|
It is well-known that many river-names are derived from
explorers' and invaders' misunderstandings of the native tongue, such as the
Roman misunderstanding that the Celtic word avon (meaning river) was the
proper name of this particular river. And that one. And another. And then
there's one over here ….
A more modern example dates from 1883, when a number of
Indian Civil Servants were seconded to the Colonial Office in London to work on
plans for the South East Asia Navigation. One of these, Billda Vies, saw an
un-named tributary of the Mekong which he felt might be suitable for
canalisation as part of the route. Billda asked his colleague, Sir Syd
Enham-Hill (a native of the Sarflund'nah tribe) "I say, old chap, you
couldn't be telling me the name of this jolly old river here, could you, what,
what?". The beknighted native replied in his own Sarflunnun tongue with an
expression of ignorance, which the Indian, no expert in this particular tribal
language, took to be the name of the river, which he then transcribed onto the
official map, River Gawdnoze.
The South East Asia Navigation had a very interesting
history, and almost certainly qualifies for the title of "the greatest waterway
never built". Originally proposed by speculators in 1820 as an ambitious scheme
for a grand cross of canals, linking the waters of the Indus with those of the
Ganges, with linked waterways northwards to Nepal and south to Madras, it was
named the Ganges-Indus & North-South Line Indian Navigation Gamble
or GIN-SLING. Some initial survey work was done by a team led by Sir
Christie Nawood-Inge who reported that because of the need for the 57-mile
Harekrishna tunnel through the Karakoram region on the line to Nepal, it would
be necessary to build the whole system to a narrow beam, so the standard
Brindley gauge of 72' x 7' was adopted.
The project ran into political problems when the India
Office (as it then was) began surveys on the ground. The plan had acquired the
name Grand Cross in memory of the earlier work by Brindley, and this
provoked considerable opposition in the Moslem areas of the Raj. So the scheme
was cut back to what was known as the Grand Crescent, a much less
ambitious project, whose proper name was the Madras-Calcutta Canal (or
MCC). This proved to be of too limited scope to attract investors, so
the plan was dropped.
It was revived after the Franco-Prussian War as an even more
ambitious Anglo-French project, with additional lines to connect the Raj to
Singapore and to link with the French Colonies in South East Asia, thus helping
to cement Anglo-French diplomatic and trade links. Such an ambitious proposal
took many years in the planning stage. Now named the South East Asia
Navigation, the work was under the direction of the British Brig.Gen.
Maurice "Mo" Leigh-Mockford and the French M Martin Fulbourne-Evry-Minette. It
was for this planning that Billda Vies and his colleagues came to London.
Apart from the Harekrishna tunnel, the major engineering
work was to be in the Gawdnoze Gorge, on the North-East India - Laos Link
section of the navigation (known as the SEAN NEILL). Here the river
drops a distance of 500 ft in the remarkably short distance of only 750 feet
(the Viagra Falls). The gorge was too narrow for the navigation channel to take
a longer winding route with a lot of locks, so the first proposal was for a
staircase of 10 locks, each 50 ft deep ("Neptune's Loft-Ladder"). However
concerns that the available water supplies would not be adequate for such deep
locks led to a postponement of the plans.
In was in the 1920s that the Indian engineer, Professor C
Hrisdeu Char, came up with a workable solution. He realised that in a staircase
of locks, the amount of water used in a through passage depends only on the
size of the individual lock, not on the number of them, so a larger number of
shallower locks would be more water-efficient, so he proposed instead a
staircase of 100 locks, each 5ft deep.. But how to fit them into the confines
of the Gawdnoze gorge? This was where Prof. Char had his great inspiration :
instead of building the locks 72ft long by 7ft-and-a-bit wide, he planned them
72ft wide and 7'6" long to take the boats through sideways. Clearly mitre gates
on locks of such dimensions were not feasible, so the flight was designed with
guillotine gates, except at the top and bottom, where the boats entered or left
the locks conventionally, thus producing top and bottom locks whose gates were
on adjacent rather than opposite sides. The drawings of this staircase were
truly dramatic, with its 99 guillotine gates, each 72' wide and a considerable
height (as is necessary for a staircase), stacked up the side of the gorge,
each only 7'6" from its neighbour. It would have been a unique piece of
engineering, and was dubbed by its designers "Neptune's Toast-rack".
Sadly by the time the plans were ready to go out to tender,
Singapore had fallen to the Japanese, and the project was never completed. I
feel the story is worth re-telling. Only the names have been changed to offend
the innocent.
|
