ARCHIE SATTERFIELD

Chapter Two

Canals obviously must have lots of water to exist and the European continent north of the Iberian Peninsula has ample supplies. Spain had one or two modest canals, and although Italy was a pioneer in canals, its water supply is limited to the northern part of the country within the Alps drainage. France and the Low Countries are fed by many rivers originating in the Alps, the Pyrenees and the Central Massif.
The Dutch have always had a water supply that goes beyond abundant. They have had no choice but learn to manage water as they gradually reclaimed land from beneath sea level. Their first canals were dug for drainage, and transportation on them was a necessity that became a bonus. Over the centuries the Dutch devised many kinds of locks, beginning deep in the Dark Ages. They also build a wide variety of boats and barges, using the wind, various animals and men and women for propulsion. In fact, many of their sailing barges, usually called tjalks, are still in use and can be seen on all canals of Europe with their distinctive sideboards, or leeboards, that look much like the wings of a floating swan. Or, as E. Annie Proulx described them in her novel, The Shipping News:
“From above, the barge looked like a low tub with strange and gigantic shoehorns on its side.”
Their hefty masts are so perfectly counterbalanced that a small woman can steer the boat with one hand while hauling down the mast with the other to go beneath a bridge, all accomplished without having to stop. Boats were built according to their uses, and scattered along the canals today you will see converted Dutch-built barges of many shapes and sizes, reflecting the original reasons for being built, such as to transport animals, flowers and vegetables, cheese or grain. Aside from the work habits that are part of the Dutch tradition, this abundance of water as a transportation corridor has always been a major factor in Holland’s success in business and shipping. Holland had few raw materials, but its transportation network enabled it to import materials, process them and ship them back out again.
As an aside, Holland is famous for the great tulip bulb boom and bust, but a less well known success story is how Holland built a strong economy in the 17th and 18th century because the country had an enormous source of energy in the form of peat. The forests of Western Europe had been ravaged by the Thirty Years War (1618-48) and wood prices went up beyond the reach of most people. So Holland became the prime source of energy and fuel for friendly neighbors, and the same barges that brought peat into the cities were used to transport night soil back to the countryside for fertilizer.
Earlier the Dutch worked at improvements not only of the canal locks but also the boats on them. One of the major developments in the 15th century was the trekvaarten, canals built with towpaths so that boats and barges pulled by horses or oxen could carry passengers and freight on regular schedules throughout the year. During the winter the same service was offered on the ice, but the only exceptions were during the spring and fall when the canals were frozen but unsafe.
Once the first trekvaarten was established on a route between Haarlem and Amsterdam other cities wanted their own routes, so many more canals with towpaths were built and for at least a century the Low Countries had the best transportation system in Europe. The trekvaartens were built in straight lines between the major cities and the owners were obsessed with punctuality; skippers used sandglasses and when they were at a dock and the last grain of sand drained downward, the boat left, no matter if someone wasn’t aboard yet. Because of their straight lines many towns were missed entirely, so it soon became a case of towns moving to the canals, or more common, new towns being built.
The boats, called trekschuits, 32 to 49 feet (10 to 15 meters) and only 6 to 8 feet (1.8 to 2.6 meters) wide. They could hold 24 to 30 passengers and most were divided into two classes. Some provided straw mattresses for night journeys. The boats were towed by a horse at a trot, usually ridden by a boy, and they averaged about seven miles an hour.
This system, with numerous variations, lasted for more than 200 years, until the advent of the steam engine and railroads. During the centuries the system was in use passenger volume was substantial--the Amsterdam-Haarlem route carried up to 288,000 passengers a year in the late 1600s--and was the envy of other countries that had to rely on rough roads and untamed rivers for inland transportation.



One of the graceful bridges Riquet had designed for the Canal du Midi

France didn’t have the flat landscape that made canals so economical to dig in the Low Countries, but it had sufficient water supplies throughout the entire country to make canals practical. Apparently the first canals were efforts to connect rivers. The first such effort is believed to been the idea of Adam De Craponne, an engineer born in 1519 who made his reputation with irrigation canals in Provence. He wanted to join the Durance and Rhone Rivers with a canal. He also designed what became the Burgundy Canal to link the Loire and Saone Rivers. Neither project was completed during his lifetime, nor the Durance and Rhone canal was never a success.
All early canals were related in some way to Paris. Like all roads to Rome, all of the first canals were designed to improve transportation facilities for the national capital, and all canals were part of the spokes with Paris being the hub of the wheel. Plans to link the interior to the Mediterranean via the Rhone River and a series of canals began in Paris, and when the great Canal du Midi was completed, it soon had a feeder canal through the flat Camargue to link with the Rhone, then on to Paris.
The first major French canal was the Canal de Braire that connected the Loire and Seine Rivers. It was finished in 1642 after 38 years of labor, and was the first summit-level canal built in Europe, meaning that traversing it was something like going over a mountain pass, one lock at a time. On the canal summit was a large reservoir that fed both sides of the canal. Paris responded to this accomplishment by building the first quays on both sides of the Seine. Its success guaranteed further canals, the first of which was the Canal d’ Orleans from the Loire at Orleans to the Loing River at Montargis. These canals were so busy that the locks couldn’t handle the traffic, so the lateral Canal du Loing was built beside the Loing to its confluence with the Seine.
Without these successes, it is hard to imagine that the most ambitious of all canals in France, perhaps in Europe, would have been approved. But a salt tax collector named Pierre Paul Riquet from the old Cathar town of Beziers in the far southeastern part of France had an idea that he would not let go. He wanted to build a commercial waterway completely across France, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, in the most narrow part of France. Such a waterway would save weeks of travel for cargo going from the Atlantic around the Straits of Gibraltar to Marseille and then up the Rhone River, and it would be an antidote to the high tariffs charged by the Spanish to go through the Strait of Gibraltar.
How or why Riquet became interested, then obsessed with the canal remains a mystery. Long after he passed his 50th year, a very advanced age in the 1600s, he took on the canal project that had been discussed, studied and abandoned by numerous professional engineers. Riquet was not a trained engineer but he was intelligent, resourceful, imaginative, and best of all, determined. He got serious about the canal sometime in the late 1650s. Actual construction began on July 9, 1666, when the first stone was laid for the Port of Sete, then spelled Cette. Riquet was 62.
The canal opened in 15 years later in 1681, five months after his death in 1680. Quiet time on the Canal du Midi

In essence, Riquet wanted to use water from the Aude River, which comes down from the Pyrenees near Toulouse and empties into the Mediterranean with the Garonne that flows west through Toulouse and empties into the Atlantic at Bordeaux. Some subsidiary streams were also going to be used, but the general route of these rivers would be followed. His canal would begin in Toulouse and end in the Mediterranean while the Garonne River leading from Toulouse to the Atlantic Ocean at Bordeaux would be left alone since it could be used for commerce much of the year. However, from the very beginning Riquet insisted that the canal be a still-water canal in that it would be a series of manmade lakes, or pounds, instead of canalizing any of the rivers that followed the general direction.
The water supply from the Aude wasn’t dependable enough for the canal, so Riquet, who by this time had moved to a chateau near Toulouse, tramped all through the Montagne Noire where all rivers except the Aude were born, devised a scheme and then began taking powerful political and religious leaders on tours to enlist their support. On the grounds of his chateau he built a model of his canal, emphasizing the summit level where he needed a reliable source of water that would be used from there west to Toulouse, and east to the Mediterranean. He found it in the Sor River that flows through Revel. By building one or two dams on it, he would have a reservoir of water for use in the dry summer months.
Riquet hired a brilliant engineer named Francois Andreossy who had experience on other canals. The two men got along well most of the time, although Riquet was enraged when Andreossy presented the King with a signed map of the canal without Riquet’s knowledge, but in general they worked so closely together that today nobody can be certain who should be credited with the many innovations the canal brought into being. Only after the deaths of both men did problems arise, and that was because the descendants of Andreossy and Riquet fought over income from tolls on the canal, and the battle continued long after the canal was sold to a railroad.
Between the two men they could always find a solution to problems they faced. For example, not long after the digging and leveling began, one of the new locks collapsed. Riquet’s solution had the simplicity of genius. To be certain it didn’t happen again, he ordered all locks, including those already in place, to be built in the shape of an oval, reasoning that if bridges and doors were strong because of the arch, the same principle would keep lock walls from collapsing. No other locks did.
Once Riquet obtained approval and funding from the government, work began on his Canal royal de Languedoc (the name was changed to Canal du Midi during the French Revolution). The construction was one of the largest undertakings of the Middle Ages. When work began in the mid-winter of 1666-67, Riquet had 2,000 employees. Soon the number increased to more than 12,000, including 600 women because the supply of men ran out. Mechanization hardly existed. Nearly all the work was done by part of the crew using picks and shovels, and the others hauling the dirt and rocks away in baskets carried on their heads. Forerunners of the wheelbarrow were probably used, as they were 200 years later when the canal-building spree hit Britain. Clay was the material of choice for the bottom and sides of the canal, sometimes as much as six feet deep. Fortunately good clay was found in abundance in the area, as shown by the millions of bricks used in the construction of Toulouse and other smaller cities and towns. In the more critical areas such as bridges and aqueducts, masonry or bricks were used on the bottom. Modern civil engineers love to travel along the canal and study Riquet’s accomplishments; his bridges, aqueducts, overflows, spillways and the one tunnel.
Riquet kept a staff of at least six surveyors working throughout the project, and it was their job to not only mark the canal’s route but more importantly, to determine the depth and level of each section of the canal, and where to place locks. In one of his many money-saving schemes that also turned the canal into a work of art, Riquet decided to follow the contours of the land as much as possible rather than imposing his will on the

Malapas Tunnel, with fearless jumper, near the eastern end of Canal du Midi

land by having a straight canal with many more locks. This made the canal longer than necessary, but it made it more a part of the landscape and enabled Riquet to build with fewer locks, which translates into faster transportation. Today it takes between 20 and 30 minutes to go through a lock. In Riquet’s time it probably took twice or three times as long.
The project took so much money over so many years to complete that at last the government withdrew its backing when the canal was only a short distance from its end. Also, in fairness to the government, Riquet was often a pest and some of his letters to the King reveal a man who was often reduced to poor-pitiful-me laments. Cruelly, it seems, just after he ordered the tunnel at Malpas dug, the government cut off his funds. From the hill above the tunnel Riquet could literally see his goal, the Mediterranean. Not to be denied at this late stage, he sold all his property and used the proceeds to complete the canal. He told a friend that, “It is said in the world that I have made a canal in order to drown myself and my family.” Shortly afterward he became terminally ill and his last words were with his son, Jean Mathias.
“Where is the canal?” he asked.
“Just one league from the Etang de Thau,” his son answered. The Etang de Thau, a broad and sheltered bay, was his goal on the Mediterranean coast.
“One league,” the old man is said to have repeated, and died a few minutes later.
To build the canal, Riquet had to invent and create as he went along. The aqueduct near Paraza is the first known aqueduct built for a canal to cross a river. The Malpas was the first canal tunnel; apparently Riquet ordered it dug as an act of desperation because he was using his own funds by that time. The du Midi had the longest pound in the world at the time it was built—33 miles (54 kilometers) on its last run from the village of Argens to Riquet’s hometown of Beziers. It is still the longest pound in France. The canal is nearly 150 miles long (40 kilometers) and has 101 locks. Because it follows the contour of the landscape as much as possible, it has always had a sinuous beauty enhanced by the thousands of plane (sycamore) trees planted along its entire length. The British canal expert Charles Hadfield called it the “greatest canal built west of China and Europe’s finest seventeenth-century engineering work, perhaps her greatest since Roman days.”
It was with good reason that UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 1996. The following year another site on the Midi, the magnificent walled city of Carcassonne, was also chosen as a World Heritage Site. According to statistics compiled for UNESCO, the canal still carries more than 40,000 tons of goods each year, about 1,200 tourists daily, and more than 8,000 pleasure boats and barges are counted each year at the Argens lock, the last one between Toulouse and Beziers. One relatively unknown statistic is that Riquet’s quest for an adequate water supply was overly successful; the surplus water from the Montagne Noire is used to irrigate almost 100,000 acres of farmland along its route.