Between the period 1840 and 1869, when the Suez Canal opened, the only way to get to India by sea from Britain was by two routes, firstly across the Bay of Biscay and down the coast of Iberia and the West Coast of Africa, around The Cape of Good Hope to Mauritius then to India: the second route across the Bay of Biscay, down the coast of Iberia and through the Straits of Gibraltar to Alexandria, in Egypt, then overland via Cairo and the desert to Suez to catch the East Indiaman ship down the Red Sea to India. There were three routes to get to Alexandria:- 1) across France to Marseilles to catch a French ship to Alexandria; 2) across to Italy and down to Trieste or Brindisi then to Alexandria or 3) using P&O to sail to Alexandria via the Straits of Gibraltar.

Once in Alexandria passengers would then board small vessels on a small canal, called theThe  Mahmoudieh Canal, to Afteh on the River Nile to connect with local craft to take them to Cairo where they would usually spend overnight before undertaking the 150 miles acrosas the desert to Suez. . This journey only took two months. The Overland Route connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, had been known ever since the time of the Pharaohs. Merchants and goods travelled from India to Egypt by sailing up the Red Sea and into the Gulf of Suez. Arab dhows with lateen sails were an exceptional sea boat well suited to the purpose. However they made the crossing with cargo and passengers, including pilgrims to Jeddah, only when the weather was suitable, with favourable monsoon winds.

This was an opportunity, however, for an enterprising former Naval Officer to try and improve the overland route. His name was Thomas Fletcher Waghorn, He pioneered the route for the carriage of mails, for which it was certainly more suited than for people. For a while he was in competition with a Mr J. Hill, but later the two joined forces to trade as Waghorn & Co. P&O in 1842 took over the whole route in order to organise it better.

In 1844, P&O provided  new carriages, rest houses, horse stations, carts, landing places and wharves. All this was provided with the assistance of the Egyptian ruler, Pasha Ishmail. The Company’s mid-desert resthouse, where the night hours were usually spent, provided a good dining room, a competent staff of cooks and servants all overseen by a European superintendent and his wife, who provided good food and clean bedrooms.

Wharves and Sheds at Alexandria c.1840s

In 1851 the famed British railway engineer, Robert Stephenson built the railway from Alexandria to Cairo, funded initially by P&O with loans of £250,000 which were repaid in full, which was completed by 1855, after which the next section across the desert was begun.

P&O invested a vast amount of money into the route, building facilities at both ends as well as in between.They improved transit for vessels through the Mahmoudieh Canal with tugs and barges. The Company also invested and lent heavily on the development of the railway and on facilitating the connections between it and the ships at both ends. They had built, staffed and managed lighthouses in the Red Sea, which were later taken over by the Egyptian Government. They even established a large farm near Cairo to provide poultry, eggs and sheep and built offices and a large hotel in Cairo for the use of their passengers.

The greater comfort and  convenience in reaching Egypt resulted in a swift rise in tourist or pleasure travel, by Europeans keen to spend the northern winter season in Egypt. The owners of the hostels and hotels were delighted because of the extra revenue from visitors spending weeks or even months in Egypt. There was also a developing trend of sightseeing and tourist travel by sea which we now call “cruising”. P&O can rightfully claim that, by encouraging this traffic, they had invented this new form of travel.

Baron Ferdinand de Lesseps, a French Consular official, became interested in the report and early historical records. These suggested there had originally been a waterway that had existed from hundreds to thousands of years, the latter only being of interest to a small number of Egyptologists. He became even more interested when an accurate survey revealed that both seas were level.

Illustrations and hieroglyphs showed a voyage of five ships from the Nile to the “Land of Punt”, a place apparently well south in the Red Sea ( modern scholarship puts it somewhere between modern day North Eritrea and Sudan), which appears in Hatshepsut’s Mortuary Temple at Deir-el-Bahri near Karnak, (she lived from 1473 BC to 1458 BC)