Thomas Waghorn

Thomas Fletcher Waghorn (20 June 1800 – 7 January 1850) was an English sailor, navy officer, and postal pioneer who promoted and claimed the idea of a new route from Great Britain to India overland through Egypt prior to the development of the Suez Canal. Waghorn claimed to have demonstrated the route for the first time in 1829-30 and that it reduced the journey from over 11,000 miles (18,000 km) to 6,000 miles (9,700 km) and while steamships around the Cape of Good Hope took about three months, his route took between 35 and 45 days. A 2004 biography states that there is little substance to many of the claims that he made and that he was mostly a fraudulent self-publicist, contrary to some earlier sources. A statue of him stands in Chatham, Kent while another installed at Suez by Ferdinand de Lesseps in 1869 was destroyed in 1956.