The result was that the Court of Directors placed on this station (that by the Euphrates presenting greater difficulties) two vessels of much superior power, the _Berenice_ and _Atalanta_, which had been laid down in 1835 for their naval service. The particulars of these vessels and of their cost, as well as those of the steamers on the Red Sea service which followed, will be found in the Indian navy list supplied by the East India House to Lord Jocelyn’s Committee of 1851, from which see extract.[318] A regular steam service having now been established between England and her Eastern empire by ships of the East Indian navy on the one side of the Isthmus of Suez, and by the Admiralty packets on the other, I shall glance at the various means of transit across this neck of land, before describing the great mercantile steam lines which now maintain the communication throughout. [Sidenote: Modes of transport across the Isthmus of Suez.] [Sidenote: Great exertions of Waghorn in the establishment of this route.] At the outset they were of the most original and multifarious description, and the few passengers who then made the overland passage found their way as best they could on camels, dromedaries, or donkeys. Towards the improvement in all its stages of this rude mode of transport there was no one more conspicuous than Thomas Waghorn. He was the moving genius of the whole undertaking, and its most zealous and successful agitator. Whatever may be said of his prudence, or however much we may lament his failings, his industry was unwearied and his zeal unbounded. It may be that he was only a convert to a scheme long contemplated by others; but, when once undertaken, his efforts never ceased until the object he had in view was accomplished. Though the first resting-places across the desert were constructed at the expense of the Bombay Steam-fund Committee by Hill and Raven,[319] under the orders of Colonel Barr,[320] the route itself was organized by Waghorn, and he was the first _who undertook and carried on by a regular system for three years the conveyance of the mails across the Isthmus of Suez_.[321] Sir Gardner Wilkinson (‘Modern Egypt,’ pp. 306-7) and various other competent witnesses bear ample testimony to this important fact, and it is one which must ever hold a prominent place in the records of the origin of the modern overland route to India.