The Sun.
London, England, 1870-04-16 00:00:00

THE SUEZ CAAL.

r 1. as r.esseps' statement that £320,000 will be required
this year to complete and improVe the word h:):v--er.r. Port
Said and Suez, and that a single" English compan:, put
down in its calculations an aranal payment of 4:1.00,000
to the Canal, are both sugg9f_tive. We have something
to say respecting the conditions under which ships make
the voyage from sea to sea, but shall deal with M. du
Lesseps' financial estimate fii\. t. It points,we are satisfied,
to improvement rather the., completion. That ugly
stumbling block, the Serape, m rock, has been removed, and
according to the captains or 'navigating officers of the ships
~vhich have passed through most recently, the portion of
the Canal in which it lay is now one of the deepest in the
whole distance. But there Rio other things required
before the great Work caii be pronounced complete. The
project for doubling the width of the Canal, so that ves-
sels should be enablect,to pass each other at all parts of it,
may be passed by 5.„, needless or premature. Ships can
be moored and ca. pass each other easily at Kantara,
at Lake Timsah, and at the Bitter Lakes ; and it
is not likely that in our time the traffic will
increase to an extent which will demand greater
accommodation than this. But there is other and
more important work calling for expenditure, which, as
we have reason to believe, have been scarcely touched
since the inauguration, and towards the completion 01
which £320,000 will go but a small way. These are
broadly the breakwater on the Damietta side of Port
Said ; the walling some thirty miles of the banks of the
Canal with a stone covering which should be three yards
wide and a yard thick ; and a far great& amount of dredg-
ing than has taken place for months. We have been at
some pains to collect the latest information respecting the
condition of the Canal from men on the spot, many of
whom have been favourable to it throughout, but who are
unconnected, commercially or financially, with its for-
tunes ; and the reader may accept the conclusions arrived
at as based upon recent and authentic information. The
breakwater at Port Said has, we are assured, already
verified all that was predicted f it in this journal, and by
the engineering authorities present at the opening. The
water from the Damietta side is charged with Nile mud,
which filters through the interstices between the monster
blocks of concrete, and is making a deposit inside the
harbour, which, though insignificant in extent is impor-
tant as an indication of what must follow unless the break-
water is made solid. The necessity for the walling of the
sides of the canal received practical illustration a few
weeks since, when some thirty tons of sand were blown
down or slipped into the water in one lump during the
Khamsan, and when the railway between Suez and Cairo
was blocked up ; and it seems admitted on all sides that
the many powerful dredges lying idle could be employed
with advantage to a far greater extent than they
are now. M. de Lesseps and the managers of the
company must be presumed to know their own
business best,. and there may be sound reasons for
proposing to limit the expenditure on improve-
ments to £320,000 ; but the shipping agents at
Port Said and Suez, the people anxious for their
own sakes that the Canal should attract as much Euro-
pean and Indian traffic as possible, are outspoken in their
complaints, and public opinion on the spot is by no means
favourable to the management. That fresh capital must
be raised before the Canal can be made perfect even in
its present proportions, and that its administration must
be purified from the taint of bureaucracy before it can
be attended by commercial prosperity, are the points
urged most strongly upon strangers by those who
maintain, almost angrily, that neither the share-
holders nor the public are reaping the advantages which
should accrue from the Canal's success. No one doubts
the permanence of this success now. The doubts and
sneers of six months ago have given way to complaints
that M. de Lesseps and his colleagues do not go sufficiently
with the times, that the fact of having made the Canal
does not qualify them for managing it, and that depart
ments and staffs of clerks have been multiplied to an
extent out of all proportion to. the necessities of
the work. The system of managing the transit
service is declared to be a vast mistake, being
one of large salaries and small results, and we
are assured that since the opening, station after
station between Port Said and Suez has been given up,
until there are none left Save those two termini and Ismailia.
Again, by Article 3 of the new rules for the navigation of
the canal, " each vessel measuring more than one hundred
tons has to take a company's pilot whilst passiog
through, who will furnish instructions as to the course to
steer, the captain remaining responsible for the con-
duct and management of his vessel ;" and it is corn-
complained that no guarantee of efficiency is given with
the pilots whom the ships are thus bound to employ and
pay for, and that such pilots are uncertificated. Vehement
objections are made, too, against what is described as " the
pinching policy" of charging fees for small and, as it is
said, needless services, such as prohibiting all independent
search for articles which may fall into the canal, and
charging salvage on them when found by the officers
of the company. Ships' anchors, for example, are
lying in the canal at this moment because of their
owners unwillingness to pay the charges for redeem-
ing them. Anecdotes are rife, too, cdncerning the
rigid formalism which pervades some of the many de-
partmental rules. We are assured, for example, that
when the steamship Queen of the South arrived at Suez
some weeks since from Bombay, she was not permitted to
enter the Canal, because she had what is called " a list,"
that is, she hung over on one side, a circumstance which
had not prevented her making a prosperous voyage from
India, and which, it was maintained, could not have
affected her progress through to the Mediterranean.
The authorities at Suez insisted, however, on
this "list" being put right, and the ship
had to be unladen, at a cost of fifteen hundred
pounds, and her cargo repacked. When this was
done she drew, as we are assured, one foot and a half
more on a level keel than she did before, but the letter of
the regulations was complied with, and she went through.
We have little doubt that there is a consider-
able exaggeration whenever the drawbacks of the
Canal, or the demerits of its management, are
under discussion ; and it may easily be that the cloud
of detraction in which M. de Lesseps and his friends
were enveloped up to the moment of their final triumph,
still hangs over their heads. There was necessarily
an enormous number of people thrown out of work,
too, when the formation of the Canal ceased, and it is
but natural that these should be lynx-eyed and many-
tongued in pointing out defects which seem to prove the
necessity for a change in management, and for the em-
ployment of different hands. Still, after making all
allowances for these fruitful sources of mis-statement, it
seems clear that the Canal's usefulness might be deve-
loped to a greater extent than at present; and
that if any scheme could be devised by which the
amour propre of the original projectors could be
protected, while new blood and fresh capital could
be thrown into the concern, the public benefit would be
considerable. It would be ungracious to even seem to
carp at men who have done so mu.. 11 in the teeth of so
many formidable, and, as the world said, invincible ob-
stacles ; but the real question is, are the means at the dis-
posal of the present proprietary and management suffi-
cient to give a legitimate development to the Canal ?
and when we find such a sum as £320,000 quoted as
the estimated expenditure for the coming year, we cannot,
in the face of things as they are, and with our
knowledge of the sums expended in mere administration,
believe that the enterprise has yet arrived, or is in the
way of arriving, at the stage of commercial prosperity. to
which we and the rest of its well-wishers look. Passing
to the English firms who put down large sums in their
calculations as payments to the Suez Canal, we have a
few very plain words to say respecting the conditions
under which their ventures enter the Red Sea. We have
before us evidence which is simply indisputable, that the
existing charts of that sea are inaccurate ; and it has
been put beyond a doubt, by independent investigation,
made within the last few weeks, that certain dangerous
islands in mid-water are some four miles out in latitude.
It happens rather oddly that there are two sets of islands
called " The Brothers ' in the Red Sea. Respecting one
of these, a group to the southward, we have nothing to
say; but the other, falsely. given in the Admiralty chart
as in latitude 26 deg. 22 rem., and consisting of a couple
of flat islands, said to be 60 feet above the sea's level, but
seeming to have far less elevation, ana with deep water right
up to them, are simply traps for ships whose captains
steer by the Government chart. Independent observa-
tions were taken from three different vessels last month,
and with the same result ; and according to the Arab pilot
on one of them, "All Peninsular and Oriental captain
know that—charts no good—these Brothers much out—
three mile, four mile, God knows. I take big ship
down Red Sea long time since—go right ahead,
full steam ; I smoke my pipe on bridge—think
all right—when I look up and see Brothers
close to—so close that my ship very near catch him."
According to the same local authority the islands Mussa-
moroo and Delgabe, and " much more islands in Red Sea,"
are " quite many miles out, every one know that ;" and
the information furnished us by correspondents, for whose
trustworthiness we vouch, makes it seem more than pro-
bable he was right. We pledge ourselves, however, to the
example quoted, and one instance is as good as a hundred
for proving the necessity of inquiry. So long as the
navigation of the Red Sea was almost confined to native
dhows and to Peninsular and Oriental captains using
their own company's charts, an error more or less in the
map published under the authority of the British Admi-
ralty might not be productive of any very serious disaster.
But now that steamers of all nations are being sent
through the Canal, and the Red Sea has in consequence
become a maritime highway, it is of the first importance
that it should be resurveyed. That the soundings
published officially should be chiefly negative, and often
only reach to a third or fourth of the actual depth, is of
comparatively small moment. But that rocks, reefs, and
shoals should be given as deep water, and deep water as
rocks and reefs, is a fact so pregnant with disaster, so
infallibly certain to lead up to catastrophe and loss of
life, that it behoves all interested to urge its remedy
with the least possible delay. The interesting.
" Sailing Directions for the Red Sea," say the Arab
pilots may be trusted implicitly, and that their local
knowledge renders them invaluable guides to the mariner.
This was doubtless true when the book was published.
But since the openin,og of the canal every idle vagabond in
Suez has dubbed himself a pilot, and proffers his
services with a confidence which is positively
staggering to residents. There is no Trinity
Board, and no system of certificating pilots
in Egypt. be it remembered ; and written testi-
monials -are bequeathed, or lent, or hired, or stolen with
facility. Given charts which are untrustworthy, pilots
who are ignorant, and rocky reefs, such as " The Bro-
thers," cropping up like the Serapeum rock, where least
expected ; and it seems dear that sea-going England
should take some steps to alter the conditions
under which she avails herself of the Canal's success.
That success was doubted so long and so obstinately that
we have not even yet mastered its effects. and probable
results • among the first of which would be a now survey
of the Red Sea and some guarantee that the acitaiziatra-