American 4,170 German 3,520 Spanish 3,157 Norwegian 1,316.
Portuguese 919 Danish 660 Burmanian 408 771,409
Some of our readers may remember the shower of prophecies with which Continental journals received the news of the success of the Suez Canal. Great Britain was to lose first her commerce, then her commercial navy, then her supremacy at sea, and finally, her Indian possessions. The Mediterranean States were to recover their long-lost Oriental trade, and 111. Lesseps was to be the avenger of a hundred sea-board cities ruined by the avarice of England. Well, here is the official return of the tonnage and nationality of the ships passing through the Canal in 1871 :— British
French Austrian Italian Turkish Egyptian Dutch
Russian Belgian
546,621 91,841 43,113 29,400 16,959 13,394 6,711 4,820 4,400
Great Britain sends five-sevenths of the whole, and much more than double the tonnage of all the rest of the world put together.
Previous page
