References
- The writer acknowledges his appreciation to Towson State University for the sabbatical leave which it granted him in 1975, and to its Faculty Research Committee for the grants which supported his efforts. He also offers sincere thanks to the staff of the Israel State Archives at Jerusalem, which generously opened their valuable collections of European consular correspondence to him. The central documents cited in this study are from that collection.
- Edgar-Bonnet , George . 1951 . Ferdinand de Lesseps, Le Diplomate, Le Créateur de Suet 137 – 49 . Paris
- Hallberg , Charles W. 1974 . The Suet Canal; Its History and Diplomatic Importance 66 – 67 . New York
- Balfour , J. P. D. and Kinross , Baron . 1969 . Between Two Seas; The Creation of the Suet Canal 40 – 43 . New York
- Marlowe , John . 1965 . A History of Modern Egypt and Anglo-Egyptian Relations 1800–1956 62 Hamden, Conn., p
- Beatty , Charles . 1956 . De Lesseps of Suet the Man and His Times 83 New York, p
- All the Prussian correspondence cited in this study was written in French. Author's translation.
- 4 December 1847 . 4 December , Pentz to Schultz, Alexandria, MSS, Collection of Files from the German Consulate at Jerusalem, Israel State Archives, Jerusalem, Group 67, File Number 15. Occasionally Pentz lapsed into incredibly long and clumsy sentences, rescued from incomprehensibility only by the accurate use of gender, number, and person. Where those advantages of the French language are not reflected in English, brackets are used to clarify the English translation by specifying words which are understood in the original. See Note 20
- Bourdaloue , M. was the engineer who had been chosen to perform the actual survey by Paulin Talabot, France's official representative in the multi-national Société. An English group headed by Robert Stephenson had been part of the Société from its founding in 1846. The English were specifically charged to study the Port of Suez. Stephenson quit almost immediately, to fight for a railway rather than a canal (Hallberg, p. 94)
- The Suet Canal; Letters and Documents Descriptive of its Rise and Progress in 1854–1856 230 – 31 . An unofficial Austrian representative spoke for Austrian interests in the Société. He was Chevalier Negrelli de Mardelbe. See Ferdinand de Lesseps, London, 1876, pp. Negrelli was an employee of the Austrian State Railway (Hallberg, p. 94)
- 36 – 37 . Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds was a French engineer, married to a Syrian wife, who had become the genius of Mehmet Ali's extensive programme for more efficient flood control and the use of the Nile's waters for irrigation. Although he accepted Le Père's theory that the Red Sea was at a higher level than the Mediterranean, he was an early exponent of a sea to sea canal, by-passing the Nile. He argued that a canal possessing a current descending a gentle slope would actually deepen its own channel. He believed that such a canal would need no locks or sluices. See Kinross
- Official Map of the Suet Canal, ibid. 282 The present city of Ismailia is on Lake Timsah. The Suez Canal today incorporates the lake channel within its course. A survey of that area was particularly crucial because if use was to be made of Lake Timsah, it would be necessary to by-pass the Plateau of Mariam to the north, and to cut through the Plateau of Serapeum to the south. See Wyld's, facing p
- The site of that branch of the Nile which had provided a river-based route to the Red Sea in ancient times. The present Mediterranean terminus of the Suez Canal at Port Said is west of the inundated Plain of Pelusium. See ibid.
- Select Committee on Steam Navigation to India 35 In fact the British Government had determined to oppose the construction of a canal. In 1830, an artillery officer, Captain Francis Rawdon Chesney had been sent by the British Embassy at Constantinople to survey alternate routes to India through Egypt and Mesopotamia. Chesney concluded that a Suez Canal was feasible, but recommended the Mesopotamian land route as better for British interests. The British had adopted Chesney's recommendation in 1834 (ibid., p.). More important than that, Lord Palmerston, during his long tenures of office as British Foreign Secretary 18 30–41 and 1846–51, had become the leader of the anti-Canal forces in Britain. He argued that the creation of a canal would only beg trouble by providing another bone of contention between the great maritime powers, as potentially conflict ridden as the Turkish Straits at the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. See Herbert C. F. Bell, Lord Palmerston (in 2 vols),Hamden, Conn., 1966, II, 355–61. The author is particularly grateful to his colleague, Professor John McCleary for sharing the results of his own unpublished research on this subject
- Ali , Mehmet . hereditary Viceroy of Egypt
- A decayed town of Asiatic Turkey, 100 miles SSW. of Konieh, on the Mediterranean coast.
- That part of Turkey lying between lat. 37° and 40° N. and Ion. 31° and 37° E.
- His Highness.
- See Note 9.
- Altesse The original of this sentence is so confusing that the only way in which it can be translated accurately is by bracketing M.A. for Mehmet Ali, when the pronoun refers to the Viceroy, and B. when it refers to Bourdaloue. The feminine pronoun ‘elle’ is used for any reference to the viceroy, whose title is the (feminine) or Highness. Bourdaloue is referred to by the masculine pronoun ‘il’
- 1841 . 184 – 85 . Mehmet Ali was appropriately nervous about doing anything which would endanger his own position as hereditary Viceroy of Egypt. Since as a consequence of the London Convention, he had been virtually independent, but was still theoretically subject to the Sultan of Turkey. The teetering balance between Britain and France which had nearly precipitated war in 1840, when Mehmet Ali had tried to seize Syria, would be sorely tested if the viceroy moved too precipitately to support a canal sponsored by France in the face of British hostility to the project. Furthermore, the considerable influence of Linant was quietly thrown into the scale against the expenditure of Egyptian money on a canal, when the Nile flood control and irrigation system demanded priority. See Edgar-Bonnet
- 1847–48 . The chief accomplishment of the expedition of was the definitive demonstration that the Mediterranean and Red Seas were at the same level. Pentz was as well informed as most engineers, however, in his acceptance of Le Père s false conclusions, in September 1847
- The length of the canal today is closer to 100 miles.
- The difference in spelling is found in Pentz's original document.
- Pentz rests all of his assumptions on the false information that the Red Sea, higher than the Mediterranean would create a strong current in the canal as its waters rushed down to the Mediterranean. The shorter 79-mile route described by Pentz, avoiding some of the lakes included in the present canal's 100-mile length, also rested on fears of the effect of the inundation of low lands opened to the rushing waters of a higher level Red Sea.
- By discovering that no locks would be needed, the expedition of 1847 changed all Pentz's assumptions.
- 18 September 1847 . 18 September , Pentz's Report to the Prussian Embassy at Constantinople, copy enclosed in Pentz to Shultz, 4 December 1847, Alexandria, Group 67, File Number 1 5
- Edgar-Bonnet, p. 185.
- 98 – 98 . Hallberg
- 355 – 61 . Bell, II
- 52 – 53 . Kinross