To link two seas 200 km apart is no mean feat, and yet the benefits of unobstructed passage from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea were too great to resist for those who planned what is today the Suez Canal despite the risk, cost and bitter rivalries involved. Mohamed Ali, the ruler of Egypt since 1805, balked at the idea when it was first presented to him. The time was characterised by a race between two major powers, England and France, and he didn't want to be caught wrong-footed. But his fourth son, Said Pasha, liked the idea after he took over the country on 14 July 1854. Five years later in April 1859 the digging started on what may be the most strategic man-made canal in the world. It was a project that was to cost Egypt dearly, however, for fewer than 20 years after the canal was completed, the British sent in an army that occupied the country for nearly seven decades. Today, Egypt makes close to $5 billion a year in revenues from this waterway, which is why the government wants to double its size and triple its activities, turning it into a hub for industry and trade. An idea of the economic advantages to world shipping from the canal can be had from an Italian ship that passed through it with a shipment of 60,000 tons on 7 September 2011 and paid $2.28 million in fees for the privilege. It was the highest fee so far in the canal's 150-year history. For over three millennia, the local and foreign rulers of Egypt tried to figure out ways of sailing from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. The idea of going through the edge of the Sinai Peninsula didn't occur to most of them, so the practice was to link the Nile to the Red Sea and have ships pass through Cairo, one of the ancient world's primary trading centres. This had the dual benefit of supplying Cairo with goods and using it as a clearing house for business. The only problem with this scheme was that the Canal tended to silt up, and without appropriate maintenance it was reclaimed by the sand of the desert and the mud of the river. In the last iteration of a long succession of canals, the Khalig Masri, or Khalig Amir Al-Momenin, now under Port Said Street that runs between downtown Cairo and Helmiya, remained a major trading route until the turn of the last century when it was finally filled in to allow fast traffic by electric train in the increasingly Europeanised capital city. Arab chronologists note that the Abbasid caliph Abu Jaafar Al-Mansour once ordered this canal to be blocked for fear of Egypt's sending reinforcements to rebels who had taken over Mecca and Medina. When French engineers accompanying Napoleon on his abortive expedition to Egypt in 1798-1801 first examined the possibility of building what is today the Suez Canal, they took measurements of both the Mediterranean and Red Sea water levels. Their conclusion was that the Red Sea was slightly higher than the Mediterranean, which they thought would lead to an ecological disaster if the two seas were linked. However, by the 1830s this idea had been dismissed as fiction, and several entrepreneurs tried to revive the idea. The most successful of these was a French diplomat with close ties to Said Pasha, Egypt's wali or viceroy. When he was vice-consul in 1832, this diplomat, Ferdinand de Lesseps, received a gift of books from his boss, M Mimaut, the consul-general of France. Leafing through these, de Lesseps found something that fired his imagination in the form of an account written by one of Napoleon's aides, a civil engineer by the name of Jacques-Marie Le Pere. From then on, de Lesseps made it his life's work to bring the idea of the canal to fruition. In 1833, a working group was formed to re-examine the sites and offered an encouraging opinion, and two French engineers, Louis Maurice Linant Bellefonds, also known as Linant Bey, and Mougel Bey, were employed to study the plan further by the Egyptian government. The plan they put forward was then adopted in 1856 by a panel of civil engineers commissioned by the International Commission for the Isthmus of Suez. To raise money for what was going to be a very expensive endeavour, 400,000 shares were issued at 500 francs each. By late 1858, the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, the Canal's management company, was already in operation. And on 25 April 1859, de Lesseps, now a 54-year-old retired diplomat, wielded a pickaxe and delivered the first stroke that signalled the launch of his long-cherished scheme. Standing just a few steps away, pickaxes in hand, were 100 workers hired from Damietta. These would eventually grow to a staggering 250,000 men. To keep the project going, de Lesseps needed all his diplomatic skills and connections to keep London and Istanbul from blocking the project. Britain was worried that the scheme could give other countries a route to the Far East, thus jeopardising its interests in India. And Istanbul didn't want an ambitious wali to set Egypt so prominently on the world stage. De Lesseps often had to use the leverage of his cousin, the empress Eugenie of France, to defuse tensions over the project, but even so the international rivalries went on unabated, only temporarily eclipsed by the pomp and circumstance of the opening of the canal on 17 November 1869. Said Pasha had died six years earlier, replaced by the energetic but financially clueless khedive Ismail. One of the problems that faced the new development was drinking water. Three distillation machines used to desalinate seawater failed to meet the needs of the thousands of workers eventually hired to carry out the project. As a result, the management improvised, first hiring fishermen to bring in sweet water and then having a canal dug from the Nile to the work site. The first city to be built on the new waterway was named after the first wali who had sanctioned the project, Port Said. But a few years later another city was added, Ismailia, to honour the man who had so completely embraced the project. When Ismail was deposed, partly because of his financial incompetence, his successor added another town this time bearing his own name, Port Tawfiq, at the southern entrance to the canal. Port Said was the Dubai of its time, a modern city created on sand for an international class of industrialists and traders. The Suez Canal authorities built a lighthouse for shipping, docks for the harbour, workshops for repairing ships and a brick factory to help with urban expansion. Work on the sweet water canal was completed on 23 January 1863, bringing drinking water from the Nile to a point close to a village called Nafisha Al-Qirabiya near Lake Temsah, now part of the sprawling city of Ismailia. A new governorate including the three major cities of the canal was then created in March 1863, and its first governor was Ismail Hamdi Bey. On 18 March 1869, the Mediterranean waters first flowed southwards into the Bitter Lakes, and within a few months the canal was completed. It had taken ten years, 368 million francs, and a total of one million men to build it. One out of ten workers employed on the project is believed to have died while on the job from exposure, exhaustion or disease. The workers received meagre wages, their employment being part of the corvée, a forced labour scheme that was abolished two decades later. The inaugural ceremony for the Suez Canal was the stuff of legend. On 16 November 1869, kings and dignitaries from all parts of the world and ferried from Cairo and Alexandria were given a sumptuous banquet for which the authorities brought in fish and meat to Port Said and summoned 500 chefs from Marseilles, Genoa and Trieste to do the cooking. To show off his country to the foreign dignitaries, the khedive Ismail arranged for Egyptian peasants and Nubians and Bedouins to arrive in Port Said wearing their traditional costumes. The empress Eugenie, on whom the khedive had lavished what some have called his romantic attention, later wrote to her husband, the French emperor Napoleon III, saying that she had never seen such a party. Thrown in the middle of the desert for nearly 6,000 guests and complete with fireworks and an opera, this was the khedive Ismail's tribute to Egypt's growing world stature. The loss of Egypt's financial and political independence, and ultimately of his own throne, was still a few years away. In the arena bordering the new canal, three platforms shaded with silk curtains were built for the visiting dignitaries. On the main platform sat Ismail Pasha, Eugenie and de Lesseps. Dutch and Prussian princes mingled in the vicinity with the Egyptian crown prince Mohamed Tawfiq, who was soon to become Egypt's ruler. Also in attendance was prince Touson, son of Said Pasha, the country's former ruler. Top government officials, including Cherif Pasha and Nubar Pasha, spoke to their guests in French, the language of high society and government at the time. The rise of Port Said to international eminence in the years to come was a mixed blessing for the other coastal towns. Damietta felt the pinch first, its harbour no longer attracting the sea and river trade it had commanded for centuries. Even Alexandria was shaken, until the khedive Ismail ordered the port to be enlarged and started a large-scale urban programme to match the one he had undertaken in Cairo. Zagazig, a sleepy town in the Delta, also benefited from the Suez Canal boom. Due to its closeness to the canal, many of its peasant population found employment there and bought back enough cash to modernise their hometown. Marine life was also affected, as Red Sea fish swam northwards and Mediterranean fish responded in kind. Had Said Pasha lived to see the canal completed, he would have been intrigued by the changes in the marine life that he had spent years studying in his youth. Said has often been eclipsed by his more glamorous successor, but the man who gave his name to Port Said was not without a flair for adventure himself. He ordered Egyptian contingents to fight as far north as the Crimea, and only a few years before his death he ordered a contingent of 500 Sudanese soldiers to go to Mexico to help the French in the American-Mexican war. The contingent disembarked in Vera Cruz in March 1863, and later took part in the attack on the town that was to become Mexico City. The surviving 300 members of the contingent were granted an audience with Ismail Pasha, who decorated several dozen of them upon their return to Egypt. The ambitious story of the Suez Canal continues to this day, with plans for a high-speed train linking Port Said and Cairo, a parallel waterway to the original canal, and tunnels connecting the mainland with the Sinai Peninsula. The enlargement of the canal was first proposed in the late 1970s by Hasaballah Al-Kafrawi, one of the men who had participated in the building of the Aswan High Dam. The project was bought to the attention of the then president, Anwar Al-Sadat, but no action was taken. In the early 1990s, Al-Kafrawi tried again to get former president Hosni Mubarak interested, but failed to marshal the resources needed for the grand scheme. Finally, in April 2013 some 100 Egyptian and foreign companies took part in a tender to create a new waterway near the old canal as well as to enlarge the existing one. In August 2014, Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb issued shares in the new project that were sold out almost immediately. According to Mohab Mamish, director of the Suez Canal Authority, the new project involves building six new harbours near Port Said, Sokhna and Al-Arish. Ismailia will also be expanded and seven new tunnels built near Port Said and Ismailia at a total cost of $4.2 billion.
