Finally, a schedule was drawn up. The work was expected to take six years. Once the freshwater canal was completed, there would be a reliable and consistent source of water, and the number of workers could be increased to thirty thousand. Then a small access canal, eight meters wide, would be dug between Port Said and Lake Timsah. The access canal, the rigole, would allow the engineers to test the flow of the Mediterranean inland. If all went well, work would continue in the north on the larger, maritime canal, while to the south another access canal would be dug, between Lake Timsah and the Gulf of Suez, which would require blasting the Chalufa ridge, south of the Bitter Lakes. The jetty would be completed at Port Said; the canal would be widened and deepened around Lake Manzala, and then widened and deepened south of Lake Timsah. And then it would be done, at a total budget of two hundred million francs.2
The final report was an exercise in fantasy and wishful thinking. The committee used existing canals and jetties in Europe as benchmarks, but even if there was some precedent for the Port Said jetty, there was none for a canal of this scope and through this terrain. The financial projections were guesswork predicated on the assumption that there would be no significant delays and that the engineering challenges were understood. In truth, they were not.
Whereas the opponents of the project routinely overstated the obstacles, Lesseps and his partisans went to the opposite extreme. Mougel Bey with his decades of experience in Egypt, should have known better, but perhaps sensing the desires of Lesseps, he went along with the sunny assessment. Conveniently overlooked in these initial meetings were the challenges posed by the three plateaus along the route. Though neither the Chalufa ridge in the south nor the Serapeum between Lake Timsah and the Bitter Lakes rose more than fifty feet above sea level, there had been no serious consideration about how to excavate them. The El-Guisr plateau in the north, located between the marshy bed of Lake Balah and Lake Timsah, would prove even more intractable, not because the region was rocky, but because it consisted mainly of sandy dunes. As anyone who has spent time at the beach knows, sand tends to shift in amoebic fashion, flowing back into the spot that has just been exposed. No one had addressed this dilemma, and the experience of European engineers with the moister, denser soils of Europe would be of little use.
But ignorance proved to be a blessing. Rather than focusing on the problems, Lesseps galvanized the staff of the company to find solutions. At each stage of the construction, as new difficulties revealed themselves, the engineers had no choice but to think on their feet and come up with solutions. Too much money and effort had been invested to allow the work to halt. Had the technical obstacles been fully appreciated at the outset, cost estimates would have ballooned, morale would have sunk, and the entire venture might have been fatally damaged.
In retrospect, what is most striking about the initial blueprints is how much the actual canal departed from them. Though the general route remained the same, the way the canal was constructed underwent a radical revision. For the first four years, the work relied on human labor, assisted by a few machines. In 1859, the company thought that the canal would be excavated in much the same way that public works in Egypt had always been completed, by the sweat and toil of hundreds of thousands of laborers. Said had agreed to furnish the company with Egyptian peasants, fellahin, who for centuries had been dragooned to work on irrigation projects or to erect the mausoleums and temples of the pharaohs. The modern Suez Canal may have been the brainchild of a nineteenth-century Frenchman, but it was to be built no differently from the canals dug by the Pharaoh Necho or by the Romans thousands of years before.
The preliminary plans did call for mechanical dredgers to deepen the channel through Lake Manzala, but for the most part the canal was treated as a straightforward task to be conducted in primitive fashion by unskilled workers with picks and baskets. By the standards of the day, the plans were unremarkable. Only in the past few decades had Europeans and Americans started to use steam machines to do what human labor had done for all of recorded history, and the reliance on human labor to construct the canal struck no one as odd.
But halfway through, the plan was radically revised. Initially, the canal was an exercise in logistics—moving men to distinct points along the isthmus so that they could move earth. Yet, by 1863, these laborers had only managed to complete a fraction of the work, and when Said died suddenly and his successor halted the supply of fellahin, the future of the canal looked bleak. But this turn of fate proved to be a blessing. Had the company continued to rely on manual labor, the project might have stretched out for many more years and taxed the patience of its shareholders, even if the technical issues had been resolved with a few tons of dynamite and thousands of bodies toiling away. Instead, the prospect of a labor shortage forced a rethinking, and in 1864 Lesseps and his engineers turned to machines.
Mechanization transformed the project. The majority of the actual excavation and the construction of the jetty were done not in the first seven years of the company’s existence, but in the final three years before the canal’s completion in late 1869. Suez was supposed to link two worlds. It did, but in ways that Lesseps, the Saint-Simonians, and others had not foreseen. The canal did not just join Europe with the Orient; it also connected the preindustrial world to the mechanical era. For the first phase of its construction, it was a reflection of the past; during the second, it became a harbinger of the future.
Manual labor began the endeavor, and steam-powered engines finished it. In many ways, the two stages of the canal’s creation mirrored the widening gulf between East and West. Until the industrial age, daily life in France was not too different from daily life in Egypt, India, or China. Language varied, as did religion. Specific history was distinct, as were geography and climate. But the needs of everyday life and the structures to supply them bore striking similarities across cultures and continents. Historians have argued, and will forever, over when the West began to diverge from the rest of the world, but there can be no question that industrialization was a physical manifestation of how different, and how dominant, Europe and North America were becoming. The mechanization of the canal’s construction was a potent example of how the industrial age changed the nature of work and allowed Europeans and Americans to alter the shape of the earth more quickly and dramatically than any humans ever had.
But on that windswept day in April 1859 when Lesseps and his cohorts gathered at Port Said to plant the Egyptian flag and strike the symbolic first blow, they held pickaxes. Had they seen into the future, they might have stood next to a mechanical dredger, and rather than raising their axes to strike the sand, they would have gathered around Lesseps while he pushed a button and listened to the roar of the motor. As it was, work began with a simple blow struck by a tool that had been used in one form or another for thousands of years.
The ceremony did not remove the substantial diplomatic hurdles that still stood in the way. Though Lesseps orchestrated that day in April, he could not both micromanage the construction and maintain pressure on the British, the Ottomans, Said, and the emperor. No one could replace Lesseps in the political arena, but after a brief search, the company hired a general contractor named Alphonse Hardon. Hardon had never set foot in Egypt, but he had overseen railroad projects in Europe and had earned accolades for the construction of a number of railway stations. As general contractor for the Suez Canal, he was given wide autonomy to hire workers and to engage subcontractors who would erect dwellings, set up condensation plants, assemble dredgers, and obtain stone and lime for the jetty. The details on the ground and choice of materials were left to Mougel, who in turn had a staff of engineers under him. All of these men were handsomely paid, and Hardon personally was guaranteed a substantial bonus if he completed the work on time and under cost.3
As Hardon and Mougel scrambled to find workers, Lesseps left for Egypt after throwing a celebratory banquet for the senior members of the Canal Company in Paris. In early spring, he arrived in Alexandria and met with
Said. He informed the pasha that Napoleon III wanted the canal built, and that he intended to honor the emperor’s desires. Said complained that Lesseps was once again placing him in an untenable position by invoking the emperor’s name without any concrete evidence that this was the emperor’s policy. Said also bristled at what he rightly took to be Lesseps’s impertinence. Rather than approaching the pasha as a supplicant seeking a blessing, Lesseps acted like a business partner. Said, ever polite and still averse to making a scene, said nothing. Informed that Lesseps had left for the isthmus to begin work, Said announced that he had not yet granted permission. Lesseps, anticipating that there would be trouble, claimed that the activity at Port Said was only a continuation of the preparations that Said had authorized long ago. The English consul, infuriated that Lesseps had circumvented the will of the viceroy, wrote angrily that Said was “a man without moral courage or consistency, who cannot be relied on for a day.” In meetings with both French and English diplomats, Said refused either to disavow or to sanction what Lesseps was doing. And so the dance continued.
But this time, the opponents pressed harder. Within the Egyptian ruling class, there were some who sided with the English. One of these was the minister of foreign affairs, Sharif Pasha, who instructed Lesseps that the prior permission to conduct preliminary works could not be used as a pretext to commence building the actual canal. He ordered Lesseps to cease and circulated this order to the consular community in Egypt. Lesseps politely refused. Until such a directive came directly from the viceroy, he planned to call all bluffs. He wrote to Said warning that “the adversaries of the Suez Canal are the enemies of Egypt and of the viceregal dynasty.” He confessed his surprise that Said “had given in to the pressure of these enemies and committed such a flagrant injustice” in allowing his minister to issue a statement that violated earlier promises to the Canal Company. “Your Highness,” Lesseps scolded, “is not at liberty to dismiss the sacred engagements, contracted in full view of the civilized world, and I am not free to delay… their fulfillment. The company is irrevocably constituted by virtue of inviolable decrees, and it must be allowed to exercise freely… the rights that it has been granted. To bring to an abrupt halt, after seven months of existence, its legitimate exercise of these rights would be to compromise your responsibilities in the most grave manner.”4
Said felt squeezed. He was also receiving letters from Constantinople advising him to think carefully before allowing the canal to proceed any further. The vizier, Ali Pasha, chided Said for not consulting with the sultan about a matter of such clear importance to the Ottoman Empire, though he stopped short of invoking the sultan’s authority and ordering a halt to the company’s activities. Feeling pressed from all sides, Said complained to the British consul that it was all fine and well for Palmerston (who was once again prime minister) to advise that the Egyptian government intercede, but not if Britain was simply using Egypt as a pawn. Said resented being put in the middle. “France wants a canal, and England does not,” he said, reasonably enough. No matter what he did, one power would be offended, and unlike the Ottoman ministers in Constantinople, he did not have the luxury of inaction. It was easy for the English and the grand vizier to pressure him, but he had authorized the creation of the Canal Company, and he alone would suffer if he tried to break his commitments.5
Meanwhile, work was continuing, though hardly at a breakneck pace. There were still fewer than two hundred people living at Port Said, and only the barest outlines of the town and the jetty had taken shape. A temporary wooden jetty had been built to accommodate larger steamers that carried water, building materials, and stone from the quarries of Mex, outside of Alexandria. The company started to hire native workers to assist in the labor. But the intransigence of London and Constantinople was having an effect. There was only so much that could be done with the limited supply of workers, and until Said allowed the company to recruit large numbers of Egyptians, progress would be minimal. The freshwater canal had to be dug before substantial work could begin in the isthmus itself, and no matter how broadly the company stretched the definition of “preliminary,” the freshwater canal would never fit. Aware that this stasis suited only the canal’s opponents, Lesseps lobbied Said with a steady stream of legalistic letters. He also escorted Said’s son Tousoun through Paris in the summer of 1859, as an act of friendship and as a signal that his relationship with Said remained strong.
But though the viceroy trusted Lesseps to take good care of his son, he was slowly succumbing to the arguments against the canal. In October, Said officially instructed the Canal Company to cease and desist. This time, the order was serious. The viceroy forbade further shipments of supplies from Alexandria or Damietta. Without these, the company would be forced to evacuate Port Said within a matter of weeks. There was only one recourse. Lesseps appealed directly to the emperor.
Napoleon was aware of the controversy. Lesseps had written in August claiming that the arguments against the canal were scurrilous and stemmed only from Great Britain’s animosity toward France, but Napoleon had once again declined to become involved in the dispute. Now, however, he agreed to meet with Lesseps. The emperor was at the height of his power. He had tightened his hold on France after the Orsini plot, and French armies had just scored a decisive victory over the Austrians at the battle of Magenta (which promptly became the name of an avenue in Haussmann’s ever-changing Paris). More popular than ever, Napoleon was less concerned about upsetting Britain and more determined to extend French influence throughout the world. That led to a few inane policies. Convinced of French greatness, he sent armies to Mexico to support the Archduke Maximilian’s effort to install a Hapsburg monarchy in the land of the Aztecs. But Napoleon’s expansive confidence also led him to rescue a Suez Canal project that was wildly popular among the same classes in France that formed the bulk of his support.
The emperor granted Lesseps an audience toward the end of October. There is no record of what role, if any, Eugénie played in arranging the meeting, and only Lesseps left a written account of what transpired. The meeting took place at St. Cloud Château, on the outskirts of Paris, and the emperor skipped over the formalities and went right to the point. “How is it,” he asked the entrepreneur, “that so much of the world is against your enterprise?”
“Sire,” Lesseps responded cleverly, “it is because the whole world thinks that Your Majesty does not support it.”
The emperor considered these words carefully, while absentmindedly twirling his mustache, as he often did when he was confronted with a question that required some thought. “Ah well, rest assured,” he told a relieved Lesseps. “You can count on my protection.”
The meeting continued for several more minutes, while Lesseps wrangled from the emperor an agreement to replace the French consul in Egypt, who had been less than helpful to the Canal Company. After hurrying back to the company’s office in central Paris, Lesseps publicized what the emperor had told him. Napoleon himself did not issue a statement confirming what he had said, but his representatives in London, Constantinople, and Alexandria demurred when furious English diplomats demanded an official denial of what Lesseps was claiming. It soon became clear that Lesseps was not lying and that the emperor had indeed blessed the enterprise. Having secured this vital backing, Lesseps proceeded to ignore Said’s direct orders to halt, and Said, recognizing that the emperor himself stood behind the company, reversed course and once again became a champion of the canal.6
To placate the Ottomans, Lesseps returned to Constantinople at the end of 1859, to dine with Sir Henry Bulwer, the British ambassador, who had succeeded the aging Stratford Canning de Redcliffe. The grand vizier had also been replaced, and there were rumors that the sultan planned to revoke the hereditary privileges previously granted to Said and the family of Muhammad Ali. The Ottoman ministers, not to mention the sultan, were piqued that Said had ignored their strong suggestions that he not allow the Canal Company to proceed, and they communicated their displeasure to L
esseps. But the veiled threats were just that. No one in a position of power at the Porte seriously intended to revoke Said’s privileges, because no one was certain that such a decree, if issued, would be obeyed. The viceroy of Egypt may have served at the pleasure of the sultan, but unless the sultan was willing to dispatch an army, he could not dramatically alter the status quo. As long as Said was alive, he and the Ottomans engaged in an elaborate charade: they pretended to rule over him as long as he continued to speak as if that were the case, and he continued to speak as if that were the case as long as they did not act as if it were.
Far from conceding the war, in the spring of 1860 Palmerston and the canal’s opponents began the next battle. New arguments were made about the dangers of the Red Sea, and articles started to appear questioning whether ships could even navigate through its supposedly erratic and violent currents. As long as little actual work had been done, there was still some hope that the tide of informed opinion could be turned against the Canal Company, and that this would then undermine the confidence of investors. Though the chances of this were slim, the continued opposition cost little to implement, and it forced Lesseps and the company agents to waste precious time and resources defending themselves. Palmerston also encouraged British diplomats to maintain the drumbeat against the canal. On the initiative of the new consul in Egypt, a “fact-finding” mission was dispatched to the isthmus. Lesseps had been claiming that the work was well advanced. Apparently, that was not the case.
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