Egypt, like the Holy Land, was also ‘an alcohol free land’,1 where neither wine, whisky or beer were openly consumed by the population. The Koran bans the consumption of alcohol, although a thirsty Thackeray had found that a bottle of Bass beer or some local wine could be procured. Thomas, who had spent nearly thirty years fighting to suppress the use of alcoholic beverages, saw his convictions made real in Muslim countries.
The flamboyant Khedive, Ismail Pasha, grandson of Muhammad Ali and son of Ibrahim Pasha, was planning a grand celebration for the opening of the Suez Canal in November. Nine years since the first spadeful of sand had been turned – amidst conditions described by critics as slave labour – the engineers of the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez were finishing the giant sluice gates. The canal, 101 miles long, would cut 4,000 miles off the sea journey to Britain from India: it would no longer be necessary to sail around the capes of Africa or South America. A trip from Australia to England, one of the longest passenger journeys in the world, would be reduced from eight to about five weeks.
The canal was the result of Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt seventy years earlier in 1798. Scientists and artists from l’Institut de France, who had accompanied his army, had discovered the Ptolemaic ruins of the Suez Canal connecting the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Returning to Paris, Napoleon made a speech about plans to resurrect this waterway, which had started way back in about 1400 bc. Speeding up communication and cargo between the East and the West would bring outposts in France’s empire closer.
Ferdinand de Lesseps persisted with Napoleon’s plans. In 1854, he obtained a concession from the Khedive, Sa’id Pasha, in Egypt, but failed to raise the money in America, Britain and Russia. Finally, France and Egypt put up just enough – a year after Louis Napoleon, now Emperor, had married Eugenie, a cousin of none other than de Lesseps. An estimated 1.5 million Egyptians worked on the canal and 125,000 died, many from cholera.
Many British politicians believed a canal would bring an excess of French interests to Egypt, Syria and India. Hostility to the canal was widespread. British entrepreneurs had already set up a short cut overland. Passengers going to India often travelled overland to Brindisi, then by ship to Alexandria, by train to Cairo, and then to the Red Sea. Every year, thousands of people went from Alexandria by rail to Cairo – staying at the legendary Shepheard’s Hotel – before going on to Port Said in the Red Sea to board a ship to India. Shepheard’s, with marble columns, chandeliers, faded carpets and muted lighting, was one of the most famous old Middle Eastern hotels, catering both for travellers in transit to India, and the growing number of businessmen. Egyptian investment and trade with Britain had increased during the American Civil War when mills in Birmingham and Manchester, starved of American cotton, utilized the acres of cotton trees on the banks of the Nile. Such fine fibres were imported that British businessmen invested a great deal to increase its production.
Thomas promptly engaged two traditional Nile boats known as dahabieh on Gezirah Island, where the Prince and Princess of Wales, who were visiting Egypt well before the opening of the Suez Canal, were staying. The boats would take him to see the monuments associated with all that he had studied in Great Russell Street. Indeed, it was the continuation of a journey which had started in the museum in London, just as in Shelley’s sonnet ‘To the Nile’:
O’er Egypt’s land of memory floods are level,
And they are thine, O Nile! and well thou knowest
That soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil,
And fruits, and poisons spring where’er thou flowest.
The Khedive was said to be more than a little enamoured of the Empress Eugenie, and the most luxurious of the many new buildings going up were for her use – the Gezirah palace2 in Cairo and a ‘royal hunting lodge’3 near the Pyramids. In France, the republican press was having a heyday criticising the expense of the Empress’s trip and provocatively asking what impact her presence would have in a Muslim country where royal women were kept behind the lattice walls of the harem.
By chance (or was it?) Thomas’s journey down the river coincided with the departure of a flotilla of boats carrying the royal party. The Khedive was lavishly entertaining the Prince of Wales4 and had already presented him with a gaudy mummy (now in the British Museum), and for the five-week voyage down the Nile the royal party was said to be carrying ‘a supply of 3,000 bottles of champagne, 20,000 bottles of soda-water, 4,000 bottles of claret . . . sherry . . . ale, and liqueurs of all sorts’.
Forgetting his old fights with the currents in the Trent, Thomas decided to dive into the Nile. When the boat arrived at Thebes, while ‘bathing in shallows over the sands, I became instantaneously the sport of a rapid under-current, was carried beyond my depth, and the boatman had to reach out an oar to my rescue, whilst a group of Arabs on the shore called upon Allah to help me! – themselves, as I afterwards learnt, dreading to come to my rescue under the impression that a crocodile had seized me . . . This was my first and last attempt at bathing in the Nile.’
This was just one of the dramas on the cruise. Travelling with the royal party was William Howard Russell. Since Crimea his reports had brought down governments and altered the course of battles. Now his target was Thomas.
Russell accused Thomas’s group of travelling far too close to the royal vessel and trying to gate-crash the royal party. The Nile is one of the longest rivers in the world, and for most of the trip Thomas’s party in the Beniswaif and Benha was just behind the boats of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Russell wrote that ‘a cloud of smoke rises from a steamer astern’, referring to the vessel towing Thomas’s two dahabieh, and added that ‘Cook’s tourists have arrived! Their steamers are just below us in the stream. The tourists are all over the place. Some are bathing off the beaches: others with eccentric head-dresses . . . Another day and the Prince and Princess would have been at their mercy!’
In a series of libellous and damaging reports about Thomas and his tourists, he made fun of the way that his boat hounded the royal party. According to Russell, the Egyptian monuments were of secondary importance to these people; their primary aim was to rub shoulders with their future king and queen.5 In his book, A Diary in the East during the Visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales,6 published later in the same year, Russell wrote:
What might not be pardoned to Mr Cook’s Tourists, who were in full cry up the river after the Prince and Princess? Some of our companions had come from Brindisi with the British caravan, and gave accounts which did not tend to make us desire a closer acquaintance. Respectable people – worthy – intelligent – whatever you please; but all thrown off their balances by the prospect of running the Prince and Princess of Wales to earth in a Pyramid, of driving them to bay in the Desert, of hunting them into the recesses of a ruin – enraptured at the idea of being able to deliver ‘an address’ in the Temple of Karnak.
Outraged when some of Russell’s derisory comments appeared in The Times, Thomas wrote to the Prince himself – not forgetting to publish a copy of the letter in the Excursionist.
TWENTY-SIX
Jerusalem, Jerusalem
It was five o’clock in the morning. Thomas rose from his bed and went outside his tent. It was cold in the desert at dawn. The eastern horizon was already tinged with gold, though the western horizon remained grey. He looked for signs of an omen guaranteeing the success of the project ahead, for on that day they would proceed to Jerusalem overland in a caravan of sixty-five horses, eighty-seven pack mules, tents, beds and field kitchens to prepare hearty breakfasts of boiled eggs followed by chicken and cutlets, and dinners of seven courses including wild boar and mutton.
The previous afternoon, just before sunset, they had pulled up to camp and the accompanying Arab servants had set up twenty little iron bedsteads with soft mattresses and clean white sheets in tents. As if out of nowhere carpets were unrolled and pitchers, canvas basins, soap and towels produced so the honoured tourists could wash and dress f
or dinner. Some of the tourists were up early to pick desert flowers to press in their Bibles to take home, to which would be added bottles of holy water from the Jordan. The party Thomas was taking through Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Jericho was the first of thousands yet to come. Thomas showed his regret that previously he had been dissuaded by Silk Buckingham from venturing to the Holy Land:
It is a great consolation that at the present time there are no serious impediments to Palestine travel. The country is remarkably free from epidemics, and the tribes are at peace . . . The lack of smooth roads and easy roads is the chief difficulty. Sometimes travellers fall into the hands of haughty, imperious dragomans, who lord over them with almost unbelievable hauteur, and as none can travel alone here, all have to submit to this disagreeable necessity . . . A tour is proposed, horses, mules, tents, provisions of all kinds are arranged, and the traveller is committed to the care of his dragoman for 20, 30, or 40 days, for which payment must be made, whatever happens to the tourist.
Most of all that day would be the longed-for moment of Thomas seeing the cradle of Christianity, Jerusalem. He was arriving at the right time, for until just over a decade earlier the activities of Protestants, especially British or American Nonconformists, had been proscribed, neither could they build churches. This had changed after Britain had helped the Sultan defeat the Russians in the Crimea War and British politicians had negotiated wider rights for both Christians and Jews. Thomas knew that faith was deepened when biblical stories were relived. For him the existence of God based on the history of the Old Testament and the Gospels could not be proven, but the effectiveness of religious practice was obvious.
Thomas was overwhelmed at the sight of the Promised Land. He saw a few well-terraced and cultivated areas, which grew grapes, olives and figs; the meagre tracts where wheat had once grown now appeared desolate and stony. Arab women intermittently passed by with their goats.
This trip combined Thomas’s religious mission with business. He had been warned by Baedeker’s Guide that the pleasure of trips to the Holy Land depended ‘on the health and energy of the traveller, on the weather and on a host of incidental circumstances which do not occur in Europe’.1 It also required being good in the saddle, and many of the tourists, like Thomas, had not been trained to ride. When someone fell out of their saddle he jokingly called it ‘saluting the ground’. They had to learn to control the animals because the dragomen let off their rifles and a trumpeter sang wild songs when the party went into certain areas of Bedouin territory.2
The new road, built in 1867 along the ancient route of Motza to Abu Ghosh to Bab al-Wad, made travel much less arduous and increased the tourist trade, but winter rains created huge potholes and washed away chunks. Patrols against highwaymen and Bedouins were also improved, but tourists still usually travelled in parties, almost in the form of a caravan. Five years before the Jaffa– Jerusalem road was started, the first carriage road in all Syria had been built between Damascus and the port of Beirut.
One of the insurmountable hurdles, which lingered on well into the twentieth century, was the woeful docking facilities for larger ships at Jaffa, the ancient, but shallow, port through which Herod had imported the cedars of Lebanon for the Temple of Jerusalem. As modern ships were too large to tie up at the old wooden jetties, passengers were transferred from ship to shore in rowing boats. When it was rough, which it often is in the winter and spring months of November and May, landing or boarding could be perilous. Summer was too hot and had the added danger of mosquito fevers – malaria was not yet defined. Another deterrent to tourism was also looming – the Russian–Turkish war.
The climax to Thomas’s life was arriving in Jerusalem. After eight hours a day on horseback for two days, he saw the dome of the mosque in the distance. From an early age Thomas had been unable to speak the name of Jesus without reverence or awe, so the excursion was far more than sightseeing. Arriving at biblical sites he had visualised since childhood was an intense experience. Sunday school books and prints had fuelled his vision of the Bible lands and merged fact and fiction. There was a huge gap between the idealised illustrations, almost saccharine in their depictions, and the reality of what was before him.
Disraeli, too, had been similarly overwhelmed. His description of Jerusalem in his novel Tancred in 1847 reflects how he fell under the city’s mystical aura during his visit sixteen years earlier:
we saw the Holy City. I will describe it to you from the Mount of Olives. This is a high hill, still partially covered with the tree which gives it its name. Jerusalem is situated upon an opposite height which descends as a steep ravine. . . . As the town is built upon a hill you can from the opposite height discern the roof of almost every house. In the front is the magnificent mosque built upon the site of the Temple. A variety of domes and towers rise in all directions. The houses are of bright stone. I was thunderstruck. I saw before me apparently a gorgeous city. Nothing can be conceived more wild and terrible and barren than the surrounding scenery, dark, strong, and severe; but the ground is thrown about in such picturesque undulation. . . . Except Athens I never saw anything more essentially striking, no city except that whose sight was so pre-eminently impressive.
Thomas longed for thousands to share his own wonder of standing on the Mount of Olives – from where the earthly form of Jesus was last seen by man – and feel the windy gusts while viewing Jerusalem. His tourists could walk on the sacred ground once trodden on by Christ to Calvary, the places where He fell, where He was insulted, where He was nailed to the Cross; the churches and shrines at the sites of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem; where Solomon had dwelt; where Abraham had spoken and where walls still stood which had witnessed the spectacle of the Crucifixion.
Regardless of his ecumenical leanings, Thomas would not pray under the majestic mosaics of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, or kneel beside the alleged location of the empty tomb of Jesus where the Angel had said, ‘He is not here! He has arisen.’ That, he believed, was a place for Roman Catholics and members of the Orthodox churches. He was dismissive of the kitsch souvenirs and spurious relics sold outside the church.
His two groups encamped just outside the Jaffa Gate at Jerusalem. He preferred the cleanliness of camping to the possible accommodation in the small hotels, religious hospices or convents. Like many Nonconformists he was reluctant to stay in Roman Catholic establishments run by priests or nuns. Besides the tents, temporary stables were set up to shade the horses and donkeys, ready for tours to Bethlehem, Solomon’s Pools, Mar Saba, the Dead Sea, the Jordan, Jericho and for Hebron and other places in the south. ‘Adroit thieves’ was a term used by some travellers to describe the Bedouin, who proved their skill on the night of 24 March, a few days before Easter. The thieves floated through the tents without waking one of the sixty-five British men and women in the camp, plus double the number of Arab servants and horse-handlers. They took £450 cash in gold napoleons and other belongings. Servants were under suspicion and were arrested by the Turkish authorities, but Thomas pleaded their case and they were released.
The year of Thomas’s arrival coincided with water supplies to Jerusalem being improved and gas lights being installed. Camels, which for centuries had been such obstructions on the alleyways, were now banned. He had other problems though, including armed bandits, beggars, unpredictable sheikhs, excess baggage, escorting tourists up steep unpaved roads – and too many demands for baksheesh. Thomas engaged dragomen as interpreters, guides and bodyguards. Some of them wore the striped kaftan, Arab headdress and a loose belt sporting an ornamental dagger or two and were descendants of the ancient traders, men who knew about frankincense, myrrh, spices, silks and eastern officialdom.
For many tourists, including Thomas, the first sight of the Jordan, like that of Jerusalem, was a moving experience. With white robes billowing in the muddy waters, Thomas let the waters flow around him while he stood in the very place where Jesus Christ had been baptised3 on this bend in the Jordan by John the Baptist eighteen hun
dred years earlier. While Thomas would drink water from the Jordan, he considered bottling it for baptisms and christenings both ‘superstitious and ritualistic’.4
Thomas would later fulfil more of his old ambitions with his ‘Biblical Educational and General Tours for Ministers, Sunday school teachers and others engaged in promoting scriptural education’. These focused on the Holy Places, the missions and their schools, and the newly unearthed relics of the past ‘Biblical excavations’. He enthused about the pleasure of coming to ‘see these wonderful places and countries . . . with the Bible in one hand and Murray in the other, to trace out sites and scenes immortalized by imperishable events’.5
Each tourist had a Bible, a hymn book, a guide book and a folding map. On foot, mule, donkey or horse, they sang English hymns or the psalms of David. Once, a clergyman, Edwin Hodder, borrowed a hornpipe and danced the Highland fling at Solomon’s Pools. Some wanted wine, but, after tasting it, one tourist quipped that, if it was served to the American public,6 it would encourage ‘total abstinence with enthusiasm’.
On his first trip, sightseeing was interrupted by an unexpected occurrence. At 3a.m. one morning, the aged Mrs Samuels died and the body had to be crated and secretly carried until a suitable place for burial was found. Miss Riggs of Hampstead recounted in her journal:
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