124 REPORT—1857. 
and Aden to Kurrachee and Calcutta. The line proposed by Sir Rowland Macdonald 
Stevenson, and which is apparently the one preferred by Lord Palmerston, passes 
over the Balkan, the Taurus and other mountain ranges quite regardless of engineer- 
ing difficulties. But if a direct line be drawn along the globe from London to Bom~- 
bay or Kurrachee, it exactly takes in the route by the Valley of the Euphrates ; con- 
sequently this portion of the line has necessarily formed a part of all the various 
projects that have been advanced with a view to facilitating and shortening our com- 
munication with India, with one exception, brought to my notice in a paper read 
last year at Cheltenham, which is supposed to go from Acre across the desert to 
Bussorah. ‘The distance by the two overland routes are as follows :— 
English miles. 
From London to the entrance of thé Red Sea ........scesseceecesseee 43724 
From the entrance of the Red Sea to Kurrachee, which will, no 
doubt, become the great port of India in place of Bombay .... 1705 
"Totalsasidsssaeevcecs Fitieivechd adden wes eveeameervaanse 60874 
London to the entrance of the Persian Gulf.......... jovdes atadcadeees 4271 
From the entrance of the Persian Gulf to Kurrachee ............ ee 702 
WMOtal bas canes sede: saves tek deaddiwscadiue tuedeeetors 4973 
the difference in favour of the Euphrates Valley being 1104} miles. The great gain, 
therefore, is from the entrance of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf onward. From the 
Red Sea to Kurrachee we have 1705 Englisk miles; whilst we have only 702 from 
the head of the Persian Gulf to the same port, or less than one-half. In the one 
case we have the monsoon right ahead towards Aden; in the other it isnearly abeam 
to Ormuz—I need scarcely add, a difficult and dangerous navigation in the one case, 
and a perfectly safe one in the other. The completion of the proposed arrangements 
would enable us to get over this distance and carry mails and passengers from Lon- 
don to Kurrachee in thirteen days and a half, or less than half the time at present 
occupied in the transit by the Red Sea; while, by laying down an electric telegraph 
line by this route, we may, in eighteen or twenty hours, be assured of the welfare 
of some friend or relative in a distant part of India, whose fate is now a matter 
of uncertainty and anxiety. I should just point out to you also that the pro- 
posed railway will form a chain of communication with those lines up the valley 
of the Indus, &c., now in progress of completion in India, and will thus give 
us as direct a route as can be had between London and Lahore. But the rapidity 
of rail and electric communication formas but a small portion of the benefits which, 
in a political, military, commercial, and social point of view, will result from 
opening up the Euphrates Valley route to India. No country possesses associa~ 
tions of such deep and historical interest as this. We have here the first seat 
of mankind—the sites of the four primeval cities of the Bible—the empires of 
Cyrus the Great, Cyrus the Younger, and of the great follower of his steps, 
Alexander, whose conquests and unparalleled marches of 19,020 miles (according to 
a careful calculation which I have made), laid the foundation of that connexion 
of the East with the West which is now under consideration. The Romans 
also were alive to the great importance of this territory; for after the empire 
of Seleucus had passed away, we read of the attempt of Crassus to conquer 
the country 53 years B.c., and of the expedition of Trajan a.p. 106. Julian the 
Apostate followed in the steps of Trajan, a.p. 361. He built a fieet on the banks of 
the Euphrates, descended the river, and, according to Gibbon, encountered there a 
most terrific hurricane at a spot answering to the present El] Kaim, above Anah; 
and it is remarkable that it was apparently nearly at the same spot that the expedi- 
tion which I had the honour of commanding was visited by a similar and equally 
fearful hurricane in May 1836. From the period of Julian, a.p. 363, we have no 
record of any great military expedition in connexion with Western Asia until Napo- 
leon conceived the idea in 1809 of transporting a force down the Euphrates with a 
view to the invasion of India, All his calculations and arrangements were made for 
