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and when we finally arrived at Port Said, we had to anchor and have a constant
watch to ensure that we maintained our position. However, we weighed anchor at
4 am, but not before we had had our logbook taken ashore and examined by the
authorities to ensure that since it had last visited Egypt, the ship had not touched
in at any part of Israel. As it had not, we set out southwards in a large convoy
towards the Red Sea.

I was intrigued by the Suez Canal and what it represented. Although built by
the French and initially owned by Egypt, the Khedive of Egypt (at that time part
of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire) had in 1875 offered to sell its shares in the
Suez Canal Company to Britain, a purchase for which Prime Minister Disraeli was
at the time roundly criticised. (It is of passing interest that the first ship through
the new canal was a P&O liner). I, like every Englishman at that time, was acutely
aware of the October 29, 1956 Suez crisis in which the British, French and Israelis
had colluded in the invasion of Egypt. Because of America’s negative reaction
to the invasion, (in retrospect, because on November 4th the Red Army had
invaded Hungary, the morality of the west’s options suddenly became a decisive
factor, though perhaps a further significant motivation was the perceived need to
keep the mercurial Nasser in the Western camp, futile though that hope proved
to be) Britain and France had been obliged to suffer a humiliating withdrawal
(not so for the Israelis, however, who, because of their efficient armed forces,
aggressively led by General Dayan, triumphed against the ragged Egyptian Army
and thereby gained land and immense prestige). Egypt, realising the manipulative
ways of the West, and after its now effectively undisputed nationalisation of the
canal, decided to turn its economic favours towards the Soviet Union and (for
armaments) to its satrapy Czechoslovakia. In so doing, the company fired most
of the canal’s western employees and turned to Russian, Polish and other such
countries for equipment, technical assistance and, particularly, canal pilots. This
resulted in some rather alarmed jocularity among Western ship-owners as to
how these un-nautical intervenors could hope to fulfil so great an undertaking
in running so complex an organisation; hiring such pilots had until then been an
almost exclusively western European privilege. The surprise, I understood before
reaching Suez, was that it was now at least as well run as before the takeover!

Less than 200 km long, the canal was nevertheless a fascinating feat of
engineering and seamanship. Little more than a sloping-sided ditch in the sand,
its apparent width is somewhat deceptive, especially when compared to the
Panama Canal. Several hundred ships per day could be accommodated, but as
they could not pass each other, they were arranged in convoys, one of which
usually waited in the intervening Great Bitter Lake for the other to pass. Actual

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