Here is the sky on Palm Sunday evening.
See the end note about enlarging illustrations.
Eridanus, the sky’s river, sometimes equated with the Nile – in twilight you may not be able to discern any of the stars that mark its course, but it fills much of the scene. Whereas the Nile rises near the equator and flows north, Eridanus starts south of the equator, at a star called Kursi, the “footstool,” close to Rigel, and descends into the Africa of the sky. It’s a long river and meandering and narrow and we can image boats trying to sail down it and being blocked at Achernar (whose name means “end of the river”) before reaching Acamar (which is now the end of the river) – both of them below the horizon.
Earthly waterways department
A huge ship called the “Ever Given” (it may have to be renamed the “Never Movin'”) has become stuck diagonally across the Suez Canal, throttling the whole world’s trade.
It took from 1859 to 1869 to build this canal, but forerunners of it go back thousands of years. They used not the north-to-south route from the Mediterranean coast but a west-to-east route of about 60 miles, from points on an eastern branch of the Nile delta and along a valley through dry hills to points near the northern tip of the Red Sea.
I allude in my Berenice’s Hair (in the scene in which Berenice gets ostracized) to the achieving of such a canal by her father-in-law, Ptolemy II Philadelphuse, around 250 BC.
But that was far from the first. The Greek historians mention such canals going back to one of the pharaohs called Sesostris around 1900 BC, and Ramesses II around 1250, and Necho II around 600, and the Persian conqueror Darius I around 500.
Some of these canal-diggings may have been incomplete, or reliant on the Nile’s annual flood, or silted up and then later reopened. But when Queen Hatshepsut sent an expedition to Punt – the Horn of Africa – in 1470 BC, its ships must have gone through such a canal; and Darius claimed that his canal enabled ships to sail from Egypt to Persia; and Ptolemy’s canal was said to be 100 feet wide and 30 feet deep, and it had a sluice at the east end to prevent salt water from getting into the Nile.
Part of a map of ancient Egypt I drew for myself “from memory” at age about 13. The ancient canals started at or near Bubastis, which is modern Zagazig.
Surely some craft could have sailed from the Mediterranean through the delta and thus by the canal to the Red Sea, but I don’t know that there is a record of this.
Ptolemy’s canal had silted up by Cleopatra’s time. It was opened again by the Romans or the Muslim conquerors, repaired briefly by the Egyptian caliph al-Hakîm about 1000 CE, and rediscovered by Napoleon’s archaeologists in 1798. Napoleon would probably have ordered a north-south Suez canal to be built – but for the mistaken belief of his surveyors that the Red Sea was 8.5 meters higher than the Mediterranean.
When in the 1850s France backed the building of the Suez Canal, Britain opposed it, and now the reason was different: Britain controlled and profited from the route around South Africa. But the stated reason was that the Egyptian labor would be on a corvée or forced system, and Britain disapproved of slave labor.
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ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format. You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor. One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge. Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it. On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers). Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.
Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after publishing it. If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.
This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
Articles I’ve seen don’t answer the obvious question: what is the size of “containers”? – 19 meters long? They must be standard, so as to fit together on a ship in numbers such as 20,000. (Our whole household furniture and belongings crossed the Atlantic in one container with plenty of room to spare.)
And am I the only one to wonder (defensible use of a cliché) why the Suez Canal Authority doesn’t ban the use of ships longer than the canal is wide?
“The Wreck of the Ever Given” (cf. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”)
The legend is told from the Bedouin on down
of the big ship they call Ever Given.
The Suez Canal really damaged morale
as when into its banks she was driven.
On her way to Rotterdam
with twenty-thou plus “tin cans”
by a sandstorm (they say) she was grounded.
Over 200 ships at both ends of the canal
had their transiting plans thus confounded…
(It’s a start…)
Marvelous! Can I venture to smooth it a little:
The legend is told by the tugboat men bold
of the big ship they called Ever Given.
The Suez Canal really damaged morale
As when into its banks she was driven.
Piled high with containers of cargo from China,
By sandstorms (they say) she was grounded.
Other ships by the hundred just waited and wondered
While all the world’s trade was confounded…
OK, I rather like my version more, but there’s no reason multiple versions can’t exist side-by-side, and balladeers 500 years in the future can choose whatever version they want. In any event, it’s not finished. A couple of alterations I thought of not long after I hit the “send” key (one of which you made also): *big ship they called* for *big ship they call*, and *twenty thousand “tin cans”* sounds better than “twenty-thou plus tin cans*.
How about “when right into its banks she was driven” instead of “as when into its banks she was driven”. I’d better stop now before tweaks to the composition consume me. It’s out-of-date anyway–the ship has been freed.
Ideally we should keep to the scansion:
ti tum ti ti RHYME ti ti tum ti ti RHYME
ti ti tum ti ti tum ti ti RHY-yme
–though Gordon Lightfoot’s original ballad doesn’t do this consistently.
Oh, I thought for a moment we had an astronomical column.
I’ve read that the names Achernar and Acamar are related by the same root and may sometimes be interchanged, but I have only ever seen Acamar refer to theta Eridani, near declination -40 deg, while Achernar is at the bottom of the constellation at -57 deg. Achernar is the second star in the far south that I enjoy seeing (the first being Canopus as you recently discussed), but you have to go to at least northern Florida to see it well. Acamar, on the other hand, is easily seen from where I live in Virginia.
Right, I had those two the wrong way around. Both names are from Arabic âkhir an-nahr, “end of the river”, but it was Acamar that first had that status, before Achernar which is farther south.
I’ve been under the Suez Canal in a tunnel when I took the bus from Cairo to St Catherine just under 2200ish metre Mt Sinai.with it blocked ships would have to go via Cape Town like the Russian Baltic Fleet was forced to do during 1904/5 when England and France refused them access to the Suez Canal and coaling facilities in Cape Town and Singapore to boot causing them to be in a very poor state when they reached Japan and to lose badly…. very badly! I’m trying to think about the last time I saw Achanar must have been when I was in New Zealand in 2017, sadly missed our southern hemisphere friends.
I have not seen it mentioned elsewhere but the Full Moon tomorrow is also close to lunar perigee with the especially high tides one would expect in such a circumstance.
I don’t know how the tides run in the Suez Canal but it seems like it would be a particular opportunity to get that boat floated out of its mire.
They ought to spend the next 48 hours getting as many containers off the ship as they can … and empty those ballast tanks!
Good point, I should have thought of mentioning that Full Moon falls today, March 28. The next Full Moon, April 27, will be one of those close to perigee (a 12 hour difference), causing highest tides. Let’s hope Never Movin’ doesn’t have to wait for that. The only references I’ve seen to tides merely say that they complicate the operation.
Another gap in the news coverage I’ve seen: The ship was heading north, and its bow is stuck into the east bank. That means that tugboats have to drag the stern out from the other bank in a counterclockwise direction. Whether it was stuck this way or into the western bank, the tugboats have to be south of the ship. Obviously they cannot get there from Port Said or the Mediterranean. Unless there were some stationed at the southern end, at Suez, or at another Egyptian port on the Red Sea, to get there from Egypt they would have to chug all the way around Africa – unless they could be borrowed from Yemen! or Sudan” or Eritrea!…
Sa’id Pasha was the Ottoman Turkish governor of Egypt from whom the Suez Canal Company acquired the rights to construct, own, and operate the canal (later nationalized by Nasser). The name of Suez, Suwais, looks like an Arabic diminutive (“little” something), but I don’t know of what.