November 12, 2009. Copyright 2009, Graphic News. All rights reserved Suez: the Napoleonic dream that shrank the world By Simon Morgan LONDON, November 12, Graphic News: The building of the Suez Canal should have been remembered as one of Napoleon Bonaparte's greatest achievements, but the execution of the scheme he hatched when a mere general in the service of the First French Republic was left to a later generation. When Napoleon landed in Egypt in 1798, planning to use the country as jumping-off point for an invasion of India, in addition to 50,000 troops he brought with him a small army of scientists and engineers. Among their triumphs were the excavations at Luxor and the Valley of the Kings. Among their failures was a mathematical miscalculation that scuppered Napoleon's bold scheme to undermine British sea power by cutting a canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. His chief engineer, Jacques-Marie Le Pere, wrongly calculated that the Red Sea at high tide was 10 metres higher than the Mediterranean and the project was abandoned. Le Pere's flawed work would not, however, be entirely in vain. In 1831, a decade after Napoleon's death, Ferdinand de Lesseps, a French diplomat, visited Alexandria and was shown the shelved plan. A seed was sown and, over the next 21 years, it germinated. It was 1856 before de Lesseps had finalised his plans and won a concession from the Egyptian Viceroy to build the canal and to run it for 99 years. In 1858 he formed the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez and set about raising the money. Work began in April the following year, when de Lesseps struck the first pickaxe blow on the beach at Port Said. The bulk of the work on the 190km canal, however, would be done by tens of thousands of Egyptian peasants, pressed into compulsory service by their own government. Plagued by shortages of water and outbreaks of cholera, the immense task would take over a decade and cost hundreds of lives, though surprisingly few by the standards of the time; in 1868, when 34,000 were working on the project, about 50 died. On November 17, 1869, the waters of the two seas mingled for the first time, at a stroke cutting in half the time of the journey between Britain and India. There was, said the Archbishop of Alexandria, addressing the crowds during the opening ceremony at Port Said, “no longer an Old World and a New”. The savings in journey times were astonishing and the canal remains essential to world trade; via the Cape of Good Hope, the journey from Ras Tanura in the Persian Gulf to Rotterdam is over 11,000 nautical miles. Through the canal, it is just 6,600. The canal became profitable in 1875 and, since nationalisation in 1956, has been a significant source of income for Egypt; in 2008 21,400 ships sailed through, earning the country a record $5.3 billion in fees. It was, however, to be the best part of a century before Egypt enjoyed the full fruits of the canal. Initially, the main shareholders in the company were the French and Egyptian governments, but in 1875, when a national financial crisis forced the Egyptians to sell their shares, the British stepped in and snapped up 44 percent of the company for a bargain £4 million. In 1882, in the face of rising resentment at the level of British intervention and the stirrings of a popular nationalist movement, Britain sent troops and ships to protect its interests in the canal zone. They were to stay for the next 70 years but a slow-burning fuse had been lit. On July 26, 1956, the country's new leader, President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had been installed after a military coup d'etat against the British-backed monarchy, nationalised the canal, triggering an ultimately futile invasion by Britain, France and Israel, militarily successful but defeated by world opinion. Three codewords spoken by Nasser during a speech broadcast over the radio triggered the seizure of the waterway: “Ferdinand de Lesseps”. /ENDS