LONDON TO CALCUTTA IN SEVEN DAYS. [From the "Times."]

New Zealander, Volume 8, Issue 616, 10 March 1852, Page 3

LONDON TO CALCUTTA IN SEVEN DAYS. [From the "Times."]

" Communication between Great Britain and India. Time, from London to Calcutta, Seven Days, without stoppages." — Such is the announcement which, in plain type and straightforward phrases, lies now before us. To be sure, the information is termed a prophecy, but, unlike most prophecies, it fixes the exact period of its own fulfilment, and that period is only fourteen years distant. Moreover, the consummation is to be gradual, and every five years will not only contribute its own realised portion of the work, but give a pledge for the completion of the rest. In sober truth the scheme exhibits not the first visionary ideas of a projector, but the revised designs of an engineer who has been for some time engaged in maturing the means of the undertaking. About two years ago we surprised our readeis with the original prospectus of the 'Direct Calais and Mooltan,' and borne doubts were, perhaps, entertained as to the seriousness of such an extraordinary suggestion. Since that time, of the four great divisions of the route two have been positively decided on, and arc in present course of completion.

I To form ;i pi oper judgment on the elm u tor of this enter})i ise, the reador falio.sLl op- n borne general map including the continents of Euro] c and Africa, w itli so much of Asia as would comprise the months of the Ganges, and then follow our remarks, pencil in hand, upon theJ.ioet before him. The aiui(."i! i onto fio'ii England lo JnT.i was round the C.pe of (!ood lli.p 1 — a pa- <a;.'o which was periVnied wholly by mm, and which q Miei.dly , occnpK-il of late \cii> about one hundred d.vs. In IS 4O, the ii) A sft pof a now sybtein h.al been taken by tinning llu: oouise straight to the East at the Cut of dihi altar, carrying it along the Mediterranean Sea, across the Isthmus of Suez, down the Red Sea, and so over the Jndian Ocean to Bombay, or round Ceylon to Calcutta. From Calais to Marseilles the detour round Cape St. Vincent — a detour exactly resembling on a smaller scale that round, the Cape of Good Hope — was altogether ctaped and the route assumed the appearance of a tolerably straight line from Calais to Aden. It will be ; observed that this gain had been effected partly | by the division of the voyage into btages, whereby steam power became available, but more notably by the substitution of overland cuts for long sea circuits. Thus the cut from Calais to Marseilles saved the circuit round Spain, and that across Egypt the vast circuit round the C.ipe. Now, to put the matter concisely, tins substitution of land-carriage for water-carriage is the one simple principle of the scheme before us, and the problem is nothing more than this — how to eliminate from the route between Marseilles to Calcutta those portions wliich ai'e still performed by bea, and substitute instead thereof some means of transport by land. Curiously enough, this is the exact reversal of that invention which changed the face of history four centuries ago. At that time the communication with the East was by land, but land journeys were then so painful and adventur ous, that the discovery of a sea passage round the Cape at once diverted the course ot traffic to a route which it still steadily maintains. At present, by the introduction of railroads, land travel has become to sea voyages what sea voyages were to mediaeval caravans, and the consequence is that Vasco tli Gama's invention will be superseded in its turn, and the traffic of the East will be once more conducted through Constantinople, Ausburg and Cologne. The sea stages of the present route to India, exclusive of the trip across the Channel, are two ; one from Marseilles or Trieste to Alexandria, and the other from Suez to Bombay or Calcutta. These stages constitute by far the longest part of the journey, being 5075 miles, performed by steamers, from which an average speed of some ten miles an hour is all that can be expected. The longer, again, of these two stages is that from Suez to Ilindostan, as it includes a circuit round two sides of the triangular territory of Arabia. The first object, therefore is to ti'eat the detour by Aden as the detours by Cape St. Vincent and the Cape of Good Hope have been treated already ; and this is to bo done by carrying the passengers to the mouths of the Orontcs, instead of the mouths of the Nile, and forwarding them across the Turkish territory to Bnssorah, at the head of the Persian Gulf. The railroad required for this purpose would run across the Euphrates Valley, and its length would not exceed 900 miles — barely the extent just executed in the little commonwealth of Massachusets— whereas its completion would reduce the distance from London to Calcutta by one-half— -by twenty days in fact, out of thirty-nine ; This project, it is conceived, could be accomplished in five years' time, and the route would then lie through Ostond, Trieste, by the Mediterranean Sea, to the Orontcs, thence to Bussorah, and by the Persian Gulf to Bombay, where it would meet with the Indian railroads now actually commenced, and by that time completed to Calcutta. "We have thus got rid of the Red Sea circuit and substituted a land route of 900 miles of the distance. There remain now the straight run from Bussorah to Bombay, and the circuitous leach from Trieste to the Orontes, to be computed for the facilities of direct railway transit by land Of these, the latter is the first to be taken in hand, and its difficulties are the less as a continuous line of railway from Ostend to Orsova, on the frontiers of the Turkish empire, is already decided on. From Orsova to Constantinople is only 3-A5 miles ; from Constantinople to Bussorah is about 1,345, of which 900 would be already covered. The distances, in our English eyes, are undoubtedly great, but Americans have accomplished greater feats of railroad mechanism in countries where the natural obstacles were at least equal to those likely to be encountered in Asia Minor. It is suggested that the line should run round the coast of' the Asiatic Peninsula, and an estimate is given that this communication between Constantinople and the [Orontes, completing that between the same city and Bussorah, might be established by_ the year 1860. On that assumption the total mileage of the route would give 4,200 to railways, and only 1,600*t0 steamers, and the journey from London to Calcutta would occupy twelve days. " Here, perhaps, we might pause, for it is no moan exploit to have brought Calcutta as near as New York, and Beloochistan, we must heeds think, would be a strange country for even Irish ' navigators.' The projector, however, is not yet content, and he allows five years more for eliminating the Persian Gulf and continuing the railway from Bussorah by ' the coast line of Persia and Beloochistan' to the old capital of the Ameers — Ilyderbad on the Indus, whence the several blanches of the Indian lines would soon whisk the passenger to Bombay, Lahore, or Calcutta, according to his wants, the latter station being exactly 5,000 miles, or seven days' journey, from the booking-office of the company in Gracechurehstreefc This is the scheme. Its accomplishment involves the completion, altogether, of some 5,000 miles of railway ; but of these some 2,(500 arc actually decided on, and in course of construction already ; and if we look to what has been done elsewhere, we may perhaps think this Anglo-Saxon prophecy by no means so impossible of fulfilment as it seemed at first. It is a remarkable circumstance that the East Indian ones which, wo introduce to notice some four years ago us undertakings in themselves of singular novelty and. boldness, should now have become the most natural and practicable portions of a stupendous whole. There is no more doubt about the line across Hindostan than about the line across Hungary, and this fact alone should lead us to distrust our impressions of schemes so strange as that above described. If the Indus Valley and the Nerbudda Valley are now thought so readily passable for locomotives, who is to say that the Euphrates Valley will not wear a like aspect whenever our eyes shall have been once accustomed to the work ? It is difficult, perhaps, to repress a smile of incredulity at the thought of a railway with one terminus at Calais and the other at Calcutta, but London and Edinburgh were once further asunder than Liverpool and New York are now, and all experience should teach us to hesitate in limiting the powers of fate am."