In December 1863, Paul Borel and Alexandre Lavalley formed a partnership, called Borel, Lavalley, and Company. Their corporate title may have lacked imagination, but their actual work did not. Like Voisin and so many others, they were graduates of the Polytechnic School, where they absorbed the ideals of progress, industry, and civilization that had infused the project from the start. They both had extensive experience working on railway lines. Borel, an intense-looking man with a penetrating gaze, was born in Marseille, and had learned his trade working on the Bordeaux-to-Tours line, and then on the important link between Lyon and Marseille. Fascinated by machinery, he formed a joint venture with several partners to manufacture train engines. The younger, genial-looking Lavalley, called by Lesseps “the most skillful engineer in Europe,” spent many years in England as an apprentice and then a designer of specialized machines. He became an expert at metallurgy, understood the workings of forges, studied the latest steam-power technology, and then applied his knowledge to customizing locomotives. His dexterity had taken him far afield. He designed lighthouses on the Black Sea and the Baltic; he created machines to bore a tunnel in Lithuania; and he fashioned dredgers to deepen ports in Russia.2
These were precisely the skills that the Suez Canal Company needed to move to the next phase of construction. Though there were a handful of dredgers in place at Port Said, most of these had been designed for work on the Nile. For work farther south, in the isthmus, different machines would be needed. At Lake Manzala and Lake Timsah, some of the excavation would be done in shallow water. The plateaus of El-Guisr, the Serapeum, and Chalufa were of different heights, and the mix of rock, soil, gypsum, and sand varied from place to place. Each excavation elevator had to be tailored specifically to account for these differences. Train tracks had to be configured to accommodate the machines. Some dredgers would be anchored on barges and used to remove the mud and sand from the bottom of the canal, whereas others would be placed on tracks along the banks of the canal. The angles for the conveyor belts and the depth of the elevators would differ, depending on where they were used. The amount of weight each bucket could carry depended on the consistency of the earth, which varied greatly throughout the isthmus.
The result was that more than a dozen different types of machines had to be designed, constructed, and then installed. Many of these came in four, five, or six different sizes. The initial prototype often went through several models. Once they were actually deployed, the new machines were subject to tinkering or redesigns. Some of that could be done in the workshops at the isthmus stations, but some of the customization had to be completed in France. For instance, one dredger meant to remove the fine sand near the Mediterranean coast kept breaking when the sand and mud clogged the works. The only solution was to rinse the machine regularly with water, and that meant redesigning the dredger and constructing and installing a water pump. There were countless adjustments like this, each of which slowed progress.
For five years starting in 1864, Borel and Lavalley furnished the company with machines. They devised them, tested them, delivered them, installed them, and, in conjunction with Voisin, hired people to use them, fix them, and maintain them. Ultimately, there would be nearly three hundred such machines, most of them powered by coal, some by steam. Borel oversaw operations from his headquarters in Paris, while Lavalley spent most of his time in the canal zone. They obtained contracts from the company for distinct phases of the work. Rates were determined by setting a price for the excavation of one cubic meter, and the price varied depending on the consistency of the soil. For instance, the excavation of El-Guisr between Lake Balah and Lake Timsah, a distance of nine miles, contained approximately nine million cubic meters, at a cost of 2.5 francs per cubic meter, as opposed to a cost of only 1.99 francs per cubic meter for the relatively loose and easy-to-remove soil found at the southern end of the canal.
Negotiations between contractors and companies are often acrimonious, but Borel, Lavalley, Voisin, and Lesseps appear to have had a collegial, respectful rapport. Of the seventy-four million cubic meters removed from the main canal, Borel and Lavalley were responsible for more than 75 percent of the total. Most of the work was performed between 1867 and 1869. It took years for the new machines to be put to most efficient use, but by 1864, Lesseps and the company directors recognized that Borel and Lavalley would be able to deliver what others had not.
But Borel and Lavalley did not have the expertise to solve the problem of the Port Said jetty. That was left to the Dussaud brothers. The four siblings from Marseille had used innovative techniques for the construction of jetties in Algiers and Cherbourg. Experts at masonry, they had experimented with new ways of mixing concrete, and they adapted these in order to solve the riddle of Port Said. Beginning in late 1864, the Dussaud brothers developed a system for creating the immense blocks needed for the two long jetties into the sea. One jetty was to be nearly two miles long, the other a mile and a half, and between them, they would enclose a triangular harbor area of 550 acres where ships entering and leaving the canal could safely anchor. Each of the blocks for the jetties weighed more than twenty tons, which were produced on an assembly line on an island near the town. Mechanical elevators poured sand into rudimentary cement mills, and then lime imported from Theil, in southern France, was added along with salt water. The lime-and-sand cement mixture was poured into large wooden frames and spread evenly to form blocks. The blocks were then left to bake in the sun for two months; once hardened, they were lifted by hydraulic cranes onto trucks and rolled onto custom-built barges that were equipped with wooden runners that held the stone slabs at an angle. The barges transported the blocks out to sea, and then the stops on the runners were released to allow the slabs to slide into the water, one after another. In the end, the jetties contained thirty thousand blocks.3
There were other engineers, of course, as well as other contractors and subcontractors. An Englishman named William Aiton oversaw a portion of the excavation around Port Said, and a French entrepreneur named Alphonse Courveux helped tackle the challenge of cutting through the plateau at El-Guisr. But by 1866, Borel and Lavalley had bought out Aiton, and they served as the de-facto general contractors for the last half of the work, answerable only to Voisin Bey and Lesseps. They drew to the canal many of the most promising young engineers in Europe, who came for the adventure and for the experience. Voisin also assembled a skilled team of regional chief engineers, men such as Félix Laroche at Port Said and Eugène Larousse at the port of Suez, also graduates of the Polytechnic. Their belief in science extended beyond machines. They also applied the philosophies of the Polytechnic to human organization. They thought that, just as machines were composed of multiple moving parts working in harmony, the work as a whole should consist of units and subunits working jointly for a common goal established beforehand and implemented rigorously. As a result, the Suez Canal Company embodied the notion of scientific management long before that term was coined.
With the arrival of Borel, Lavalley, and the Dussauds, working for the Suez Canal Company became one of the most desirable jobs in Europe. Ambitious young engineers knew that having the canal on their résumés would be worth a fortune in future prestige and subsequent jobs. The end of the corvée increased the need for semiskilled European workers and foremen, and the mechanization opened up countless opportunities for apprentices. In 1863, there had been tens of thousands of fellahin and only a few thousand Europeans. By the mid-1860s, there were ten thousand Arab and Egyptian residents in the various towns and settlements along the canal, and more than eight thousand Europeans. The non-Europeans were a mix of fellahin, Bedouins, people from Cairo or Alexandria, and Syrians. Several thousand were employed directly by the company, while others ran stores or coffeehouses and provided daily necessities. As time went on, workers also brought their families, and the resident population included wives and children, of both Europeans and non-Europeans alike.4
In an age when someone like Lesseps could make himself i
nto one of the most prominent citizens of the day, there were thousands of other ambitious men who believed the same thing about themselves. Many of them, finding Europe too competitive, traveled far, to the new colonies of France in North Africa or of England in India, South Africa, and the Far East. One of the best ways to advance in society, then as now, was to become involved in important projects run by important people, and the Suez Canal by the mid-1860s was the largest, most expensive, and most scrutinized engineering project in the world. A mason or a machinist in his twenties, a hydraulic engineer or a metallurgist in his early thirties might aspire to oversee the construction of a bridge or railroad or tunnel, but the only way to get there was to work steadily, make contact with other prominent engineers, and establish a reputation. The canal provided that, and not just for engineers. It offered an opportunity for accountants, shopkeepers, clerks, doctors, carpenters, surveyors, topographers, barge captains, blacksmiths, masons, stonecutters, train conductors, cooks, and telegraph operators, as well as for hundreds of minor functionaries who went to work for the company. Even so, joining the Canal Company was a major commitment for someone living in rural France or England or Italy. The grandeur of the endeavor, the romance of the desert, and the good publicity helped the company. Yet people were drawn not just by the work itself and by the prospect of being involved in something monumental, but by the salaries, which, from the director general of the works on down, were considerably higher than anywhere in Europe at the time.
What was true for skilled workers was also true for the laborers who replaced the fellahin of the corvée. Given the cotton boom and inflation in Egypt, salaries for unskilled workers had to be high enough to draw them to the isthmus. In 1865, Ismail provided the company with several thousand “soldiers,” who were mostly ill-trained and were in essence corvée labor by another name. But as the work became more mechanized, there was less need for them. Soon, the company was hiring workers with minimal assistance from the Egyptian government.
Ismail had wanted to end the corvée in order to increase his power. Instead, his influence over the canal zone decreased. As long as the corvée was in use, government officials were stationed throughout the isthmus to keep an eye on the fellahin in conjunction with company officials. But once it ceased, there was no need for Ismail’s agents. The concessions had given the company wide latitude to govern the area during the construction, and though each district had an Egyptian administrator, after the corvée the company began to act as a quasi-autonomous state. There was not much Ismail could do about that. Before the canal, there had been no governmental presence in the isthmus outside of the port of Suez and the western side of Lake Manzala. Ismail could and did designate new administrative zones around the major canal settlements, but the towns were being built by the company; the company owned the stores; the company paid for and owned the rail links; and until a final settlement was reached, the company controlled the Sweet Water Canal and all transport from Cairo. In 1865, Ismail authorized and funded the construction of a railroad from Cairo to Ismailia, but it would be years before that was complete. In the interim, as the population of the canal towns and settlements rose above twenty thousand, the company took on the functions of a government. It policed the towns, and it kept the peace. And slowly, its administrators began to assert their prerogatives at the expense of Egyptian officials.
In April 1864, the governor of Damietta lodged a complaint with Laroche, the chief engineer of Port Said. The district of Damietta included the lands around Lake Manzala, as well as the lake itself. It had come to the governor’s attention that fishermen had begun to fish in the newly excavated canal in the eastern part of the lake. That disturbed the governor. He did not object to the fishing per se; after all, the few people who lived in the area had been trawling the lake with their nets since antiquity. But he complained that the government was owed duties on the catch, and he demanded, politely, that either the fishermen employed by the company or the company itself pay the taxes levied on all fishing in Egypt.
Though Laroche was the company agent in charge of the region, he recognized that this type of dispute was, as it were, above his pay grade. He referred the complaint to the director general, Voisin Bey and Voisin Bey immediately referred the matter to Lesseps. Lesseps wasted no time in sending a somewhat impolite response, and forwarded copies not only to the provincial governor who had raised the matter in the first place but to the French consul general in Alexandria. Anticipating that this was just the sort of thing that sovereign governments can become agitated about, he wanted his reasons understood.
Though he did not say so in his letter, Lesseps had a sentimental attachment to the fishermen of the lake. They were, he remarked in a speech a short while later, “a race of men who do not at all resemble the rest of the inhabitants of Egypt. It is believed that they are descended from ancient shepherds. M. Mariette, the wise explorer of Egyptian antiquities, has unearthed in this area statues that date from the time of Joseph, and these had similar physiognomy and special characteristics that can be observed in the current residents of the lake.” These were the same people who had developed the only effective method of excavating the mud of the lake, and whose labor on the canal had been vital until the dredgers designed by Lavalley supplanted them. But whether or not they were directly descended from Biblical shepherds, and whether or not they had aided the canal’s construction and provided the residents of Port Said with food, Lesseps did not think that their labor belonged to the Egyptian state. Instead, he rejected the governor’s demand. The fishermen, he said, were working for the company, or, at the least, working as independent contractors supplying the company with fish. According to his reading of the concession of 1856, the company was entitled to “the use of all land and waterways not belonging to private individuals.” As a result, no taxes were owed the Egyptian government, and he would not allow the governor of Damietta to collect them.5
Lesseps may have been within his rights to reject claims that the company pay duties, but it was a considerable stretch to assert that Egyptians who worked for the company did not owe taxes. Though the local fishermen must have celebrated the company’s decision, Lesseps was blatantly infringing on the sovereignty of the Egyptian state. Well before the canal was finished, the fears of Muhammad Ali were coming true. A European company, backed by a powerful European government, was starting to erode the autonomy of Egypt. Other states around the globe had already discovered that European commercial ventures could be lethal to local autonomy. Said and then Ismail looked to the canal as a conduit to future Egyptian greatness. The closer the canal came to completion, the more unlikely that seemed.
Fishing rights were a minor matter, but the willingness of Lesseps to dismiss Egyptian sovereignty was not. The company was becoming more autonomous and more imperious. Though Lesseps had always challenged the right of the viceroy to alter the concessions without compensation, he had treated both Said and Ismail as authorities to be respected. In 1854, he had simply been a well-connected private citizen with a scheme. A decade later, he was the president of a multinational company that employed thousands of workers and was at the center of international politics and finance. He was regularly lauded at shareholder meetings and banquets, and toasted as one of the true geniuses of the day. At a banquet in 1865, he was hailed as “the collaborator of God” whose name would live forever. He had never suffered from excess humility, and it would have taken a preternaturally modest soul not to be puffed up by all this praise. The more power he acquired, the less he was willing to defer to Ismail. The more power the company acquired, the less it was willing to defer to the Egyptian government. The fishing rights in and of themselves were trivial, but what began with perch in Lake Manzala ended not many years later with a viceroy exiled, a treasury bankrupt, a company wealthy beyond all measure, and an Egypt governed and occupied by a foreign power.
Throughout this period, Lesseps maintained his peripatetic lifestyle. He rarely stayed in one place for mo
re than a few months, though he had homes in central Paris, near the company’s offices, and a comfortable residence in Ismailia. Whenever he was in the canal zone, he spent days inspecting the work, and he enjoyed poring over plans with his engineers. When he was in France, he insisted on receiving detailed reports, prepared specifically for him. Nothing was too insignificant to attract his attention, and the files of the company bulge with instructions from him to district chiefs, foremen, and local supervisors. He wanted to know precisely what was going on where. He also was an active administrator of the company’s business affairs, and he kept careful tabs on the finances. As much as he may have wanted to control all aspects of the project, however, he was too busy to decide everything, and he had good instincts about when to defer to the wisdom of his executives and engineers and when to demand a different course of action. And at no point did he have the luxury to focus primarily on the logistics of the construction. He was the public face of the Canal Company, and he was the only one who could effectively promote the enterprise.
By 1865, the canal began to attract more visitors. These ranged from curiosity seekers making a detour from the Nile antiquities and the Holy Land, to journalists from Europe and the Americas looking for a good story, to business leaders trying to gauge when the canal would be open for trade. Commercial delegations were greeted with as much pomp and circumstance as the company could provide. Leaving a good impression was vital to future business, and the company developed a model tour for visiting dignitaries. In April 1865, the company hosted a delegation from the New York City Chamber of Commerce, along with representatives from Austria, Greece, Belgium, Russia, Persia, and the Low Countries. With the Civil War ending, American merchants looked once again to opportunities abroad, and the arrival of the Americans drew the attention of company officials. The British still accounted for most of world trade, but the United States was rightly perceived as an emerging power. Hosted by Lesseps himself, the delegates were transported from Cairo on trains outfitted with the latest luxuries. They were given tours by both Borel and Lavalley and they were treated to a feast in Ismailia. The head of the New York Chamber, Cyrus Field (who was in the process of laying the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable), thanked Lesseps profusely. “You have undertaken to divide two continents for the profit of all the commercial nations of the world; I fervently pray that you will soon see complete success, and that this work will rest as a monument as durable as the Pyramids because of your energy and your talent.”6
Parting the Desert Page 27