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CHAPTER XIII - EGYPT—SINAI—BOMBAY—MADRAS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2011

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Summary

The Overland Route, a phrase which has ceased to have any but a historical meaning since the opening of the Suez Canal, had just been made a fact when, in the autumn of 1839, Dr. and Mrs. Duff went forth to India for the second time. On the ordinary roll of the English martyrs of science the name of Thomas Waghorn is not to be found. It has been left to the French to do justice to the memory of the man who, amid obstruction, obloquy and injustice ending in a pauper's death, first opened the British overland route to India in 1830. When M. Ferdinand de Lesseps created the consequent of that by cutting the canal between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean in 1870, his first act was to erect, at the Red Sea entrance, a colossal bust of Waghorn on a marble pedestal, with basrelief of the explorer on a camel surveying the desert, and this inscription: “La Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez au Lieutenant Waghorn.” We have never passed that statue without a sense of shame—and of gratitude to the genius of the catholic Frenchman. In 1830, the quondam midshipman of the navy, who had become a Bengal pilot, sailed down the Red Sea in an open boat with despatches from Lord Ellenborough to Sir John Malcolm.

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The Life of Alexander Duff, D.D., LL.D
In Two Volumes, with Portraits by Jeens
, pp. 388 - 424
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010
First published in: 1879

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