Parting the Desert

by Zachary Karabell

  Many of these people were included before they had actually been approached and asked if they wanted to be. Lesseps preferred to err on the side of listing too many rather than too few. He understood that even someone such as Baron James Rothschild would be tempted, flattered, and seduced by being selected as a founding member of a great venture, and thereby be more likely to support the project. For that reason, the list contained possible adversaries and potential patrons along with established friends and supporters.

  Remarkably, though it would take another five years of diplomatic wrangling before work on the canal actually began, the rudimentary blueprints drawn up by Lesseps, Linant, and Mougel in these first weeks formed the eventual template. Dozens of other engineers would survey the isthmus in later years in order to validate or debunk the feasibility of the route charted in these first weeks, but the final project looked much as Lesseps thought it would at the end of 1854.

  Lesseps had to function at several levels. He faced an assortment of hurdles, and they each required careful navigation. At the diplomatic level, there was the question of which governments would support the canal and which would not. The concession may have called for the canal to be built by a private company, but a project of this nature could not avoid becoming political. The states of Europe, and England and France especially, were actively competing in the world outside of Europe, and anything that could materially alter the balance between them would become a contentious issue. The canal promised to change the dynamics of international trade and to redirect the flow of goods in ways that would cause all concerned countries to turn their attention to Egypt. At the outset, Lesseps anticipated that France would support him, and that England would not. And, as much as he needed the good will of the Emperor Louis-Napoleon, the acquiescence of Britain was even more vital.

  The Ottoman Empire was also a central player. Legally, Said ruled Egypt at the whim of the sultan, and he had no authority to “alienate” Egyptian land without the sultan’s permission. By granting the Canal Company land rights, Said ventured into questionable territory, and the first act of concession was silent about the sultan. Lesseps no less than Said recognized that the project could not continue indefinitely without consulting the Ottoman government in Constantinople, and Lesseps planned to head there as soon as he had made a preliminary survey of the isthmus. Whatever he believed about the legal relationship between the viceroy and the sultan, Lesseps argued that precedent gave Said the right to undertake the canal project without prior approval from Constantinople. Gaining such approval would be useful, and appealing to the sultan was at the very least good manners and good politics. But Lesseps refused to endorse the principle that Said required the permission of the sultan, and doing so would have transferred the political question out of Egypt and into a more complicated arena, where Lesseps would not enjoy the same advantages.6

  Then there were the technical obstacles, which had to be resolved even before the equally challenging financial hurdles could be approached. Ever since the renewed flurry of interest in the canal in the 1840s, opinion among the engineers of Europe had been divided about the feasibility of the idea. No canal of this size and scope between two seas had ever been constructed. Knowledge about the region was scant. How would the sands be kept at bay? What would prevent the head of the canal from silting up? Were the sea levels really the same? Would the canal overflow its banks? And what about the currents of the Red Sea? But the most pressing question was whether the route should cut directly through the isthmus or use the indirect path via the Nile. That was both a technical debate and a political one. Those favoring an indirect route tended to represent the merchant community in Alexandria, which stood to lose greatly if the canal bypassed them. Those favoring the direct path saw it as cheaper, simpler, and more efficient. A direct route would also offer better competition to the railroad then being built from Alexandria to Cairo under English auspices with Egyptian government funding. Said himself had an additional reason for preferring the direct route. Unlike Muhammad Ali, who wanted the canal where he could keep an eye on it from Cairo, Said wanted the channel to be distant from the power centers of Egypt. In theory, that would prevent the meddling states of Europe from interfering in domestic Egyptian affairs. In reality, it did not.

  Lesseps had his own reasons for championing a direct route. Others had already staked their reputations on the indirect path, and if that was adopted, it would be almost impossible for Lesseps to claim sole credit for the canal. He did not admit to this motive; he may not even have been aware of it. But, self-consciously or not, he sought more than full control; he wanted absolute credit, and he made herculean efforts to appropriate the legacy for himself alone.

  There were several other claimants, but the most organized and formidable were the remnants of the Study Group assembled around Enfantin. By writing regularly to Arlès-Dufour, Lesseps both kept the Study Group appraised and signaled to Enfantin that the canal was now his. If any of the former members of the Study Group wished to participate in the project, they would have to do so on Lesseps’s terms. Over the next months, there were heated debates in the capitals of Europe over which plan for the canal was the most prudent. Learned men and assorted entrepreneurs published opinion pieces, gave speeches at meetings, and argued in drawing rooms and salons about the technical pros and cons of the various options. But the most heated debate was over control, and the technical debate was merely a proxy for a contest for fame.

  In the end, reputation is what mattered for Lesseps, far more than the money. He wanted to perpetuate his name and have it associated with progress and civilization. It is true that he enjoyed the finer things in life, and lovingly described the opulence of his surroundings wherever he went, but he wasn’t in this game because he craved lucre. He was driven, fiercely and inexhaustibly, by a passion to be known and to have the world say “Ferdinand de Lesseps” with that mixture of awe and admiration that is reserved for a very few.

  Over Christmas 1854, Lesseps left for the Red Sea port of Suez with the French Consul Sabatier, Madame Sabatier, Linant and Mougel, an escort of armed horsemen, servants on camels, an assortment of soon-to-be-eaten sheep, goats, and pigeons, and dozens of barrels of Nile water. Lesseps then spent three weeks traveling north toward the Mediterranean. He found the town of Suez desolate and its three thousand “miserable” inhabitants eking out a bare existence. Near the town were the outlines of the canal bed described by Herodotus and other travelers, and it was there that Lesseps began the survey.

  As this party made its way along the proposed route, Linant offered his advice about canal building and Mougel talked about hydraulic engineering. After a few days assessing the quality of the stone in the mountains of Attaka, Lesseps and the engineers parted with Sabatier, mounted their camels, and began to head toward the Bitter Lakes, which had long since dried up and were now large, empty, salinated depressions filled with eerie crystalline formations. The region was uninhabited, though Lesseps did note telltale signs of desert gazelle, antelope, and hyenas. Skirting the jagged lake-beds, they crossed the Serapeum plateau and into the region of Lake Timsah.

  During the trip, Lesseps began to read the Biblical story of Moses, and he was swept up in the headiness of following in the footsteps of the Hebrews. Europeans who explored the lands of the Near East had tried to match the stories of the Bible with physical places, but the question of where Moses and the fleeing Jews of Egypt had crossed into the Promised Land was unresolved. The Bible says that the Red Sea parted, but scholars doubted that the Hebrews had gone so far south. Lake Timsah, in the middle of the Isthmus of Suez, or the Bitter Lakes were more likely alternatives, since they were smaller and offered a more direct route into Israel. And because they had been filled with salt water from the Red Sea, ancient writers might have considered them part of it.

  As Lesseps read his Bible he wrote in his journal about walking where Joseph had been enslaved and where Moses had wandered. He compared the place-names in the Bibl
e with the current names given those landmarks by the local Bedouins, and added his annotations to Biblical passages. For instance, in the Bible it says, “The children of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth,” to which Lesseps added: “Succoth in Hebrew means Tents. This place is now called by the Arabs either Oum-Riam (the Mother of Tents) or Makfar (the Hollowed-Out Place where the old canal passed).” But though he wrote these descriptions, he was guided by Linant, who had traveled through the region numerous times and had spent years trying to correlate its geography to the stories of the Bible. Linant was convinced the area around the Bitter Lakes and Timsah formed the Biblical land of Goshen, and that the low areas near Timsah were called the Valley of the Reeds; this may in turn have been why translations of the Bible incorrectly referred to the “Red Sea” instead of to the “Reed Sea,” which would have meant the reedy Lake Timsah.7

  The Bible aside, Lesseps was pleased that Lake Timsah was large enough to act as a midway port for the canal, as well as a logical spot for the intersection of the freshwater canal from the Nile. He took strength from the thought that the land of Goshen, described in the book of Genesis as a region of fertility and abundance, would bloom again. Lesseps was not particularly religious, but, like many of his upbringing and class, he saw the Bible as the cornerstone of Western civilization and the ancient Hebrews as vital actors in God’s plan to raise the West to the pinnacle of world culture.

  From Timsah, the group continued north to Lake Manzala, through oases of date palms and past marshes filled with swans and pelicans. It took only two days to go from Timsah past the plateau of El-Guisr and then to the ruins of Pelusium on the coast. On the way back to Cairo, Lesseps was struck by the legacy that he was inheriting, not just from the ancient world, but from his father. He wrote with unusual humility in his journal that he was now completing a saga that had been begun by his father and Muhammad Ali, and which now seemed to be reaching its glorious culmination at the hands of both of their sons.

  The expedition returned to Cairo in mid-January 1855, and Lesseps began another intensive round of correspondence. News of the canal had spread quickly, and interested parties in Europe had begun to take their stands. Lesseps understood that he could not dawdle, and that adversaries and competitors would take advantage of any delays to wrest control or elevate their schemes over his. In Cairo, he instructed Linant and Mougel to explore the issues raised by the brief survey in the isthmus. What work needed to be done at the port of Suez? How should the canal use the dry basin of the Bitter Lakes? What should be done with Lake Timsah? What exact path should the canal follow from Timsah to Lake Manzala? How could the marshy area near Pelusium be transformed into a suitable port? How long would the jetty have to be from Lake Manzala into the Mediterranean? How would the tides affect the work? What about the dunes and sands in the desert regions? And, finally, how much would it cost? He told them to spare no expense in answering these queries, and asked only that if they differed about the answers they would keep such disagreements secret so as not to give the enemies of the canal any ammunition.8

  Lesseps then left for Constantinople to explain the project to the government of the sultan. He also began to assemble material to refute the growing chorus of arguments against the canal in general and against a direct canal, many of which were emanating from England, but one of which was coming from an unexpected direction.

  He continued the regular exchange of letters with Arlès-Dufour. At first, he seems to have assumed that Arlès-Dufour, Enfantin, and the Study Group would embrace him. After all, he had won the concession that the Study Group had tried to obtain years before, and which Enfantin had yearned for since the 1830s. But it soon became clear that Lesseps’s success had engendered envy and rage, rather than warmth and enthusiasm. Having been apprised of Lesseps’s plans by Arlès-Dufour, a very grumpy Enfantin used his formidable connections to wangle an interview with Napoleon III.

  As a young man, Louis-Napoleon had dabbled in the ideas of Saint-Simon, and he was rumored to be a closet Saint-Simonian. Meeting with the emperor, Enfantin was annoyed but deferential. He wanted Napoleon to support the Study Group and not Lesseps. He alluded to the familial connection between Lesseps and the new Empress Eugénie de Montijo, and he implied that the emperor ought not be guided by that. Enfantin believed that the Study Group had a prior and valid claim to the project, and that, although Lesseps was welcome to participate, he was not entitled to call the enterprise his own.9

  During the previous weeks, Enfantin had written to Lesseps through Arlès-Dufour. He was not pleased. He objected to the use of Pelusium as a port and recalled that the Study Group had rejected Pelusium for good reasons. It was too shallow, and though the mouth of the Nile had in past centuries moved west, the alluvial sands would still be a chronic problem. In addition, there were no quarries in the vicinity, and the cost of transporting the massive quantities of stone needed for the extensive jetty would make the overall cost of the project prohibitive. Enfantin referred to the studies made by Paulin Talabot in 1847 for proof that the design now championed by Lesseps was seriously flawed, and he argued instead for a version of the indirect route that Talabot had recently gone on record supporting.

  But Enfantin’s real gripe was that Lesseps had taken charge of an endeavor that wasn’t his to lead. He felt that the Study Group had a prior claim, though he acknowledged that the opposition of the English member of the group, Robert Stephenson, was a potential liability. Enfantin talked to Lesseps as if to an old friend with whom he was having a misunderstanding, and he asked Ferdinand to respect the prior rights of the Study Group and to treat its members as equal partners.

  Lesseps did not agree. On his return to Cairo, he wrote to Arlès-Dufour knowing that everything he communicated would in turn be relayed to Enfantin. Lesseps admitted that he too was worried about the truculence of Stephenson, and for that reason, he thought it best not to emphasize the role of the Study Group. If one of its key members, a person allied with the governing coalition in England, was actively opposed to the canal, that would make it almost impossible for the group to function effectively. Besides, Lesseps continued, it was a moot point, since Said had entrusted the building of the canal not to a group but to one man, Ferdinand de Lesseps. That was for the best, he continued, because the Turks preferred personal relationships, and placing a project in the hands of someone trusted carried more weight with Said than a multinational group, no matter how impressive its pedigree. He told Arlès-Dufour that he planned to remain “the master of this affair.” He acknowledged that the Study Group had been a vital element, but it was his opinion that the group “no longer exists and there is no way to revive it.”

  This was a debatable conclusion. The group had been dormant, yes, but it had never officially disbanded, and its leading members contended that it did still exist. Lesseps did not argue the merits of what the group had accomplished, and he credited Enfantin, Arlès-Dufour, the Talabots, and Negrelli with having done invaluable work. For that reason, he explained, their names had been included as founding members of the Suez Canal Company. In financial matters he was equitable, and had every intention of remunerating the Study Group with whatever profits accrued from the canal. Yet, though he wanted its members to be rewarded for their efforts, he was determined that they have no say in how the project would evolve from this moment on.

  Democratic about sharing the wealth, he was autocratic when it came to personal glory. That desire was the key ingredient of his ambition. As he told his mother-in-law several days after writing Arlès-Dufour, “I want to do something great, without hidden motive, and without any personal interest in money…. I will be resolute…. My ambition, I swear, is to be the only one to lead all those involved in this immense affair….” He refused to accept any conditions that anyone placed on him or on his vision for the canal. He claimed that he had learned a crucial lesson from none other than Muhammad Ali, who had once told him that if he wanted to accomplish anything important he could only co
unt on himself. “If there are two of you,” the pasha had advised him, “there are too many of you.” Lesseps took that lesson to heart, and it was his guiding mantra for the remainder of his life.10

  Enfantin did not react to this snub with equanimity. Surrounded by acolytes who viewed him as the messiah, he was not used to having his wishes so flagrantly disregarded. He began a campaign to undermine Lesseps. In France, he assailed both the logistics of the proposed plan and the validity of Lesseps’s claim. He enlisted supporters to spread the word that the concession was illegitimate, that the direct route violated both common sense and good engineering, and that Ferdinand de Lesseps, a once-disgraced diplomat, had usurped the venture in ways not befitting a gentleman.

  He also wrote directly to Lesseps. His letter was alternately taunting and conciliatory. He accused Ferdinand of unnecessary paranoia that others might steal his thunder, and stated that such fears were not becoming in someone with pretensions to greatness. He scolded Lesseps for relying on the advice of Linant, whom Enfantin had tangled with in years past and whom he now accused of a complete lack of scientific knowledge. He also questioned Lesseps’s technical acumen. “We [Saint-Simonians] are engineers,” he chided. “Are you and Said engineers?” Furthermore, he assailed Lesseps for not seeing how much of a liability Linant was. The English opponents of the scheme were using Linant’s plan and the Pelusium idea as the major point of attack. If Lesseps would see the light, embrace the support of Enfantin, and adopt the ideas of Talabot for an indirect route, then the canal might stand a chance of being built. Otherwise, Enfantin warned, the project “would find not a sou in Europe for an enterprise so obviously crazy.”