Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River

by Twigger, Robert

  De Lesseps knew his time had come because the day he presented his idea to his friend Said Pasha there was a Saint-Simonian rainbow in the sky linking East to West. Said had not forgotten his old friend and tutor – he agreed immediately that such a canal should be made.

  Without the corvée the canal could not have been built – and the corvée existed because of the Nile. But long before the problems of digging the canal appeared de Lesseps had to fight the Turks and the British to get his canal started. His correspondence offers a handbook in surmounting huge difficulties. He never doubts that he will succeed. He is willing to continue until he drops (his wife had died and he had vowed he would never marry again until he had achieved his Suez dream – and on the opening voyage through the canal which Flaubert’s mistress Louise Colet joined, he married again). And he never writes anything negative. And eventually he succeeded. Fifteen years after his old pupil Said (who was now dead) had agreed to de Lesseps’ plan, the canal was opened.

  The canal changed the position of Egypt almost overnight. It extended the Nile east, and became the gateway to India. From being sceptical the British suddenly appreciated its worth. As we have seen, when Said’s successor Ismail bankrupted Egypt through rebuilding Cairo, they assumed his debts and took over the country. From the moment Britain became the driving force in Egypt the Nile became British business. To boost the exchequer it was decided to improve irrigation and thus agricultural yield. While many hated Lord Cromer, the British proconsul in Egypt, he and his Nile irrigation experts such as Scott-Moncrieff and William Willcocks turned Egypt from a bankrupt country into one that enjoyed a commercial boom.

  I got a little obsessed by de Lesseps. He seemed both so ordinary and yet so extraordinary in his efforts. In the end he went slightly mad and was sentenced to a suspended prison term for corruption over his next big scheme – the Panama Canal. He was eighty-eight at the time.

  I saw in a book of black and white photographs a giant statue of de Lesseps lying in a heap of rusty cables and scrap metal in Port Said. I went looking for the statue, which I discovered had been erected at the entrance of the Suez Canal and had been sculpted by Emmanuel Frémiet. Yet rather than the figure of de Lesseps it had nearly been the Statue of Liberty that graced the entrance. Another French sculptor, Frédéric Bartholdi, had approached the Egyptian ruler Ismail and suggested that a giant statue of an Egyptian peasant woman holding a torch should act as a lighthouse at the entrance of the Suez Canal. Sketches and models were made but the project was derailed by the Franco-Prussian War when Bartholdi’s home was occupied by the Prussians.

  The models and sketches found their way to America with Bartholdi, who now became obsessed with building his light-bearing statue at the entrance to New York. Slowly he gained support. The inside structure of the giant sculpture was designed by Gustav Eiffel (who incidentally also built one of the famous bridges over the Nile at Cairo). The whole was donated to the Americans as a part of the hundredth-anniversary celebrations of American independence. The committee which decided this was led by none other than Ferdinand de Lesseps, which explains all the Egyptian connections. If you have ever wondered who the Statue of Liberty was modelled on, it was actually a Nile-dwelling Egyptian peasant girl who, Bartholdi announced, symbolised ‘light in the world’ (though the statue also bears a certain resemblance to his mother). If you are an Egyptian visitor to the USA the sight of a fellow countryman in such a prominent place should be reassuring, though it should perhaps not be mentioned when you are given the third degree at JFK Airport . . .

  The imposing thirty-foot-high statue of de Lesseps that once stood guard over the Mediterranean entrance to the canal was blown off its plinth by enthusiastic Egyptian patriots in 1956, the year Nasser would also go ahead with his plans to build the Aswan dam. The damaged statue ended up in the scrapyard of the Suez Canal Company – where it still resides, albeit now back on its feet again in a sort of gravel viewing area surrounded by old cable drums and scrapped heavy-lifting material. De Lesseps’ family paid for the little memorial patch and family members visit every year, so the supervisor at the yard told me. It was an embarrassment really, because if they reinstated the statue on the plinth nationalistic Egyptians would complain. If they sold it abroad then the publicity would be damaging. So, in a true Egyptian compromise, the man who brought Egypt its fourth-largest source of revenue resides in a place of oily old engines, rusty remains and broken pipes.

  13 • Petherick’s problems solved by a fly

  Even though the flies swarm they cannot lift the lid of the pot.

  Sudanese proverb

  The Nile has two special features: one is the extent of its reach since we do not know of any other river in the inhabited world that is longer, for its beginnings are springs that well from the Mountain of the Moon which is purported to be 11 degrees south of the Equator; two is its increase which takes place when others dry up for it begins to increase when the long days start to end and reaches its maximum with the Autumn equinox when the canals are opened to flood the lands. Abdullah el-Baghdadi (AD 1200)

  The Suez Canal was opened in 1869 – the year that Burton and Speke would confront each other over the source of the Nile. But we must go back a little, to the 1850s, before any of the new generation of Nile explorers had set out. It is strange: we assume that explorers come before tourists, but they don’t in the case of the Nile. Some early tourists, such as Flaubert and Monckton Milnes, came first and may have inspired the explorers to go further, to the uttermost ends of the river. We know that Milnes’ best friend Richard Burton must have heard stories from him of the Nile. And though traders usually follow explorers, some seem to keep neck and neck with them, especially when it comes to such valuable items as slaves and ivory.

  The region that came to be known as Equatorial Egypt and later as Southern Sudan was, due to the barrier of the Sudd, really the nub of the problem. When Werne’s (and Verne’s) account of Muhammad Ali’s expedition was circulated in Europe, many were determined to push further, either through Equatorial Egypt or in from the coast of east Africa. Burton and Speke headed in west from Zanzibar and John Petherick attacked from the north. They either followed slave routes or opened up routes soon to be used by slavers.

  The amiable Petherick, Welshman, mining engineer, not quite out of the same drawer as Baker, Speke or even Burton, was decidedly from the lower end of the spectrum, similar to Livingstone and Stanley. It seems that explorers come from either end of the social scale and rarely from the comfortable middle: either they have nothing to lose, or they have so much that losing isn’t a problem. Petherick has been harshly treated by history. He spent years exploring the lesser-known regions of the upper Nile, and quite unfairly was lambasted by the unstable, unreliable Speke after he had failed to be there, in person, to greet the explorer when he emerged triumphant in Gondokoro . . . a year late. Missing a date by a year, I think, excuses the person stood up for being a little less than punctual. But Speke did not see it this way and did his darnedest to blacken Petherick’s name to everyone and everywhere. Petherick fought back, and achieved apologies and compensation for the damage to his reputation, but the damage remained done. His books are hard to find but make admirable reading. He is every bit as brave as the more famous explorers, and a lot more inventive. In 1854, seven years before the exploration of the Nile by Burton and Speke began in earnest, Petherick was pushing further and further south in Sudan into the region of the Dinka, Nuer and Djibba tribes along the upper reaches of the Nile. The Djibba wore wrist knives: ‘with the bracelet he inflicts severe blows upon his antagonist’s face’. The Djibba decorated themselves with the hair of their fallen enemies, which they wove into their own hair to form ‘a long tail, reaching almost to the ground’. Petherick was one of the first Europeans to proceed past the Sobat river, a tributary of the Nile that drains the lower part of Ethiopia. Forty years later, the French Marchand expedition – the first to traverse Africa from west to east – would proceed up
the Sobat in a steel boat they had dragged through hundreds of miles of jungle.

  Petherick was poor, and any attempt at exploration had to be funded by trading. For five years he was in the gum-arabic business at Al-Obeid, a trading town in Sudan established by the Egyptian Turks in 1821 but later destroyed by the Mahdi’s army. When gum-arabic ceased to be profitable his mind turned to the Nile, the mains cable of African wealth snaking its way into the jungle. Capitan Selim, in the expedition funded by Muhammad Ali Pasha in 1840, reached 4 degrees 42 minutes North. This expedition established that the Blue Nile was definitively not the only source of the Nile – that the ancients had been right in positing a source deeper in the heart of Africa. Petherick’s friend Alphonse de Malzac, an ivory trader who had been an attaché at the French Embassy in Athens, had explored some of the tribes around 7 degrees North, but he had recently died in Khartoum. There was plenty for Petherick to do, and if by chance he also found the source of the Nile, so much the better.

  Petherick was tough. He reported that he suffered fevers in his first two years and then none for the next nine. Without passing judgement he describes the native cures as something that would ‘kill a horse’, cures such as ingesting a pound of butter on an empty stomach and, if internal pain is intense, branding with a hot iron on the skin. ‘Diarrhoea, dysentery, liver-complaints and Guinea-worm are the prevailing diseases; smallpox is the most deadly, cholera and plague are very rare.’ Of Guinea-worm he writes,

  This fearfully distorting malady occurs only among the barefooted part of the population, and its period is confined to the rainy season. Attacking generally the foot in the first instance, the swelling extends frequently to the knee to a loathsome extent, and is accompanied by excruciating pain to the sufferer. At last a small soft spot presents itself as if suppuration were coming to a climax, into which a red hot nail is thrust; and, in nine cases out of ten, in a few days this effects a cure. Sometimes, however, two or more such places in different parts of the limb require as many firings which at last become ‘too hot’ for the disease. Another method, not so much practised, is to allow the spot apparently suppurating to burst, when a threadlike substance emerges. This, the real cause of so much pain and swelling, is a long and almost endless worm, perfectly white, and of the substance of a thick cotton thread. Protruding sufficiently to be laid hold of, it is wound round a piece of reed as thick as a straw, and generally extracted by turning the reed until resistance is experienced . . . Each day the worm, morning and evening, is wound out of its unwelcome hiding-place; and an expert hand, in the course of a few days will succeed in extracting the entire worm, when the disease disappears. If, unfortunately, the worm is broken during extraction, it still continues to torment the patient; and causing great pain eventually reappears in another locality, when the operation of winding it out is recommenced.

  Smallpox received a less successful cure: the patient was laid out, completely nude, on a bed of ashes with the juice of raw onion continuously dripped into their eyes. The cure ceased only when the ashencrusted patient either recovered or died.

  To further fund his travels, Petherick was looking to trade ivory and had with him ‘some tons of glass beads, cowry shells and a variety of trifles in request by the negroes’. He had an armed escort of twenty Maghrebis from Kordofan – North African Arabs who had settled centuries earlier in Sudan.

  The party soon passed out of the area administered by the Turkish Egyptian government. Their boat traversed a maze of beautifully wooded islands, small blue monkeys bounding from tree to tree. ‘Mimosa and Heglig [the desert date, like a plum with an outsize stone, whose fruit are a preventative for bilharzia] were the predominant trees; the magnificence and beauty of their rich foliages I cannot describe.’ Moving upstream they encountered Shilluks, Dinka and Nuer. When a Nuer chief came aboard, the guns and knives of Petherick’s men were much admired. Immediately the chief ‘rose up on his knee [and], grasping my right hand and turning up the palm, he quietly spat into it; then, looking into my face, he elaborately repeated the process’. Having just been spat at (which in Egypt is a not an uncommon climax to a verbal row), Petherick wrote, ‘Staggered at the man’s audacity, my first impulse was to knock him down; but his features expressed such kindness that I vented my rage by returning the compliment with all possible interest. His delight seemed excessive, and returning to his seat, he expressed to his companions his conviction that I must be a great chief.’

  Petherick pressed on up the Nile past 8 degrees latitude into an area of marshy lakes thick with reeds: the Sudd. Hippopotami were now more common. The river became a baffling labyrinth. Eventually they found an island and attempted a landing. From nowhere, it seemed, ‘some hundreds of negroes assembled on the opposite side of the channel, and with frantic ejaculations of rage, wielding their lances and clubs on high, defied us to land on their shore . . . I found not a man that would follow me, nor a sailor to man the boat . . . I had no alternative but to return.’

  Weaker or less adventurous men would have left it at that, but a year later, in 1854, Petherick was back, with an increased number of men, determined to push on past the hostile island, his previous ‘furthest south’. Surprisingly this time there was no hostility and a small present of beads soon established cordial relations. It seems the aggressive natives had been not of the Raik, as these people were, but a party of marauding Nuer. Petherick decided to leave the Nile and investigate the interior. He then heard there were tribes with much ivory not far away.

  His party travelled from tribal group to tribal group, picking up guides and porters as they went. Always, they were told, the next tribe had ivory, great stores of ivory. Petherick waited three hours for the chief of the Wadj Koing to arrive ‘surrounded by the population, who, criticising and laughing at us, congratulated themselves on the rich spoil that had providentially fallen into their grasp’. The chief finally turned up and banged his club on the ground as he told Petherick they had no ivory and that he and his men must leave immediately. Petherick would not be beaten so easily. He told the chief that if he wasn’t more welcoming they would sack the village and burn their huts, and his own hut would be first. After the usual display of firearms, hostility was replaced by an interest in trading food for beads. But it soon became clear that Tschol, the chief, had other plans.

  Overnight the African porters were scared away and the guide disappeared. Petherick and his men now had no way of moving out unless they left behind their trade goods – which of course was Tschol’s plan. Petherick enticed the chief into his own hut and said he would shoot him before sundown unless they received water: the terrified chief signalled that they be allowed to drink. For food Petherick shot game and they subsisted off meat alone. He sent out two parties, one with his donkey loaded with beads – this was their only donkey and it had been brought for Petherick to ride. It was the first time these people had seen a man riding a creature and they declared that the beast was part of him, that in some way they were one creature – a rather humble nineteenth-century centaur. It is fascinating to speculate that the mythical origin of creatures half man half horse might lie in the recorded first reactions of people to mounted invaders. But such speculations were far from Petherick’s mind. His hope was that one of the two parties would encounter a hospitable tribe and, by trading beads, gain enough porters to enable them to return and rescue his property.

  After two weeks of waiting it all became rather desperate. Tschol saw that Petherick was drinking brandy each night and asked for some, knowing it was alcoholic as he himself drank manioc beer. Petherick was down to his last bottle so he gave the chief a glass of vinegar instead. The requests for brandy stopped.

  Every day Petherick shot game and read from the few books he had with him. The chief admitted they would have killed him long ago but for ‘my mysterious dealings with the little black marks on paper’. They feared his sorcery would cause the extermination of the tribe. Petherick was inspired by this admission and, capitalising on the
fact that there was a drought, he told the chief (after consulting very publicly an antiquated copy of the Weekly Times) that he could provide rain as long as the tribe could pass a special test.

  ‘Despatching some men to catch half a dozen large flies, bearing some resemblance to a horse fly but larger’, Petherick then trapped the flies in a bottle with a little flour. This he shook over the flies before telling the people that they had done wrong, had carried off women from neighbouring tribes, had murdered others and generally misbehaved, and until they made restitution by providing cattle to the people they had wronged the rains would not come. The people denied these charges but Petherick said he had the means to know they were lying: the fly bottle. If they could catch the flies when he released them, that would prove they were telling the truth. But if they couldn’t then they would have to repent and accept that they had to pay with cattle. Somehow Petherick had caught the imagination of the tribe and all were fascinated by the flour-covered flies buzzing within the bottle.

  Hundreds of clubs and lances were poised high in the air, amidst loud shouts of ‘Let them go! Let them go!’ With a prayer for the safety of my flies I held up the bottle and smashing it against the barrel of my rifle, I had the satisfaction of seeing the flies in the enjoyment of their liberty. Man, woman, and child gave chase in hot pursuit . . . it was not until after the sun had set that the crest-fallen stragglers returned. Their success having been limited to the capture of two flies, though several spurious ones, easily detected by the absence of the flour badge, were produced.