Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

My original intention was to have reached Lake Victoria by taking the mail steamer at Khartum to Gondokoro, and following the Nile by boat and on foot to its source where it pours out of the lake, but owing to the run-down condition of my son Jack, caused by the dengue fever which he caught in Egypt, I have not dared to risk the dangers of the malaria, black-water fever, and sleeping sickness so common in the wilds of the upper Sudan, and therefore have changed my route to the Suez Canal, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean.

All travel in East Africa was reorganized when the Suez Canal was built. About three thousand years ago, when the Phœnicians had settled on the north coast, founding Carthage, they had pushed their way into Egypt and even into Abyssinia, and a little later had come down along the east coast of the Indian Ocean, forming settlements probably as far south as Mozambique. After Carthage was conquered by the Romans, these East African settlements were seized by the Arabs, who colonized the coast of the Indian Ocean as far south as Sofala. Later still, under the Ptolemies, Greek traders visited many of these Arab settlements, and in the twelfth century Zanzibar first appeared on European maps of the world as one of the Mohammedan colonies. Then Columbus discovered America and Vasco da Gama, who was the first to round the Cape of Good Hope, anchored at Mombasa in 1498. Until the Suez Canal was constructed, the only sea route from Europe to the ports of the Indian Ocean was by the Cape of Good Hope. There are ships still making the voyage that way, but for the most part they end their trips at one of the eastern ports of South America.

The ships that formerly went to China and India had to go around Africa, the trip to Bombay from London being over eleven thousand miles. By the Suez Canal it is just about seven thousand miles, making a saving of four thousand miles, or a thousand miles more than the distance from New York to Liverpool.

I have before me the figures giving the traffic of the Suez Canal in a typical year. Four thousand vessels and five hundred thousand travellers passed through. Supposing that each made a saving of four thousand miles only, the total gain for the year would have been sixteen million miles or enough to reach six hundred and forty times around the world at the Equator.

The gain is even greater at the Panama Canal. It is hard to estimate how much time and distance have been saved for the world by these two great waterways.

My investigations at Port Said and Suez show that not only will the Panama Canal pay, but that Uncle Sam will some day find it his most profitable investment.

Our trip from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Suez took just eighteen hours, and it cost the ship a toll of four hundred dollars per hour. For the privilege of passing through it had to pay seventy-five hundred dollars, and, in addition, two dollars for every man, woman, and child on board. All the canal company did in this case was to reach out its hand and take in the money. The ship had to furnish its own coal and steam its way through, the toll being merely for the right of passage.

But this ship is comparatively small. Its tonnage is only five thousand, and many of the vessels now using the canal are much larger. Nearly every day steamers pay ten thousand dollars each for their passage, and tolls of fifteen and twenty thousand dollars are not uncommon. When an army transport goes through, the men on board are charged two dollars a head, and this adds enormously to the canal receipts. Indeed, a war, which knocks so many other stocks flat, sends those of the Suez Canal sky-high.

Beside the Suez Canal runs a fresh-water canal built to supply the workmen digging the big ditch. The trees lining its banks are striking proof that the desert needs only moisture to make it bloom.