Read Ebook: Waterways and Water Transport in Different Countries With a description of the Panama Suez Manchester Nicaraguan and other canals. by Jeans J Stephen James Stephen

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INTRODUCTION AND OUTLINE iii

APPENDICES.

INDEX 495

WATERWAYS AND WATER TRANSPORT.

THE WATERWAYS OF DIFFERENT COUNTRIES.

THE TRANSPORTATION PROBLEM.

The history of transportation is largely, and of necessity, the history of material progress. It is hardly possible to conceive of the prosperity of a people to whom the most precious possessions that the arts and sciences have bestowed upon mankind for the purposes of commerce were unknown. Such a people could, no doubt, exist, and perhaps maintain a considerable amount of rude health. But, like the aborigines of an unsettled and uncultivated territory, they would find themselves shut out from participation in the advantages which civilisation confers upon mankind. They would be exclusive, uncultivated, ignorant, incapable of great effort, limited in their capacity for enjoyment, subject to the constant danger of famine, and without the command of those amenities which have created such a gulf between the "rude forefathers of the hamlet" and the happy possessors of all that civilisation can bestow.

Only a very perfunctory acquaintance with the physical configuration of our planet is required, in order to show that the natural arrangement of land and water is not the most convenient that could be devised for the purposes of commerce and travel. The oceans and seas do not afford in all cases the most direct and desirable routes between one part of the world and another. Rivers of otherwise gigantic dimensions are now and again found to be possessed of rocky and shallow beds that are unsuited to navigation except by the tiniest craft. Promontories are projected into "the waste of waters," compelling the navigator to sail for hundreds or thousands of miles further than "the crow flies" in order to reach his destination. Every here and there an isthmus is found to divide waters that appear as if they were intended by Nature to be joined together.

The same remarkable absence of facilities for promoting the requirements of commerce is apparent on land as on water. The surface of the earth, and the divisions of land and water, appear to have been left by Nature in such a condition as to tax the highest powers and capacities of man. The knowledge of roads, of bridges, of canals, has been laboriously acquired and slowly applied. The aboriginal inhabitants of a country usually care for none of these things. Beasts of burden are seldom used in the most primitive conditions of existence, and, without these, roads are not so much of a necessity. Man, however, found out, in course of time, that it suited his interests and his convenience to establish a system of interchange of commodities. The simple and self-contained habits of the trapper and the hunter gave place to a more composite order of being. Then it was that the primeval forest, the jungle, the morass, and the prairie became rectangulated with roadways over which traffic could be rudely transported on the backs of mules, horses, or other beasts of burden. As exchange and barter extended, the pack-horse was found inefficient. He could only perform a very limited day's work, whether measured by quantity or by distance. For transport over great distances he was virtually useless. In the absence of any other system of transport, districts near the sea, or placed on navigable rivers with easy access to the ocean, became developed at the expense of other districts that had equal, and perhaps greater, facilities otherwise except those of transport. A notable case in point is that of the coal trade. For many years the export coal trade of this country was limited to an area within 12 miles of convenient ports, because coal could not be transported beyond that distance except at a virtually prohibitory cost.

A hundred and thirty years ago, England was in a very different position to that which she occupies to-day. So, also, was the rest of the world. The woollen trade was the greatest of our national industries. The cotton industry was just beginning to take a firm root The quantity of coal produced in Great Britain was estimated at five or six millions of tons per annum. The quantity of iron produced was believed to be about 100,000 tons. The only coalfield that had been developed to any extent was that of Durham and Northumberland. The working of coal far from the seaboard was impossible on a large scale, because there were no means of transportation that would allow of anything being carried more than a few miles, unless it were of the highest value. The cotton, woollen, silk, and other textiles were made by hand-looms, and for the most part in the private dwellings of the workers. The modern factory system had not come into being.

The condition of the roads, even so late as the middle of the eighteenth century, was in a very large number of cases a matter for just and serious complaint. Lord Hervey wrote from Kensington in 1736 that the road between that village and London had become so bad that "we live here in the same solitude as we would do if cast on a rock in the middle of the ocean, and all the Londoners tell us that there is between them and us an impassable gulf of mud." In London itself the pedestrians who made use of the public thoroughfares had to walk on the ordinary round paving-stones which are still employed in some towns for the centre of the road, pavements being unknown. The streets were lit with oil-lamps sufficiently to make darkness visible, gas not having been introduced. The common highway was also the common sewer. The ruts in the thoroughfares, even in the streets of London, made it dangerous to employ vehicles, which, indeed, except in the form of sedan-chairs, had not yet come to be largely employed.

But these dangers and troubles, manifest and inconvenient though they were, by no means exhausted the list. In the absence of a proper system of police, and with streets enveloped in darkness, there was serious danger incurred in stirring abroad after nightfall. The public thoroughfares were infested by bands of footpads and robbers. The main streets of London were the worst off, and so serious was the danger of going out at night that it was the rarest thing to find any one stirring after dark. So far was this system carried that robberies took place in broad daylight. Even such public places as Piccadilly and Oxford Street were not exempted from the common danger. Horace Walpole relates that he was robbed in this way, with Lord Eglinton, Lady Albemarle, and others. Those who had to travel to the adjacent villages of Paddington and Kensington were afraid to proceed alone. It was therefore customary to wait until a sufficiently numerous band had been collected to enable the pedestrians to resist any possible attack of footpads. The Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens, then the chief places of amusement in the vicinage of the metropolis, had to employ patrols to keep the way clear to London.

As in the metropolis, so in the provinces. The roads, both in the towns and outside them, were in many cases as bad as bad could be. Their not unusual condition was that of "a narrow hollow way, little wider than a ditch, barely allowing of the passage of a vehicle drawn by horses in a single line." This deep, narrow road was flanked by an elevated causeway, covered with flags or boulder stones, along which the traffic of the locality was carried on the backs of single horses, so that "it is difficult to imagine the delay, the toil, and the perils by which the conduct of the traffic was attended." Under these circumstances, "there were towns, even in the same county, more widely separated for all practical purposes than London and Glasgow in the present day." Business was done slowly, and involved so great an expenditure of time and trouble that prices were necessarily high. News travelled more slowly still, and it was sometimes months before the people who lived at the extremities of the island knew what had happened in the metropolis.

The reader who desires to obtain a graphic and eloquent account of the circumstances of England previous to the canal era could not do better than consult Macaulay, who, in the famous third chapter of his 'History,' has devoted a considerable amount of space to the consideration of the social and economic changes that had come over the country since 1685. The description given of the condition of the people in that year might almost be literally applied to their condition in the middle of the eighteenth century. The population had increased, it is true, and commerce had been developed in the interval. But the facilities for rapid and economical transportation had not been materially altered for the better. The great mass of the people were as ignorant, as superstitious, as shiftless as in the seventeenth century. Their sanitary surroundings were as unwholesome, their industrial pursuits as improvident, their habits as deplorable, their hardships as irksome, their discomforts and inconveniences as tiresome. From this remarkable record of the days of our forefathers we quote the following passages as being specially germane to the subject under consideration:--

"It was by the highways that both travellers and goods generally passed from place to place; and those highways appear to have been far worse than might have been expected from the degree of wealth and civilisation which the nation had even then attained. On the best lines of communication the ruts were deep, the descents precipitous, and the way often such as it was hardly possible to distinguish, in the dusk, from the unenclosed heath and fen which lay on both sides. Ralph Thoresby, the antiquary, was in danger of losing his way on the great North Road between Barnsley Moor and Tuxford, and actually lost his way between Doncaster and York. Pepys and his wife, travelling in their own coach, lost their way between Newbury and Reading. In the course of the same tour they lost their way near Salisbury, and were in danger of having to pass the night on the Plain. It was only in fine weather that the whole breadth of the road was available for wheeled vehicles. Often the mud lay deep on the right and the left, and only a narrow track of firm ground rose above the quagmire. At such times obstructions and quarrels were frequent, and the path was sometimes blocked up during a long time by carriers, neither of whom would break the way. It happened, almost every day, that coaches stuck fast, until a team of cattle could be procured from some neighbouring farm to tug them out of the slough. But in bad seasons the traveller had to encounter inconveniences still more serious. Thoresby, who was in the habit of travelling between Leeds and the capital, has recorded in his Diary such a series of perils and disasters as might suffice for a journey to the Frozen Ocean or to the Desert of Sahara.

"The markets were often inaccessible during several months. It is said that the fruits of the earth were allowed to rot in one place, while in another place, distant only a few miles, the supply fell far short of the demand. The wheeled carriages were in this district generally pulled by oxen. When Prince George of Denmark visited the stately mansion of Petworth, in wet weather, he was six hours in going nine miles, and it was necessary that a body of sturdy hinds should be on each side of his coach in order to prop it. Of the carriages which contained his retinue several were upset and injured. A letter from one of the party has been preserved, in which the unfortunate courtier complains that, during fourteen hours, he never once alighted, except when his coach was overturned and stuck fast in the mud."

A story is told of an old stage-coach driver who, finding that his occupation had been seriously interfered with by the modern innovation of railways, thought he would strike a blow for the old system by attacking the railway in a vulnerable part. "Consider," he argued, "what happens in case of a collision. If two stage coaches come into collision, and there is an upset, why, there you are. But in a railway collision, where are you?" In those days stage coaches did not enjoy the immunity from disaster that they do in these, when macadamised roads enable them to roll along almost as if they were on a billiard table. When the canal system was being fairly started in England, only one stage coach ran between London and Edinburgh, starting once a month from each city, and taking ten days for the journey in summer, and twelve days in winter. It took fourteen days to travel between London and Glasgow. In 1760 it took three days to travel from Sheffield to London, and in 1774 Burke travelled from London to Bath with what was described as "incredible speed" in twenty-four hours.

From this condition of things England was largely rescued in the latter part of the eighteenth century by the introduction and development of internal waterways. This movement gave a remarkable stimulus to commercial and industrial progress. It enabled raw materials to be transported at about one-tenth of what they had formerly cost, and facilitated the interchange of commodities between the different parts of the kingdom to an extent previously undreamt of.

It is remarkable what a large crop of important discoveries and inventions were made about the time that canals began to be generally used as waterways. Robinson's project for working steam locomotives on common roads was put forward the year after Brindley commenced the Bridgwater Canal. In the same year the manufacture of thread and gauze was commenced at Paisley, and Jedediah Strutt made his first improvement on the stocking loom. Two years later Arkwright obtained his first patent for the spinning-frame, and Watt made his first experiments on the power of steam with Papin's digester. It was in 1762 that the production of Wedgwood ware was first begun, and the same year witnessed a notable development of the linen manufacture of Ireland, while in 1763 Hargreaves the weaver produced his spinning-jenny in his house adjoining the print works of the first Sir Robert Peel. These are but a few of the concurrent and collateral movements of the period. Of the measure in which they were aided by internal transport we shall have more to say by and by.

An examination of the geography of European countries will disclose the fact that the United Kingdom is almost unique in regard to its possession of a magnificent coast-line, studded with harbours and docks, and approached by a large number of navigable rivers, which afford easy communication with the sea. If we compare our facilities with those of Germany, Austria, Belgium, Holland, Italy, or indeed any other European country, we cannot fail to be struck with their enormous superiority. Scarcely any part of the United Kingdom is more than a hundred miles distant from a good harbour. In many European countries there are important towns that are very much further, while some countries, like Switzerland, have no seaboard at all, and others, like Austria, besides having very few ports worthy of the name, are landlocked on more sides than one.

Again, let us look at the recent history of European politics. Do we not find that a more extensive seaboard is the ruling passion of such nations as Germany and Russia, whose outlets are few and inconvenient? The half-suspected designs of Germany upon Holland, and of Russia upon Turkish and Chinese territory, have been mainly ascribed to this ambition. To obtain such an outlet for the Asiatic part of her dominions, Russia is at the present moment laying down a railway across Siberia, which will give her a closer connection with China than the Chinese seem to care for, and is likely, in the opinion of some shrewd politicians, to eventuate in her obtaining possession of a large slice of the Celestial Empire. The neutralisation of certain prominent waterways is, moreover, regarded as a matter of so much importance, that costly and protracted wars have been undertaken with a view to that end, nor would it be difficult to trace a connection between the passion for more ports and the costly armaments which have now for many years threatened the peace and impoverished the resources of Europe.

Nevertheless, with a command of the sea that makes us at once the envy and the despair of rival nations, and has placed our shipping supremacy on such a pinnacle of power and prosperity as the world has never before been acquainted with, we still require to pay more for reaching our ports, relatively to the distance traversed, than any other nation in Europe, and very much more than either the United States of North America, or our own possessions of India and Canada. It is not too much to say that if we possessed the same transportation rates as some of these countries, our trade with the rest of the world would be much greater than it is; while if we had the same distances to traverse as in these countries, at the existing railway rates of our own, competition in neutral markets with the low-rate countries of the Continent would be impossible.

Up to the period of the first Canal Acts, English waterways were under the control of the State, or of authorities appointed by the State for the conservancy of navigation; and that such an arrangement was, on the whole, not without its advantages, is proved by the fact already referred to, viz.: that in the middle of the eighteenth century the advantages with regard to water carriage enjoyed by England enabled her to outstrip other countries in the development of her manufactures. With the construction of the first canal began the era of private enterprise in respect of inland navigation, which owes its existence, as it is hardly necessary to remark here, to the genius of Brindley, and to the unflagging determination of the Duke of Bridgwater--whose efforts in the cause of progress were, like those of Stephenson, and the pioneers of railway enterprise after them, at first strenuously opposed by the public, and almost entirely neglected by the State.

"It's not so much the lover who woos As the gallant's way of wooing."

In Roman times, again, Julius Caesar, Caligula, and Nero were canal-makers, having each in his day attempted to unite the Ionian Sea with the Archipelago, through the isthmus of Corinth--an undertaking which is only in our own day being consummated. The emperor Trajan was also greatly interested in canals, as his correspondence with Pliny proves, while all the principal Roman consuls and generals appear to have possessed some knowledge of hydraulics, and applied that knowledge to useful purpose.

Charlemagne attempted to unite the Rhine with the Danube, and to establish water communication between the German Ocean and the Black Sea. Leonardo da Vinci was equally great as a canal-maker and a painter, having constructed some of the earliest canals in Italy. The Doges of Venice, "the City in the Sea," naturally paid much attention to the same subject, which was, indeed, essential to their convenience, security, and prosperity.

If we cast our eyes over the rest of the European Continent we shall find that wherever artificial waterways have been provided, Royal or Imperial encouragement has assisted in the operation. Peter the Great and Catherine attached the utmost importance to the development of Russia by this means. In Sweden, Gustavus Vasa and his successors were equally solicitous, in a country full of natural waterways, that these should be utilised and connected by artificial means.

Canal engineering, besides, has a very remarkable record, and has achieved many notable triumphs. These have hardly received the attention to which their importance entitles them. It is true that no canal has been carried, like the Callao, Lima, and Oroya railroad, in Peru, to the height of nearly sixteen thousand feet above the level of the sea. It has, however, on the Languedoc and other canals been found easily feasible to carry a canal to a height of 600 to 1000 ft. above the sea. Canal engineers have not, perhaps, pierced the Alps with a tunnel ten miles in length, as on the Saint-Gothard Railway; but they have carried a tide-water canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and they have essayed to perform the same feat through the Cordillera. Hydraulic engineering has, next to railway engineering, been the most remarkable manifestation of the applied science of modern times, and in canal construction it has attained some of its most successful results.

It was while we were depending exclusively upon this expensive and tedious system of conveyance, when the internal development of the country was rendered all but impossible by the heavy expense of bringing produce to the sea, and when our export trade was consequently of the most restricted dimensions, that canals came to the rescue. They worked a marvellous change in the trade of the country--a change which can, perhaps, be best illustrated by the ordinarily dry, but in this case almost thrilling, returns of our exports and imports. Burke, in one of his greatest speeches, spoke of a total exportation of the value of 14 1/2 millions, and a total importation of 9 1/2 millions sterling, as an index of extraordinary prosperity. In another equally great oration he said, speaking of the fact that we were then exporting rather over six millions a year to our colonies, that "when we speak of the commerce with our colonies, fiction lags after truth; invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren." What would he have said had he lived to see, as we have done, our exports reach the vast total of 250 millions a year, with nearly 90 millions of exports to our colonies? Canals certainly did not complete this revolution, but they had a very important share in giving it a start. Between the time when the canal system was commenced, about 1760, and the end of the first canal period, which may be put at 1838, the export trade of the country advanced from 14 millions to about 50 millions per annum. This is poor progress, compared with what has since been attained, through the development of the steamship, the railway, the telegraph, and other modern adjuncts of commerce, but it was deemed as remarkable for that day as we consider our subsequent progress to be in ours.

It is practically impossible to arrive at a correct estimation of the tonnage of goods of different kinds that goes to make up the inland and the external trade of this country. We know that the railways of the United Kingdom annually carry about 280 millions of tons of minerals and merchandise , but a considerable part of this tonnage is duplicated, in consequence of passing over more than one railway. Of the total tonnage carried by railway, the greater part probably goes no farther. It is consumed on the spot, like the coal traffic of London and the minerals supplied to our great ironmaking centres. But a very much larger quantity is carried from inland centres to seaports, and thence shipped for places of consumption at home and abroad. The coastwise carrying trade of the United Kingdom is now represented by 60 million tons a year. The foreign shipping trade amounts to over 70 million tons a year. Only a comparatively small proportion of these quantities is consumed at the ports of shipment. The greater part is carried farther by railway, thus breaking bulk twice--once in moving it from the ship to the railway wagon, and again in removing it from the railway wagon. Much of it has to be carried from the ship in barges, and thence transferred to the railway. All this means loss of time, loss of money, and deterioration of quality, which adequate water facilities should do much to obviate.

There are three great epochs in the modern history of canal navigation, each marked by characteristics peculiar to itself, and sufficiently unlike those of either of the others to enable it to be readily differentiated. They may be thus described:--

We are now in the very throes of the revolution that appears to be destined, before it closes, to secure for most of the great inland centres of population a large share of the advantages that result from being on the seaboard. The location of many of our large towns is difficult to understand. Their prosperity, in spite of their location, is still more unintelligible, on the first blush. Very few of our great cities are on the seaboard. London is over 60 miles from the Nore. Paris is 227 1/2 miles from the sea at Havre, and Berlin, Vienna, and Madrid are each over or nearly 200 miles. In England we have such towns as Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford, and Birmingham, situated at long distances from shipping facilities, and flourishing in spite of that disadvantage. But the fact has been recognised as a disadvantage, none the less. Manchester, less unfavourably situated than some of the towns we have named, has resolved to "burst its birth's invidious bar" by the construction of the ship canal that is now being proceeded with. Sheffield has initiated a project with the same end in view. The people of Birmingham and the Midlands generally appear to have made up their minds to have direct communication with the Bristol Channel. In regard to all of these towns canal facilities of an inferior kind already exist. These, however, are now held to be quite unequal to the demands of modern commerce. They do not give to any town the position of a seaport, and that is the main requirement. The time has gone past when barges of forty or fifty tons, plying on a canal 60 to 80 feet wide, could be seriously put forward as contributing essentially to this end. The canal system of a hundred years ago has been put to the trial, and has been found wanting. We now carry millions where we then carried hundreds and thousands of tons.

The great commercial characteristics of our time are to have things done on a large scale, with the utmost practicable facility, and at the lowest possible cost. The existing canal system is quite out of touch with these desiderata. It "cumbereth the ground," and must be got rid of. But the waterways that still survive may in many cases be made the nucleus of a new and better system, under which the great inland towns of Lancashire, Staffordshire, and Yorkshire may find their lines cast in more satisfactory maritime places.

There are not a few people who regard the canal system almost as they might regard the Dodo and the Megatherium. It is to them an effete relic of a time when civilisation was as yet but imperfectly developed. It is placed on the shelf of their memories and sympathies much as the old hand-loom, or the earliest forms of metallurgical processes, might be; and if by accident an old canal happens to cross their path, it is regarded with the same sort of curiosity as would be bestowed upon the Great Wall of China or the Pyramids of Egypt.

Canals do, indeed, belong to the past. In this respect they are entitled to be regarded with interest, and even with veneration. The Cnidians, according to Herodotus, the Boetians, according to Strabo, the Babylonians, according to Ptolemy, and the Romans, according to Pliny, were all skilled in the art of canal-making, and employed their skill to good purpose. From those times until these the waterways of art have supplemented those of nature as handmaidens of trade and commerce, as fertilisers of the soil, and as military and strategical highways. That canals also belong to the present, Egypt, the American isthmus, Manchester, Corinth, and other places, fully prove; and, unless we greatly err, they are no less the heritage of the future.

FOOTNOTES:

Smiles's 'Lives of the Engineers,' vol. i. p. 180.

Even so late as 1794, Hepburn, in his 'General view of the Agriculture and Economy of East Lothian,' stated that, not long before, not a single bullock was slaughtered in the butcher market at Haddington except at a special time.

See a paper read before the British Association at Birmingham, 1887.

Report of House of Lords Committee on Conservancy Boards, 1877.

Report of Select Committee on Canals, 1883.

Herodotus, lib. ii. c. lxlix.

Diodorus Siculus, lib. i. c. iv.

Strabo, lib. xvii.

Diodorus Siculus, lib. i. c. i.

Cresy's 'Encyclopaedia of Civil Engineering,' c. iv.

The railway starts from Callao at a height of 448 ft. above sea level, and at 104 1/2 miles distance it passes through the summit tunnel at a height of 15,645 ft. above that level.

'Practical Treatise on Railroads,' third edition, p. 684.

Observations on a late publication 'The Present State of the Nation,' Bohn's series, vol. i. p. 198.

Speech on conciliation with America, Ibid., pp. 461-62.

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