Posted on by bugsy122019

Vicomte de Lesseps–HELP!!!

Ever Given stuck in the Suez Canal (source: Maxar)

The Suez Canal is one of the most important thoroughfares on earth, moving more 10% of the world’s cargo every year. Last year more than 18,500 vessels covered the 120-mile-long canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. Last week, an ultra-large container ship, the Ever Given, on its way to the Netherlands from Malaysia ran aground after turning sideways while struggling with the wind. No ships have been able to move north or south since then, and maritime experts from around the world are trying to find a way to reopen the canal. That’s caused a $10 billion dollar lost in little more than a week.

People have been interested in a canal since the days of ancient Egypt. Several Pharaohs attempted a canal, though only Darius I managed to develop something similar to a canal. Venetians, the Ottomans, even Napoleon attempted to build a canal but for a variety of reasons, particularly cost, engineering, and manpower, none ever managed to built such a canal. There were several goods about attempts to build a canal, and while waiting under quarantine in Egypt, a young assistant consular agent, Ferdinand de Lesseps, spend his time reading Napoleon’s civil engineer, Jacque-Marie Le Pere’s book, The Ancient Suez Canal. De Lesseps was hooked.

Ferdinand Marie Vicomte de Lesseps (1805-1894) attended the College of Henry IV in Paris, and initially worked in the Commissary Department of the French Army. In the following years he served as the vice-consul in Lisbon, Tunis, and Alexandria. He became consul in Cairo, Rotterdam, Malaga, and Barcelona, and served as the French Minister to Madrid. However, after major elections in 1849, de Lesseps retired from public office.

While he had worked as assistant consul in Alexandria, he had become very friendly with Sa’id Pasha who, in 1854, became Khedive (viceroy) of Egypt. He and de Lesseps were extremely interested in a canal, so de Lesseps returned to Eqypt, and on November 7, 1854, the Khedive signed a bill giving de Lesseps the concession to build a canal. He immediately called in thirteen engineers to develop appropriate plans which were adopted by the International Commission of the piecing of the Isthmus of Suez in 1856, and on December 15, 1858, de Lesseps established the Suez Canal Company.

Work started in April 1859. Roughly 30,000 people from a variety of nations worked on the canal. Many from Egypt worked on the canal as required by the “corvee” —a specific amount of unpaid labor owed to the government in lieu of taxes. Sadly, they’re were thousands of deaths over the year, due largely to cholera. The canal doesn’t require locks and initially there was just a single lane, but it quickly made sense to included passages at the Ballah Bypass and the Great Bitter Lake, to allow limited north-south passages. The north terminal is at Port Said, with Port Tewfik at the southern end.

The Suez Canal opened on November 16, 1869, with a blessing of the waters of the canal by both Muslim and Christian clerics. It was followed a lavish banquet including the Khedive, the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph, the French Empress Eugenia and the Crown Prince of Prussia, along with other dignitaries who watched lavish fireworks. The following morning, ships set sail for the half-way point at Lake Timsah. However, the French ship Peruse anchored too close to the entrance, accidentally swung around and ran aground, blocking the way into the lake. The rest of the ships anchored in the canal itself, and managed to drag Peruse clear the next morning.(Portent of things to come??) They sailed on to Port Tewfik on the 19th. The following day, the S.S. Dido was the first ship to pass through the canal from south to north. Once the Suez Canal was in full swing, it cut 5,500 miles off the trip from Europe to the Far East.

One of the most important political issues regarding the Canal came in 1888 with the Convention of Constantinople, in which all of the European powers signed a treaty agreeing that the Suez Canal would be a neutral zone, even during times of war. However, during both World Wars, it was closed, as well as during the 1956 Suez Crisis. That ended with the first United Nations Peacekeeping Force which assumed control of the Canal and maintained open access for all until both Egypt and Israel withdrew.

Comte Ferdinand de Lesseps

Thanks to the tides, tug boats, a number of engineers and salvage teams and dredgers, the skyscraper/cargo ship is righted, and will move into the Bitter Lake, the widest area of the canal so that it can be thoroughly inspected while the hundreds of waiting ships can start moving again.

Posted on by bugsy122019

Black History Month–we remember Ralph J. Bunche

Ralph Johnson Bunche, 1904-1971

I was very surprised to learn that some student’s didn’t know who Ralph Bunche was, so Black History Month is the perfect time to learn about an extremely influential American—and international—leader.

Ralph Johnson Bunche was born in Detroit on August 7, 1904. His father, Fred, was not an involved parent, so when Ralph’s mother, Olive, developed serious medical issues in 1915, she moved to Albuquerque, NM, with her children, Ralph and Grace, was born in 1909, along with her mother Lucy Johnson, and the children’s uncle. However, Olive Bunche died in 1917 and three months later, her brother committed suicide. Looking for a better life for all of them, Ralph and Grace’s grandmother took both children to Los Angeles in 1918. There, Ralph was an excellent athlete, and an outstanding student, graduating as the valedictorian from Jefferson High School in 1923. He then attended UCLA, where he graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian in 1927.

Bunche received a scholarship to Harvard University where he earned a Master’s degree in 1928 and Ph.D. in political science in 1934. In 1936 he published his first book, A World View of Race. He went on to do post-graduate work at the London School of Economics and the University of Cape Town, South Africa. While working on his dissertation at Harvard, he began teaching at Howard University in Washington, D.C. where he revamped the Political Science department. In addition, in 1940 he worked as the lead investigative research and writer for An American Dilemma with Swedish sociologist Gunner Myrdal. Also while working a Howard, Bunche became one of the new generation of Black American intellectuals who believed that integration was necessary and overdue in the US. He worked with men such as A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and served on the board of the NAACP.

When World War II arrived at America’s shores, Bunche moved from Howard University to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) where he served as the senior social analyst. He then moved over to the State Department where he was an adviser for the US delegation at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference. He also provided much preliminary work for the United Nations conference in San Francisco, particularly Chapter XI and XII of the UN Charter, and working closely with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Count Folke Bernadotte and Ralph Bunche

In 1947, the first Secretary General of the UN, Trygve Lie asked Bunche to act as Director of the Trusteeship Committee. He accepted, and in 1948 joined the UN’s Special Committee on Palestine. On September 17, 1948, Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, the chief UN mediator of the Arab-Israeli conflict, was assassinated in Jerusalem. The Secretary General requested that Bunche take up Bernadotte’s work, and in 1949 he got both sides to agree to the Armistice Agreement between Israel and Egypt, Jordon, Lebanon and Syria. In 1950, Bunche became the first African American to received the Nobel Peace Prize. He was one of the most important, and famous, men in the US at that point. President Truman asked that he become Assistant Secretary of State, and later, President Kennedy asked Bunche to serve as Secretary of State. He preferred to continue his work in the United Nations.

Over the years, Bunche became the Director of Peacekeeping in the Suez Crisis in 1956, the Congo in 1960, and Cyprus in 1964. By the late 1960’s he was the Undersecretary-General for Special Political Affairs. He had received 69 honorary doctorates, and numerous awards, most importantly, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It’s very possible that he could have gone on to be the Secretary General of the UN. Unfortunately, Bunche had diabetes, and other medical issues, and decided to retired in 1971. He died on December 9, 1971 and is buried at the Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City.

Hopefully, you’ll look a little deeper into a quiet man who did so much to make both the United States and the world a better place. If you’re looking for a good book about him, take a look at Brian Urquart’s Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey.