The Suez Canal

The Separation of the African Continent from that of Asia, and the formation of a direct waterway between the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans by cutting the Isthmus of Suez, has been often and justly spoken of as one of the most daring achievements of the present century. With less justice is it adduced to prove our immense superiority over ancient engineers, in works of great public utility. The canalisation of the Isthmus is no modern project. It had been commenced whilst the Israelites were yet in Egypt, and probably formed part of their labours at the period of the Exodus. It was carried forward almost to completion by Pharaoh Necho, who defeated king Josiah in the great battle of Megiddo (2 Chronicles xxxv. 2-24). And a hundred years later it was finished by the Persian conquerors of Egypt.

It would, however, be an error to suppose that M. Lesseps and his associates simply inherited the ideas of the Pharaohs. Their aims and their methods were altogether different. Each adopted the best means available for attaining his object. A consideration of what those objects were, will explain the course pursued by them.

The Suez Canal is solely designed to facilitate communication between the Eastern and the Western Continents. For this purpose all that is needed is the construction of a channel wide and deep enough for ocean-going steamers, through the narrow neck of land which divides the Mediterranean from the Red Sea, thus avoiding the long détour by the Cape of Good Hope. But the Egyptians were not a maritime people. To navigate the Nile was enough for them. A mere ship canal would be worthless to a nation which had no foreign commerce, and it might indeed be used for the invasion of their territory by a seafaring enemy. It must serve, therefore, other purposes than those contemplated by M. Lesseps.

We have already seen that the north-eastern frontier of ancient Egypt was the one most exposed to assault. Once in their history, hordes of nomades poured across the isthmus and established themselves as rulers of the land. By the same route came Idumean and Canaanitish merchants to exchange their commodities for those of the Nile Valley. The monuments afford innumerable illustrations of this, and the histories of Joseph and his brethren show the nature and extent of the traffic thus carried on. It was therefore important that a line of fortified posts should be constructed to guard this frontier against invasion, and at the same time to protect the caravans from the attacks of marauding Bedouin. But food and water were needful for the labourers employed in the work of construction, for the garrisons who held these outposts, and for the traders who met there to transact their business. These supplies could not be found in the desert. A canal, therefore, was excavated at least as early as the time of Rameses the Great to convey the waters of the Nile to these points. The sand of the desert, which looks so hopelessly barren, only needs water to make it “rejoice and blossom as the rose.” But sea-water, of course, will not serve the purpose. It would only increase, if that were possible, the sterility which already existed. It must be fresh water. This being conducted by canals from the Nile, and running through the eastern wilderness, added a new province to Egypt, and turned the arid waste into a fertile garden. It has been already remarked that the phrase used in Scripture respecting the canals, “brooks of defence,” was in accordance with the facts of the case. The great Bahr Voosef, as it is now called, which runs the whole length of Egypt from Cairo to Farshoot, offered a barrier to the inroads of Bedouin horsemen, or, if they made their way across it, they were in danger of being cut to pieces before they could effect a retreat. What had proved so serviceable as a defensive work along the Libyan frontier would be even more important on the north-east, from which more serious danger was apprehended. The canalisation of the isthmus by the ancient Egyptians was mainly designed to attain these three ends – to reclaim and fertilise a portion of the desert, to facilitate the construction and maintenance of fortresses on the exposed frontier, and to form a foss as a protection against Bedouin forays. The opening up of a waterway for sea-going vessels was a subordinate purpose, which only took effect at a comparatively recent period in the history. These facts being borne in mind, we shall be able the more easily to understand what follows.

We read that the Israelites “built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses.” These were two of the fortresses to which reference has just been made. The former of them is mentioned by Herodotus. The ruins of the latter have been recently discovered with the statue and cartouche of the great monarch who founded it. Their site is now buried deep in desert sand; but traces of an ancient canal are distinctly visible, which we may fairly conjecture to have been excavated by the labour of the Hebrew slaves who built Raamses and Pithom for the king. Greek and Roman writers ascribe the construction of this canal to Rameses the Great, known to them as Sesostris. This, it will be observed, affords an incidental corroboration to the statement of Scripture; for the city and the canal were doubtless the work of the same monarch who gave his name to the outpost upon which the Hebrews were at work at the time of the Exodus. Though the term “treasure city” conveys a false impression to our minds, it is not therefore inaccurate. It was not a place in which the royal treasure was deposited, but a fortified khan where merchants could store their goods, and transact their business in safety.

The canal thus commenced, prior to the Exodus, was still further extended by Pharaoh Necho, in the fifth or sixth century before the Christian era. He is the only Egyptian monarch whose name appears in connection with maritime enterprise. In his zeal for the promotion of navigation, he projected the formation of a ship canal connecting the Nile with the Red Sea. Herodotus tells us that one hundred and fourteen miles of this great work had been completed when he was warned by the oracle to desist. This admeasurement is evidently an excessive one. It probably includes the whole distance from sea to sea, without making allowance for the branch of the Nile north of Bubastis, where the canal commenced, or the Bitter Lakes, which lay in its course. The statement of Pliny is
probably nearer the truth. He gives it as fifty-seven Roman, equal to sixty-two English, miles. The oracle called upon the king to suspend his operations, on the ground that he was “working for the barbarians.” This reason has been rejected as absurd by recent historians. But it really was a piece of shrewd advice. The canal, if completed as proposed, would have afforded facilities for the invasion of Egypt by the war-galleys of the Persians, with which the Egyptians could not cope.

About a hundred years later, when the Persian conquerors had succeeded for a time to the throne of the Pharaohs, Darius, the son of Hystaspes, resumed the work commenced so long before. He cleared out the canal, which had begun to silt up, and carried it forward to where Suez sea to sea. During the French occupation of Egypt, at the commencement of the present century, the project of reopening this ancient channel of communication suggested itself to the mind of Napoleon. Surveys were made, and plans prepared by his orders. But the ambitious schemes of the emperor having been baffled by the battle of the Nile, nothing further was done, and the proposal remained in abeyance till about twenty years ago.

The various engineers who had turned their attention to the subject prior to M. Lesseps proposed to adopt, with some modifications, the plan followed by the ancient Egyptians, and construct a freshwater canal by tapping the Nile somewhere in the Delta. Many high authorities are of opinion that he erred by deciding upon a different course.

Mr. Barham Zincke thus sums up the argument in favour of the scheme which was rejected; “The ancient Egyptians would have decided in favour of fresh water, because they, could then have constructed it at half the cost; and would, furthermore, by so doing, have had a supply of water in the desert, sufficient for reclaiming a vast extent of land, which would have more than repaid the whole cost of construction. Instead of cutting a canal deep in the desert at an enormous cost, they would, as it were, have laid a canal on the desert. This they would have done by excavating only to the depth requisite for finding material for its levees and for the flow of the water which was to be brought to it from some selected point in the river. It is evident that this kind of canal might have been made wider and deeper than the present one at far less cost. The river water would then have filled the ship canal, just as it now does the sweet-water canal parallel to it. The sweet-water canal now reaches Suez. A sweet-water ship canal might have done the same. As far as navigation is concerned, the only difference would have been that locks would have been required at the two extremities, such as Darius and Ptolemy had at Arsinöe. These locks would have been at Suez, and at the southern side of Lake Menzaleh. But the diminution in the cost of construction, say £8,ooo,ooo, instead of £6,ooo,ooo, would not have been the chief gain; that would have been found in the fact that the canal would have been a new Nile in a new desert. It would have contained an inexhaustible storage of water to fertilise, and to cover with life and wealth, a new Egypt.” (Egypt of the Pharaohs and the Khedive, p. 420.)

The fresh-water canal, the construction of which was an essential preliminary to commencing the main work, leaves the Nile near Cairo, and pursues a north-easterly course till it reaches the site of Pithom, where, as we have seen, the Hebrews were labouring at the period of the Exodus. It thence runs due east to Ismailia, the central station on the ship canal, and is continued southward to Suez. Pumping-engines at Ismailia force the water along iron pipes northward to Port Said, a distance of about fifty miles. Reservoirs are constructed at all the principal stations along this part of the canal for the supply of the inhabitants, and open drinking-troughs are placed at distances of about three miles from each other along the line, which are kept constantly full, by means of an ordinary ball and cock, like those in use in our English cisterns.

The ship canal is as nearly as possible one hundred miles in length, running due north and south from Port Said to Suez. It was not found necessary, however, to excavate the channel for the whole distance. A glance at the map will show that it runs through four great lakes: Menzaleh, Ballah, Timsah, and the Bitter Lakes. The first two of these, with only a few short cuttings, extend for 41 miles, the second for 5, the third for 25, making together about 6o miles, and leaving 40 miles of earthwork to be excavated. Lake Menzaleh was so near the Mediterranean as to be always under water. The others were deep depressions in the soil, marking the spots where lakes of sea-water were left when geological changes raised this part of the isthmus above the level of the Gulf of Suez. It was only necessary, therefore, to admit water into them, to bank the channel, and to make it of the required depth by dredging.

At Suez, the works of the canal consist chiefly of an entrance channel into the Red Sea, increasing gradually from 72 feet in width at the bottom, to 980 feet of a basin or dock, and a considerable quantity of reclaimed land. But at Port Said the works are on a much more important scale. The water was so shallow that within a mile and a half of the shore there was not sufficient depth to float the vessels which would pass through the canal. Hence it has been necessary to construct two walls or breakwaters; one, of the enormous length of 2730 yards, and a shorter one of 2070 yards long. These breakwaters are not built in the solid fashion of those at Plymouth and Cherbourg, but are composed of blocks of concrete, which have been manufactured at Port Said out of lime brought from Europe and sand obtained on the spot. These blocks – which weigh about twenty tons apiece, and 25,000 of which have been required – have been tumbled down roughly one upon another and allowed to settle by their own weight. Between these two rude walls a passage of depth sufficient for large ships has been dredged, but the alluvium brought down through the adjacent mouths of the Nile, which formerly was deposited without hindrance over the whole of the surrounding coast, is now stopped by the most westerly of the breakwaters, and has not only formed large accumulations of solid shore on its outside, but has forced its way through the interstices of the blocks into the passage intended for ships.

The accumulation of mud at the mouth, and of drifting sand along the course of the canal, involves the necessity of constant dredging. The expense which has thus to be incurred, together with the enormous amount of capital sunk in the construction of this great work – about seventeen millions sterling – have hitherto prevented its being a financial success. But, from the rapid increase in the number and tonnage of the vessels which pass along it, hopes are entertained that it may ultimately prove to be remunerative to the shareholders as well as beneficial to the world at large.

There is little to interest the traveller in a voyage through the canal. From the deck or paddle-box of an ocean steamer, an extensive view is gained over the expanse of desert on either hand. But passing through it, as I did, in one of the Viceroy’s steam launches, nothing is to be seen but a long, monotonous line of sand-banks, which slope upwards from the water’s edge and obstruct the view. Where the canal passes through the Bitter Lakes, and Lake Timsah, the eye can range over the lagoons, but they offer nothing to attract attention except flocks of birds, – pelicans, flamingoes, herons, cranes, and ducks apparently in infinite numbers. After a sojourn in Egypt, even these have become so familiar as no longer to excite interest. It was at first thought that sharks and fishes from the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean would pass along the canal into the Mediterranean. They, are, however, kept back by an unforeseen cause. The evaporation in the broad open lagoons is so great that the water in them becomes nearly as salt as that in the Dead Sea. Fish which are only accustomed to water whose density and saltness is that of the ocean, find this an insuperable barrier to their farther progress, and the shores were at first lined with their dead bodies. It is said that a few varieties are becoming familiarised to their new habitat, and are thriving in it. But none of the larger and more important species have, as yet, made their way through the intensely salt waters of the Bitter Lakes.

Ismailia, the central station on the canal, is admirably adapted for a sanatorium, and was designed for this by the engineers of the company. It combines the pure, dry, exhilarating air of the desert with splendid sea-bathing, and irrigation from the fresh-water canal produces the most luxuriant vegetation in the gardens and pleasure-grounds around it. The town was laid out upon a pretentious scale. Here are boulevards, open squares, promenades, the Grande Rue de l’Empereur, the Boulevard de l’Impératrice, and all the high-sounding titles of a French city. M. Lesseps has a charming residence, and the Viceroy a palace, in the suburbs. But the scheme is a failure. The houses are empty and falling into ruins. The hotel is without guests. Visitors do not arrive, and vessels sail past without stopping. But its advantages as a health resort are so great that it may even yet realise the hopes of its founders.

The only point of historical interest on the canal is Kantarah. Lying just at the southern end of Lake Menzaleh, it marks the route by which travellers have always passed to and fro between Egypt and Palestine. Millions of warriors have trodden these sands age after age, from the time when Rameses crossed the isthmus for the invasion of Assyria and Scythia, to that of Omar, when the Moslem conquerors, emerging from their Arabian deserts, wrested its richest province from the enfeebled hands of the Byzantine Emperors, or of Napoleon, whose troops, parched with thirst, broke their ranks to pursue the mirage of the desert. “The father of the faithful” and his descendants came hither on their way to Egypt, when the famine was “sore” in the land of Canaan. The “Midianites merchantmen,” coming “from Gilead with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt,” (Genesis xxxvii. 25) bore past this spot their young Hebrew prisoner to sell him into slavery. But no army, however laden with the spoils of victorious war; no caravan, however enriched with the accumulation of successful commerce, can so fire our imagination or fix our thoughts as the two poor fugitives who, weary and footsore, fled across this dreary waste, escaping with “the young Child” from the wrath of Herod the king (Matthew ii. 13-21). The glory of God, the salvation of man, the sole hope of a ruined world, had been committed to their charge. He who was carried in His mother’s arms, or walked with infant feet over this oft-trodden track, had stooped to mortal weakness that we might rise to a glory which shall never pass away.

From Land of Pharaohs – Illustrated by Pen and Pencil
by Rev. Samuel Manning, 1875.

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