Transcriber's Note: Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. [Illustration] Thomas Whiteside The Tunnel Under the Channel [Illustration] SIMON AND SCHUSTER · NEW YORK · 1962 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM COPYRIGHT © 1961, 1962 BY THOMAS WHITESIDE PUBLISHED BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC. ROCKEFELLER CENTER, 630 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK 20, N. Y. MOST OF THE MATERIAL IN THIS BOOK ORIGINATED IN _The New Yorker_ AS A SERIES OF ARTICLES, WHICH HAVE BEEN HERE EXPANDED. FIRST PRINTING LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 62-9744 MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY AMERICAN BOOK-STRATFORD PRESS, INC., NEW YORK _To Karen, Anne, Jimmy_ [Illustration: One] IN THE SOCIAL HISTORY of England, the English Channel, that proud sea passage some three hundred and fifty miles long, has separated that country from the Continent as by a great gulf or a bottomless chasm. However, at its narrowest point, between Dover and Cap Gris-Nez—a distance of some twenty-one and a half miles—the Channel, despite any impression that storm-tossed sea travelers across it may have of yawning profundities below, is actually a body of water shaped less like a marine chasm than like an extremely shallow puddle. Indeed, the relationship of depth to breadth across the Strait of Dover is quite extraordinary, being as one to five hundred. This relationship can perhaps be most graphically illustrated by drawing a section profile of the Channel to scale. If the drawing were two feet long, the straight line representing the level of the sea and the line representing the profile of the Channel bottom would be so close together as to be barely distinguishable from one another. At its narrowest part, the Channel is nowhere more than two hundred and sixteen feet deep, and for half of the distance across, it is less than a hundred feet deep. It is just this extreme shallowness, in combination with strong winds and tidal currents flowing in the Channel neck between the North Sea and the Atlantic, that makes the seas of the Strait of Dover so formidable, especially in the winter months. The weather is so bad during November and December that the odds of a gale's occurring on any given day are computed by the marine signal station at Dunkirk at one in seven, and during the whole year there are only sixty periods in which the weather remains decent in the Channel through a whole day. Under these difficult conditions, the passage of people traveling across the Channel by ferry between England and France is a notoriously trying one; the experience has been mentioned in print during the last hundred years in such phrases as "that fearful ordeal," "an hour and a half's torture," and "that unspeakable horror." Writing in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ in 1882, a French writer named Valbert described the trip from Dover to Calais as "two centuries ... of agony." Ninety-odd years