The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  All this changed with the accession of a new viceroy, Said’s capable and efficient nephew Ismail. He had not previously favoured the canal, for he was a great landowner and disliked the corvée system, which took fellahin away from the fields, often in the months when they were needed most. He was a graduate of the military academy of St Cyr and was aware of Western ideas. He had no intention of democratizing his monarchy, but (rather like Tsar Alexander II) he viewed the labour system as anachronistic in a modernizing society. It was he who said: ‘Egypt must become part of Europe.’8 His suspension of the corvées left de Lesseps with the problem of where to find labour, and appeals as far east as China produced little manpower. The answer, entirely appropriate to the modernizers, was mechanization, and at the end of 1863 Borel, Lavalley and Company set to work to design a great array of machines suitable for the different soils along the canal route. About three-quarters of the soil removed to create the canal was dug up by these machines, mainly in the final two years of the building of the canal, from 1867 to 1869, but nothing was predictable: on the very last day an enormous rock was found to be protruding into the canal, threatening any ship of reasonable draft, and had to be blasted out of existence.9 The use of machines doubled the cost of the enterprise, but without mechanization the project would never have finished on time, and swift delivery was vital if the canal were to win the approval of the viceroy, the sultan and the French emperor.

  Ismail was convinced that he could use his handsome revenues from cotton to pay his contribution to the building of the canal. Egypt was well placed in the 1860s to benefit from world demand for cotton, which had boomed because the traditional supplier across the Atlantic, the United States, was immersed in civil war. In the long term, prospects were not as good as Ismail assumed, but, like too many politicians, he assumed there would be no bust after boom; in 1866 he was already short of funds, and de Lesseps arranged a loan in Paris at a hefty rate of interest without even consulting him. By the time the canal was completed Ismail Pasha had paid 240,000,000 francs towards its construction, nearly £10,000,000 at then current exchange rates.10 Politically, Ismail found he had to steer a careful course. He persuaded the Sublime Porte to grant him a new title and the automatic right of succession through eldest sons, and saw this, with some justice, as recognition that he was now to all intents an independent sovereign. The Turks reluctantly dredged up an old Persian title, ‘khedive’, whose exact meaning was apparent to no one, but which seemed to be an assertion of regal authority. On the other hand, Ismail had good reason to be alarmed at the development of the powers of the Suez Canal Company, which acted, at least towards European settlers in the canal zone, as an autonomous government. The erosion of Egyptian control over the canal was already under way.

  The ceremonies for the opening of the canal in November 1869 neatly expressed the desire of the khedive to be accepted among the rulers of Europe. Among the guests were Empress Eugénie of France in the paddle-steamer L’Aigle, Franz Josef, emperor of Austria, and princes from Prussia and the Netherlands. Religious ceremonies were held to mark the event, according to both Muslim and Christian rites. The empress’s father-confessor proclaimed that ‘today two worlds are made one’; ‘today is a great festival for all of humanity’. This message of the brotherhood of mankind, of which Enfantin would certainly have approved, was exactly the one Ismail wished to promote. The confessor also delivered a eulogy of de Lesseps, comparing him to Christopher Columbus, while de Lesseps was convinced that no such joint ceremony of Muslims and Christians had ever before been held.11 On 17 November a great procession of more than thirty ships set out from Port Said along the canal, and the grandees’ journey was interrupted by lavish stops for refreshment and entertainment along the route. The empress’s paddle-boat reached the Red Sea on 20 November and was greeted by a 21-gun salute. De Lesseps had ‘converted Africa into an island’, as The Times reported.12

  Everything now would depend on the volume of traffic through the canal, from which the khedive optimistically hoped to derive great benefit; he was entitled to a 15 per cent share in the profits from the canal. It is no surprise that shippers and traders took a few years to adjust to the existence of a new express route to the Orient. In 1870 over 400,000 tons of goods were shipped through the canal, on nearly 500 vessels. In 1871 this rose to 750,000 tons. But the khedive had been led to believe that he would be receiving revenue from 5,000,000 tons a year, and it took a while to reach that figure. While the canal was being built, Port Said attracted plenty of French steamships (sixty-four) and many Egyptian ones too, as well as great numbers of Turkish sailing ships. Austrian sailing vessels brought coal from Wales and southern France, wood from Corsica and Istria, and wine from Provence to solace the European settlers on the barren edges of Sinai.13 The contrast between these raw figures and those from the years following the inauguration of the canal provides a real sense of the changes that took place once the passage was opened. In the long term, there was massive growth: 486 ships passed through the canal in 1870, 765 in 1871, and for the rest of the decade the figure hovered around 1,400, breaking beyond 2,000 in 1880 and reaching a high point of over 3,600 in 1885, after which the number fell back only slightly. Despite the coolness of the British government towards the project, British businessmen were quick to take advantage, and by 1870 two-thirds of the traffic was owned by British investors. In the twenty years from 1870, the British ascendancy became stronger and stronger, so that by 1889 the United Kingdom accounted for well over 5,000,000 tons of goods, out of nearly 6,800,000 tons; this left France with a tiny proportion (362,000 tons) and smaller shares for shipping from Germany, Italy and Austria (mainly Trieste). The Board of Trade in London asserted: ‘the trade between Europe and the East flows more and more through the Canal, and the British Flag covers an ever increasing proportion of this trade’.14

  This was a bright future, but in 1870 shareholders could only hope, and their uncertainty grew as the Canal Company proved unable to produce a dividend, or, as a French pamphlet proclaimed: ‘The agony of the Suez Canal – Zero results – Next comes ruin!’15 De Lesseps decided to focus his attention on another canal project, through Panama (which was beyond his technical and financial capacity), and the French emperor, defeated in war by Prussia, was forced into exile while Paris was taken over by its communards. Once order was restored in Paris, the Third Republic proclaimed its firm support for the canal, but was unable to help the hapless investors. Ismail had been largely abandoned, and in 1872, out of funds, he was forced to raise a loan of 800,000,000 francs (£32,000,000); by 1875 his debts were approaching £100,000,000, and simply servicing them, at about £5,000,000 per annum, was draining away his resources faster than he could accumulate them – in 1863 the Egyptian government had received less than that in tax revenues. His attraction to lenders lay in his collateral: he possessed large numbers of Suez Canal shares, including those dumped on Egypt by de Lesseps when foreign investors had proved reluctant to buy. He had steered Egypt towards greater political independence, but the financial cost was so great that he risked compromising that independence. In 1875 the only option seemed to be the sale of the Egyptian shares. French buyers were ready to pounce. Then Benjamin Disraeli received intelligence of what was happening and saw that, for £4,000,000, he had the opportunity to gain partial control of the Mediterranean route to the Indies. He informed Queen Victoria that purchase of the shares, ‘an affair of millions’, ‘would give the possessor an immense, not to say preponderating, influence in the management of the Canal. It is vital to Your Majesty’s authority and power at this critical moment, that the Canal should belong to England.’ By the end of 1875 the British government found itself the owner of 44 per cent of all canal shares, making it the largest shareholder. Disraeli informed the queen: ‘it is just settled: you have it, Madam’.16

  This purchase had enormous consequences for Egypt and the Mediterranean. An Anglo-French Dual Control Commission was set in place to administer the Egyptian s
tate treasury and to impose proper discipline on the khedival budget, vastly increasing the influence of Great Britain in Egyptian affairs. However, the commission authorized the sale of the khedive’s right to 15 per cent of the canal revenues to a French bank for a knockdown sum, which hardly bolstered his position. The Ottoman sultan, with good reason, saw this as the first step towards an Anglo-French takeover of Egypt, while Ismail’s dependence on foreign loans would endanger the annual tribute the khedive paid to Constantinople. Ismail dreamed of finding new assets within Sudan, but sending armies to the south cost more money than he could afford. He became increasingly isolated: in 1879 the sultan removed him from office, though in these kinder times he suffered no worse a penalty than exile in the Bay of Naples. Yet in deposing Ismail, the sultan was in reality bowing to pressure from the Dual Control Commission, and the succession of Ismail’s son Tawfiq, who was friendly to the European powers, only brought Egypt deeper into the British web. By 1882 Tawfiq was under immense pressure at home: an army coup installed an Arab-led government that was hostile to the old Turkish-Albanian elite. In late summer 1882, with the help of an army despatched from England, British forces bombarded Alexandria, where a massacre of foreigners had taken place, to European disgust; the British secured the Suez Canal and advanced towards Cairo, with the public aim of restoring Tawfiq to his throne.17 Egypt now became to all intents a British protectorate, even if the khedive (and his successors, the kings of Egypt) were allowed considerable autonomy. In deposing Ismail, the sultan had set off a series of events that led to the final loss of Egypt by the Ottoman Empire, but in reality the sequence of events had begun when de Lesseps’s labourers turned the first sod of the Suez Canal.

  II

  The other transformation that took place in the Mediterranean in the middle of the nineteenth century was the coming of steamships, followed by the arrival of ironclad vessels. The first attempts to build steamboats can be dated as far back as the 1780s, in the United States and France. The fundamental new features of steam navigation were speed, reliability and regularity. Speed should not be exaggerated; eight knots was considered fast. Nonetheless, the steamship route from Trieste to Constantinople, instituted in 1837, took two weeks, as against a month or even forty days by sailing ship, and by the end of the century larger, ironclad, screw-driven steamships reached the Turkish capital in less than a week. Steamships did not need to tack in the face of contrary winds and could face the Mediterranean in all seasons. Shipping was less constrained by the traditional routes that followed prevailing winds and currents; in other words, routes from point to point became more direct, and it became possible to predict with a fair degree of accuracy when a ship would arrive. On the other hand, steamships were very expensive, and – whereas sailing ships were empty of machinery down below – the hold of a steamship was full of fuel (in the form of coal), not to mention the engines and boilers, which occupied the prime position amidships, as well as the quarters provided for the crew and passengers; they also carried sail to augment or replace steam power when appropriate. One report explained that ‘steamships cannot be and never will be cargo ships’; because they provided an express service, they did not linger in ports loading and unloading cargoes in the rather casual way a sailing vessel might.18

  It became obvious that steamships would be most useful for transporting mail, including bank transfers; in other words, steamships could play a vital ancillary role in trade, accelerating the speed of payments and the spread of commercial information, as well as providing space for passengers who found steam packet ships more comfortable. The French government was planning steam packet routes as early as 1831, when steamships opened a route from Marseilles to southern Italy.19 Timetables could be constructed: in 1837 the Austrian government entered into a contract with the Austrian Lloyd Company, based in Trieste, for two voyages a month from Trieste to Constantinople and Alexandria, visiting Corfu, Patras, Athens, Crete and Smyrna, and carrying coin, mail and passengers.20 Four years earlier a group of insurance underwriters in Trieste had established the organization known as Lloyd Austriaco, taking the name from the London coffee house where a similar cooperative organization of underwriters had emerged in the eighteenth century. In 1835 Austrian Lloyd created a steamship company, in the realization that their work as insurers would benefit enormously from access to up-to-date information; 60 per cent of stock in Austrian Lloyd was snapped up by the Rothschilds in Vienna, and the London branch of the Rothschild bank helped supply ships and engines from England.21 In 1838 the Austrian Lloyd fleet consisted of ten steamships, the largest of which, the Mahmudié, was, significantly, named after the canal linking Alexandria to the Nile, and displaced 410 tons; its engines produced 120 horsepower. The fleet was decribed by the British consul in Trieste as ‘well-constructed, well-equipped, and well-manned’.22

  Outside the Mediterranean, the Peninsular Steam Navigation Company established services from England through the Straits of Gibraltar; it had already begun to specialize in a packet service between England and Iberia (this was the ‘peninsular’ part of the title of the firm that became Peninsular and Oriental, or P & O), and took as its colours the red and gold of the Spanish flag and the blue and white of the Portuguese flag then current. P & O rivalry with Austrian Lloyd caused some annoyance: in 1845 the British company established a route right across the Mediterranean and into the Black Sea, as far as Trebizond – once in the Black Sea, the British threatened to clash further with the commercial interests of Austrian steamships that plied up and down the Danube and along the Black Sea coasts.23 Steam navigation had turned into a success story: European powers competed to gain ascendancy along the trade routes, and yet the competition remained remarkably peaceful: some naval conflicts did break out in the mid-nineteenth-century Mediterranean, but the threat of piracy had been very greatly reduced since the American and French victories in Barbary, and clashes between armed fleets were rare after the Greek War of Independence.

  One exception is provided by the conflict that culminated in an Austrian naval victory over the newly established Italian fleet at Lissa, now known as Vis, in July 1866. The Austrian acquisition of Venice after the Napoleonic Wars brought the Venetian fleet under Austrian command, and for a period the Austrians also controlled fleets in Tuscan lands briefly ruled by the Habsburgs – until 1848, Italian was the language of command in the Habsburg navy and the majority of sailors were Italian, though by 1866 Germans accounted for 60 per cent of manpower.24 The Habsburg fleet was well managed; the emperor’s brother Ferdinand Maximilian, later to meet a tragic fate in Mexico as Emperor Maximilian, served as commander-in-chief between 1854 and 1864, and appreciated the advantages not simply of steam power but of cladding the hulls of his ships in iron. He found the fleet to consist of sailing ships and a few paddle-steamers; he commissioned screw-driven schooners, followed later by armour-plated frigates, which were particularly expensive – in 1861 Austrian foundries were not up to the task of producing iron plates at sufficient speed and in sufficient quantity, and the plates had to be ordered from the Loire Valley and exported from Marseilles in strict secrecy. Engines, though, were constructed at a new factory in Trieste, in which the emperor had a financial stake. He let his brother spend whatever he thought was necessary.25

  Rule over lands in northern Italy had brought the Habsburg emperor into conflict with the forces that sought to unify the peninsula under the house of Savoy. An alliance between Prussia and the kingdom of Italy threatened Austrian control of Venice and north-eastern Italy. When the Austrian and Italian fleets met off the Croatian coast at Lissa the Austrian fleet was outnumbered – the Italians possessed twelve ironclad steamships, while the Austrians had only mobilized seven. The number of unarmoured steamships in the Italian side was also slightly higher. On the other hand, the Italians had clearly given little thought to the form action would need to take. An engagement between ironclads was a novelty, and the Austrians decided that the correct tactics (in a throwback to classical an
tiquity) would be to ram the enemy. Although this did no favours to their ships, the Austrians did manage to sink two Italian ironclads. The Austrian commander admitted: ‘the whole thing was chaos … It is a miracle we did not lose a single ship.’ Against the odds, the Austrians had won.26 The victory did not assure them of Venice, which they lost to the Italian kingdom, but it did prevent Italy from gaining control of the Dalmatian coast (from which a number of the ‘Austrian’ sailors originated).27 If anything, the loss of Venice after Lissa only enhanced the importance of Trieste as the gateway of the Habsburg empire in the Mediterranean.

  Trieste boomed under Habsburg rule. Thirty years before the Suez Canal opened, an American diplomat in Vienna reported to the Secretary of State in Washington in glowing terms:

  Trieste itself is a beautiful and for the greater part a new city – and, as in new cities generally, there is much activity and business. Its harbour is excellent with a sufficient depth of water for almost any vessel. It contains 50,000 inhabitants mostly engaged in commerce which is said to be lucrative and rapidly increasing. Its imports amount to 50 millions of Florins [over $100,000,000] and its exports to 40 millions.28

  Trieste faced many challenges: the quality of goods coming down from the Habsburg hinterland around Vienna and Prague was not especially high, making it difficult for Trieste to sell Austrian products in the Mediterranean, while access to the Austrian heartlands was blocked by the Alps. On the other hand, Trieste was a free port able to enjoy generous exemptions from standard commercial taxes. As early as 1717 the city had received privileges from Emperor Charles VI of Austria, and behind that lay an even longer tradition of trade within the Adriatic – Charles V had granted the merchants of Trieste special rights in southern Italy in 1518. In these centuries Trieste was still very small, greatly overshadowed by Venice, from whose political tutelage it had escaped in the fourteenth century. It took much longer to escape Venice’s economic domination: at the end of the eighteenth century Venetian merchants were trans-shipping goods via Trieste to benefit from its status as a free port. Further privileges, along with maritime law codes, were acquired at the end of the eighteenth century under Empress Maria Theresa, and Trieste was able to exploit its position even more when Venice lost its independence in 1797: in 1805 537 ships were registered at Trieste, the vast majority owned by Venetians.29