Another distraction: The Grand Canal

Well I just found an unpublished post, and maybe that's just as well, but I'll publish it anyway.
Re-reading it and reflecting upon it, I see that it captures two features of internet research:
1. How easy (and how much fun) it is to stray from the subject at hand.
2. How contradictory and unverifiable the information can be.

and here's the unpublished post. . .

Bamber Gascoigne's short entry on the Grand Canal in China on his site
http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=aa19>TEXT
whetted my curiosity, so I Googled Grand Canal China. Here are a few of the sites I visited.
http://www.chinatown-online.com/cultureeye/highlights/grand.htm
had some salacious stuff about the Emperor who did the heavy lifting (and brutalizing) of connecting smaller canals into the Grand Canal in the 7th century.
The Wikipedia site
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_%28China%29#English
wasn't that helpful, due to the lack of good maps, or that interesting, due to the writing.
http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Places/District/879134
was a better read, and led me to a few photography sites with Grand Canal shots. In some places houses back up to the canal walls, Venice-like, and stone steps lead down to water level, also like Venice. Gorgeous.
But at this point, let's face it, I don't need to know the exact route of The Grand Canal. Nor do I need to sort out the snarl of conflicting information that I found. I know what I need to know about The Grand Canal in order to get on with the Erie Canal.
Time to shut down this distraction and get focused again.

Treasure!

I got access to jstor and spent a lot of time pursuing a man named Canvass (or Canvas) White, specifically his trip England to study canals. He came back with drawings, technical innovations, all kinds of information that was crucial to building the Erie Canal. Apparently he's better known for inventing waterproof concrete, so I had to skim through many, many articles from places like Journal of Concrete Engineering before I found anything biographical about him. Unfortunately the England trip wasn't mentioned.

So I took my own trip to England, Googled the Bridgewater Canal figuring from what I've read that that's one that Canvass wouldn't have wanted to miss. Many websites later I found myself at the Canal du Midi, a 240 km water route through France built in 1681 that links the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, eliminating the then month-long trip around Spain.

Websites make conflicting claims about both these canals as being the first of, best of, biggest of, etc. and I found myself once again yearning for CONTEXT. I need a sense of where the information fits into a bigger picture of history if I'm ever to sort out the conflicting claims. Like the CONTEXT I found reading Ronald E. Shaw.

Whimsically I Googled history of canals and landed on two pages of remarkably thoughtful and clear history of canals dating back to the 5th century BCE. Only half a dozen or so canals were discussed, but each was purposefully, even brilliantly chosen, and the author wove their stories together beautifully. But I was still suspicious. Who was this author? Could I trust him or her? How could I check her/him out since there was no byline on the article? I found a button for "how to cite the site," and it turns out that Bamber Gascoigne is responsible for all the content of the site, historyworld.net. Gascoigne wrote a book called The Mughals which I referred to often when I was writing about the Taj Mahal, and which is one of the most thorough, readable, and fascinating histories I've ever read. I poked around a bit on historyworld.net, feeling like a Mughal emperor sifting jewels through his fingers, and what I found was every bit as intelligent as the canal history.