The Suez Canal Part 2

By mid-1859, work was finally underway on the long-planned canal to unite the Mediterranean and Red Seas through Suez. Ferdinand de Lesseps, a disgraced French diplomat, had managed to overcome a tremendous tangle of financial and diplomatic obstacles to organize a company to build the canal, with the aid of Egypt's ruler, Said. The plan was relatively straightforward. While the final canal would run at sea level from Port Said in the north to Suez in the south, supplying water to workers in the desert would be extremely difficult, so another canal would be dug first, this one running from the Nile along the ancient canal route. Besides supplying the workers with water, it would also allow easier movement of material and allow irrigation of lands granted to the canal company by Said, which would help to finance the construction of the main canal. A great deal of work would also be required to turn Port Said into a suitable harbor for ocean-going ships.

Under the initial plan, the vast majority of this work was to be done by hand. Said had agreed to supply the company with labor from the corvee, an ancient practice where Egyptian peasants were liable for a certain number of days of unpaid labor each year. Corvee labor had built the Pyramids and the irrigation of the Nile Delta, and the Canal Company would be able to get its labor at far less than market rates. De Lesseps was concerned about how the wider world would react to his use of an institution that was essentially temporary slavery in a world where public opinion (at least outside the American South) was increasingly against any form of forced labor, but it was the only way to get sufficient manpower. At its peak, the company would have 60,000 peasants under the corvee, although only about 20,000 were actually working at any given time. And by the (admittedly fairly low) standards of forced labor, the workers were treated fairly well. They were actually paid a small wage, and the company was careful to make sure they were adequately supplied with food, water and medical care, although shelter was frequently lacking. The vast majority went home in good health, and some even chose to stay as paid labor when their term was done.

The corvee labor began in the summer of 1861, and work quickly proceeded on the Sweet Water Canal from the Nile Delta, which reached Lake Timsah in the middle of the isthmus the next February. Although it had involved removing 1.1 million cubic meters of earth, this was only 1% of what would be required for the main canal. But with the water problem solved, work on the main canal could begin in earnest.

The Sweetwater Canal in the early days

Unfortunately, just as the canal was taking shape, another obstacle appeared. Said died in January 1863, leaving the throne to his nephew Ismail. Ismail, like his grandfather and uncle, was a dedicated reformer, but unlike Said he was not a friend of de Lesseps or a supporter of the canal project. Even with the windfall in cotton revenue provided by the blockade of the Confederacy, the payments for Egypt's shares of the Canal were a serious drain on the treasury, which he would rather spend on other modernization projects. He didn't object to the canal itself, but he wanted it to be basically Egyptian rather than French. To humble de Lesseps, he announced, only days after taking power, that he was abolishing the corvee. This was a popular move, as opposition to slavery had grown with the conflict raging in America, where Lincoln had issued his Emancipation Proclamation a month earlier. But it would take time to phase the corvee out, and meanwhile, work continued.

Ismail

Ismail then launched two other fronts to his attack on de Lesseps. First, he began to question the grant of lands along the Sweet Water Canal to the company, claiming that it was illegal to hand over his territory that way. Second, he dispatched diplomats to Paris, hoping that the other attacks would allow them to oust de Lesseps and bring the company under the control of more compliant leadership. In this, he found powerful allies high in French politics, but de Lesseps fought back, and after a year-long battle, the stalemate had reached the point where only Napoleon III could resolve it. The result, issued in 1864, was a clear victory for de Lesseps. The corvee would end and the land grants would be revoked, but the Egyptian government would have to pay them compensation of a bit more than 40% of the money raised by the stock issue. Ismail accepted this, figuring that the cotton boom would last forever.

Ferdinand de Lesseps

Despite the continued opposition of the British government, and the fact that it would take until early 1866 for the legal dust to settle, it was clear that the main obstacles remaining were simply those of digging a giant ditch between the seas. The loss of the corvee meant that the bulk of the work would need to be done by machines instead of by hand, and de Lesseps turned to French engineers to design and build the 300 or so mechanical shovels and dredgers of a dozen varieties required to remove the various types of rock and soil along the canal route. Mechanical excavation was still in its infancy, and many of the machines needed to be extensively redesigned before they worked reliably. But these problems, and ones involving bad assumptions about the soil under the route,¹ were overcome. The majority of the 74 million cubic meters of earth involved in the construction project were excavated between 1867 and 1869, when construction was finally completed.

A dredger at work in the Canal

But while 1867 saw the technical side of construction more or less solved, the fiscal side was less solid. The company would need more capital to finish the work, and de Lesseps had been telling shareholders that things were going well so far, which meant that it would be very tricky to raise more. To make things work, he took advantage of the Exposition Universelle held in Paris that year, a proto-World's Fair showcasing the cultures of the shrinking world and the technical marvels of the age. Only one exhibit managed to combine both, that of the Suez Canal Company, which deployed a remarkable diorama in the Egyptian pavilion that drew glowing reviews from visitors. Riding this wave of publicity, de Lesseps announced a bond sale, but it wasn't enough to sell out the initial plan, and controversy soon began to grow around the company, which had become increasingly entangled in the national honor of France. But de Lesseps persevered, and was given the right to use a lottery to market the rest of the bonds.

De Lesseps set the completion date for the Canal as October 1869. This was not based on engineering progress, but on when the money would run out to pay for the works, as the burgeoning operation was enormously expensive. Nor was he the only one with money troubles. Ismail had also gone to the Exposition, and returned home determined to transform Cairo and Alexandria into European-style cities to rival Paris, which meant taking out more loans despite the collapse in cotton prices that came with the return of American cotton to the global market. His need to raise revenue meant that he was taking a closer look at the booming cities in the canal zone, leading to another clash with de Lesseps. The Frenchman's vision was of an essentially sovereign canal zone under the control of his company, arguing that the government hadn't really cared about the area before he was there and would get its 15% of net revenues from the canal, while Ismail was nervous about his sovereignty and eager for the tax revenue that the booming cities of Port Said and Ismailia could produce. Eventually, the issue was largely settled in Egypt's favor, with Ismail buying much of the infrastructure in the area from the company.

Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia

Visitors came from across Europe to see the Canal, from the Prince of Wales and the Viceroy of India to a sculptor named Frederic Bartholdi, who came up with an idea for a lighthouse at Port Said. It would be a 100' statue of an Egyptian peasant woman, holding aloft a torch, in homage to the Colossus of Rhodes and called "Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia". Neither de Lesseps nor Ismail were interested, largely due to the cost of the project, but Bartholdi persevered with the idea of a monumental statue carrying a torch. Ultimately, he settled on New York Harbor, and the result emerged as "Liberty Enlightening the World", with de Lesseps serving as chairman of the French fundraising committee.

But that was almost 20 years in the future, and in 1868, de Lesseps turned his looming deadline into another PR coup, as the world watched to see if he would make his deadline. With 13 months to go, 27 million cubic meters, nearly a third of the total, still remained to be excavated, but de Lesseps merely had his engineers run their machines around the clock, and began planning for the opening ceremony, a grand tribute to the union of the two seas and to the modernizing Egypt. The guest of honor would be Empress Eugenie, as Napoleon III decided not to come, but most of the rest of France, and much of Europe's nobility, wanted to go and see the festivities. Ismail paid the majority of the million-franc budget for the ceremony, as de Lesseps was short of cash, having spent 404 million of the original 200 million francs raised. Ismail also wished to increase his status on the world stage and (implicitly) secure independence from the Ottomans. He had recently been named Khedive, a made-up title that had little practical effect, and gained the right to pass his throne to his son.

Finally, on August 15th, the last dike was broken and the Red Sea ran into the Bitter Lakes, meeting the waters of the Mediterranean. That should have been the end of things, but a block of stone was discovered in the channel underneath, and it was only removed thanks to the emergency application of gunpowder just before the opening flotilla left Port Said on November 17th after festivities of a scale never before seen in Egypt. The flotilla was led by Eugenie's yacht, L'Aigle, and despite fears of grounding in the canal, the ships reached Ismailia that evening, prompting another round of festivities starting that night and stretching through the next day. On the 19th, the day de Lesseps turned 64, the ships left for the Bitter Lakes, finally reaching Suez on the 20th. De Lesseps was instantly one of the foremost men of the age, a hero in France, and he celebrated on the 25th by getting married again, to a woman a third of his age who would go on to bear him 12 children.

Ships assemble for the opening of the Canal

But although the Canal was a technical success, there were still questions about its commercial viability. The initial toll was set at 10 francs to the ton,² and in 1870 only 400,000 tons of shipping passed through, less than a tenth of the expected total. Although the Canal Company teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, de Lesseps continued to command respect, and his stature was only enhanced by the events of that year. In July, Napoleon III declared war on Prussia in an attempt to assert French dominance among the European powers. Unfortunately, he had dramatically miscalculated, and in September, he was forced to surrender along with most of his army at Sedan, bringing an end to the Second Empire. De Lesseps was uninvolved in the disaster, and stood as one of the few prominent Frenchmen uncontaminated by the disaster. He would attempt to repeat his great feat by building a canal through Panama. Unfortunately, he would fail, but that is a story for another time, and we must first look at the history of the canal in operation.