Diary of a Dead Cat Quarterly: Canals
Too Much Curiosity for Only Nine Lives
Canals
Canals have been around everywhere on earth (and other planets, supposedly) for thousands and thousands if not a hundreds of thousands of years. The canal that slices through Egypt, the canal(s) that unite China, the economic canals of Great Britain and the US, the canal that dissects a Central American isthmus, the canals Venice has instead of roads, the canals Percival Lowell believed inhabited the surface of Mars, the canal we all have in our ears, and the birth canal. The latter two canals have been in our existence for, probably, hundreds of thousands of years (unless you are a Bishop Ussher believer).
Where can one start when one wants to start talking about canals? When we listen to people complaining about, discussing, or even designing canals we use one of our very own. Our ear canal goes from the outside, where are ears are, to the inside where our ear drums are. The air that sound moves when people speak, dogs bark, and donkeys bray hits the outer bit of the canal and is funneled ever so quickly and efficiently into the ear drum which translates the movable air into electric waves the brain can understand. In fact, when we listen to the gates of a canal open and close, listen to the water rushing out of one section of a canal to the other, when we hear the crank and creak of a canal's sluice gates operating, we are using our ear canals.
The Suez
Speaking of sluice gates and water rushing in and out, let’s turn our minds away from our own ears momentarily and go back in time. Let’s first scurry back to those exciting years surrounding 1869, a mere 155 years ago. (If you’re reading this in 2024and not 2016 or 2224, that is.) And the land of the pharaohs, Egypt where our first canal feature will play out in silence as we read without moving our lips, okay?
What happened in Egypt in 1869? I’ll tell you what happened in Egypt in 1869: the Suez Canal was finished under the leadership of one very famous French administrator/career diplomat Monsieur Ferdinand de Lesseps. The French had wanted a shipping route from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea for a long time. Why? Because they wanted to defeat, win over, embarrass, one-up their chief rival in sea transport: England.
A shortcut from Marseilles to India, the Spice Islands, China, and other profitable places in Asia, such as the newly forcibly opened Japan, would give France a fine advantage over England. As early as 1800 Napoleon had surveyors checking out routes, heights, contours, and tidal forces.
Unfortunately for him, Napoleon was told that the Red Sea was 30 feet higher than the Mediterranean. Dig a canal, his rather incompetent surveyors reported, and the Red Sea will hemorrhage into the Mediterranean and sweep away the Nile Delta.
The survey was grossly in error, of course. Other French scientists tried to point out that sea levels couldn’t possibly differ that much at two points only eighty miles distant from each other, however…
Yes, the damage was done; the moment had passed; only the idea survived, wounded, and alone in the canals of history. However, it re-emerged in both England and France after Napoleon was gone.
De Lesseps finally dug his Suez Canal so it wandered northward from the Red Sea, following the two Bitter Lakes at a mid-point. Then he had hundreds of laborers dig a straight line to the Mediterranean.
That southern leg of the de Lesseps canal from the Red Sea north actually followed a vastly older canal. Atypically, Napoleon had been a latecomer to the canal idea. In 500 BC, the Persian conqueror of Egypt, Darius, began a canal along that same route. He meant his canal to swing west at the mid-point and link with the Nile near Cairo. But Darius's experts, perhaps distant relatives of Napoleon’s experts, decided the Red Sea was higher than the Mediterranean. They too thought a canal would result in disaster.
So Darius didn’t finish his canal. But the Ptolemies who followed Darius did finish it. By 250 BC, a well-built heavy-duty canal linked the Red Sea with the Mediterranean. It was fifty yards wide and it served ocean-going vessels. Well, ocean-going vessels at the time; which were not exactly the mega-cruise ships of today. In fact, Cleopatra probably saw the banks of that canal with either Julius or Anthony as her barge poked along its route a few years before the birth of Jesus. In Fact, Aristotle once wrote, although not in the English we are familiar with these days,
One of their kings tried to make a canal to it (for it would have been of no little advantage to them for the whole region to have become navigable; Sesostris is said to have been the first of the ancient kings to try), but he found that the sea was higher than the land. So he first, and Darius afterwards, stopped making the canal, lest the sea should mix with the river water and spoil it.
Here the plot thickens even further: For Darius had built on the route of an even earlier canal, which was begun in 600 BC. And that canal followed the route of an even older canal that served shipping around 1300 - 1500 BC. Temple carvings show the Queen of Egypt (yes, that Nefertiti) setting out for Africa on that canal. And, as Egyptian history blends into myth, 4000 or so years in the past, it tells of still other canals. Obviously Egypt, the Red Sea, and The Bitter Lakes were popular places for canals.
What is a Canal?
But, but wait! What is a canal? (Besides a noun of a famous palindrome? - A Man, A Plan, A Canal: Panama. About whom we will learn more of later).
For boats and ships it’s a waterway. For people it is a passage through which air and humans move. Human canals (ear and birth) are more specialized and smaller than ship canals. However! Yes, again with the however...
Not just any waterway is a canal as the Nile, Congo, Amazon, and Mississippi rivers are waterways as well, but not canals in any sense of the word. But, usually, a man-made waterway; one that was built for a specific purpose. Not unusually, that specific purpose was to make money for the builders/owners/operators.
Canals are oft times built between two bodies of water that permit better sea-going transportation. The Panama Canal, for example, was built to cut the time of sailing from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Or, more specifically, from San Francisco to New York. It connected those two oceans, the largest on the planet.
On the other hand, there are numerous canals, especially in England, that connect small rivers so that small barges could haul freight from one small town to another, hopefully larger town for increased profits by decreasing transportation costs. In fact, the Panama and Suez canals were both built to cut down on transportation costs.
The Suez Canal we remember and is still in existence is the one built by de Lesseps We don’t remember the ones built by Darius or the ancient Egyptians of mythic and not-so-mythic past. The crowning irony is that the French (who were initially against the canal) honored de Lesseps so highly for his work that they gave him the job of digging a canal across the then-disease ridden isthmus of part of Colombia known as Panama. But that was another matter entirely.
The Panama Canal (not the hat)
The Panama Canal had to penetrate jungles, cross mountains, and span great fields of mud and graves. Twenty thousand workers died – mostly of mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and yellow fever which weren’t controlled until a little-known military physician named Walter Reed injected some volunteers! with the diseases and confirmed their transmission mechanisms as described by the Cuban scientist Carlos Finlay: the mosquito. Reed’s research benefited the Panama canal but he never visited that region. His research, as we as Finlay’s, was centered in Cuba. Reed died without seeing the completion of the Panama canal as it was completed in 1914 while he died in 1902, but not of yellow fever or malaria (’Twas a burst appendix that did him in at 51).
Aside from diseases killing off his workers, De Lesseps also had two other problems: finances and his design. He couldn’t raise the money needed, especially after workers started dropping off like flies, nor was his design practical. He wanted a sea-level lock-less canal which proved to be nigh on impossible in the mountainous isthmus. Strike Three! Bad design, No money, and dying workers. De Lesseps returned to France in failure.
In Panama de Lesseps didn’t have the old Egyptians to lead him. For the Suez, he had problems that were solved millennia before by some of the finest engineers the world has known. In Panama, he undertook a problem that hadn’t been solved by those minds, those minds being long embalmed several centuries previous.
Wadi Tumilat and De Lesseps
Speaking of embalming, Darius the Great was not one to hide his accomplishments under a bushel basket (whatever that means). He had his feat of building a canal inscribed all over the then-god’s then-known creation: Five monuments written in Old Persian, Elamite, Babylonian, and Egyptian expounding Darius’ canal between the Nile and the Red Sea (of Moses-Parting-the-Sea fame). All the monuments were placed strategically in the Wadi Tumilat for all to see. One of these monuments was discovered in 1866 130 kilometers from Suez. Near Kabret in Egypt. By Charles de Lesseps. Yes, Ferdinand’s son found inscriptions advertising the existence of a canal built 2300 years before his father’s canal In The Exact Same Place! For almost the same reasons: shipping, trade, and - probably – embarrassing or impressing some nearby dynasty/kingdom/upstart principality.
The elder De Lesseps is known for things other than canals, by the way. He was the Frenchman who gave the US the Statue of Liberty back in 1884 and spoke at its dedication in 1886 along with US President Grover Cleveland. His name was used in 1956 as the signal for the Egyptian army to burst unannounced into the Suez Canal Company's opulent offices so that Egyptian President Gamal Nasser (of course, who else?) could seize the canal, its assets, and nationalize the wholeshebang, much to the chagrin of the European consortium that was making profits off of it. To add insult to injury, De Lesseps’ statue was unceremoniously ripped from its moorings near the entrance of the grand canal and plopped into a garden in a shipyard.
Meanwhile.... Well, not exactly meanwhile for the De Lesseps family of canal builders. More like meanwhile for the Darius the Great family of canal builders. On the opposite side of the globe were some very busy canal builders indeed.
China’s Grand Canal
Since the third century BCE, the Chinese were building canals all over the Middle Kingdom because most all of the rivers in China flowed in parallel with each other. Canals were needed to connect the rivers. Left, right, and upside down. Canals were everywhere.
During the Sui Dynasty, about 700 CE, some administrative type ventured the proposition that if all the canals could be connected the emperor/government could make some serious coin (although the government was literally making serious coin in the mints already). The profits in grain trade alone would probably pay for the unified canal systems let alone the huge tourism dollars that would flow like wine once the 20th century hit (a mere 1200 years later, according to this administrative type.)
And so it was. A whole ton of workers were conscripted to start digging. They dug north. They dug west. The connected the Yangtze River in the south with the Yellow River in the north. They connected the Yellow in the north with the Wei River in the west so that grain, hogs, and dignitaries could float from the breadbasket of China in the south to the capital at Xi’an in the northerly westernly kind of centerish bit. At last those with political power and influence who lived in the capital could eat. The rest of the country would benefit? Perhaps? Yes?
Then, in the 1200s - late middle 1200s - Kublai Khan, Genghis’ grandson, suddenly found himself in charge of the entire Middle Kingdom. He was emperor and not even really Chinese but Mongolian! The very people the Great Wall was built to keep out. In charge! He immediately moved the capital to a more hospitable place, at that time. Now it’s a bit of an air polluted conflagration of crowds, humanity, people, and pollution: Beijing. The Northern Capital.
But the Grand Canal didn’t go to Beijing as it was just a backwater little burg compared to Xi’an. But Kublai Khan was emperor of the Yuan Dynasty and by golly, he could do whatever he wanted and what he wanted was food. Grain. And the tourist dollars that would come in only 700 more years. He wanted a canal.
And so it was. Another ton of workers dug some more. North this time. And connected the previously built Grand Canal with a newer part of the Grand Canal that connected it with Beijing which made the Grand Canal even Grander. Or at least longer. The bit that stretched out to Xi’an gradually faded away, however, as the capital under Kublai Khan was now in Beijing and Xi’an was way out there in the hinterlands. Don’t forget that it only took about 1,000 years from the first canal to the Grand Canal ending in Beijing after bypassing Xi’an, which as we have mentioned, is out in the boonies. Or was.
In fact, it was so far out there in Podunkville, China that China’s space program is centered there. America’s space program is centered on a peninsula (Florida) with some political pull in the money center of the US government (Washington DC) so they can shoot rockets over water; the old Soviet Union’s space program was centered in Central Asia where they could shoot rockets over the vast uninhabited plains because, except for the Arctic Ocean, they really didn’t have much open seas to shoot things over; thus, China’s emulates the old Soviet Union’s space program and similarly shoots rockets over vast relatively uninhabited plains and deserts. Xi’an, of course as you know is also home of the terra-cotta soldiers that guard Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin dynasty and consolidator of the many walls in northern China into the Great Wall of China (like the Grand Canal a few centuries later).
Unlike the non-locked Suez Canal, the Grand Canal of China required a multitude of locks the kind of which did not exist previously. Leave it to a Chinese engineer in the 900s to come up with a couple of solutions. Chiao Wei-yo. He first used the fairly common Flash!Lock but it proved unsatisfactory for boats moving upstream. They were great if you were going downstream, however.
Generally speaking, if you remember your junior high physics class you’ll recall that water flows downhill. If you are in a boat and you need to go over a rough bit of rockery that would tear the crapola out of the bottom of your boat, you build a lock. The simplest lock holds the water back until it is deep enough to float your boat. Picture this: a river flowing down stream, as rivers are wont to do. But one section has too many rocks and not enough water. If you build a dam at the lower end of the rocky section, then build walls around the rocky section to keep the water from flowing around the dam pretty soon you’ve got yourself a lake. Your boat floats on the lake. Then you open the dam wide enough to let your boat through but not so wide that all the water gushes out in an instant, leaving your boat high and dry on the bottom of what was your artificial lake. Slowly, you open the dam and slowly widen it until your boat is through, then you close the dam to make a lake for the next boat to cascade down.
Great if you’re going downstream. Not so great if you’re going up. In fact, if you’re going upstream, you can forget about it; you ain’t going nowhere. At least, by a boat on that river. You could walk around your lake carrying all your goods on your back but that would be a long, hard, and, more importantly, an unprofitable trip. Or you could hire a few gabillion people or horses, mules, or oxen to pull your boat upstream against the current and gush of water when the dam is opened. They have to be strong, fast, and motivated. But basically, the Flash! Lock is only good for a one way trip downstream.
A more flexible lock was required. Chiao Wei-yo turned his lonely head to the Pound Lock. You, dear reader, if you’ve seen a lock anywhere in the world you are mostly likely familiar with the Pound Lock. It has gates at both ends of a pond which sometimes has a lot of water in it and sometimes has little. The amount of water in the pond usually equals the level of the water outside the lock. If you have a bunch of water in, say, a lake or a sea (like the Red Sea or Puget Sound) and want to go to a higher lake or river (like the Nile or Lake Union), then first the water in the pond matches the body of water you are in (assuming you are in a boat or swimming). You enter the pond with the level of the water you are in. Water is pumped into (or out of) the pond until it matches the level of the water where you want to go. The gates open and merrily you float along until reaching your destination, wherever that may be (Port Said, for example, or Husky Stadium). This is a pound lock. Pound locks exist all over the known planets, especially Earth, because of our man Chiao Wei-Yo back in the 10th century CE.
But that didn’t stop Leonard da Vinci from improving on the Pound Lock, no siree, Bob. He devised, for Milan, the Mitred Pound Lock. Why? Probably for both the challenge and the money. With a mitred lock the gates are mitred which means they overlap or fit into each other. Water pressure holds them closed very tightly as the mitre bit is very strong. The San Marco lock in Milan is a mitre lock that many people who care about the history of locks or the biography and accomplishments of da Vinci believe is his design. Cool. He designed it in 1500, well after Chiao Wei-yo had left this veil of tears.
The Netherlands, home of a bit of soggy land and watery bits, is home to what many believe to be the first Pound Lock on the European continent, built perhaps maybe around or in 1373 at a difficult-to-spell place for non-Netherlanders called Vreeswijk on the river Lek. A simple lock with a simple mechanism but difficult to use. Lift the gate up, let the water in. But water pressure on the gate makes it difficult to lift, even for the most ambitious boater. About 120 years later came the mitre lock and viola! Ambition rules!
The Netherlands starts whacking out canals all over the damn place; mainly to drain the soggy watery bits so that humans can actually use the land (and having a series of canals people can use like a road is a happy coincidence to say nothing of the number of tourists who flock to the Netherlands even now to ride the canal boats – The Netherlands being closer – and cheaper to get to – to most of Europe than China’s long loooong loooooong 1800 km long Grand Canal or 1,100 miles)
Before we canalboat away from The Netherlands, perhaps we should explain a bit about this soggy soggy country and why it seems to have half a dozen names. Well, two at least. One is The Netherlands which is pretty easy to remember. The other one is Holland. These darker yellow bits are the Holland parts of the Netherlands and they shouldn’t be confused with the entire country.
Back to Water Transport!
It is not hard to expect that some PhD candidate somewhere, or even a tired history professor looking for an additional publication for his or her résumé, has written The History of European Canals: 12th to the 17th Century or The Economic History of European Canals. But in either of these tomes will we find Naviglio Grande which was an Italian canal built for one specific purpose: to haul marble from the shorelines of Lake Maggiore to Milan. And it only took about 30 years to build the canal system, let alone the reason: a cathedral in Milan — where the San Marco lock designed by da Vinci resides. Coincidence? I think not. Somebody (the Duke of Milan perhaps?) had some serious coin, eh? –– Perhaps we could find a PhD student willing to write The History of Naviglio Grande for the currency of the academic realm which is publication and tenure.
Built for marble, the Naviglio Grande was, said Yoda. But one canal was built to avoid most of Denmark, I think. The Stecknitz canal (started in 1391, finished in the next century) connects the Baltic and the North seas. But if you look at a reasonably accurate map (like the Fra Mauro world map of the 15th century) you’ll notice that these two bodies of water are already connected. If you load up your sailing vessel with lutefisk in Helsinki, Finland on the Baltic Sea you can sail it all the way to Sandwich on the Southeast coast of England on the North Sea if your heart desires. Why, then, build a canal from Lubeck to Hamburg on the Elbe River if not to avoid Denmark? Oh, perhaps to improve the economy of both Lubeck and Hamburg, maybe?
Speaking of Hamburg, if you read Sandwich, another issue of Diary of a Dead Cat Quarterly (Too Much Curiosity for Just Nine Lives), you might find a hamburger in it. Not an actual hamburger; for that you'll have to sail to a port city with a McDonald’s.
Canal du Midi
Then there’s the Canal du Midi. What can we say about the Canal du Midi besides it was completed in 1681. Oh, we can add a few things, I believe. Like, it connects the Mediterranean with the Atlantic. Of course, these are already connected via the Straits of Gibraltar but the French wanted them to be scenic and connect by navigating rivers and canals through most of France, it would appear. There are about 240 km (150 mi) of canals including! Including! Mind you:
a canal through a tunnel
A canal on not one, not Two, but Three! Aqueduct – man-made bridges for water for a canal that goes over – Over – mind you! Rivers.
Made possible because of Chiao Wei-Yo's pound lock and da Vinci's mitre lock.
The Canal du Midi might use three aqueducts to cross three rivers but James Brindley of England built a canal that eschewed rivers altogether. Mr. Brindley's Bridgewater Canal, named after the aptly named Duke of Bridgewater, is one entire aqueduct from start (the lucrative coal mine owned by the duke) to finish (the equally lucrative Manchester coal market) and became what China’s Grand Canal would soon be: a tourist attraction. And an icon for the Industrial Revolution.
Why did Brindley pooh-pooh the use of a traditional canal with locks and whatnot? Because building locks was expensive and time-consuming. The Bridgewater Canal Aqueduct was cheaper and only took two years to build. Plus it became profitable because of lower coal shipping costs almost immediately. The duke could lower his coal prices yet sell more. He was one happy camper with more cash to play with and Brindley was one happy self-educated engineer who had proved his worth and went on to be employed as a canal builder/designer for at least 300 more miles of canals.
Percival Lowell
Speaking of many more miles of canals, once upon a time there lived a wealthy man named Percival Lowell. He was smart and wealthy. He also contained in his brain a lot of curiosity; too much for just for one life. He was interested in: Asia, Astronomy, Peace.
As he was wealthy, he could indulge himself in whatever interested him. For example, his interest in Asia took him, logically, to Asia where he worked in Korea and travelled in Japan and China. And not just the expected joints in Japan either; off the beaten track he was back when off the beaten track meant more than a train ride west. We’re talking hiring a translator, taking trains, mules, and walking to meet citizens who had never met a non-Japanese person in their entire lives.
He might not, however, have read the language of the peninsular country to Italy particularly well because he took the Italian word canali (which means channel) for canal. He got canali from the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli who wrote about Venus and Mars long before the McCartney album of the same name. From canali, Lowell assumed from that that there were these canals on Mars.
Canals being for the most part made by something other than nature (they are usually not made by wind or water power; although, come to think of it, both the ear and birth canals were made by nature, unless, of course, you believe and have faith in Bishop Ussher – the Martian canals couldn’t have been man-made as there were no men or women on that planet –) meant that there must have been living creatures – what we call Martians; those little green men we love to read about in science fiction. Why little?– there.
[Wasn’t that the happiest sentence you’ve ever come across in a long time or what?]
Channels, not canals, are oft made by nature, however — water erodes land to form river channels; constant winds can form channels given the proper soil and time; and glaciers (a form of water) gouge channels out of entire mountains.
Lowell authored three books about what he believed to be the channels on Mars: Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals (1906), and Mars As the Abode of Life (1908). He did not write John Carter on Mars which was inspired by the idea there might be creature-made channels on Mars but written by Edgar Rice “Tarzan” Burroughs (no relation to the William S. Naked Lunch Burroughs—really?) in 1917 (well after Lowell’s final Mars book).
Now, as it turns out, and otherwise, it has been observed by observant Martian observers that there are not, in fact, canals on Mars. Nor are the observers actually on Mars. Except for:
~ Curiosity ~
the wandering car-sized robot NASA sent there in 2011 and what did Curiosity discover? That there was once water. And with water we can hope infer think that maybe there was life as we know it. Maybe. And maybe because there was water might there also have been water-crafted canals? Yes indeed there might. But still yet not canals as we think of them: watery bits connected by human-made locks; not the nature made ones that extend from inside the human body to out. Like the ear canal and the birth canal. But canals created by creatures we have no knowledge of but will, hopefully, in the future and we can shake Bishop Ussher’s hand and give him a hearty and strenuous “Well done, my good fellow, well done!”
Diary of a Dead Cat Quarterly
Too Much Curiosity for Only Nine Lives
The ear drum image called External, Middle, and Inner Ear courtesy of Chiara Mazzasette
We’d be glad to hear from you about anything you’ve read. Or not read.