Posted on 04/19/2009 12:19:42 AM PDT by forkinsocket
Like many of Egypt’s towns and cities, Port Said is bustling. Donkey-carts weave through traffic on roads, while westerners – once the focus of local hostility – move about undisturbed. Sitting at the northern mouth of the Suez Canal, many call Port Said Egypt’s most beautiful city.
It is also a popular tourist destination for cruise ships, which roll in and out, unloading their passengers at Egypt’s second largest port. Here, the visitors watch as cargo vessels line up to enter the canal – a 150km stretch of water that links the Red and Mediterranean seas, cutting out the long journey around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope.
Ships have been lining up at the entrance to this shortcut to India for 140 years, and this month marks the 150th anniversary of the Suez Canal’s construction. Since the first blow of the pickaxe on April 25, 1859, the canal has been ever-present in the world’s consciousness as a point of conflict and commerce. This feat of engineering wizardry has been all-encompassing; a strategic interest in times of war and peace, a symbol of power and ambition. The canal put Egypt at the heart of world trade and commerce, ending its domination by the world’s most formidable colonial superpowers.
At the mouth of the canal there is a truncated base, where a statue of its creator, Ferdinand de Lesseps, once stood. The statue was destroyed 53 years ago after Egypt had seen off the Franco-British military offensive during the Suez Canal crisis. The Europeans had been forced into a hasty and humiliating retreat only two days earlier. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s charismatic president, had, in the eyes of the Arab world, evolved from mortal hero to living legend and his adoring public wanted to make one final gesture of defiance on his behalf.
For those who came to witness the statue’s demolition, however, patience was required. Three sticks of dynamite produced only smoke and dust. The next attempt, using twice the force, blew a hole in the statue’s right leg, causing it to lean rakishly. Twelve sticks of dynamite were finally used, and much to the delight of the crowd, it crashed to the ground enveloped in a thick black fog.
Until this moment, de Lesseps and the canal had been inseparable. For the French diplomat and entrepreneur, untrained in the field of civil engineering, connecting the Red and Mediterranean seas was his attempt to succeed where Napoleon Bonaparte failed. Indeed, Napoleon’s dreams of a canal came unstuck when his engineer, J M Le Pere, concluded that the level of the Red Sea was some 30 feet higher than that of the Mediterranean. (This theory eventually proved incorrect.)
De Lesseps was born in Versailles in 1805 to a French family of career diplomats. Following in his father’s footsteps, he joined the diplomatic corps and spent most of the 1830s in Egypt. After reading a memoir on the Suez project by one of Napoleon’s aides, de Lesseps became determined to build what the emperor could not. But putting the grand scheme into practice was going to require unprecedented support. Fortunately, de Lesseps’ years as a diplomat had gained him access to the Egyptian royal house, where he had befriended Said Pasha – the overweight heir to the Egyptian throne. Once ruler of Egypt, Said, a Francophile who had a fondness for macaroni (a food which his father had forbidden him to eat as a child, but which de Lesseps had provided to him in secret), invited de Lesseps back to Egypt in 1854, where the canal project was agreed upon during a trip across the western desert to Cairo.
De Lesseps would later write of the deal: “To my right, there is the east in all of its limpidity; to my left, the west is dark and cloudy. All of a sudden, I saw a rainbow, with all of its vivid colours, spanning east and west.”
In order to shift the first of the 100 million cubic feet of sand and rock that lay between the two seas, de Lesseps needed manual labourers, and lots of them. Said duly obliged, and at the construction’s height, supplied more than 60,000 workers. Recruits to the cause were extracted from the so-called corvee (the conscripted labour force), which was made up by the fellahin (the peasantry), and though serving in the corvee was an unappealing activity, conscription into the army was even worse.
“There were lots of stories of peasants trying to avoid military service, because it was particularly unpleasant,” says Dr Anthony Gorman, a lecturer in modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Edinburgh. “They adopted strategies such as cutting off fingers or putting poison in their eyes.”
Forced to dig with bare hands in the early years of the decade-long project, the fellahin perished from cholera and heat exhaustion. The canal would eventually claim tens of thousands of lives (some estimates exceed 100,000).
In 1869, the finished canal was a breathtaking sight, despite being four years behind schedule and, at £18,144,000, costing more than double the original estimate. It was more than 150km long, 22 metres wide at the bottom and 70 metres wide at the surface.
Ismail Pasha – who became the king after Said’s death in 1863 – didn’t disappoint with the opening celebration. On November 17, the waterway launched to pomp and circumstance, with empress Eugenie of France vying with the canal itself as the centre of attraction.
After the celebration, attention almost immediately turned to the traffic on the high seas. The first few years were somewhat difficult – and even a commercial disaster as far as early projections were concerned. But change soon came, not only with respect to the number of vessels using the waterway – some 500 in 1870, rising to 3,284 in 1884 – but also the towns and cities along the canal, which grew in importance and population. In 1865, the Suez Canal Zone had a population of some 10,000. This rose to 34,000 in 1868, by which time Port Said had around 10,000 inhabitants. (Today, it stands at more than 500,000.)
Though Port Said was described in its early years by one author as “a den of thieves and assassins”, the canal was a major facet in the modernisation programme of the Middle East, even if competing imperial interests were not so virtuous in their use of it. In 1875 the British government bought out the shares originally purchased by Said – they had been transferred to Ismail, who needed to sell his stake due to the incursion of massive debts. The UK would dominate canal traffic well into the 1950s.
For years, and through various means, Great Britain ratcheted up its military control over the canal – not least through its intervention and subsequent occupation of Egypt in 1882 – all the way through the Second World War. But in a twist of fate, the canal would eventually facilitate the ignoble end to Britain as a global superpower.
“Where Britain was seriously exposed was after the Second World War,” says professor Scott Lucas, a historian and author of the book, Divided We Stand: Britain, The United States And The Suez Crisis. “In economic terms, Britain is completely strapped in terms of resources … and then you have the political drive of Egyptian nationalism … which built up resentment to outside powers.”
Indeed, led by the uncompromising President Nasser, who ceaselessly promoted pan-Arabism, Egypt landed the fatal blow to European aspirations for continued global superiority, bringing about the downfall of the British prime minister Anthony Eden in 1957. Eden could not accept that times had changed and that Egypt should run the Suez Canal. When Nasser nationalised the canal, Britain and France, using Israel as a ruse to provoke the battle, invaded, the final moments of British imperialism played out. The US refused to back the action, and without Washington, the invading force was compelled to back down. And so came the demolition of de Lesseps’ statue, a symbol of European oppression that was unceremoniously dumped at a shipyard in Port Fuad.
The post-war years may have led to Britain’s ouster in 1956, but many of the British service personnel who served in the Suez Canal Zone during the emergency of 1951-54 and beyond provide a telling snapshot of canal life.
“All our tents were right beside the canal,” recalls Bill Lowe, then a corporal in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC). “And I remember seeing all the hospital ships coming back from Vietnam – a whole convoy of them – when the French were in Vietnam before the Americans got there.”
Others recall their admiration for the Suez Canal as a piece of infrastructure. John Mitchell, a leading aircraftsman in the Royal Air Force (RAF), marvelled at the sheer scale of the waterway. “I always regarded the canal as one of the wonders of the world. When you think of the terrain that the canal had to be engineered [out of] – I mean, there was just so much sand. It was relentless!”
Both men endured the day-to-day uncertainty that came to symbolise military service in the zone. Mitchell vividly recalls the cat-and-mouse games that used to preoccupy the British army while on night duty.
“It was our job to make sure that there were no Egyptian intruders coming in through the barbed wire perimeter fence,” says Mitchell, now chairman of the London and South-east area of the Suez Veterans Association. “One night, as I was walking around the wire, I came to this place and I noticed that something had burrowed a hole under the barbed wire. I immediately reported it back, and they sent out a ‘wire party’, which arrived in the form of a truck. They looked at this scraping in the sand and said, ‘I think that’s a wild dog’. And I said, ‘That must be a very clever dog, because he must have been carrying wire clippers as the bottom two strands of the barbed wire have been cut!’”
As a member of the RAMC, Lowe was at the sharp end of Britain’s military presence in Suez, which, in the run-up to the crisis, told of the ever-increasing tensions in the area. “A lot of our casualties in the British military hospital were from [Egyptian militant] activities,” recalls Lowe, now the northern representative of the Suez Veterans Association. “Besides dysentery … a lot of our patients were mutilated. Various things happened at that time – soldiers were even kidnapped … but our main wars were with dysentery.”
De Lesseps had, quite intuitively, predicted that the Suez Canal would one day be the site of a battlefield. As for Egypt in the short term, the nationalisation of the Suez Canal was a momentary triumph. Egypt and its crucial waterway would go on to be involved in the costly wars and defeats of the Arab-Israeli conflicts. Indeed, closed between 1967 and 1975, the canal was only reopened once the debris of two wars and endless artillery duels had been successfully removed.
Today, it is a very different story. The canal, which has undergone many modifications over the years, is one of the most important sources of funding for the Egyptian government. More than 16,000 vessels pass through the canal each year, with some seven per cent of world sea trade carried via the channel. In 2008, the canal made a record $5.4 billion (Dh19.8m).
But it is facing challenges. Somali piracy in the Gulf of Aden has led many shipping companies to favour the substantially longer pre-canal route round the Cape of Good Hope. The world economic crisis has also had adverse effects on the volume of trade as a whole.
There are, however, signs of hope. “There’s been a sharp reduction in the number of piracy attacks over the last several months of this year,” says Julian Bray, executive editor of the shipping publication TradeWinds. “[This reduction is] partly due to the number of naval vessels in the region today. It was getting out of control a bit last October. Ships coming out of the Suez Canal are probably better protected than they would be anywhere else in the world right now.”
After all, resilience, in many respects, is the canal’s enduring legacy. It has seen off challenges and has outlived all who threatened its existence. And that, at least in part, is something of which modern Egypt can feel justifiably proud.
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