: 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 - Canals

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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.

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