Now I know what you’re probably thinking: what’s so important about a massive ship blocking a canal anyway? You might also wonder how that affects you in any way. Don’t worry, I thought the same too. But it doesn’t just affect you personally. It affects the entire world. For you who might not know about it, it’s probably just another headline in the news. But for the guy who was maneuvering the whole ship, you’d think “Oh, I hope my insurance covers this.” $10 billion worth of goods is currently stuck in a traffic jam in the middle of the Suez Canal. Furthermore, you’re looking at billions more being delayed, postponed, and even canceled altogether. For us, the crewmates, and the driver of Ever Given, this is a pretty big deal.
What is the Suez Canal?
To give you a little bit of an idea of what the Suez Canal is, let’s take a look at its history. The Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea are two trading areas that connect multiple countries. However, there’s never been a direct route between the both of them. The Suez Canal is a passageway that intersects the Mediterranean and Red Seas that’s been needed by nation-states for centuries, and the canal’s significance was obvious even before construction started.
Around 1850 BCE, the first canal in the region was dug when an irrigation channel was dug into Wadi Tumelat (Al-umaylt), a dehydrated river valley east of the Nile delta. Known as the Canal of the Pharaohs, that channel was lengthened by the Ptolemies via the Bitter Lakes that stretched as far as the Red Sea. From the area of Lake Timsah, a northward arm seems to have reached a previous branch of the Nile. Increased under the Romans (who called it Trajan’s Canal), disregarded by the Byzantines, and reinstituted by the early Arabs, that canal was intentionally filled in by the ʿAbbāsid caliphs for military reasons in 775 CE. Throughout its years, the motive for those transformations seems to have been for managing trade from the delta lands to the Red Sea rather than providing a way to the Mediterranean.
Constructed in a decade by local peasants and forced laborers, as well as Europeans who joined in later, the Suez was initiated by French interests and exploration. Initially, they dug only by hand with picks and baskets. After that, dredgers and steam shovels controlled by European laborers took over, and, as dredging proved less expensive than dry excavation, the terrain was artificially flooded and dredged wherever it could be. Other than in a couple of areas where rock strata were met, the whole canal was driven through sand or alluvium. In August 1869 the waterway was finished, and it officially opened its doors (or waters to be exact) with a grand ceremony on November 17.
Why Suez Canal is So Important to the World?