Britain did her best to maintain that her opposition had in fact achieved its purpose: the abolition of forced labor, the reduction in the concessions of land, the defeat of plans for French colonization, the maintenance of Egypt's jurisdiction and of her right to construct fortifications. 

France had emerged from this decade of Suez strife with her prestige enhanced. Alive from the start to the possibilities of the Canal and its immense geographical significance, the French Government was yet more concerned with the overriding necessity to maintain and strengthen, as a basic principle of its European and Middle Eastern policy, the Anglo-French alliance. 

Here, for France, lay the reality. But Britain mistrusted France, and the mistrust became mutual, provoking French fears of aggression by Napoleon III. In this atmosphere of shadow warfare the Emperor feared to provoke Britain over the project for a Suez Canal, which represented for him neither imperialist designs nor political ambitions. Thus he shrank, for a decade, from giving it that resolute official support which might, at any moment, have decided the issue. He delayed it, and thus delayed the Canal's construction, until French interests seemed seriously threatened. Then his intervention was conclusive, a French Suez Canal was assured, and France, at the end of an unduly prolonged diplomatic war, which stopped short of the battlefield, could justly claim a resounding victory.

Al-Bab al-`aliy emerged from its passive part in the struggle with its prestige unimpaired. Never greatly concerned, one way or the other, with the merits of the Canal as such, it had directed a long spell of masterly inactivity to the objective of keeping its balance between Britain and France, its two contending guarantors and protectors. Showing a judicious bias towards Britain, as traditionally the stronger, moreover the readier to curb any separatist trend on the part of Egypt, Al-Bab al-`aliy had yet contrived not to antagonize France. A hastier and more positive policy might have driven the Khidiwiy of Egypt, with French support, to act, in the matter of the Canal, independently of the Sultan's firman. But he had refrained from doing so, and so the point was reached at which the firman became essential to its final construction. Thus the sovereignty of the `Uthmanliy  over Egypt was confirmed to the world as though it had never been called in question.

Such contradictions of motive underlay the spirit of vacillation and subterfuge inherent in Isma`iyl's tactics. They were aggravated by his excessive reliance on unreliable counselors like Nuwbar Pasha (1)  and Morny, who played on his ambitions, led him astray into dreams of increased power and fortune, and caused him to obtain less than he hoped through demanding too much. In the end he had obtained, at an absurdly disproportionate cost to himself, part of what he wanted from France. But he had obtained nothing of what he wanted from the Sultan. Nor was he to obtain it in full until seven years later and then only at a further ruinous cost in terms of bribes and gifts.

Meanwhile, on August 1, 1866, Lesseps could at last justly say to his shareholders that the Canal was now no longer a hope but an incontestable fact. All that now remained to be done was to complete its construction.

Through these years of contention and crisis, from the accession of Isma`iyl in 1863 onwards, the works in the Isthmus sometimes languished, but never wholly ceased. The four earlier years had been a time of preparation, at the end of which Hawkshaw pronounced his favorable verdict on the progress of the work and its ultimate prospects. Reporting early in 1863, he anticipated that the Canal could be finished within five years at a cost of £10 million (£2 million more than the previous estimate), and made light of the various obstacles to its operation.

During 1863 the excavation of the maritime Canal proceeded slowly southwards from Timsah towards the Bitter Lakes; a start was made on the cutting of the rockier ridge of Shaluwf, between Suez and the Bitter Lakes; and at the end of the year a branch of the Sweet Water Canal reached Suez. This was a year of transition between the preliminary works and the larger-scale works which lay ahead, between the period of manual labor and the period of increased mechanization. Throughout it the Khidiwiy continued to supply forced labor, and there was no serious interruption in the work.

By the end of the year, the harbor of Port Sa`yid was in good working order; the workshops throughout the Isthmus were well equipped; the main stations were growing into towns; there were stretches of a navigable channel of some kind if only a few feet deep and for flat bottomed boats along much of the line of the two Canals; the lands along the banks of both were becoming settled and cultivated; above all, there was fresh water everywhere, disposing once and for all of the specter of thirst in the desert. But the bulk of the work still remained to be done.

By now the former single contractor, Hardon, had retired from the scene, since the task had expanded beyond his scope. Instead Lesseps invited tenders from firms of contractors in Europe, who visited the site and were duly impressed. He divided up the various tasks among four of them. Dussaud, who had . been responsible fox the harbor works of Cherbourg, Marseilles and Algiers, took over the construction of those at Port Sa`yid; Couvreux, another Frenchman, supervised the excavations at al-Gisr; Aiton, a Scotsman, was entrusted with the first stretch of the Canal from Port Sa`yid to Lake Timsah; Borel and Lavalley, two notable French engineers, with the stretch from Lake Timsah to the Red Sea. 

The supply of forced labor had started to dwindle from the earlier part of that year, and was employed for the last time on the cutting of the channel through the ridge of Shaluwf In June, in anticipation of the Imperial Award, it ceased altogether. Thus 1864 was a lean year for the works in the Isthmus.

In the following year, at an intricate moment in the Paris negotiations, a disastrous epidemic of cholera brought Lesseps hurrying back to Egypt. Isma`iyl, had fled to seaside at the start of the outbreak to Alexandria.

Up-to-date machinery on a large scale had been ordered through Borel and Lavalley. But it would not be available until the following year, and the existing supply of dredgers was limited.

In the spring of 1865 Lesseps's organized a visit to the Isthmus to nearly a hundred representatives of the principal Chambers of Commerce of Europe and America. Landing in Alexandria, they were surprised to find, among its business community, a strong element of opposition to the Canal as a "chimerical enterprise". The main reason for this was a fear that Port Sa`yid would replace Alexandria, by diverting much of the trade from the city. In Europe the delegates had been regaled with the usual tendentious rumors, including one to the effect that there was still no water at all in the Canal. The delegates were saluted on the ridge of al-Gisr by the piercing hoots of locomotives, and entertained to an open-air luncheon on the site of the Canal station; where a garden was striving to bloom amid the sand-dunes.  When the delegates reached Port Sa`yid he took them in a tour, In the course  the party covered the Canal site, from one end to the other, in twenty-seven hours traveling time. 

Hawkshwa had disposed, in his report, of the threat drommoving sands, considering that it could easily be met by a permanent system of dredging. The further anticipated hazard of wear and tear to the banks as a result of wash was being carefully studied. Its effects were more noticeable on and near the waterline than at a lower depth. Thus the slopes were being inclined at 1 in 5, diminishing to 1 in 2 It was found too that a natural growth of seaweed often helped to consolidate the banks.

Such embankments were now beginning to line other stretches of the Canal, built up on either side of it in the process of excavation and, as dredging proceeded, given a firm surface by the harder clay soil from the lower levels. They appeared to be effective breaks for any moving sand which might threaten to choke the waterway, and would be more effective still when irrigated and planted to hold the sand on certain stretches, as the proposal now was, thus confuting those pessimists who had foretold such a hazard. Even more telling in confutation was the fact that the excavations, for the Sweet Water Canal, of stretches of the original Canal of the Pharaohs, disclosed intact its original banks. Its bed showed little trace of blockage by sand, despite its abandonment eight hundred years before.

 At a banquet, where the flags of all nations were draped around a transparency of the Isthmus of Suez, the toast of the Canal was proposed by Cyrus Field, from New York. He was about to inaugurate the first submarine cable across the Atlantic Ocean, and he wished all success to its forthcoming union by Lesseps, for the good of humanity, with the Indian Ocean. The Suez Canal, he declared, would be a monument to his talent and energy as enduring as the Pyramids.

After visiting al-Isma`iyliyah, by the route of the Wadiy Tumilat, Lesseps conducted his party to Suez, the insignificant Egyptian village which was soon to be transformed, thanks to the arrival of the Sweet Water Canal, into a large and active port. As a natural harbour it demanded no works on the scale of Port Sa`yid; the Company's activities were limited to the construction of a mole at the future mouth of the Canal, as a break against southerly gales and high tides; the dredging of a channel from the mouth to the roadstead; and the reclamation of land with the use of the dredgers.

Before the delegates dispersed, the optimistic announcement was made to them that the Company hoped to complete the Canal by 1868, within the limits of its existing capital and of the funds supplied by the Khidiwiy's indemnities. They were also assured that, with the completion of the sluices on the Sweet Water Canal, and thus the release of more water in the direction of Suez, regular navigation fox merchandise from sea to sea would soon be an accomplished fact; and this promise was fulfilled a few months later.

On August 14, 1865, amid rapturous applause and the firing of salvoes, at al-Isma`iyliyah, the first through convoy of barges passed southwards on its way from Port Sa`yid to Suez. Dressed with the flags of all nations, they carried a cargo of coal, and which would henceforward be available at Suez for fifty instead of ninety francs per ton.

A fresh impetus was given to the Canal works in the course of the summer of 1865, when the arrival and assembly of the new machiner. During the first phase of construction, between 1861 and 1864 the total dug, largely by hand, was 15 million cubic meters. During the second phase, between 1865 and the end of 1869, the total dug, largely by machinery, was 60 million. Over roughly eight years, this made a total of 75 million cubic meters. If performed entirely by hand this task, so it has been calculated, would have demanded 25 million man days: With an average corvee of  20,000 men working 365 days a year, they would have taken twelve-and-a-half years for excavations alone, without taking into account the necessities of port construction etc.

Now the whole hundred-mile line of the Canal wound off across  the desert, marked by the high superstructures of the modern machines, their chimneys curling day and night with the smoke which denoted continuous industry.

 All this was highly expensive. Machine power cost roughly twice as much as man power, even allowing for the fact that its work took roughly half as long. The machines themselves cost some 60 million francs (£ 2,000,000) and consumed coal at the cost of a million francs (£40,000) per month. The six years' delay in completion, beyond the estimated time when the Canal could start to produce revenue, had doubled the interest due to shareholders. For these and other reasons the Canal was costing more than twice as much as its original share capital of 200 million francs (£ 8million) . was indeed bent, at all costs and by no matter what means, . But the cost had now soared, calling for ruthless expedients. That of the contract for the remaining excavations alone, quite apart from the ports, was estimated by Colonel Stanton, the British Consul-General, at more than 150 million francs a sum equivalent to three-quarters of the Company's initial and now largely spent capital of 200 million francs. 

 Now, thanks to the firman, the Company was in a position to call up the remainder of this capital, due from the shareholders on the final installment. But further capital was needed almost at once a sum estimated at 100 million francs, or half as much; again as the original total. Lesseps, indifferent to the mechanics of finance, hence inept in financial discussion, left his associates to worry in Paris while he worked in the Isthmus with his technical experts. And worry they did: it would be hard to raise this money, for the credit of the Company was low and its shares had dropped.

Lesseps thus turned his thoughts once more towards Egypt's Treasury. In 1866 Isma`iyl had been unable to meet his installments on the final call. Lesseps had thus raised on his behalf a loan in Paris, apparently without his previous consent, of 17 million francs, at 11 1/2 per cent interest. Of this interest the Company, nicely tided over by such a lump sum, agreed to pay a share. Now, in January 1867, Lesseps proposed to  Isma`iyl that he should hand over his entire shareholding in the Company, amounting to more than 85 million francs, in return for the cession of all its remaining lands, installations and buildings in the Isthmus, apart from the Canal itself a distinctly cynical proposal in view of the fact that the lands had been allowed to it, only a few months before, as being essential to the Canal's completion and maintenance. 

The Khidiwiy at first was inclined to consider it, partly on the grounds that, in the event of the non-completion of the canal, it would give him the land on which to construct a railway between Port Sa`yid and Suez, and thus a stronger hold over the Company's activities. but he he finally rejected the deal, heeding the advice of Colonel Stanton, the British Consul-General, who argued that the possession of the shares gave Isma`iyl in fact the stronger hold, which he would be unwise to relinquish, and that their value exceeded that of the property which the company offered.

Nonetheless, though the opening of the Canal was now sure, the funds at the Company's disposal remained insufficient. In fixing the bond issue at 200 million francs, Lesseps had underestimated the actual sum still required. He thus resorted to new and more questionable devices to extract more funds from the Khidiwiy. He saw a means of doing this through an extreme interpretation of a clause in the original Concession, covering the Company's Customs franchise. 

Meanwhile the Khidiwiy thought it worth his while to satisfy the Company's need for funds. On April13, 1869, a Convention Company for the privileges ceded, and a further 10 million for the installations. In a second Convention he agreed also to the joint exploitation of the lands, subject to joint agreement on a revision of the present system of Capitulations. This would regulate, through the establishment of Mixed Courts, the legal position of foreigners in Egypt, in relation to one another and to Egyptian subjects.

These 30 millions were raised by the Khidiywiy's renunciation of interest and profits on his shares in the Company for twenty-five years. This was done through the detachment, from the shares, of coupons, and their offer in the form of  120,000 bonds, bearing 5 per cent interest and dividends over this period, to other Ordinary shareholders. Here was a handsome bonus for the shareholders, who had lately been through anxious times; and a handsome bonus for the Company, which the Khidiywiy had in effect indemnified twice over for concessions twice repeated, and for installations which had served their purpose and which it no longer needed to use. Two years later, by a provision depriving of voting rights the holders of shares from which coupons had been detached, it denied to Isma`iy all influence over the Company, whose principal shareholder he was. The Viceregal barrel had been scraped to the dregs.

From now onwards the construction proceeded with several alarms but no crucial mishaps, working to a completion date postponed from 1868 to October 1869, with bonus and penalty clauses agreed in the contract. One after the other the physical obstacles were removed from its path. The cutting through the ridge of soft sand at al-Gisr, between Port Sa`yid and Timsah, was at last completed in January 1868, six months ahead of contract, after more than eight years of excavation, primarily manual but finally mechanical. 

The cutting through between Timsah and the Bitter Lakes, could be manually excavated only down to a certain point. Then a thick vein of gypsum was found, and the dredgers took over, operating with the aid of explosive charges in a bed temporarily flooded by the Sweet Water Canal. This work was soon completed so far as to allow the maritime Canal to be prolonged to the northern shore of the Great Bitter Lake, where a 300 foot barrage contained it.

Here, in the middle of March 1869, a striking ceremony was performed by the Khidiwiy Isma`iyl, who chose this moment to pay his first visit to the works in the Isthmus. The waters of the Mediterranean were let loose for the first time through the sluices of the barrage, to cascade in a huge wave of foam into the Bitter Lake that yawning basin, as a spectator described it, stretching as far as the eye could see, where soon a great sea would be created. Lesseps, Isma`iyl was impressed by the Canal between Port Sa`yid and al-Qantarah, which he saw as a veritable Bosporus. But he voiced his misgivings as to whether the rest of it especially the stretch from al-Isma`iyliyah to Suez could be made navigable on time.

By the end of 1869, the Khidiywiy had contributed to the cost of the Suez Canal a sum amounting to some 240 million francs (just short of £10 million). His contribution consisted of 87 million francs in share capital, 124 million francs in indemnities, in effect the recovery of lands and rights which had originally belonged to him and 30 million francs in interest on arrears on these sums. It amounted to more than half the total cost of construction 450 million francs (£18 million) a sum more than double the original estimate. It took no account of the cost of public works indirectly concerned with the Canal mainly the construction of the harbour at Suez and of the westerly stretch of the Sweet Water Canal which amounted to some 55 million francs; nor of the incidental expenses of Nuwbar's missions abroad or of the lavish festivities staged for the opening of the Canal. In all, Isma`iyl's final Canal debt amounted to some 400 million francs (£16 million), one-fifth of that final total debt, in foreign loans, which was to lead him to bankruptcy seven years after it was opened to traffic. Such was the cost to Egypt of a Canal from which Egyptian posterity would continue to suffer dire consequences.
 
 

(1) Nuwbar Pasha was an Armenian, not yet forty years old. He was one of the richest men in Egypt, a possessor of lands and a fortune skilfully amassed over a period of years by adroit and often devious methods. He was considered the archetype of the Levantine confidential adviser and middle-man, frequenting the ante-rooms of `Uthmaliy power, he had been an éminence grise of the two previous Khidiywiy. Now, under Ismail, he had soared to a position of paramount influence. For more information see Kamal katba's Article entitled An Historical Account of  Prime Ministers of Egypt .  "The Egyptian Chronicles" October, 2003 issue. ( click on the icon below)

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