According to the report filed by the consul, in the entire isthmus, the company employed a total of 210 Europeans and 544 Egyptians, not including staff in offices in Cairo and Alexandria. The company’s agents had marked out eleven stations along the proposed route, with anywhere from three to a hundred Europeans camped at each point. But most stations had fewer than half a dozen Europeans and a dozen Arab workers living in tents. The major settlements, at Port Said, Lake Timsah, and Kantara, consisted of a few dozen adobe huts each, with a general store, lime and brick kilns, wells, a few steam engines, and dilapidated old dredgers. The outpost of Gebel Genifa, twenty-eight miles northwest of Suez, had been praised by the company’s propaganda as a thriving community. Yet it consisted mostly of stakes in the sand marking out future streets that had already been given names such as Rue de Lesseps and Rue de Mougel. The soil consisted of sand, clay, and some lime. Even with fresh water, it would be useless for agriculture, and the well water was so saline that it was essentially undrinkable.
At Port Said, the busiest of the stations, there were two dredging machines for work on the small access canal and a total of eleven wooden huts. While the residents spoke of plans for engines to condense steam into drinking water and boasted of the stone that was supposed to arrive from Attaka and Alexandria, none of this had yet happened, and morale was low. One engineer complained that the company was disorganized. “They give me men, and no pick-axes; another time they give me pick-axes without men; and once or twice, when they have succeeded in giving me both at the same time, they have found it impossible to send provisions.” Drunken fights between the residents were common, though at least they could get their broken bones set and their cuts stitched at a makeshift hospital, staffed with European doctors hired to tend to workers who would almost certainly be injured when construction of the jetty began.
Details of the report were leaked to the press. The Times of London wrote, “A show of carrying on works in the Suez Desert is still kept up, but every one is agreed that it is nothing more than a mere pretense, and that not the slightest real progress is made.” The paper claimed that, though the project could be completed with enough money, the sum required would be many times the amount currently budgeted. As things stood, The Times concluded, the company was about to spend eight million pounds (the equivalent of two hundred million francs) “digging holes in the sand” that would soon fill up again, leaving the isthmus as impassable as ever.7
Lesseps painted a very different picture of the scene. In June, he left Alexandria for the canal zone, and though he was president of a company and not a country, his tour had all the trappings of a state visit. Accompanying him were the chief engineers of Mougel’s staff, a number of French naval officers, a priest, and a Muslim imam. After surveying the quarries at Mex, the party made the difficult trip east to Port Said. The route was by this time well established, but it was still an arduous journey. No large ships could actually dock at Port Said itself. The group had to take a train that terminated about forty miles from Damietta. Then they disembarked and went by mule to the village of Mansourah, where they got on barges that took an entire night to navigate the eddies to Damietta. From there, they went by lake boat across Manzala to Port Said. The whole trip took three days.
The night they arrived, the priest celebrated mass, and then baptized the first child born in Port Said. Lesseps was honored to be the godfather, and the child gained two additional names, Ferdinand and Said. In return, Lesseps gave the child two shares in the company. Mass was followed by a banquet hosted by the company for the entire community.
Lesseps was delighted by the sight of the new fifty-foot-high lighthouse, and he wrote glowingly about the town. It was, he claimed, filled with new stores, including a butcher shop, a bakery, a canteen for supplies, and a restaurant. Other stores sold shoes and clothing. Food was dispensed at reasonable prices, and a bottle of red wine from France went for about half a franc. Though there were still fewer than five hundred workers, there was already a nascent system of payment. Employees of the company were given color-coded chits corresponding to their salaries, and they used these to purchase whatever they required. Soon, arrangements would be made for licensed Egyptian vendors to sell the company workers everything from fish from Lake Manzala to fruit, vegetables, and eggs, and deals were being finalized to establish a distribution chain, with company-owned warehouses in Damietta on the coast and at Bulaq on the Nile. Materials and dry goods could then be transported as needed to the eleven stations along the canal route.
Slowly, the company was acquiring the powers of a small state. In America and in Europe, both railroad and mining corporations perfected the art of the company town. Rather than being paid a direct salary, workers were issued credits for use at company stores where they could buy sundries and necessary amenities. In time, the Suez Canal Company became a bureaucracy that ran not just the canal, but also the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the canal zone. In the spring of 1860, Lesseps could only hope that such a day would arrive, but already there were signs of what was to come.
Materials were being assembled at Port Said. Rail tracks and digging tools were piled up near the makeshift jetty, and an access rail line was being laid next to the canal to facilitate the movement of dredgers, men, and equipment. It would not be operational for many months, however, and Lesseps’s party toured the canal zone between Port Said and Lake Timsah by camel and mule. They inspected the stations along the way, and stopped at Kantara and at the future site of Ismailia (which was then called Tousounville, after Said’s son) before returning to Cairo along the proposed route of the freshwater canal.8
Though radically different in tone, the two accounts are reconcilable. The report filed by the British consul and the version left by Lesseps agree in most respects. The difference was in how the facts were interpreted. The British filtered the data through a lens of hostility. They wanted the canal to fail, and so, instead of lauding the bare-bones settlement, they pointed to the primitiveness of Port Said as evidence that the project consisted mostly of propaganda. Where Lesseps saw the beginning of a glorious future, the British observer saw a pitiful group of single-story dwellings dwarfed by a rickety lighthouse and a pier that could barely contain the mild tides. Where Lesseps discerned the outline of a railway to supply the rest of the isthmus, the British noticed piles of rusting metal. And whereas the small community would have cleaned up and made everything look its best in anticipation of Lesseps’s inspection, the British observer arrived anonymously and was able to observe the colony in its less polished state.
No matter how the picture was interpreted, as of the summer of 1860, the company was at best a chrysalis of what would be. Though Port Said had grown, there was no evidence of an actual canal, and, however unfair, that fact alone provided ammunition for the project’s determined adversaries. When Said was presented with the bill for the shares he had agreed to purchase, Lord Palmerston used these reports to assail Lesseps and the company for having misled investors.
It was no secret that the viceroy intended to pay for the shares that had not been bought in Britain, Austria, Russia, and the United States. But that did not stop Palmerston from making an issue of it. Said was asked to pay an installment of fifteen million francs on the 177,642 shares that he owned. Compared with the revenue taken in annually by the Egyptian government, that was a substantial sum, and though Said could cover the first payment from the reserves in his treasury, beginning in 1862 he had to borrow money from European bankers in order to meet his obligations. Palmerston accused Lesseps of taking advantage of the viceroy. “A great many persons in France—small people—have been induced to take small shares,” he declared in Parliament, “under the notion that the concern would be a profitable matter…. The progress of the works in Egypt, however, has been such as to show that, if not impracticable, it will require an expenditure of money, time, and labour quite beyond the reach of any private company.” But, Palmerston continued, “the un
fortunate Pasha” had been “hoodwinked” by Lesseps into thinking that the expenditure would be good for Egypt. Though he did not doubt that it would be good for Lesseps, he feared that it would lead to Said’s ruin. It was not, Palmerston claimed, simply a private matter between a French company and a foreign investor. If Said was forced to go into debt to pay for the shares, and if he contracted loans with French bankers and then defaulted, then these bankers, in league with the French government, might start seizing property, or even take control of Egypt’s finances, in order to collect their money.9
Palmerston was wrong yet prescient. The ruler of Egypt did go into debt. He did default, and European bankers did take control of Egyptian finances, which paved the way for the collapse of the Egyptian state and the occupation of the country by a European power. But the ruler was Said’s successor, Ismail; the bankers were English; and the European power was Great Britain. Though the canal contributed to the bankruptcy of Egypt, as Palmerston feared, it ultimately enriched Great Britain and enhanced British power, as Palmerston would have liked.
Said graciously paid the first installment, but the extra money did not provide any substantial boost to the work. The situation on the ground was certainly better than the English claimed. After all, until a few years before, the entire region had been inhabited only by a few fishermen trawling the swamps of Lake Manzala and by Bedouin tribes who occasionally camped along the isthmus. That the company towns at Timsah and Port Said existed at all was an accomplishment, and even under the best management, it would have been difficult to set up supply lines any more quickly.
But it soon became clear that the company was not graced with the best management, or with the best laborers. Hardon and Mougel were not working well together. In part, this was an issue of personality, but there were structural problems that made the situation worse. Never having been to Egypt, Hardon had agreed to serve as general contractor without a full appreciation of the immensity of the undertaking. Faced with the actual problems of a waterless desert region, and confronted with the reality that supplies and workers would have to be obtained elsewhere and then transported to the isthmus at considerable cost, Hardon was flummoxed. It was not that the work wasn’t getting done, but it was taking far longer than planned.
Whereas Hardon suffered from lack of experience in Egypt, Mougel may have had too much. He gathered a superb staff, but having spent decades working on plans for the canal, he had a hard time integrating new information. He thought he understood what needed to be done better than anyone else, and he might have. But as more people with expertise divided the work into component parts and began to examine the soil and the precise route and what was required in each place, Mougel resisted change. He was wedded to the initial blueprints, and as the site engineers started making adjustments, he was slow to alter the master plan. That meant delays in ordering new supplies, in recalculating costs, and in revising the route.
For instance, there was the challenge of excavating Lake Manzala. The first section of the canal was supposed to run along its eastern shore, which meant that a channel had to be dug out of the marshy, sulfurous lake-bed. From his experience as the chief engineer on the Nile dam, Mougel planned to use a few dredgers to carve a channel through the lake, but the dredgers he obtained didn’t work properly. There were problems mooring them along the shore, and even when they scooped out soil from the lake bed, the currents from the lake carried silt that rapidly filled in whatever holes had been dug. The dredgers could go for hours and have nothing to show for it.
But the fishermen of Lake Manzala knew how to manipulate the lake. They had been doing so in small ways for thousands of years. The company hired these fishermen, who stood knee-deep in the water and scooped up as much as their arms could hold. They then rolled the mud, which stank of sulfur, into balls, squeezed out the water on their chests, and let these balls bake in the sun until they hardened. The hardened round bricks were used to form a break wall that rose above the lake’s surface. Only then could the excavation of the channel proceed. At each stage of the work, improvisation like this was required. The method for building an embankment near Port Said didn’t work farther south, near Lake Balah, because the soil was completely different. Manzala soil hardened, but the gypsum of Lake Balah cracked, which meant that material for the embankment had to be trucked in from somewhere else.10
In fairness to Mougel and Hardon, they had been put in an untenable position. They had been instructed to build a canal and were expected to solve whatever problems arose. But the fault lay as much with Lesseps and the company as it did with them. There was no way that they could not have made mistakes, and the company’s expectations were unreasonable. But by the middle of 1861, Lesseps decided that both men had to be replaced. That meant firing the two senior officials involved in the construction. No company undertakes a decision like this lightly. There was a very real chance that the removal of Hardon and Mougel would disrupt the timetable, jeopardize relationships with subcontractors and suppliers, and cause an uproar among the shareholders. But Lesseps was certain that neither man could complete the project, and whatever the risks of removing them, he believed that keeping them would be worse.
Hardon remained until his contract expired at the end of 1862, and Mougel was slowly eased out. Their successors fared much better, in part because they were able to learn from the early false starts. In January 1861, François-Philippe Voisin was appointed engineer-in-chief of the canal works; Mougel remained director general for another year. A graduate of the Polytechnic, Voisin had established his reputation working on the port of Boulogne and then on hydraulic projects in the Pyrenees. Soon known as Voisin Bey he was forty years old, energetic, and, as it would turn out, perfectly suited for the task. Lesseps was delighted. He announced that he had “unlimited confidence” in Voisin and praised his “excellent judgment and good nature.” The canal had found its engineer.11
But one other problem remained unresolved: workers. For the first two years, the company relied on voluntary laborers. Said had promised to provide the project with labor, but Lesseps was wary. The corvée would give the company tens of thousands of workers, courtesy of the Egyptian government. But even though these workers would be paid, they were still forced labor—not exactly slaves, but not exactly free. Popular opinion in France and England abhorred slavery. The United States was beginning a civil war because of slavery, and even the Russian tsar was coming under pressure to free the serfs. Lesseps wanted to avoid being portrayed as a man who used slave labor to build his ode to civilization.
For the first year, the corvée was not an option. Until the end of 1859, Said objected to what the company was doing and would not have authorized the corvée even if Lesseps had wanted it. Said’s position changed in 1860, but Lesseps worried that “the theme of the corvée would become the pivot of attacks launched against the canal by its adversaries.” Instead, he tried to find workers without the intervention of the Egyptian government. He met with Bedouin shaikhs on each side of the isthmus and asked them to supply some men. They entertained him in their tents, drank coffee with him, and smoked pipes, but they did not oblige. Though the company was able to hire several hundred Egyptians and a few Syrians and Palestinians, that was a pittance compared with what was needed. Villagers were understandably wary of foreigners promising wages for work to be conducted many days from their homes. Desperate, the company recruited as far afield as Cuba, California, Australia, and even China. None of these yielded more than a handful of men.12
The Suez Canal could never be created with a few hundred workers. In fact, the company did not even have enough men to dig the freshwater canal from the Nile. Though he was aware that the corvée might become a public-relations disaster, Lesseps had exhausted all other options. After the summer of 1861, thousands of peasants started to arrive in the canal zone. They were not there by choice.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE CORVÉE
THE FRENCH EXPRESSION “Quelle corvée!�
�� translates as “What a drag!” The actual corvée in nineteenth-century Egypt was that and more. Hardly unique to Egypt, the corvée has been used in countless countries for as long as human history has been recorded. Most of the wonders of the ancient world were built through forced labor. Even the temples of the Greeks were constructed by laborers who were not given the option of refusing to haul the tons of stone and thousands of bricks needed to construct a Parthenon. The Great Pyramids at Giza, the Great Wall of China, the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia—all were the products of hundreds of thousands of peasants who were corralled by armies of the state, taken to the sites, and put to work. Whether they survived was not a primary concern.
One of the byproducts of the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, the American and French revolutions of the eighteenth century, and the emergence of liberal ideas in the nineteenth century was that slavery and forced labor came under attack. Human bondage was difficult to reconcile with the principles of liberty and freedom. The British officially outlawed the slave trade in 1807. In France, the Society for the Abolition of Slavery agitated for decades before it was finally victorious, during the brief Second Republic interregnum, in 1848. Neither of these laws actually ended slavery in the colonies held by Britain and France, and it would take continuous effort by antislavery advocates to eradicate the human trade in Africa, Asia, and even Latin America. But by midcentury it was difficult to find anyone in a position of influence in the West defending slavery, at least outside of the Southern part of the United States.
The Egyptian corvée existed in a gray zone. The peasants pressed into service were not considered property of the state or of private individuals. But the system did impose a form of temporary servitude. The workers could not come and go as they pleased. They were recruited under the threat of violence and forced to work under the threat of violence. Typically, the corvée was used for irrigation projects on the Nile. These took several months to construct, but it was simple to assemble large numbers of peasants from nearby villages. The Nile Delta, to the north of Cairo, was the most densely populated region of the country outside of the cities, and most of the dikes, dams, embankments, and sluices that needed maintenance and dredging were within a few days’ journey from even the most remote delta village. The system was further softened by an unspoken understanding that irrigation did not just serve the interests of the few: agriculture was vital for ruler and peasant alike.
Parting the Desert Page 21