The present port of Havre is absolutely insufficient to answer the ever increasing requirements of commerce. Its entrance, which is too narrow and not deep enough, does not permit steamers to go in, come out, and perform their evolutions with the rapidity required by our epoch. So they are gradually abandoning our port, and going to load and unload at Anvers and elsewhere. A large number of wise heads, who are anxious about the future of this port and our national interests, have devoted themselves to finding a means of enlarging it, not by dredging _new_ basins, which would prove ruinous to the budget and useless in twenty years, but by installing a true roadstead at the entrance to the present basins.
[Illustration: FIG 1.--PLAN OF THE PROJECTED ROADSTEAD AT HAVRE.]
Upon the maps of the hydrographic service may be seen, under the name of the Little Roadstead, a vast extent of sea nearly two kilometers wide by three to four in length, bounded upon one side by the heights of Heve and St. Adresse, and upon the other by the rocky line of Eclat and of the heights of the roadstead (Fig. 1). This Little Roadstead, so called, in order to become a genuine one, would have to be protected against the great waves of the open sea. To thus protect it, to close it as quickly and as cheaply as possible--that is the problem.
In 1838, Charles de Massas presented a project (the first in order of date), which consisted in constructing upon the Eclat reef a semi-lunate dike, and a breakwater at Cape Heve. Moreover, upon the emergent parts of the Eclat reef and heights of the roadstead he proposed to erect two forts.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--LEWIS' FLOATING BREAKWATER.]
The defense of the port of Havre is a very important question, and one that appears to be completely abandoned. Since Engineer Degaulle in 1808 advised the erection of a fort upon the Eclat, and requests have periodically been made and projects drawn. The requests are forgotten, but the drawings are in the Ministers' portfolios, and if France should to-morrow have a war with a maritime power our great northern port might be destroyed and burned by the smallest squadron.
Some years after Massas' project, two officers, Deloffre and Bleve, and an engineer named Renaud, received a commission to search for a means of closing a portion of Seine Bay. These gentlemen advised the erection of two dikes, one on the Eclat shoal in the very axis of this reef, and the other at Heve. Between these two masonry dikes was to be placed a floating breakwater. This project, which was submitted to Admiral de Hell in 1845, had a favorable reception, and the Admiral especially applauded the trial of breakwaters, "which were much talked of in England, although the effects that they might produce were not well known." Deloffre, Bleve, and Renauds' project comprised two forts--one to the north and the other to the south of the roadstead. For a long time nothing more was said about it, and it is only during recent years, when the peril has become imminent for Havre (threatened as it is of being abandoned even by the French transatlantics), that the question has again became the order of the day.