Discoveries and Inventions of the Nineteenth Century

Egypt was losing confidence; and, had his opinion been adverse to the project reported upon, the Viceroy would certainly not have taken upon himself additional liability in connection with the undertaking, and the money expended up to that date would have been represented only by some huge mounds of sand and many shiploads of artificial stone, thrown into the bottom of the sea to make the harbour of Port Saïd. And that M. Lesseps appreciated the good offices of Mr. Hawkshaw is shown from the fact that, when he introduced that engineer to various distinguished persons, on the occasion of the opening of the canal, he said, “This is the gentleman to whom I owe the canal.” It cannot, therefore, be said of the English nation that they were jealous of the peaceful work of their French neighbours, or opposed it in any other sense but as a “non-paying” and apparently unprofitable scheme. The Canal was opened in great state by Napoleon III.’s Empress Eugénie, in November, 1869, when a fleet of fifty vessels passed through, and the fact was thus officially announced in Paris:—“The canal has been traversed from end to end without hindrance, and the Imperial yacht, Aigle, after a splendid passage, now lies at her moorings in the Red Sea. “Thus are realized the hopes which were entertained of this great undertaking—the joining of the two seas. “The Government of the Emperor cannot but look with satisfaction upon the success of an enterprise which it has never ceased to encourage. A work like this, successfully accomplished in the face of so many 254obstacles, does honour to the energetic initiative of the French mind, and is a testimony to the progress of modern science.” An Imperial decree was then issued, dated the 19th of November, appointing M. de Lesseps to the rank of Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, in consideration of his services in piercing the Isthmus of Suez. The Suez Canal is 88 geographical, or about 100 statute miles long: its average width is 25 yards, and the minimum depth, 26 feet. At intervals of five or six miles, the canal is widened, for a short space, to 50 yards, forming thus sidings (gares) where only vessels can pass each other. At these, therefore, a ship has often to wait until a file of perhaps twenty steamers, coming the other way, has passed. Occasionally a ship gets across, or “touches,” and then the canal is blocked for hours. So much inconvenience has been found from the restricted dimensions of the work, that in 1886 it was proposed to widen the canal, or, alternatively, to construct a second canal, and use the two like the lines of a railway, so that vessels would never have occasion to pass each other. The amount of traffic is very large, and has been steadily increasing. Thus, in 1874, the tonnage of the vessels passing through was 5,794,400 tons; in 1880, the tonnage was 8,183,313, and the receipts of the Company amounted to £2,309,218. In 1875, the British Government purchased, from the Khedive, £4,000,000 worth of shares. Fig. 124.—A Group of Egyptian Fellahs, and their Wives. The Suez Canal is not so much a triumph of engineering as a monument of successful enterprise and determination on the part of its great promoter, M. Lesseps, in the face of great difficulties. According to the original programme, the canal was to have been constructed by forced labour, supplied by the Viceroy. The unhappy peasantry of the country, called “fellahs,” were compelled to give their labour for a miserable pittance of rice. No doubt, in ancient times, when forced labour was in use, every peasant might cheerfully work, because it was for the general benefit to bring sweet water from the Nile to other dry and thirsty places in Egypt; but to be obliged to work at a waterway of salt, which was only to be of 255use to foreigners who passed through the country, could not be expected of human beings, and therefore the carrying out of the work was not unaccompanied by cruelties of the nature attending slave labour in other lands. This was one of the reasons why the late Lord Palmerston opposed the canal scheme, for the kind hearted statesman bore in mind the loss of health and life occasioned to poor Egyptians by this mode of labour, and the more so because it had been originally proposed that one of the conditions on which the French Company was to take up the project should be the execution of the work by free labour. In consequence, no doubt, of representations from free countries, the Porte was induced to put a veto on the employment of forced labour, and everyone thought that this would be the deathblow to the completion of the canal: but M. Lesseps did not give way to despair, and he since stated that if he had depended on the labours of the fellahs only, the difficulties of the work never could have been surmounted; and that, in fact, the successful prosecution of the work was owing to his having turned his attention to the mechanical contrivances used for dredging on the Thames and the Clyde, from which he obtained better results in half the time and at half the cost. Fig. 125.—Dredges and Elevators at Work. Fig. 126.—Map of the Suez Canal. The dredges used in the construction of the canal were of a new description. They were wonderful mechanical contrivances, and but for them the canal would not have been finished. They were not the contrivance of M. Lesseps, but of one of the contractors, a distinguished engineer, who received his technical education in France but his practical experience in England. The use of the dredging machines was prepared for by digging out a rough trough by spade work, and as soon as it had been dug to the depth of from six feet to twelve feet, the water was let in. After the water had been let in, the steam dredges were floated down the stream, moored along the bank, and set to work. The dredges were of two kinds. The great couloirs consisted of a long, broad, flat bottomed barge, on which stood a huge framework of wood, supporting an endless chain of heavy iron buckets. The chain was turned by steam, and the height of the axle was shifted from time to time, so that the empty buckets, as they revolved round and round, should always strike the bottom of the canal at a fixed angle. As they were dragged 256over the soil they scooped up a quantity of mud and sand and water, and as each bucket reached its highest point in the round, it discharged its contents into a long iron pipe which ran out at right angles to the barge. The further extremity of this pipe stretched for some yards beyond the bank of the canal, and therefore, when the dredging was going on, there was a constant stream of liquid mud pouring from the pipe’s mouth upon the shore, and thus raising the height of the embankment. When the hollow scooped out by the buckets had reached the required depth, the dredge was moved to another place, and the same process was repeated over and over again. These stationary dredges, however, though very effective, required much time in moving, and the lighter work of the canal was chiefly effected by movable dredges of a smaller size. These machines were of the same construction as those described; the only difference was that the mud raised by their agency was not poured directly on shore by pipes attached to the dredges, but was emptied in the first instance into large barges moored alongside the dredge. These barges were divided into compartments, each of which contained a railway truck, and when the barge was filled it steered away to the bank, where an elevator was fixed. The trucks, filled with mud were raised by a crane worked by steam power, and placed upon inclined rails, attached to the elevator, which sloped upwards at an angle of 45 degrees towards the bank. They were then drawn up the rails by an endless rope, and as each truck reached the end of the rails its side fell open, the mud was shot out upon the bank, and the empty truck returned by another set of rails to the platform on which the elevator was placed, and was thence lowered into the barge to which it belonged. As the elevator could unload and re-load a barge much faster than the dredges could fill it with mud, each elevator 257was fed by half a dozen dredges, and thus the mud raised from the canal by several dredges was carted away without difficulty at one and the same time. As these floating dredges were much easier to shift than those encumbered by the long couloir pipes, the work of excavating the bed went on much more rapidly. But in places where there was any great mass of earth or sand to be removed, the large couloirs could scoop out a given volume in a shorter time. The traveller who wishes to see the canal should go to France, and, embarking at the port of Marseilles, cross the Mediterranean Sea, and steam to Port Saïd, which is about 150 miles east of the port of Alexandria, where the isthmus is crossed by the railroad, and is used by travellers to India, being known as the “overland route.” And this railway conveys the mail to and from India, thus saving the great sea voyage round Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. Nevertheless, it involves two transhipments—from the steamer to the rail at Alexandria, and from the railway to the steamer at Suez. Fig. 127.—Port Saïd, the Mediterranean entrance to the Suez Canal. Let us notice in order the places passed by the traveller in going from Port Saïd to Suez and the Red Sea. The arrow (Fig. 126) points in the direction of the compass, and shows that the canal runs very nearly from north to south. Port Saïd is the little town at the northern or Mediterranean entrance to the canal, situated on the flat sands at the entrance of the canal, and is built chiefly of wood, with straight wide streets and houses, and although it now contains several thousand inhabitants, before the making of the canal was begun one hundred people could hardly have been got together. The town contains nothing deserving of notice, and has a striking resemblance to the newly settled cities of America. But in it reside agents who represent numerous varied interests—administrative, financial, mercantile and political. It is provided with docks, basins, quays and warehouses, and has a harbour stretching out a couple of miles or so into the sea, for to that distance two piers, or rather breakwaters, run out. 258Fig. 128 shows these two converging breakwaters, which have been built out into the Mediterranean from the coast, the larger and more westerly one being one mile and a half long, the shorter about a mile and a quarter, and the distances between the two lighthouses erected on the extremities of the breakwater being half a mile. The piers are made of concrete which was cast in blocks weighing 10 tons each. This composition has of late years been greatly approved by engineers where stone cannot be procured. The sea-face of the great canal in Holland is composed of a similar artificial stone, and it is found to bear the wear and tear of the waves almost, if not quite, as well as ordinary stone. It is stated that 25,000 blocks, each weighing 10 tons, were used. They were not laid with the regularity of ordinary masonry, but had been dropped from large barges, so that they presented a very rugged and uneven appearance (Fig. 129); but the object of throwing out these great bulwarks is for the purpose of preventing the sand brought down by the Nile silting in and closing up the canal. Along the western pier there is, from