1875 Stern Souvenir Map and Table of the Suez Canal

An intriguing lettersheet from the early days of the Suez Canal, this c. 1875 souvenir map and table was meant to chart the progress of a ship and its passengers through the canal.

A Closer Look

A map and chart of the canal and environs between Port Said and Suez / Taofik (Tewfik) occupies the left. Anchorages and sandbanks are indicated on water, while on land, railways, roads, mountains, lighthouses, signals, ruins, settlements, and other features are noted. The Fresh Water Canal (Ismaïlia Canal or Sweet Water Canal), running parallel to the southern portion of the Suez Canal, was built before the main canal to provide fresh water to workers and to the growing city of Port Said. A grid of latitude and longitude lines overlies the map. The right half of the sheet is a table of landmarks and moorings, which allowed the passenger to track their ship's progress through the canal (from south to north).

Suez Canal

The Suez Canal was built by the Suez Canal Company between 1859 and 1869, officially opening to maritime traffic on November 17, 1869. The canals cuts through the western Sinai Peninsula between the Mediterranean at Port Said and the Red Sea, at Suez. The completion of the canal allowed for significantly faster communication between European ports and the lucrative markets of Asia, as it nullified the need to round Africa.

Work began on April 25, 1859, shortly after the developer Ferdinand de Lesseps obtained a concession from Sa'id Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt and Sudan. He created an international commission of 13 experts from 7 countries to construct the canal. Much of the construction force was conscripted labor under the corvée system, which was common in Egypt until 1882, when it was outlawed. The British initially opposed the canal out of fear it would disrupt English dominance of maritime trade, but in 1875, when Said Pasha's successor, Isma'il Pasha, ran up excessive debt, the British government acquired 44% of the canal. In 1888, it was declared a neutral zone under British protection (today, the canal is under Egyptian control). Combined with the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in the United States six months earlier and a rail link across the Indian Subcontinent the following year, the Suez Canal signaled a new era of long-distance transportation and was quickly the subject of related cultural production, such as Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days (1872).

Publication History and Census

This map and table were engraved by (Moïse) Stern in Paris for Worms and Co., a still-extant shipping company (operating as Worms Services Maritimes). Though printed in France for a French company, the text is (mostly) in English, perhaps because of the direction of the ship's voyage from India towards the Mediterranean. We are unable to locate any examples of this work in institutional collections. We know of one other example in private hands.