Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

The whole of to-day has been spent wandering about the cotton wharves of Alexandria. They extend for a mile or so up and down the Mahmudiyeh Canal, which joins the city to the Nile, and are flanked on the other side by railroads filled with cotton trains from every part of Egypt. These wharves lie under the shadow of Pompey’s Pillar and line the canal almost to the harbour. Upon them are great warehouses filled with bales and bags. Near by are cotton presses, while in the city itself is a great cotton exchange where the people buy and sell, as they do at Liverpool, from the samples of lint which show the quality of the bales brought in from the plantations.

Indeed, cotton is as big a factor here as it is in New Orleans, and the banks of this canal make one think of that city’s great cotton market. The warehouses are of vast extent, and the road between them and the waterway is covered with bales of lint and great bags of cotton seed. Skullcapped blue-gowned Egyptians sit high up on the bales on long-bedded wagons hauled by mules. Other Egyptians unload the bales from the cars and the boats and others carry them to the warehouses. They bear the bales and the bags on their backs, while now and then a man may be seen carrying upon his head a bag of loose cotton weighing a couple of hundred pounds. The cotton seed is taken from the boats in the same way, seed to the amount of three hundred pounds often making one man’s load.

Late in the afternoon I went down to the harbour to see the cotton steamers. They were taking on cargoes for Great Britain, Russia, France, Germany, and the United States. This staple forms three fourths of the exports of Egypt. Millions of pounds of it are annually shipped to the United States, notwithstanding the fact that we raise more than two thirds of all the cotton of the world. Because of its long fibre, there is always a great demand for Egyptian cotton, which is worth more on the average than that of any other country.

For hundreds of years before the reign of that wily old tyrant, Mehemet Ali, whose rule ended with the middle of the nineteenth century, Egypt had gone along with the vast majority of her people poor, working for a wage of ten cents or so a day, and barely out of reach of starvation all the time. Mehemet Ali saw that what she needed to become truly prosperous and raise the standard of living was some crop in which she might be the leader. It was he who introduced long-staple cotton, a product worth three times as much as the common sort, and showed what it could do for his country. Since then King Cotton has been the money maker of the Nile valley, the great White Pharaoh whom the modern Egyptians worship. He has the majority of the Nile farmers in his employ and pays them royally. He has rolled up a wave of prosperity that has engulfed the Nile valley from the Mediterranean to the cataracts and the prospects are that he will continue to make the country richer from year to year. The yield is steadily increasing and with the improved irrigation methods it will soon be greater than ever. From 1895 to 1900 its average annual value was only forty-five million dollars; but after the Aswan Dam was completed it jumped to double that sum.

Though cotton is the big cash crop of Egypt, small flocks of sheep are kept on many of the farms and the women spin the wool for the use of the family.

Sugar is Egypt’s crop of second importance. Heavy investments of French and British capital in the Egyptian industry were first made when political troubles curtailed Cuba’s production.

The greater part of Upper and Lower Egypt can be made to grow cotton, and cotton plantations may eventually cover over five million five hundred thousand acres. If only fifty per cent. of this area is annually put into cotton it will produce upward of two million bales per annum, or more than one sixth as much as the present cotton crop of the world. In addition to this, there might be a further increase by putting water into some of the oases that lie in the valley of the Nile outside the river bottom, and also by draining the great lakes about Alexandria and in other parts of the lower delta.

Egypt has already risen to a high place among the world’s cotton countries. The United States stands first, British India second, and Egypt third. Yet Egypt grows more of this staple for its size and the area planted than any other country on the globe. Its average yield is around four hundred and fifty pounds per acre, which is far in excess of ours. Our Department of Agriculture says that our average is only one hundred and ninety pounds per acre, although we have, of course, many acres which produce five hundred pounds and more.