THROUGH THE SUEZ CANAL
Bring your steamer chair to the rail and look out from the deck of our
ship over the Red Sea as we sail southward along the coast of East
Africa. The sun is hot but we have an awning above us, and the salt
breeze cools our cheeks. We have returned by rail and by river from
Khartum to Cairo, have gone over the Nile delta to Port Said, have passed
through the Suez Canal, and have sailed south into the Red Sea. We are
now off the coast of Arabia, on our way into the Indian Ocean, bound for
the port of Mombasa, whence we shall go across a mighty plateau to the
great African lakes. Mombasa is within a rifle shot of the Equator and
only a few miles north of Zanzibar. It is at the southeastern end of
Kenya Colony and is the terminus of the Uganda Railway which crosses that
country to Kisumu, the chief port of Lake Victoria.
My original intention was to have reached Lake Victoria by taking the
mail steamer at Khartum to Gondokoro, and following the Nile by boat and
on foot to its source where it pours out of the lake, but owing to the
run-down condition of my son Jack, caused by the dengue fever which he
caught in Egypt, I have not dared to risk the dangers of the malaria,
black-water fever, and sleeping sickness so common in the wilds of the
upper Sudan, and therefore have changed my route to the Suez Canal, Red
Sea, and Indian Ocean.
All travel in East Africa was reorganized when the Suez Canal was built.
About three thousand years ago, when the Phœnicians had settled on the
north coast, founding Carthage, they had pushed their way into Egypt and
even into Abyssinia, and a little later had come down along the east
coast of the Indian Ocean, forming settlements probably as far south
as Mozambique. After Carthage was conquered by the Romans, these East
African settlements were seized by the Arabs, who colonized the coast
of the Indian Ocean as far south as Sofala. Later still, under the
Ptolemies, Greek traders visited many of these Arab settlements, and in
the twelfth century Zanzibar first appeared on European maps of the world
as one of the Mohammedan colonies. Then Columbus discovered America and
Vasco da Gama, who was the first to round the Cape of Good Hope, anchored
at Mombasa in 1498. Until the Suez Canal was constructed, the only sea
route from Europe to the ports of the Indian Ocean was by the Cape of
Good Hope. There are ships still making the voyage that way, but for
the most part they end their trips at one of the eastern ports of South
America.
The ships that formerly went to China and India had to go around Africa,
the trip to Bombay from London being over eleven thousand miles. By the
Suez Canal it is just about seven thousand miles, making a saving of four
thousand miles, or a thousand miles more than the distance from New York
to Liverpool.
I have before me the figures giving the traffic of the Suez Canal in a
typical year. Four thousand vessels and five hundred thousand travellers
passed through. Supposing that each made a saving of four thousand miles
only, the total gain for the year would have been sixteen million miles
or enough to reach six hundred and forty times around the world at the
Equator.
The gain is even greater at the Panama Canal. It is hard to estimate how
much time and distance have been saved for the world by these two great
waterways.
My investigations at Port Said and Suez show that not only will the
Panama Canal pay, but that Uncle Sam will some day find it his most
profitable investment.
Our trip from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Suez took just eighteen
hours, and it cost the ship a toll of four hundred dollars per hour.
For the privilege of passing through it had to pay seventy-five hundred
dollars, and, in addition, two dollars for every man, woman, and child on
board. All the canal company did in this case was to reach out its hand
and take in the money. The ship had to furnish its own coal and steam its
way through, the toll being merely for the right of passage.
But this ship is comparatively small. Its tonnage is only five thousand,
and many of the vessels now using the canal are much larger. Nearly every
day steamers pay ten thousand dollars each for their passage, and tolls
of fifteen and twenty thousand dollars are not uncommon. When an army
transport goes through, the men on board are charged two dollars a head,
and this adds enormously to the canal receipts. Indeed, a war, which
knocks so many other stocks flat, sends those of the Suez Canal sky-high.
[Illustration: Beside the Suez Canal runs a fresh-water canal built to
supply the workmen digging the big ditch. The trees lining its banks are
striking proof that the desert needs only moisture to make it bloom.]
[Illustration: The traffic and earnings of the Suez Canal have far
exceeded the hopes of even De Lesseps, whose statue now stands at the
entrance of the great ditch through the desert which changed the shipping
routes of the world.]
The Suez Canal is controlled by the British. It was planned out by a
Frenchman, financed by French bankers, and engineered by French brains,
but the bulk of the profits go to John Bull. When Ferdinand de Lesseps
proposed to build it, the English sneered at the suggestion. When he got
a concession from the Khedive, Said Pasha, they actually opposed its
construction, doing everything they could to clog the work. The French
received no help from other European nations, but they went on. They
began digging in 1859, and just about ten years later the waters of the
Mediterranean were allowed to flow into the Red Sea.
The opening of the Suez Canal cost Ismail Pasha more than twenty millions
of dollars. Among the notables who were present was the Empress Eugénie,
for whose entertainment a grand palace was fitted out at Cairo. My old
dragoman told me that he had seen Eugénie during her visit to Egypt
and that she had climbed the Pyramids, taken the fatiguing trip to the
interior of the greatest of them, and had ridden on a camel to the Sphinx.
In the year following its opening some five hundred thousand tons of
shipping went through the canal. In less than five years this had
increased to more than two million tons and the gross income to almost
five million dollars per annum. The British, then seeing that it was a
good thing, cast about to find some method of control. They succeeded
through Ismail Pasha, who was on the throne of Egypt. Old Ismail was one
of the most extravagant tyrants who has ever squeezed money out of an
oppressed people. He had aided the French in building the canal. In the
allotment of shares, one hundred and seventy-six thousand out of the four
hundred thousand had gone to the Egyptian government, so when the Khedive
got hard up he concluded to put them on the market. The English cabinet
got wind of the matter, and at the same time the French minister at Cairo
telegraphed Paris that “unless France buys the Egyptian shares to-morrow,
they will be purchased by England.”
At that time Parliament was not in session, but Lord Beaconsfield and
one or two others took the responsibility of making the trade. Borrowing
twenty million dollars from the Rothschilds, they had the whole of
Ismail’s stock in the British treasury and John Bull had the control
before the world outside had any idea that the bargain was even pending.
He had not, it is true, fifty-one per cent. of the entire capital stock,
but the other holdings were so scattered that the seven sixteenths which
he owned gave him the whip hand, and that he has held ever since.
Now, no large block of common stock appears to be held by any individual,
corporation, or other government. Indeed, at a meeting some years ago the
largest shareholder outside of Great Britain was a Frenchman, who had a
little more than fifteen hundred shares.
That twenty million dollars was one of the best investments John Bull
has ever made, his holdings to-day being worth many times what he paid
for them. He has already received from it many millions of dollars in
dividends, and by his control of the canal has enormously increased
his power and prestige among the nations of the world. His money gain,
however, is not quite as great as that of the original stockholders. They
paid only about one hundred dollars per share while he paid a little more
than one hundred and thirteen dollars.
I know the Panama Canal well. I visited it when it was in the hands of
the French, and I have spent several weeks there during American control.
I went over it from end to end with our engineers; watched the steam
shovels gouging the earth out of the Culebra Cut, and travelled in a
canoe down that part of it which was once the Chagres River. I have also
gone through the Suez Canal at three different times and have made many
notes of its construction.
The two undertakings are vitally different. The Suez Canal is little
more than a great ditch through the desert, and although it is just
about twice as big as Panama it does not compare with the latter in
the engineering difficulties of its construction. The ground here is
comparatively level. That of the Panama Canal route is up hill and down,
going right across the backbone of the Andes. The amount excavated
here was one hundred million cubic yards, or just about one hundred
million tons of dead weight. On one of my visits to Panama I figured
that the excavation of Culebra would just equal a ditch three feet
wide and three feet deep and long enough to go two times around this
twenty-five-thousand-mile globe with ten thousand miles of ditch to spare.
Twenty thousand and more of the Egyptian _fellahs_ were employed upon
the Suez Canal at a time, and they scooped up much of the dirt in their
hands and carried it away in baskets. At the start men were paid from
ten to fifteen cents a day and boys under twelve only five cents. After
a time they were not paid at all. The Khedive agreed to furnish all the
labourers, and they worked for the French under the lash just as the
Hebrews did for the Egyptians in the days of Pharaoh ages ago. With
up-to-date canal-dredging machinery and steam shovels the work of digging
the canal at Suez could perhaps be reproduced at one half its original
cost. The actual cost was probably quadrupled through the money spent in
graft, extravagance, and high interest rates by the French and Egyptians
in connection with it. When Ismail Pasha was forced from the throne he
left Egypt in debt to the amount of five hundred million dollars, most of
which was directly or indirectly caused by canal expenditures.
One would think that Egypt ought to receive a big revenue for the right
of way through her country and for the canal which her money and her
people practically built. By the original concession with Said Pasha she
was to receive fifteen percent of the net profits for the entire term of
the concession, which was ninety-nine years. But after Ismail Pasha was
deposed, the Egyptian government, finding itself without money or credit,
sold this claim on the canal profits to the Crédit Foncier of France for
a little more than four million dollars, and the only interest it now has
in the canal is in the trade which the ships passing through bring to the
country. Had Egypt retained that fifteen per cent. it would have been
receiving millions of dollars a year from the tolls, and within a short
time it could have recouped itself for all Ismail Pasha’s extravagances.
During the term of the concession it could easily have repaid its debt to
Turkey, and could have made itself one of the richest countries of the
world. As it is, the canal, with all its property, becomes the possession
of Egypt in 1968, when the receipts at the present ratio of increase will
be so enormous as to make it, in proportion to its population, a Crœsus
among the nations of the world.
I spent all of last night on the Suez Canal. It was afternoon when our
ship left Port Said, and as the darkness came on we were in the heart
of the Arabian Desert. The air was clear, and the scenes were weird but
beautiful. The stars of the tropics, brighter by far than our stars at
home, made the heavens resplendent, while a great round moon of burning
copper turned the famous waterway into a stream of molten silver. As
we ploughed our way through, we could look out over the silent desert
of Arabia, and now and then see a caravan of long-legged camels with
their ghost-like riders bobbing up and down under the moon. Our own
pathway was made brighter by electric lights. We had one blazing globe
at our masthead, fed by a dynamo on deck, and another at our prow. The
latter threw its rays this way and that across the channel in front of
the steamer, making the waters an opalescent blue like that of the Blue
Grotto of Capri. We passed many ships. In the distance they appeared only
as two blazing eyes—the reflectors which all vessels are required to keep
lighted as they pass through. As the ships came nearer they rose up like
spectres from the water, the masses of hulls and rigging back of the
fiery eyes making one think of demons about to attack.
The trip through the canal is slow, for the ships are allowed to go only
five or six miles an hour. Now and then they have to tie up to posts,
which have been set along both sides of the canal all the way from Port
Said to Suez. The canal rules require that when two ships meet one must
stop and hug the bank until the other has passed by.
Parts of the banks are walled with stones to prevent the sand from
falling in and filling up the canal, but notwithstanding this the dredges
have to be kept at work all the year round. Not far from Port Said I saw
great steam pumps sucking the sand from the bottom of the channel and
carrying it through pipes far out over the desert, and I am told that the
process of cleaning and deepening the waterway is always going on.
There are stations, or guard houses, at intervals along the course of
the waterway and a few small towns have grown up here and there. While
the boat was stopping at one of these, a dirty Arab brought alongside a
leg of raw mutton. He offered to sell it to the passengers but found no
buyer. Outside of these towns and the guard houses we see few signs of
life. Here a camel caravan trots along over the desert. There a flock of
long-necked cranes springs from the water into the air. When the sun is
right, away across the hot desert at the side of the ship there looms up
out of the sands a strange ship on other waters, apparently as real as
those through which we are moving. That is the wonderful mirage of the
desert, which so often deceives the thirsty traveller passing through
it on camels. As we approach it, it soon fades and disappears like a
veritable castle of the air.
The Suez Canal of to-day is far different from that which was opened in
1869. As originally planned, the channel was less than twenty-five feet
deep and so narrow that it could not have accommodated the shipping which
goes through it nowadays. It has since been widened so that its average
width at the surface is about three hundred feet, and the curves in it
have been straightened so as to shorten the time of transit and enable
ships to pass the more easily. The shipping facilities have been greatly
improved both at Port Tewfik and at Port Said. At Port Said the coaling
arrangements have been so improved that the largest steamers can load
thousands of tons in a very few hours.
The chief towns on the canal are Port Said, Ismailia, and Suez. Port Said
is at the northern end of the canal where we took the steamer. This city,
long said to be the wickedest and most dissipated station on the way from
London to the Far East, was made and lives by the canal, the harbour
being full of shipping from one year’s end to another.
Ismailia, midway of the canal, is still scarcely more than a small town.
It is now said to be a healthful place, although at one time it was
malarial. The Arabs call it the “cleansed tomb.” This town is at the end
of the fresh-water canal which was made during the building of the Suez
Canal to supply the workmen with water, and is not far from Zagazig and
the old Land of Goshen.
Suez, which is a small-sized city with several thousand Europeans, is
connected by train with Port Said, and also with Cairo and other parts of
Egypt. The city is about thirteen hundred miles from Aden, Arabia, and
just twenty-nine hundred and nineteen miles from Mombasa, where we are to
enter the Colony of Kenya and make our way by rail across country to the
Great Lakes.