Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

The traffic and earnings of the Suez Canal have far exceeded the hopes of even De Lesseps, whose statue now stands at the entrance of the great ditch through the desert which changed the shipping routes of the world.

The Suez Canal is controlled by the British. It was planned out by a Frenchman, financed by French bankers, and engineered by French brains, but the bulk of the profits go to John Bull. When Ferdinand de Lesseps proposed to build it, the English sneered at the suggestion. When he got a concession from the Khedive, Said Pasha, they actually opposed its construction, doing everything they could to clog the work. The French received no help from other European nations, but they went on. They began digging in 1859, and just about ten years later the waters of the Mediterranean were allowed to flow into the Red Sea.

The opening of the Suez Canal cost Ismail Pasha more than twenty millions of dollars. Among the notables who were present was the Empress Eugénie, for whose entertainment a grand palace was fitted out at Cairo. My old dragoman told me that he had seen Eugénie during her visit to Egypt and that she had climbed the Pyramids, taken the fatiguing trip to the interior of the greatest of them, and had ridden on a camel to the Sphinx.

In the year following its opening some five hundred thousand tons of shipping went through the canal. In less than five years this had increased to more than two million tons and the gross income to almost five million dollars per annum. The British, then seeing that it was a good thing, cast about to find some method of control. They succeeded through Ismail Pasha, who was on the throne of Egypt. Old Ismail was one of the most extravagant tyrants who has ever squeezed money out of an oppressed people. He had aided the French in building the canal. In the allotment of shares, one hundred and seventy-six thousand out of the four hundred thousand had gone to the Egyptian government, so when the Khedive got hard up he concluded to put them on the market. The English cabinet got wind of the matter, and at the same time the French minister at Cairo telegraphed Paris that “unless France buys the Egyptian shares to-morrow, they will be purchased by England.”

At that time Parliament was not in session, but Lord Beaconsfield and one or two others took the responsibility of making the trade. Borrowing twenty million dollars from the Rothschilds, they had the whole of Ismail’s stock in the British treasury and John Bull had the control before the world outside had any idea that the bargain was even pending. He had not, it is true, fifty-one per cent. of the entire capital stock, but the other holdings were so scattered that the seven sixteenths which he owned gave him the whip hand, and that he has held ever since.

Now, no large block of common stock appears to be held by any individual, corporation, or other government. Indeed, at a meeting some years ago the largest shareholder outside of Great Britain was a Frenchman, who had a little more than fifteen hundred shares.

That twenty million dollars was one of the best investments John Bull has ever made, his holdings to-day being worth many times what he paid for them. He has already received from it many millions of dollars in dividends, and by his control of the canal has enormously increased his power and prestige among the nations of the world. His money gain, however, is not quite as great as that of the original stockholders. They paid only about one hundred dollars per share while he paid a little more than one hundred and thirteen dollars.

I know the Panama Canal well. I visited it when it was in the hands of the French, and I have spent several weeks there during American control. I went over it from end to end with our engineers; watched the steam shovels gouging the earth out of the Culebra Cut, and travelled in a canoe down that part of it which was once the Chagres River. I have also gone through the Suez Canal at three different times and have made many notes of its construction.

The two undertakings are vitally different. The Suez Canal is little more than a great ditch through the desert, and although it is just about twice as big as Panama it does not compare with the latter in the engineering difficulties of its construction. The ground here is comparatively level. That of the Panama Canal route is up hill and down, going right across the backbone of the Andes. The amount excavated here was one hundred million cubic yards, or just about one hundred million tons of dead weight. On one of my visits to Panama I figured that the excavation of Culebra would just equal a ditch three feet wide and three feet deep and long enough to go two times around this twenty-five-thousand-mile globe with ten thousand miles of ditch to spare.