, resolved upon a dead level canal for the whole distance of 103 miles. The plan ultimately adopted has no doubt been the most advantageous to commerce, inasmuch as it has facilitated the time and labour involved in passing vessels through the canal. It has, however, necessitated a considerable annual outlay for dredging. Nearly two millions of cubic yards of material have had to be removed in a single year from the bed of the canal, in order to maintain the requisite depth. In advocating his plan for the construction of a canal across the Isthmus of Suez, M. de Lesseps calculated that in 1851 the value of the commerce with countries to the east of Egypt was a hundred millions sterling, and the tonnage employed in its transport was four millions of tons.[144] This figure he raised in 1855 to sixteen millions of tons; but he was content to adopt six millions as the tonnage that would represent the Eastern trade, of which he reckoned that one-half would make use of the canal. These were described by the ‘Quarterly Review’ as “preposterous speculations,” and figures were quoted from the ‘Revue des deux Mondes’ to prove their fallacy. In the latter periodical, M. Baude had calculated the total trade with the East at that time (1850-53) at 1¾ millions, and M. Dupontès at two millions of tons. The calculations of M. de Lesseps do not seem to have been stated with much precision. There is no statement of the description of tonnage referred to, which is of very material importance. If gross tonnage was meant, then the estimate of M. de Lesseps was realised five years after the canal had been opened. If net tonnage, then it was not reached until