LONDON TO CALCUTTA IN SEVEN DAYS.

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume VIII, Issue 679, 4 February 1852, Page 4

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 ol 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 lor some time engaged in maturing the means of the undertaking. About two years ago we surprised our readers with the original prospectus of the ‘Direct Calais and Mooltan,’ and some 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 are in present course of completion.

To form a proper judgment . on the character of this enterprise, the reader should open some general map including the continents of Europe and Africa, with so much of Asia as would comprise the mouths of the Ganges, and then follow our remarks, pencil in liana, upon the sheet before him. The ancitnt route from England to India was round the Cape of Good Hope—a passage which was performed wholly by sea, and which generally occupied of late years about one hundred days. In 1840, the first step of a new system had been taken by turning the course straight to the East at the Gut of Gibraltar, carrying it along the Mediterranean Sea, across the Isthmus of Suez, down the Red Sea, and so over the Indian 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 escaped, and the route assumed the appearance of a tolerably straight line from Calais to Aden. It will be observed that this gain Lad been effected partly by the division of the voyage into stages, 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 Cape. Now, to put the matter concisely, this 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 which are still performed by sea, and substitute instead thereof some means of transport by land Curiously enough, this is the exact reversal or mat 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 adventurous, that the discovery of a sea passage round the Cape at once diverted the course of traffic to a route which it still steady maintains. At present, by the introduction of railroads, land travel has become to sea voyages what sea voyages were to medieval caravans, and the consequence is that Vasco di 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 piesent route to India, exclusive of the trip across the Channel are two ; one from Marseilles or Trieste to A exandria, and the other from Suez to Botnay or Calcutta. These stages constitute by far th e longest part of tbe jo(jrney , b > 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 f r ~ " to Uindostan, as it includes a circ° m 8! two sides of the triangular bia. The first object, therefore, is ( 5> tbe detour by Aden as the detours bv D**' St. Vincent and the Cape of Good IL C 8 been treated already ; and this is to°bf> ” a? 8 by carrying the passengers to the mJ,?’ 116 the Orontes, instead of the n>on*»- ° - Nile, and forwarding them across ’ Turkish territory to Bussorah, at t k 6 > he of the Persian Gulf. The railroad req u S for this purpose would * • ~ MVI VOC3 IQ A L’ phrates Valley, and its length would not ceed 900 miles—barely the extent just cuted in the little commonwealth of M chusets —whereas its completion would reT' the distance from London to Calcmtn k. Ce wr-by twenty days, in fact, out o f thi?' nine! This pioject, it is conceived, could!' accomplished in five years’ time, and the rom would then lie through Ostend, Trieste ? the Mediterranean Sea, to the Orontes th to Bussorah, and by the Persian Gulf to Bo " bay, where it would meet with the Indi"** railroads now actually commenced, and h” that time completed to Calcutta. ’

“We have thus got rid of the Red § I circuit and substituted a laud route ofOoOmil 61 of the distance. There remain now t” straight run from Bussorah to Bombay, J the circuitous reach from Trieste to the Orontej to be computed for the facilities of direct rail’ way transit by land. Of these, the latter i' B the first to be taken in hand, and its difficult ties are the less as a continuous hue of rail way from Ostend to Orsova, on the frontiers of the Turkish empire, is already decked on I From Orsova to Constantinople is only 345 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 greatei feats of railroad medianism in countries where the natural obstacle! were at least equal to those likely to beencountered in Asia Minor. It is suggested that the line should run round the coast of the Asiatic Peninsula, and an estimate > s 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 to steamers, and the journey from Loudon to Calcutta would occupy twelve days. “ Here, perhaps, we might pause, for it is no mean exploit to have brought Calcutta as near as New York, and Beloochistan, rre must needs think, would be a strange country foreven Irish ‘navigators.’ The projector, however, is not yet content, and he allow five years more for eliminating tbe Persian Gulf and continuing the railway from Bussorah by * the coast line of Persia and Beloochistan’ to the old capital of the*AmeersHyderbad on the Indus, whence tbe several brancnes of the Indian lines would soon whisk the passenger to Bombay, Lahore, or Calcutta, according to his wants, the latter station being exactly 5,600 miles, or seven days' journey, from the booking-office of the company in Gracechurch-street. This is the scheme. Its accomplishment involves tbe completion, altogether, of seme 5,600 miles of railway ; but of these some 2.600 are actually decided on, and in course cf 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 we introduced to notice some four years ago as undertakings io 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 Uindostan than about tbe line across Hungary, and this fact alone should lead us to -istrust our impressions of schemes s.o 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 1 ifficult, perhaps, to repress a smile of incredu ity at the thougat of a railway with one terminus at Calais and the other at Calcutta, but ondon and Edinburgh were once further asunder than Liverpool and New York are now, and all experience should teach us to lesitate in limiting the powers of steam.”