KING COTTON ON THE NILE
The whole of to-day has been spent wandering about the cotton wharves
of Alexandria. They extend for a mile or so up and down the Mahmudiyeh
Canal, which joins the city to the Nile, and are flanked on the other
side by railroads filled with cotton trains from every part of Egypt.
These wharves lie under the shadow of Pompey’s Pillar and line the canal
almost to the harbour. Upon them are great warehouses filled with bales
and bags. Near by are cotton presses, while in the city itself is a great
cotton exchange where the people buy and sell, as they do at Liverpool,
from the samples of lint which show the quality of the bales brought in
from the plantations.
Indeed, cotton is as big a factor here as it is in New Orleans, and the
banks of this canal make one think of that city’s great cotton market.
The warehouses are of vast extent, and the road between them and the
waterway is covered with bales of lint and great bags of cotton seed.
Skullcapped blue-gowned Egyptians sit high up on the bales on long-bedded
wagons hauled by mules. Other Egyptians unload the bales from the cars
and the boats and others carry them to the warehouses. They bear the
bales and the bags on their backs, while now and then a man may be seen
carrying upon his head a bag of loose cotton weighing a couple of hundred
pounds. The cotton seed is taken from the boats in the same way, seed to
the amount of three hundred pounds often making one man’s load.
Late in the afternoon I went down to the harbour to see the cotton
steamers. They were taking on cargoes for Great Britain, Russia, France,
Germany, and the United States. This staple forms three fourths of the
exports of Egypt. Millions of pounds of it are annually shipped to the
United States, notwithstanding the fact that we raise more than two
thirds of all the cotton of the world. Because of its long fibre, there
is always a great demand for Egyptian cotton, which is worth more on the
average than that of any other country.
For hundreds of years before the reign of that wily old tyrant, Mehemet
Ali, whose rule ended with the middle of the nineteenth century, Egypt
had gone along with the vast majority of her people poor, working for a
wage of ten cents or so a day, and barely out of reach of starvation all
the time. Mehemet Ali saw that what she needed to become truly prosperous
and raise the standard of living was some crop in which she might be the
leader. It was he who introduced long-staple cotton, a product worth
three times as much as the common sort, and showed what it could do for
his country. Since then King Cotton has been the money maker of the Nile
valley, the great White Pharaoh whom the modern Egyptians worship. He has
the majority of the Nile farmers in his employ and pays them royally.
He has rolled up a wave of prosperity that has engulfed the Nile valley
from the Mediterranean to the cataracts and the prospects are that he
will continue to make the country richer from year to year. The yield is
steadily increasing and with the improved irrigation methods it will
soon be greater than ever. From 1895 to 1900 its average annual value was
only forty-five million dollars; but after the Aswan Dam was completed it
jumped to double that sum.
[Illustration: Though cotton is the big cash crop of Egypt, small flocks
of sheep are kept on many of the farms and the women spin the wool for
the use of the family.]
[Illustration: Sugar is Egypt’s crop of second importance. Heavy
investments of French and British capital in the Egyptian industry were
first made when political troubles curtailed Cuba’s production.]
The greater part of Upper and Lower Egypt can be made to grow cotton, and
cotton plantations may eventually cover over five million five hundred
thousand acres. If only fifty per cent. of this area is annually put
into cotton it will produce upward of two million bales per annum, or
more than one sixth as much as the present cotton crop of the world. In
addition to this, there might be a further increase by putting water into
some of the oases that lie in the valley of the Nile outside the river
bottom, and also by draining the great lakes about Alexandria and in
other parts of the lower delta.
Egypt has already risen to a high place among the world’s cotton
countries. The United States stands first, British India second, and
Egypt third. Yet Egypt grows more of this staple for its size and the
area planted than any other country on the globe. Its average yield is
around four hundred and fifty pounds per acre, which is far in excess of
ours. Our Department of Agriculture says that our average is only one
hundred and ninety pounds per acre, although we have, of course, many
acres which produce five hundred pounds and more.
It is, however, because of its quality rather than its quantity that
Egyptian cotton holds such a commanding position in the world’s markets.
Cotton-manufacturing countries must depend on Egypt for their chief
supply of long-staple fibre. There are some kinds that sell for double
the amount our product brings. It is, in fact, the best cotton grown
with the exception of the Sea Island raised on the islands off the
coasts of Georgia and South Carolina. The Sea Island cotton has a rather
longer fibre than the Egyptian. The latter is usually brown in colour and
is noted for its silkiness, which makes it valuable for manufacturing
mercerized goods. We import an enormous quantity of it to mix with our
cotton, and we have used the Egyptian seed to develop a species known as
American-Egyptian, which possesses the virtues of both kinds.
There is a great difference in the varieties raised, according to the
part of the Nile valley from which each kind comes. The best cotton grows
in the delta, which produces more than four fifths of the output.
A trip through the Nile cotton fields is an interesting one. The scenes
there are not in the least like those of our Southern states. Much of
the crop is raised on small farms and every field is marked out with
little canals into which the water is introduced from time to time. There
are no great farm houses in the landscape and no barns. The people live
in mud villages from which they go out to work in the fields. They use
odd animals for ploughing and harrowing and the crop is handled in a
different way from ours.
Let me give you a few of the pictures I have seen while travelling
through the country. Take a look over the delta. It is a wide expanse
of green, spotted here and there with white patches. The green consists
of alfalfa, Indian corn, or beans. The white is cotton, stretching out
before me as far as my eye can follow it.
Here is a field where the lint has been gathered. The earth is black,
with windrows of dry stalks running across it. Every stalk has been
pulled out by the roots and piled up. Farther on we see another field
in which the stalks have been tied into bundles. They will be sold as
fuel and will produce a full ton of dry wood to the acre. There are no
forests in Egypt, where all sorts of fuel are scarce. The stalks from
one acre will sell for two dollars or more. They are used for cooking,
for the farm engines on the larger plantations, and even for running
the machinery of the ginning establishments. In that village over there
one may see great bundles of them stored away on the flat roofs of the
houses. Corn fodder is piled up beside them, the leaves having been torn
off for stock feed. A queer country this, where the people keep their
wood piles on their roofs!
In that field over there they are picking cotton. There are scores of
little Egyptian boys and girls bending their dark brown faces above the
white bolls. The boys for the most part wear blue gowns and dirty white
skullcaps, though some are almost naked. The little girls have cloths
over their heads. All are barefooted. They are picking the fibre in
baskets and are paid so much per hundred pounds. A boy will gather thirty
or forty pounds in a day and does well if he earns as much as ten cents.
The first picking begins in September. After that the land is watered,
and a second picking takes place in October. There is a third in
November, the soil being irrigated between times. The first and second
pickings, which yield the best fibre, are kept apart from the third and
sold separately.
After the cotton is picked it is put into great bags and loaded upon
camels. They are loading four in that field at the side of the road. The
camels lie flat on the ground, with their long necks stretched out. Two
bags, which together weigh about six hundred pounds, make a load for
each beast. Every bag is as long and wide as the mattress of a single
bed and about four feet thick. Listen to the groans of the camels as the
freight is piled on. There is one actually weeping. We can see the tears
run down his cheeks.
Now watch the awkward beasts get up. Each rises back end first, the bags
swaying to and fro as he does so. How angry he is! He goes off with his
lower lip hanging down, grumbling and groaning like a spoiled child. The
camels make queer figures as they travel. The bags on each side their
backs reach almost to the ground, so that the lumbering creatures seem to
be walking on six legs apiece.
Looking down the road, we see long caravans of camels loaded with bales,
while on the other side of that little canal is a small drove of donkeys
bringing in cotton. Each donkey is hidden by a bag that completely covers
its back and hides all but its little legs.
In these ways the crop is brought to the railroad stations and to the
boats on the canals. The boats go from one little waterway to another
until they come into the Mahmudiyeh Canal, and thence to Alexandria.
During the harvesting season the railroads are filled with cotton trains.
Some of the cotton has been ginned and baled upon the plantations, and
the rest is in the seed to be ginned at Alexandria. There are ginning
establishments also at the larger cotton markets of the interior. Many
of them are run by steam and have as up-to-date machinery as we have. At
these gins the seed is carefully saved and shipped to Alexandria by rail
or by boat.
[Illustration: The Nile bridge swings back to let through the native
boats sailing down to Alexandria with cargoes of cotton and sugar grown
on the irrigated lands farther upstream.]
[Illustration: A rainless country, Egypt must dip up most of its water
from the Nile, usually by the crude methods of thousands of years ago.
Here an ox is turning the creaking _sakieh_, a wheel with jars fastened
to its rim.]
[Illustration: Egypt is a land that resists change, where even the native
ox, despite the frequent importation of foreign breeds, has the same
features as are found in the picture writings of ancient times. He is a
cousin of the zebu.]
The Egyptians put more work on their crop than our Southern farmers do.
In the first place, the land has to be ploughed with camels or buffaloes
and prepared for the planting. It must be divided into basins, each
walled around so that it will hold water, and inside each basin little
canals are so arranged that the water will run in and out through every
row. The whole field is cut up into these beds, ranging in size from
twenty-four to seventy-five feet square.
The cotton plants are from fourteen to twenty inches apart and set in
rows thirty-five inches from each other. It takes a little more than
a bushel of seed to the acre. The seeds are soaked in water before
planting, any which rise to the surface being thrown away. The planting
is done by men and boys at a cost of something like a dollar an acre. The
seeds soon sprout and the plants appear in ten or twelve days. They are
thinned by hand and water is let in upon them, the farmers taking care
not to give them too much. The plants are frequently hoed and have water
every week or so, almost to the time of picking. The planting is usually
done in the month of March, and, as I have said, the first picking begins
along in September.
I have been told that cotton, as it is grown here, exhausts the soil and
that the people injure the staple and reduce the yield by overcropping.
It was formerly planted on the same ground only every third year, the
ground being used in the interval for other crops or allowed to lie
fallow. At present some of the cotton fields are worked every year and
others two years out of three. On most of the farms cotton is planted
every other year, whereas the authorities say that in order to have
a good yield not more than forty per cent. of a man’s farm should be
kept to this crop from year to year. Just as in our Southern states,
a year of high cotton prices is likely to lead to overcropping and
reduced profits, and _vice versa_. Another trouble in Egypt, and one
which it would seem impossible to get around, is the fact that cotton is
practically the only farm crop. This puts the _fellaheen_ more or less
at the mercy of fluctuating prices and changing business conditions; so
that, like our cotton farmers of the South, they have their lean years
and their fat years.
Egypt also has had a lot of trouble with the pink boll weevil. This
pestiferous cotton worm, which is to be found all along the valley of
the Nile, has also done great damage on the plantations of the Sudan,
a thousand miles south of Alexandria. It is said that in one year it
destroyed more than ten million dollars’ worth of cotton and that
hundreds of the smaller farmers were ruined. The government has been
doing all it can to wipe out the plague, but is working under great
disadvantages. The Egyptian Mohammedans are fatalists, looking upon such
things as the boll weevil as a judgment of God and believing they can do
nothing to avert the evil. Consequently, the government had to inaugurate
a system of forced labour. It made the boys and men of the cotton region
turn out by the thousands to kill the worms under the superintendence of
officials. The results were excellent, and as those who were forced into
the work were well paid the farmers are beginning to appreciate what has
been done for them.
The government helps the cotton planters in other ways. Its agricultural
department sends out selected seed for planting a few thousand acres to
cotton, contracting with each man who takes it that the government will
buy his seed at a price above that of the market. The seed coming in
from that venture is enough to plant many more thousands of acres, and
this is distributed at cost to such of the farmers as want it. More than
one quarter of all seed used has latterly been supplied in this way.
The government has also induced the planters to use artificial
fertilizers. It began this some years ago, when it was able to distribute
thirty thousand dollars’ worth of chemical fertilizer, and the demand
so increased that within a few years more than ten times as much was
distributed annually.