Many authors and explorers, both ancient and modern, have imagined that in the basin of the shotts they had discovered the Triton sea of Herodotus, believing the river bed of Wad Malah to be the lower course of the Triton river, which connected that mysterious lagoon with the sea.
Though this hypothesis has never been proved, Raudaire, captain of the general staff, conceived in 1878 the bold project of reconstructing the old Triton sea, by leading water into the immense basin of the shotts. He thought it would be only necessary to dig through the eleven miles of the wide chalky tract near Gabés to form a large inland sea. From this scheme great advantages were to be gained. The southern French frontier would be protected by a natural barrier. The re-created Triton sea would soon be traversed by shipping, thereby leading to mercantile relations being established with regions and people hitherto unknown.
And what a change might result in the climate! The moisture would create fruitful stretches of land, where colonists would flock in numbers.
Alas! the project, vigorously supported at the outset by the Government, proved untenable after further investigation in 1876. Raudaire’s survey had not been accurate. The western shott did indeed lie twenty metres below the sea-level, but the immense shotts of “Jerid” and “Fejej” proved, on the other hand, to be as much above it; so that the canal would have had to be prolonged nearly one hundred and fifty miles, and even then only the first named of these shotts would be submerged.
This unfortunate revelation did not dishearten either Raudaire or his celebrated supporter, Lesseps; and, until the death of the former, in 1885, he—Raudaire—defended his project with an energy and determination worthy of a better cause, and in spite of the State having wisely withdrawn its support. Lesseps still visited the ground on several occasions, and positively asserted that at the cost of a hundred and fifty millions of francs the scheme was feasible. From past events it is sad to note that great minds like Lesseps’s often have recourse to dubious expedients when they desire to lancer une affaire.
All other learned authorities—geologists and scientific men, such as Parnel, Letourneux, Doûmet-Adamson, and others—had, long before, sharply criticised Raudaire’s fantastic project, and declared that the sea had never in ancient times occupied the flats now filled by the shotts. Indeed, Cosson further maintained that had this proposed inland sea been successfully dammed, it would soon have been imperatively necessary to fill it up again, so much opposed would it have been to the general interest.
All were, moreover, agreed that it was highly improbable that the climate would be influenced to any extraordinary degree; that, by admitting the water, millions of date-palms would be destroyed, and most of the springs which now fertilise the oases of the Jerid would be tainted and spoiled by the salt water, thus causing the ruin of the country; finally, the project would cost a thousand (in place of a hundred and fifty) millions of francs.
Lesseps’s repeated assurances of the accuracy of his researches were received very coldly, though this was before the occurrence of the Panama affair.
Now the question is closed, and one hears nothing more of the company formed in 1882 by the great Frenchman, pour la création de la mer interieure. The old man’s prestige had been on the wane for some years already. Yet the day will come when the memory of his important works will obliterate the recollection of the errors of the evening of his life, and history will again grant him the title which is his due—that of “the great Frenchman.”