OBITUARY.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1189, 14 December 1894, Page 17

OBITUARY.

YICOMTE DE LESSEPS. 1805-1894. Paris, December 7. M. Ferdinand de Lesseps is dead. Paris, December 11. The Prince of Wales, the Emperor William of Germany and other Royalties have sent letters of sympathy to the widow of the late Yicomte Ferdinand De Lesseps. The death of the veteran is a release from troubles of which his clouded mind was hardly cognisant. The closing years of his busy life one would like, if possible, to forget. France has long ago come to the conclusion, however, that the great engineer was honest. The nation trusted him with millions of its money, and showed what it thought of him by refusing to press for the carrying out of the sentence of imprisonment which he incurred by a guilt not more than technical. The whole world pitied his misfortunes, regretted his miscalculations, and was sorry at the failure of his great Panama project. The story of his great achievement at Suez, and of his life is thus told in f ‘ Men of the Time ”:— His fame -rests chiefly on his scheme to pierce the Isthmus of Suez by means of a canal, and in successfully carrying it out he showed much zeal and indefatigable energy. It was in 1854, when in Egypt on a visit to Mehemet Said, that he opened the project to Said Pacha, who, seeing the advantage that might be expected to accrue from its execution, invited him to draw up a memorial on the subject. This was done, and M. de Lesseps received a firman sanctioning the enterprise in 1854, and a letter of concession was granted by the

Viceroy of Egypt, January, 1856. Eminent English engineers (and among them the late G. Stephenson) questioned its practicability, which however, has since been clearly demonstrated. The works were begun soon after the company was constituted, i& 1859* large sums were subsequently expended, and the late. Pacha of Egypt was induced to take a large number of shares in the undertaking, besides per-

mitting M. de Lesseps to employ native labourers. This ingenious scheme was at first favoured by a . portion of the commercial body in this country; but a belief soon gained ground that the project was virtually a political one, and in this point of ■ view it received no encouragement from the British Government. On the death of the late Pacha of Egypt in 1863, the question of the sanction of the Ottoman Porte was more actively discussed, and the right of the Sultan to grant it formally insisted upon. The result was the withdrawal of the permission to the company to hold any portion of Egyptian territory—the supposed covert design of the project; and after much dispute between M. de Lesseps and the Egyptian Government, the claim for compensation to the company he "represented was left to the arbitration of the Emperor of the French, who imposed certain conditions on both parties, and allowed _ - i t. i t T *J.I.

the works to be continued. A canal, with sufficient water to admit of the passage of steamboats, was opened on August 15, 1865. By degrees, owing to the employment of gigantic dredges and a novel system of machines for raising and carrying away the sand, the bed of the canal was enlarged, so that small ships and schooners were enabled to pass through in March, 1867. At last the waters of the Mediterranean mingled with those of the Bed Sea in the Bitter Lakes, August 15, 1869, an event which was commemorated by grand fetes at Suez ; and on November 17th the canal was formally opened at Port Said amid a series of festivities participated in by the Empress of the French, the Emperor of Austria, the Crown Prince of Prussia, Prince William of Orange, the English and Russian Ambassadors at Constantinople, and a large number of English and Continental merchants and journalists. A grand processional fleet, composed of forty vessels,., then set out from Port Said in the direction of Ismailia. A few days after the inauguration, M. de Lesseps married Mdlle. Autard de Bragard, a very young Creole of English extraction. In February, 1870, the Paris Societe de Geographic awarded the Empress’s new prize of 10,000 francs to M. de Lesseps, who gave the money as a contribution to the Society’s projected expedition to Equatorial Africa. He was appointed to the rank of Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, November 19, 1869, and received many other decorations.

MAJOR TUNE. ' Opunake, December 11. Major Tuke, S.M., died this morning, after a short illness. We understand that the death of Major Tuke will not necessitate the appointment of another Magistrate. Major Tuke-only attended to Court work at Opunake and one other outlying place, and as provision has already been made for an additional Magistrate for the North Island, these two places will be brought into some other Magisterial district when the proposed readjustment of boundaries takes place. M. BURDEAU. { Paris, December 12. M. Burdeau, President of the Chamber of Deputies, is dead.