Lord Mayo was interested in the canal because he had been appointed viceroy of India, and was on his way to assume his duties. Much to the surprise and delight of company officials, The Times wrote glowingly of the visit. The correspondent marveled over how much had changed in a few short years. The population of Port Said was nearly twenty thousand; its harbor teemed with frigates, barges, steamers, and sloops. Kantara, once a dry patch at the edge of the Lake Manzala swamp, boasted a hospital, tidy streets, and, by all accounts, a superb dinner at the Buffet de la Gare. In the words of the illustrator Édouard Riou, “The chicken was perhaps a little fleshy but the cutlets were succulent and the wine good.” In case the chicken failed to entice visitors, company officials emphasized that the settlement was the midpoint of the ancient route from the Holy Land to the Nile.
The Times expressed concern about the inundation of the Bitter Lakes, which was scheduled to begin shortly, as soon as the dam that kept back the waters of Lake Timsah was removed. At some point several months in the future, the inundation would be completed with the removal of another dam, to the south, allowing the waters of the Red Sea to merge with those of the Mediterranean in the Bitter Lakes. No one knew what would happen when the two seas merged. Would the water level rise above expectations? Would there be excessive pressure, or too much volume for the embankments of the canal? It was also not clear how many months it would take for the lake beds, which extended nearly twenty-five miles and were as much as eight miles wide, to fill up. Other than raising this question, however, the normally hostile Times printed a series of laudatory articles. The canal, the paper declared, far from a threat to England, was “simply a waterway between two great seas—a shortcut from the Western to the Eastern world, and that is all.” Whatever its financial prospects, it was a technical accomplishment that everyone would welcome. Lord Mayo claimed to be impressed and endorsed the canal as a benefit to English trade and to the health of the British Empire. Given that he would be assassinated in India three years later by an irate Afghani prisoner, he might have preferred to skip the trip.8
The canal received more positive publicity in the spring of 1869, when the prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, made a tour of the isthmus. That visit followed on the heels of the first official inspection of the works by the khedive, who had stayed in his chalet in the city named after him, and enjoyed the comforts that he was accustomed to in Cairo, Alexandria, or Paris. Lesseps timed the khedive’s arrival with the inundation of the Bitter Lakes. When the khedive gave the signal, the dam was broken and the water began to pour in. Lesseps delivered yet another pitch-perfect encomium: “Moses ordered the waters of the sea to withdraw and they obeyed him; on your order, they will return to their bed.” Four million cubic meters of water cascaded into the lakes in less than twelve hours.
The khedive, for his part, tried to make amends with Lesseps. “You know,” he wrote in a letter designed to lessen the friction between the two, “that I have always had the most passionate sympathy for the great work that you have undertaken to join the two seas…. In visiting your works, I could only be convinced of their importance…. Today, no one can doubt that here, in several months, the Isthmus of Suez will be open to navigation and a new route will be opened to commerce and civilization. No one appreciates better than I the advantages, and as sovereign of Egypt, I can only be happy and proud that a part of the territory that I govern will become once again, as it had been long ago, the meeting point of Europe and the Orient.” He vowed that, though pressing questions remained about customs duties and tribunals, he would do his part to settle such differences with mutual respect. But Ismail offered more than kind words. He agreed to purchase the telegraph systems then owned by the company, along with the quarries of Mex, hospitals along the isthmus, a number of stores, and fishing rights, thereby ending a dispute that had begun with a few carp in Lake Manzala. The total sum was thirty million francs.9
Ismail entertained the prince of Wales in Cairo before the English heir departed for the isthmus, and he provided his personal railway car for the prince’s transport to the city of Suez. Lesseps organized a schedule of banquets and sightseeing, and the prince was treated to a tour of the works by Borel and Lavalley The royal party stood on a wooden platform above the Bitter Lakes and watched as the waters slowly filled up the desolate expanse. Then they were conveyed by a company steamer to Ismailia—“the Venice of the Desert,” according to the Times reporter. There, they stayed in the chalet recently vacated by the khedive, still staffed by “gold-laced and scarlet uniformed servants, with cooks and stores of all kinds… and a regiment of infantry with its band.” A dinner attended by the luminaries of the company was served on the porch under the stars. A band played waltzes and an impromptu chorus of bagpipes while the prince, Lesseps, Voisin, and others “smoked the diamond and ruby studded chibouques, brought down by the corps of chibouqjees from Cairo.” The next day, they went on to Port Said, passing the dredgers at work on the banks. At the mouth of the canal, the royal party was met by cheering crowds, a chorus of “God Save the Queen,” and the strains of the “Viceroy’s Hymn.” The prince stayed on the khedive’s barge, the Mahroussah, where dinner was served in a salon decorated with damask cloth and silver columns and lit by hundreds of candles. Impressed by what he had seen, the future Edward VII concluded that, in opposing the canal, Lord Palmerston “had been guilty of a lamentable lack of foresight.”10
Another visitor to the canal attracted much less attention, an idealistic thirty-four-year old French sculptor opposed to the autocracy of the Second Empire and entranced by the Egyptian past. He had made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and to Egypt when he was barely twenty-one, and as it had so many other travelers, the trip affected him deeply. He sketched the fallen statues that lay in the sand and spent days inspecting the half-excavated and partly restored Sphinx at the base of the Great Pyramids of Giza. He wrote about the emotion he felt looking at “centuries-old granite beings, in their imperturbable majesty… whose kindly and impassible glances seem to disregard the present and to be fixed upon the unlimited future.” He did not forget what he had seen, and a decade later he returned to Egypt to make his own mark.
He had heard that Ferdinand de Lesseps planned to build a larger lighthouse at Port Said, and he lobbied for the commission to design it. He conceived of a statue, ninety feet high, guarding the entrance. One of the ancient wonders of the world had been the Colossus at Rhodes, built in the third century B.C., which observers described as a statue so immense that it straddled the mouth of the harbor, and ships would pass between its legs. No trace of it remained, but in the nineteenth century, as educated Europeans read the Latin and Greek texts of Strabo and Pliny, the memory of it was tantalizing. The young sculptor drew up plans for a towering statue of a female fellah. She would be draped in the robes worn by Egyptian peasants. To fulfill the functions of a lighthouse, she would carry a torch, and her name would be Egypt Bringing Light to Asia.
Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi was certain that Lesseps would embrace the idea. To his great disappointment, both Lesseps and the khedive declined. The statue was simply too expensive. Bartholdi dedicated himself to finding another location, and in 1871 he left for the United States. Fifteen years later, in 1886, a colossal statue was unveiled in New York Harbor, to commemorate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. It was called Liberty Enlightening the World, more popularly known as the Statue of Liberty, and it was dedicated by an official delegation sent from France, one of whose members was Ferdinand de Lesseps.11
Though Lesseps passed on the ninety-foot statue, in order to generate excitement, the company exploited an unfolding drama: Would the work be completed in time? With assembly-line precision, the Dussaud brothers had been able to deposit thirty to forty of those twenty-ton blocks a day in the waters off of Port Said, and the jetties were finished in early 1869. The excavation, however, was not. In fact, in August 1868, nearly twenty-seven million cubic meters still had to be removed,
almost a third of the total. Only thirteen months remained until the official deadline. The canal had always been perceived as a triumph of human ingenuity over the challenges of the natural world, but now it was portrayed as a sprint to the end. The suspense was whether the machines of Borel and Lavalley would be able to dig enough earth within the limited amount of time. The engineers themselves were skeptical, and worried that they would fail. The drama was real. All the company had to do was draw attention to it.
Correspondents were dispatched by papers throughout Europe to report on the stages of the work, and the monthly statistics published in L’Isthme de Suez were widely excerpted.12 The dredgers operated sixteen or seventeen hours a day, and were running at full capacity. Adding to the suspense was the risk that too many of the machines would break and thereby make the promised date impossible to achieve. Since 1863, the work had relied on machines, but in 1869 the company hired thousands of unskilled laborers to dig by hand the soft sand on a ten-mile stretch between the Chalufa ridge and the port of Suez. Though no one could say for sure that the goal would be accomplished, Lesseps proceeded under the assumption that it would be, and that this final difficulty would somehow be surmounted, as every previous one had been.
With the date fixed, the company and the Egyptian government planned for a grand festival to celebrate the opening. In November, the most powerful and influential people in the world would be invited to Egypt to witness a historic event, and they could assess for themselves whether or not the canal was a practical, functional alternative to the long route to Asia around the Cape of Good Hope. After years of florid speeches and evocative dreams, people wanted to know one thing: could a modern steamship, fully loaded, make the passage from Port Said to the Gulf of Suez? If the elites of Europe, America, and Asia arrived and the canal was not finished, they would question whether it would ever be, and they would wonder if the company and Lesseps were up to the task of operating it. At best, they would go back to their homes annoyed at the pointless journey. At worst, they would never again trust what the company said, and Lesseps would be left with a reputation as a trickster who had saddled thousands of investors and two rulers of Egypt with a ditch to nowhere.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE DESERT IS PARTED
IT WAS A difficult summer for Khedive Ismail. His relationship with the Ottomans had deteriorated again, and the grand vizier, Ali Pasha, was attempting to dictate the size of both Ismail’s army and the Egyptian state budget. This tug of war between Egypt and the Porte had been going on for decades. The two states had achieved an uneasy status quo, but each time a new crisis arose, officials in Cairo and Constantinople girded themselves for a serious confrontation. In hindsight, it is easy to dismiss these tempests as insignificant. At the time, Ismail, Nubar, the sultan, and the vizier wondered if the next step might be war.
While this diplomatic crisis unfolded in a series of tense meetings and cool telegrams, Ismail prepared for the inaugural ceremonies. The opening of the canal presented him with a unique opportunity to demonstrate to the powers of Europe how far Egypt had come under his stewardship. There would always be state visits. Ismail could look forward to many opportunities to host a prince or a queen, an emperor or a king, but singly, or in small groups, perhaps a few times a year, and rarely making a substantial impact either on Egypt or on Europe. But the completion of the canal was a singular event, and just as the Parisian exposition of 1867 gave Napoleon III the chance to strut for the assembled nobility of the continent, the canal provided an excuse for Ismail to showcase Alexandria, Cairo, and the cities of the isthmus.
The goal was to prove that Egypt had arrived. Ismail had spent millions on bribes in Constantinople to secure his title and hereditary rule, and he had spent millions more on canals, railroads, and the transformation of Cairo from a medieval Muslim city into a Middle Eastern Paris. None of that would do him or Egypt much good if no one came. Having invested so much to transform the country, he naturally spent whatever was necessary to draw people to Egypt to witness what he had done.
The company’s goals were similar. No matter how much it publicized the canal through special brochures, press junkets, and advertising, the best way to demonstrate to the world that the canal was an attractive alternative to the Cape of Good Hope was to get as many people as possible to see for themselves what the company had achieved. Company officials in Europe faced skepticism, and as they began to set rates and look for business, they were confronted with people who doubted that the work was nearing completion, and who questioned whether it would be safe for passage even if the excavation itself was finished. Years of negative publicity surrounding the feasibility of the canal, especially in England, had left far too many people mistrustful of the endeavor. They expected the company to proclaim the virtues of the new route, but they did not fully believe what they heard. Until they had proof that the journey was not dangerous, that the sands of the desert would not degrade the embankments, that the shallow tides of the Mediterranean would not silt up the harbor at Port Said, and that the currents of the Red Sea were easily navigable, merchants and shippers and navies would prefer the old route that they knew, however long and inconvenient.
The company and the khedive, therefore, budgeted a million francs to bring a thousand guests on an all-expense-paid tour of the canal for its official inauguration.1 The Egyptian government covered most of the bill, largely because the company had barely enough cash to complete the work in time for the festival. At some point during the summer, the inauguration date was set for November 17. On that day, a flotilla would gather at Port Said and begin a three-day journey through the canal. There would be festivities at each of the canal cities, and then a final round of celebrations in Cairo. Though the list of attendees was still evolving, one person was confirmed: the Empress Eugénie, the cousin of Lesseps, benefactor of the canal, and the guest of honor for its opening.
Though she had supported Lesseps at several key junctures, she had done so purely out of fondness for him. Egypt was an abstraction, and the canal was simply a business venture. But during the Universal Exposition, that changed. Eugénie was fascinated by the Egyptian pavilion on the Champ-de-Mars, and the artifacts of ancient Egypt caught her imagination. She had also been taken with the khedive, and the two had, according to the gossips, developed a close bond. In 1869, she was forty-three years old; Napoleon III was in his sixties. He had never been a faithful or attentive husband, and now his health was failing. After years of balls and parties, after decorating new palaces, overseeing the remodeling of old ones, and raising a young son, Eugénie was bored and curious.
For her as for so many other Europeans, Egypt and the Near East offered the chance of escape. For all the purported wonders of science and industry, there were strong currents of ennui and despair in mid-nineteenth-century European culture. The very people who were supposed to enjoy the fruits of the Second Empire or the benefits of the British Raj were often the same who yearned to escape to a distant past or to a remote desert. Eugénie began to look east just when her empire started to crumble. The trip to Egypt gave her a chance to see the ruins of the Nile and to be honored in her own right, separate from her husband, who was not inclined to make the trip. She would take her yacht, L’Aigle, and stop at Venice, Constantinople, and then Alexandria. From there, she would go to Cairo and set off for a two-week tour of the monuments of Upper Egypt, at the end of which she would return north, board her yacht, and arrive at Port Said by November 16.
That summer in Paris, the air buzzed with talk of the Suez Canal and the impending departure of the empress. Suddenly an invitation to the festivities became a precious commodity. Society women wrote to one another trying to find out who was to be invited. Egyptian fashion was the theme of the season, and jewelers developed copies of Egyptian necklaces. A theater impresario created a spectacle called All of Paris Is Going to Suez, with the subtitle An Egyptian Fantasy in Two Acts. The play began with the seated Sphinx talking with a mummy who i
s revealed to be Cleopatra. The second act had the statue of Memnon praising the modern marvel of the canal. “Today,” Memnon announced to the audience, “the inauguration of the Suez Canal will occur. Millions of invitations have been sent through the populations of the universe in ebullition. They are coming, they are coming…. And the Egyptian desert will not long from now be invaded by a multitude of visitors….”2
In anticipation of the opening, papers ran articles on the climate and vegetation of Egypt. There were reports that examined the growing French empire in Cochin China, trade with Japan, the possible effects of the canal on the port of Marseille, and the potential of increased tension with Britain. The shares of the company enjoyed a brief rally above five hundred francs. Entrepreneurs organized package tours for the inauguration. “Excursion to Suez: Travel Comfortably to Attend the Opening of the Canal and Visit the Isthmus!” For fifteen hundred francs, you could get a berth on a steamship outfitted with salons, loges, and even a piano, leaving Marseille on October 28, with medical service included and meals catered by the “best restaurateurs in Marseille.” Commemorative picture books filled with artful illustrations of the canal were published. Lesseps himself held several dinner parties at his home on the Rue Richepance, near the Place Vendôme, where he entertained senators, deputies, and journalists and urged them to take a tour of the Nile and the canal works—paid for by the company—in the weeks before the inauguration. Though the khedive invited a thousand official guests, the company also arranged special tours for merchants, illustrators, artists, sculptors, painters, essayists, heads of chambers of commerce, and members of the international press. Most of them leapt at the chance to see Egypt and the canal, but Lesseps wooed them nonetheless and promised that the opening ceremonies would be suffused with the magic of the Orient and would surpass anything in A Thousand and One Nights.
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