Chapter 4 ‘Civilising and Disciplining Nature’ One cannot deny that these results [of the Commission’s hydrau- lic works] represent a veritable triumph of peaceful international work, conceived with the support of science and conducted with constancy, assurance and loyalty. DIMITRIE A. STURDZA, 1908 ∵ 1 ‘The Father of the Danube’ By the end of his life, Charles Augustus Hartley (1825–1915) was an accom- plished man, with a remarkable career in fluvial and maritime engineering. Perhaps the best recognition of his technical mastery was the ‘Albert Medal’ which he received in 1903, in the same decade as Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Noble and Marie Curie, in recognition of his services, extending over forty-four years, as Engineer to the International Commission of the Danube, which have resulted in the opening up of the navigation of that river to ships of all nations, and of his similar services, extending over twenty years, as British Commissioner on the International Technical Commission of the Suez Canal.1 Hartley’s professional path is illustrative of the internationalisation of hydrau- lic projects in the nineteenth century. He was involved in engineering works on four continents, but his most durable and probably greatest accomplishment was that completed along the Maritime Danube in his capacity as engineer- in-chief of the European Commission of the Danube. Paraphrasing David Blackbourn’s chapter on the celebrated Johann Gottfried Tulla, the engineer who accomplished the straightening of the Rhine, Hartley was ‘the man who 1 ‘Albert Medal,’ Journal of the Society for Arts 51.2636 (29 May 1903): 593. © Constantin Ardeleanu, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004425965_006 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.Constantin Ardeleanu - 9789004425965 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 11:47:57PM via free access ‘Civilising and Disciplining Nature’ 115 tamed the wild Danube’2 or, as he was dubbed in Romania, ‘the Father of the Danube’.3 This chapter is about the Maritime Danube and the people who ‘corrected’ it to shape it to the needs of global trade and shipping. It aims to present how the hydraulic projects of the Commission were designed and put into practice and the key role Hartley played in this. Gliding between the second and third layers of analysis as presented in the introduction to this volume, it will focus on the three main actors involved in ‘remaking’ the Danube: the Commission, its lead engineer and the riverain environment itself. For an organisation en- dowed with a technical mission and whose institutional fate was linked to this accomplishment, designing and completing a hydraulic project in one of Europe’s least developed peripheries was a remarkable episode in transna- tional technopolitics.4 It was this entanglement of technology and politics that allowed the Commission to brand itself as a successful organisation and which eventually secured its survival. The narrative will further explore decision- making mechanisms within the Commission and the formation of networks of experts5 in river improvements. Hartley’s accession to a global authority in hydraulic works was tied to his Danubian experience and to his views on the rationalisation, governance and management of nature for maximising the economic benefits of waterways. This drive towards rationalisation involved removing the artificial or natural sources of insecurity and turning the river into a predictable transportation in- frastructure. The Commission’s work was part of a security-driven programme which included a ‘hardware’ component, related to completing (material) engineering tasks, and a ‘software’ one, consisting of establishing shipping norms, procedures and enforcing institutions. Existential threats to navigation, such as sandbanks or the Sulina bar, were securitised since pre-Crimean War times, and emergency measures were taken by the organisation acting as an instrument of ‘Europe’s will’. 2 David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York 2007), 72–120. 3 See his biography in C.W.S. Hartley, A Biography of Sir Charles Hartley, Civil Engineer (1825–1915): the Father of the Danube, vol. 1–2 (Lampeter 1989) and a shorter account of his Danubian works in David Turnock, ‘Sir Charles Hartley and the Development of Romania’s Lower Danube – Black Sea Commerce in the Late Nineteenth Century,’ in: Anglo-Romanian Relations after 1821 (Iași 1983), 75–98. 4 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 2002). 5 Martin Kohlrausch and Helmuth Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise. Innovators, Organizers, Networkers (Basingstoke 2014); Wolfram Kaiser and Johan W. Schot. Writing the Rules for Europe: Experts, Cartels and International Organizations (Basingstoke 2014). Constantin Ardeleanu - 9789004425965 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 11:47:57PM via free access 116 Chapter 4 But establishing a security regime for trade and shipping along the Maritime Danube proved more complicated than originally believed when the Commission was founded in 1856, and the Commission was hardened into a durable organisation by the complexity of the finely tuned ‘organic machine’, the Danube Delta, which it was supposed to improve for human needs.6 As a ‘river history’7 or, to quote Mark Cioc, a river ‘eco-biography’,8 this chapter will also highlight, on the trail of Sara B. Pritchard’s approach, the links between sci- ence and technology studies, environmental scholarship and political history.9 2 Post-Crimean War Transnational River Expertise Hartley joined the Commission’s Technical Department from the early days of the organisation. When he agreed to work in the Danube Delta, he was already an experienced civil engineer. His formal technical education consisted of ‘a practical course of instruction in mining and railway engineering’, followed by a decade of actual fieldwork. As a contractors’ district agent (1845–1848), he coordinated the construction of a key section of the Scottish Central Railway. He successfully coped with tunnels, bridges, river diversions, level crossings and drainage works. For the next six years (1848–1854), Hartley supervised the construction of a new harbour in Plymouth and became familiar with the lat- est engineering techniques used in hydraulics. In 1855 he enrolled as an engi- neer in the corps conducted by Major John Stokes, under whose command he served in the Crimean War in the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire. Stokes appreciated Hartley’s technical skills and perseverance, and literally the second day after his nomination as Britain’s delegate to the Commission, Stokes requested that ‘Charles Hartley, Esq., late Captain in the Turkish Contingent Engineers’ be one of the three engineers to assist him. In December 1856, with the approval of his fellow commissioners, Stokes officially invited him to serve as the Commission’s engineer-in-chief.10 6 Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York 1996). 7 See two recent historiographic papers: Paula Schönach, ‘River Histories: A Thematic Review,’ Water History 9.3 (2017): 233–257 and Matthew Evenden, ‘Beyond the Organic Machine? New Approaches in River Historiography,’ Environmental History 23.4 (2018): 698–720. 8 Mark Cioc, The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815–2000 (Seattle and London 2002). 9 Sara B. Pritchard: Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône (Cambridge MA and London 2011). 10 Hartley, A Biography, 5–116. Constantin Ardeleanu - 9789004425965 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 11:47:57PM via free access ‘Civilising and Disciplining Nature’ 117 At the time, after decades of Russian mastery, the river was portrayed as economically degraded and in need of urgent technical rescue.11 Hartley got to Sulina in early 1857 and quickly found out that it took more than the removal of Russia to turn the Maritime Danube into a secure waterway. He started by acquainting himself with the variable local geography and hydrography as he wanted to collect solid scientific data on depths, flows, winds, currents and tides before proposing the most suitable channel of the Danube’s three main branches and the appropriate technical solution for its improvement. At the same time, he started to look for the means of procuring and transporting con- struction materials (stone and timber), and for gathering the human resources who were to carry out these works under his coordination. He was scrupulous in collecting data and in drafting a solid technical project that he could ex- ecute in one of Europe’s poorest peripheries. Six months after his arrival in the Danube Delta, his scientific – and necessarily dilatory – approach started to alarm his impatient employers, who did not lack ideas about what needed to be done,12 as at least half a dozen other experts kept proposing improve- ment projects. Time was of the essence in this process, but understanding nature’s own time, with the cyclicality of the Danube’s flows and a long-term ‘Braudelian’ perspective on changes in its hydrography, was certainly a lengthy process. Hartley felt he needed to bond with the river; he needed to ‘think’ like a river.13 Thomas Abel Brimage Spratt was a reputed hydrographer sent by the British navy to sound and chart the Danube Delta. Together with the crew of HMS Medina, Spratt surveyed the Chilia and St George mouths of the river in 1856–1857 and drafted detailed maps which he presented to the Commission