The Caledonian Canal
Report of the Commissioners of the Caledonian Canal
There were excellent reasons for building a canal across Scotland in 1800. The declining economy needed the boost a canal promised, and English ships needed a safe passage from one side of Britain to the other without being chased by Napoleon's ships. The English civil engineer Thomas Telford, renowned for his elegant and graceful engineering projects, was at the height of his fame. Not surprisingly, his report on the practicality of the canal was well received by the Commissioners in 1802. The ambitious scheme was massive in scale, calling for a ship canal, not a narrow barge canal, through the Scottish Highlands and incorporating the famous Loch Ness. The scale of the enterprise – the machinery, the work force, the quantity of rock and earth to move – made the Caledonian Canal a remarkable engineering feat by any standard. The canal includes 29 locks that were built as proposed, but little else went as planned. When it was completed in 1822, the cost was over three times the estimate and it could not take the larger ships that were expected to bolster the Scottish economy. In the Highland Mountain passage, the canal became a wind tunnel that held ships up for days, so that it was often easier to sail around the coast of Scotland than to take a chance in the canal. Still, the canal was and is considered an engineering triumph.
A French View of the Caledonian Canal
Flachat was involved with a ship canal in France between Rouen and Paris, and he wrote this report on the Caledonian Canal in part to prove the advantages of such a canal. He visited the Caledonian Canal to gather information firsthand, and made surveys on the spot with assistance from the resident engineers. Many of the cross sections of embankments and sluices appear in no other published accounts of the canal. In addition, Flachat included this evocative lithographic view of a canal scene. What could be more perfect, it seems to suggest, than a canal for ships built in harmony with the surrounding countryside?