THE SUEZ CANAL.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2191, 21 September 1907, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE SUEZ CANAL.

THE KEY TO THE 20th CENTURY’S PROGRESS.

How Disraeli secured for Britain control of Waterway to the East.

Originally used by the Ancients, Every spadeful dug has been soaked in human blood. (liy Charles Edward Russell in “Everybody’s Magazino.”

Port Said, baking in the sun: a candy, stealing, raucous place, compact of all the tribes aitul redolent of all the ovil smells of earth. Alongside the coal-barges, great and dirty a thousand of the maniacs of four brown nations shrieking and dancing over the coal ; on the other side a massed flotilla of petty pirates; in an ill-conditioned boat, charging the pirates. a squad of the ved-fezeed and white-jacketed policemen of his debilitate Majesty, the Khedive of Egypt ; clouds of coal-dust to offend the eve, and a Babylonian horror of gabbling'tongues to stun tin* senses and we ar v the soul. And above all this seething tumult and mad revel of confusion stands forth the serene image of order, system, of cold, calculating, relentless' method, the colossal statue of Ferdinand de Lessops.

Anything that has steam must be passed at a passing-station; there is no room in the canal. But tho native boats, the Arab dhows, lateen-rigged, manned by naked brown and black men, you may pass anywhere, provided you stop your engines long enough to let them go hv. A our steamer may move six miles an hour through the canal, hut at no luster rate. The dhows pitch mightily in your swell, threatened with disaster against the near-by hanks; hut tho brown, naked men care naught-, and only sit in the sun and stare. liO. where the sand insatiate drinks The steady splendor of tho air—

vo i say; lor all about is flab desert. And leaning over tile rail, staring at the flat, yellow, glaring expanse, you arc aware that the lady next to you

So you go from the AVest into the East : out of the European world into the Asiatic; and that statue, imperturbable heforb the gateway, marks the dividing lino. On this side you are in your own country; on the other side the thin silver cord of the great canal stretches out over the yellow desert to alien things and peoples. You look up at the' statue, as below on the steamer you slide by at quarter spec 1. and in some occult wav the calm, masterful lace, the long, strong iaw, the pose of comma nil and authority, touch the easy springs of racial pride. Below are the squalling hordes of Asia; above the reserve and strength of the Caucasian; and the essence of the contrast is good to taste. Here is the race that does things, your race and mine; here is efficiency against inefficiency; power and concentration against inejititudo ; and that, you toll yourself, is the story of the, Suez Canal.

is talking. the mirage of the desert. “Henry, dear,” she says (not to you ; to her husband), “just she how fresh and cool those trees look out in that sand !” You look, too, and the trees certainly do seem wonderfully fresh and sweet, and you wonder at them ill such a place. Before them is an expanse of water, and that looks fresh and sweet also ; but strange in a way you cannot define. And presently, as you gaze, trees and water vanish, and where they were is only the sand insatiate and tho steady splendor of tho air. It was naught- hut mirage; re-appearing and vanishing wherever you look, until you arc not sure whether oven tlio sand it-self, the stretches of smooth, oily lagoons, or the very camel trains, bo real. But to tho earn'd trains. indeed,

you may swear with full assurance, for by the might of these, and t-lie bawling boys that drive them, and the brown laborers, and tho great black reptiles of dredges here and there, you use the canal or have the canal to use. Tho great insistent problem of Suez is the sand and the wind that forever blows and blows into the canal. But for endless toil and sleepless vigilance the ditch would fill up. Such was the fate that overtook its predecessors. For this is no nineteenth-century nor European project, as a matter of fact, but a thing two thousand years old, or more. Then from the time of the Moors, in the ninth century, down to - fifty years ago there was no canal, and all the huge traffic of the Orient came and went by the Cape of Good Hopo. Some time when we are celebrating the surpassing wisdom of the Caucasian mind, let us put this in: The ancients cut the isthmus; we went around the Cape, taking six months, to get to India. I read the other day that somewhere in England there is a monument in memory of Lieutenant Waghorn of tho British army. - One monument!—to the man that first drove into the British intelligence the fact that, canal or no canal, the Cape of Good Hope route was not necessary. His idea was to steam to Alexandria, carry the passengers, mails, and freight overland to Suez, and reembark. them on the Red Sea. It was so simple and obvious that any child with a map could have hit upon it; but AVaghorn hammered for years at the Britsh Government before he could get anybody .to listen to him. At last, he was graciously allowed to see what he could do, and in 1845 he got letters from London to Bombay in thirty days. AV-lien that fact had sufficiently permeated safety, sanity, and conservatism, the AVaghorn route was adopted—for the mails. So moves tho world. The demonstration that the thirtv-day plan was feasible gradually centered attention upon a certain mad Frenchman, ceaselessly shouting about his canal project; the great- Indian revolution of 1857 showed the British public that quick transit was more desirable than conservatism, and so at last De Lesseps raised his money and began to dig sand and kill fellalis. The dredges scoop from the bottom of the canal tlio blown-in sand and dump it along the shore; the camel trains bring rip rocks and supplies for the army of workmen that must toil always to keep this highway clear. Egyptians and Arabs are the workmen, Scotchmen the engineers, naked savage hoys the camel-drivers, elinging with one hand to tho first camel’s tail and with the other beating the beast- ceaselessly. One boy manages eight or ten camels, tethered in a string—their loads on their backs. AVbon the steamer coaies, invariably lie drops the tail to which he lias been •holding and races along the shore screaming for bakshish and revealing to the interested passengers the amazing extent of his professional skill in picturesque profanity.

From the clouds of dust ami the shrieking bedlam, you, making terms with a petty pirate, flee to the shore to wander the sandy streets, and watch the human kaleidoscope turning and turning beneath your eye Arabs, Syrians, Greeks, Italians, Russians, Frenchmen, Germans, English are in that-mass, with anthropological odds and ends unidentified. The street signs are a study in polyglot; men lie and steal and gamble in all the tongues from Babel; and the v iety of costume makes you think of something stagey and theatrical until you hit upon the exact word your mind has been groping for to describe all this—vaudeville. Port Said is a kind of vaudeville; it is the showplace of nations. The Arab sheiks, white-turbaned, tall, austere of countenance. lithe of step, seem placed on show for your delectation; the gaudily attired water-seller seems a fantastic impostor ; the Parsee moneychanger appeals to you as a piece of stage setting, and the red fezes seem donned for the occasion. But two things are genuine enough to any apprehension: the hot' dry wind of the desert that strikes with a material impact on your face, and the incessant bawling of the men that swarm about you offering to be guides. And these drive you in the end to a cafe on the shore where you can sit, and from a safe distance watch the maniacs and the eddying life of the waterfront.

The sun slants westerly, and the maniacs break into a chant, the whole mad gang singing together as they pass up the coal in baskets hidden in a choking nimbus of coal-dust. It is one of the primeval tunes of Asia. I have heard' tlie same tiling in the streets of Canton. There are four notes in it—maybe five—and the maniacs sing it hours together while'they pass up the coal. As for the words, heaven knows what they are, for tho four nations speak four different ton-

gues and EACH MANIAC SCREAMS IN HIS OWN VERNACULAR,

but all to the same tune—more or less. And all the while tho foremen or drivers or bosses, whatever they may be, with blows and oaths incessantly drive the workers onward. Broad-nosed negroes, Arabs, Egyptians, and Syrians aro in the gang. You remember, doubtless, the pictures from the old Egyptian temple walls, the slender hare men with a strap about their loins and a strange cylindrical head-dress, the same thin, naked bodies. Thirty centuries have passed over earth sooner than the habits of -one raoe. These aro the men that built the pyramids; with such drivers and such blc#vs and such misery and hopeless toil. And now they coal the R.M.S. Moldavia at tlie entrance to the Suez Canal.

•Down at the other end of your panorama, away from Europe, down toward the desert and tlie silver line, is the great, glorious office-building of the Canal Company, white stone, glittering in the sun, very imposing, a proper antithesis to the howling wretches on the barges, a proper compliment to the beautiful statue. Between lies Port Said. AVhen the canal days dawned, the company built it to house the vast army of workmen whale alive and to serve as a convenient pit to throw them into when dead. It has thriven mightily since; for to all the vast trade of the boundless East it holds the door, and takes tribute. It began as. a charnelhouse ; it will end as one of the great cities of earth ; . and if the sand; whereon it is built could speak, they might tell awful tales.

That other and narrower stream to starboard there is the fresh-water canal built to supply Port Said and the laborers while the Suez was being built. It reaches up toward the Nile somewhere. Close beyond it is the embankment of the railroad from Port Said to Cairo, along which Am-

erican built locomotives flip the swift express trains past the slowly moving steamer. And still farther are the-

endless lagoons and dreary sands IliaT is the scenery. More monotonous country is not 'known to man

hut from every steamer the passengers study the prospect with unflagging interest. The HOT SANDS STRETCH FAR AWAY unvaried, unrelieved, the air radiates visibly from their blistering surface, the sun burns madly in a sky of perfect violet, the whole thing is tiresome, hut you watch every mile of the way and think it too short. Because here is the work of man’s hands that has done most to further trade and hind together peoples and to contract the round earth to the hollow of your hand.

But now in the manner of our kind we think of no such thing. AH night the steamer lies at Port Said, while the cafe orchestras blare and the roulette wheels turn ; and in the morning, with the clean dry air sweeping in from the desert, the sky full of ben iidemig wealth of fur Mediterranean color, you are carried past the straggling town, past the company’s beauthnl white office into the very canal itself; for so far you have been in hut the artificial harbor at its mouth. This ditch, 137 feet wide, 31 feet deep, cut straight for league upon league through level desert or hanked across shallow lagoons—how simple it seems when you think of Culebra Cut and the manifold terrors of Panama, can stand on the forecastle head and the banks meet in front of you and again far behind, so straight it is. But for the passing-station every five miles, with its little houso and cluster of palms and telegraph signal, and, maybe, a waiting steamer’ there is no change in the dead uniformity.

Tn the mid-afternoon you pass the ! "e the great caravan track crosses, and maybe, if you h-there is a caravan, trains i camels heavily laden, black negroes, and the Arab on his horse—not very different from his pictures; dirty, maybe, hut always a respectable-look-ing figure.

No town, no villages, and, except

for the passing-stations, no hum in habitations; unless by some assault upon speech you can call those things human habitations wherein, back of

the station-houses, the brown men live, where the savage women are always cooking before a fire,’” and the

savage'children are always swarming about. At the first turn, at Lake Tonisah, in the, late aftoru ion ‘.'no is a .glimpse of. the. town, r f Ismail,>a lar away, but the stcamer.no more than slackens her speed o chav-go pilots, .with, the, boat’steaming awi gsi'de, mid, pluqgqs bctiyqijn ;ho sandy walls agniu.

Sunset is tho supernal glory of the Suez day—a Mediterranean s.,nsc-t intensified; redder reds, more vivid saffrons, a. more gorgeo.us and iutoxicasting riot’ of colors, against which tlio palms of a passing-station are painted with a Midden stroke likely to take away your hrentli. And when, in the excellent phrase of the old Roman. Night, rushes in from the ocean, and the great search-light on the bow turns its flood up tlio canal there are other surprises. Then the palms and the passing-stations aro all done in silver and the shores seem strangely unreal ; and all the ship’s company gathers on the forecastle or in the forward pronienado to watch the memorable pageant. You do the ninety-nine miles of the canal in about seventeen hours if you are not held up anywhere at a pas-sing-station. Part of the distance is traversed through the Bitter Lakes, where there is ample room and good water and the chief bolow hooks up the engines to full speed; blit- * 1 the canal proper is traversed at quarter speed or less to save tlio banks from being washed clean away. Soon tho picturesquo passing-stat-ions will be of time gone by and there will bo no moro delay of steamers ; for tho company has undertaken to

from Suez down the Red Sea. Bitter cries wont up from -all tho commercial world because of shipments delayed and dealings paralyzed. In a momont it was lovoaled that tho Suoz Canal was tho main artery of tho huge Oriental commerce, vital to tho interests of millions upon millions of men. At last the ongineors wero forced to act. So they tenderly sent batteries and moro dynamito into tho sunken Chatham and touched the whole thing off. Tho roar of tho terrific explosion was heard in Port Said and beyond. And the Chatham—where was she? Splinters of her coverod tho area of a western county. And about half a mile of tho canal bank slio took with her. But the canal was cleared, the ships resumed their several ways, and tho commercial world rejoiced. It had learned what tho canal really means to mankind. It ought to mean much, for it cost enough. To say that every spadeful dug from it was soaked with human blood were hardly an exaggeration. In that region of earth human blood has always boon clioapor than water. More monuments than that to Ferdinand do Lessops symbolize this great work and the others aro not loss significant becauso they aro unseen. One of them is to the huge unprofit and huge cruelty of cheap labor. Many another such monumpnt has boon built on this same spot in this same fashion. Tho history of all these canals lias probably .been written in blood, and though tho letters aro now effaced, tho message is still understandable. Such is tho clear intimation of Herodotus, who describes tho first of these enterprises, and it must have been so when Darius completed the work, when the Romans repaired it, when the galleys of Cleopatra sailed through'it, when tho Moors of t-lie ninth contury, to whom we owe the foundation of our science, maintained hero a ' canal eighty miles long, and by it passed from tho Red Soa to tho Mediterranean. In tho intervals between successive waves of civilisation the desert winds invariably filled all these works with sand. When Napoleon visited Egypt his discerning mind saw •at a glance tho immense importance of such a canal, and ho ordored it' to be dug; but having many people to kill, went off about that moro important mattor and forgot tho other. Then came 1854, and De Lessops, who cliiofly revived the plans of tho an-

WIDEN THE ENTIRE CANAL, until two vessels can anywhere pass in it. Then tho speed limit may possibly be raised and tho time of passage be shortened. Even now the work of widening is well in hand. Easily enough the company can afford tho great though expensive improvement, for tho profits aro goodly. In 1904 tho receipts wore 23,163,195 dollars —that is all. For a passage through tho canal the charges aro 7 francs 25 centimes (.45 dollars) for each passenger. Tho profits aro such that they pay seven per cent, to the stockholders after numerous fixed charges have been met. Amongst the odd items of the charges aro a. paymentto the employees of two per cent, of the net earnings and another of ten per cent, to the board of directors, of whom there are fifteen, six being French and six British.

By the crowning triumph of the wily Disraeli’s career, tho government of Great Britain in 1887 became the principal owner of the canal. Quietly and without asking tho permission of Parliament, Disraeli BOUGHT FOR 20,000,000 DOLLARS the entire holding of the Khedive of Egypt. At once arose a mighty howl of protest by indignant Britons, for England had always looked askance upon the canal. But Disraeli bought the stock, and the British Government has ever since raked off the goodly profits and held its ownership as a secret menace against the world’s commerce. All the nations of Europe have solemnly agreed that the canal is to be open t-0 all ships at all times, and all the nations know that the British Government might •seize the whole thing if they chose. AVe are about to go heavily into the canal business as builders and operators. The task we have under-

taken is the most colossal (of its kind) in history. Compared with t!h© difficulties at Panama the difficulties at at Suez seem trifling. Instead of the dead levels and easy sand of Suez, Panama presents terrific rock cuttings and puzzling problems in engineering; instead of a fairly healthful climate, Panama has malarias and deadly pestilences. Here, then is something for us in the records and results of Suez, the next/ greatest canal in the world, and what it cost in money and human lives and suffering, and what it has meant for the world; for these things indicate what may ho ahead of us. First, about the result* to (ho world; hero,is an outlino of the business that- the Suoz Canal has done: Year Number Tons Fees of Ships Dollars 1869 10 6,576 ... ... 1870 486 436,609 1886 3,100 8,180,000 11,300,000 1891 4,207 12.200.000 16,700,000 1897 2,986 11,120,000 14,220,000 1904 4,237 18,661,092 23,163,000 TONNAGE. 1886 1896 British ... 6,260,000 8,060,000 German 320,000 1,120,000 Frel ich 700,000 820,000 Italian 190,000 590,000 Dutch 310,000 520,000 Various 400,000 930,000 In 1904, 210,849 persons were passengers through the canal. This is an analysis of the tonnage that year: Gross Country Vessels Tonnage Great Britain 2,679 12,164,591 Germany 542 2,736;067 France 262 1,167,105 Holland .'. 223 814,204 Austria 135 632,323 * ul y ... 94 306,395 Ilussia 82 249,801 Norway 72 194,278 S l ,a,n 29 125,116 Denmark ... - 21 77,204 1 Ul ' ke y 43 65,679 1 mted States 17 39,220 Croece 17 32,305 Japan 6 32, 81 3 F-Pyt 7 7,866 Belgium 2 6,060 Sweden 2 3,812 Portugal 3 4,408 Chn ° 1 1,545 Total 4,237 18,661,092

cients. Most of the wise modern world, and chiefly England, thought- Do Lesseps insane, and declared the scheme to be utterly impossible. Ono of the many curiosities of their contention was their childlike faith in tho doctrine that tho level of tho Red Soa was 30 feet higher than the level of the Mediterranean. No man may say now where this fantastic notion was bred, but somebody asserted it and everybody believed it, and used it to bowl over De Lesseps. So the French had to go ahead and build the canal themeselves with the assistance of Mohammed Said, Viceroy of Egypt, who was a clever ruler and an intellectual beast.

The AUceroy undertook to fur .ish the labor, or most of it, and tba-t was where the evil came in. De I eetejs is dead ; let us charitably suppose tint he was never aware of all the boriois that followed. Tho Viceroy’s method of obtaining labor was to send to an Egyptian village, seize all the fellahs, or serfs, tie their bands, put ropes about their necks, and march them off to the canal,' into which they were driven by armed guards, and where they labored under tho lash until they dropped dead. Of how many were slain, there is do record. AVe have tactily agreed in modern Government to the suppressing of disagreeable details. How many persons perish of famine in misruled and plundered India ? How many natives are slain at Kimberley ? What are our death-lists •at Panama ? But search among the dusty and neglected Suez reports show this, at least, that the mortality was frightful. The digging of the canal began April 25, it‘s 3. Py 1863 the complaints about the slaugli tor of the serfs had made such an impression that observant an! kindhearted men began to prvtast'.- The British Government, which had at first insisted that only slaves should tic employed on the work, now demanded an investigation. The Sultan went in person. Ho found the MEN DYING LIKE FLIPS.

Not only wore they killed in the ditch (under the lash) but tho Alecca pilgrims had kindly in trod i-.ed cholera in the camps and the vict'ir.s died faster than they could be buried. The Sultan was not noted for humane or generous feelings, but ths horror ol the situation made an impression upon even his obtuse mind. He instantly ordered the whole labor system abolished, broke up the camps, and sent tho laborers home.

But you could pile up the figures without end and give no real value ol the thing. No one in this generation glimpsed what it meant until the affair of the Chatham. It takes an object lesson like that to drive mto these heads of ours almost any simple fact. The Chatham was a common English tramp, one of those duty, slovenly tubs that go limejuicing around the world, and she managed to sink herself in the canal about twenty miles from Port Said. To have a steamer sunk in a 137-foot channel is had; but this was worse, for the inconsiderate Chatham had on hoard 600 tons of dynamite. No contractor would essay the task of raising her; no diver would go down intotbo hold. So while the engineers do![berated traffic stopped, for no steamer could pass the obstruction, lor eleven days the embargo lasted, and the ships 'accumulated at each end of the canal, until the shipping stuck out from tho Port Said breakwater into the Mediterranean aud

Now invention and progress aro the products of high-paid labor. So far tlie canal had been dug by hand, the earth being brought up in rude baskets. But wlion slave labor was abolished the contractors were obliged to supply steam machinery. In ten months 18,000 cheap laborers had removed only 4,000,000 cubic metres of material. The steam machinery and the paid labor did more than that in one month. Some Europeans came and earning by piece-work 1 dollar to 1.20 dollars a day, pushed the canal towards completion. Yet to the end the state of the native laborer continued to be deplorable. For the •slave driver was substituted the contractor’s boss: for forced labor a small wage. But the deaths were many and the bones accumulated in the sand-pit's. How will it be at Panama ?

In 1867 the thing was done. In money it had cost for construction close to 100,000,000 dollars. The first estimate, made by a solemn conclave of export engineers, was

40,000,000 dollars. The time consumed was about twice as long as was estimated. And the canal was dug with far more slaughter than ten ordinary battles cause. Yes, the colossal st-atuo of Ferdinand Do Lesseps symbolizes the Caucasian order, method and success; also other things. European selfsufficiency, for instance, that we praise ourselves for doing what the half-savage ] jeoples did many ages ago. Also our exceeding great competence, that it took us so long, to do what was not only obvious hut

merely imitative. And, above all, our humanity and intelligence, that we should celebrate with a joy a work done so badly and bloodily, so clumsily and stupidly. It is a great statue ; it fills us all with pride and happiness, hut' with all its beauties it seems to lack something. Perhaps the deficiency would be supplied if we were to erect by the side of it another statue of the same size representing a

scrawny and naked fellah digging under tho lash. For, after all, that seems to tell more truly than the other the story of the Suez Canal. .