Suez Canal

Suez Canal. The canal, still one of the world's most heavily used shipping lanes, is 163 kilometres (101 mls.) long, and connects the Mediterranean at Port Said with the Red Sea at Port Suez. Proposals for such a waterway date back over 4,000 years, and during the Roman occupation of Egypt work was started in cutting a canal. This linked the River Nile with the Red Sea along the course of a previous small canal which had been in existence 700 years earlier. However, this venture never reached fruition, nor did the plans drawn up by one of Napoleon's engineers when France occupied Egypt at the beginning of the 19th century. It was eventually begun in 1859 after its progenitor, the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, won from the Egyptian Khedive the right to build the canal and to lease it until 1969. It took ten years to build instead of the expected six and was not constructed across the shortest part of the isthmus, which is 120 kilometres (75 mls.), but deviated in order to use several lakes. It has no locks.

The Canal was officially inaugurated by Empress Eugénie in November 1869. During its first full year only some 486 vessels used it, but by the end of the Second World War (1939–45) both passenger and commercial traffic had reached a high volume. However, in July 1956, after Britain and the USA had decided not to finance Egypt's Aswan Dam, the Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalized the Canal to pay for the dam, precipitating what became known as the Suez Crisis. After diplomacy failed, Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt, the first two on the pretext of restoring order between Egypt and Israel, but in reality to seize control of the Canal and overthrow Nasser. Pressure from the USA and the world community soon brought the invasion to an end, and the Canal, after being blocked by Egypt, was soon back in commercial use. By 1966 traffic had grown to 21,250 transits annually, but the following year, during the six-day Arab–Israeli War, the Egyptians blocked the Canal again and it remained closed until 1975. By the time it reopened the tonnage of tankers had necessarily increased to enable them to carry sufficient oil round the longer Cape of Good Hope route, which made many of them too large for the Canal. This, and a changing pattern in world trade, lost the Canal much of its strategic importance as a waterway. Nevertheless, employing a long-established convoy system, and with the help of some enlargement along the route, the waterway, which takes around fourteen hours to negotiate, is currently (2004) used by container ships and ro-ro vessels, and by empty supertankers as big as 200,000 deadweight tonnes.