Colonel William Francis Butler writes of his astonishment and pleasure at seeing a Canadian birch-bark canoe on the Nile, above the second cataract; it was paddled by William Prince, ‘Chief of the Swampy Indians’, whom Butler had last met fourteen years before during the Red River expedition in Canada, a man ‘grown more massive of frame … but still keen of eye and steady of hand as when I last saw him standing bowman in a bark canoe among the whirling waters whose echoes were lost in the endless pine woods of the great Lone Land’.
One of the most extraordinary aspects of the relief expedition was the employment of Mohawk Indians from Canada to help navigate the whaleboats that were supposed to take British troops on to Khartoum. As well as west African ‘Kroomen’ – boatmen from the Kroo (Kru) tribe, admired by Wolseley when he led his campaign against the Ashanti in 1873 – the expedition included 400 Canadian voyageurs, drawn from the community of backwoodsmen and fur-traders who had helped Wolseley’s Red River expedition in Canada in 1870. The elite among them were some sixty Mohawk men from the Ottawa valley, Iroquoian speakers, many with French blood, who were descendants of the feared Iroquois allies of the British in the wars against America. By the mid nineteenth century they specialised in guiding rafts of logs down the Ottawa river, and would have been familiar to the British army engineers and their families based in Ottawa to build and maintain the Rideau Canal, part of a communication and supply network designed to impede American attack. In my novel, Major Ormerod, second in command of the contingent, as well as Mayne’s companion Charrière, are both fictional, but are inspired by real-life characters; several of the Mohawks on the Nile were veterans of the Red River expedition, and at least one had also served in the Union Army in the American Civil War. The voyageur contingent was a civilian force, and suffered no battle casualties – of the sixteen deaths, six were drownings in the Nile, the rest from illness – though it provided a precedent for the dispatch of Canadian volunteers to the Boer War and the First World War, when soldiers of Iroquois and other aboriginal descent had a high reputation as scouts and snipers and many were killed in action.
As an archaeologist, I have always been fascinated by the reverence given to relics of Gordon after his death, when he was promoted in popular imagination to something akin to sainthood – a transformation ironically only possible through his death, but which was undoubtedly encouraged by those who wished to deflect public attention from their failure to rescue him. His elevation had begun while he was still alive, and burgeoned once he was in Khartoum. His Reflections in Palestine, compiled from his notes ‘with anxious care by more than one of the writer’s friends’, shows an almost mystical reverence towards his every word, with every inchoate thought they could find put into print; Gordon the saint might have looked upon their efforts with indulgence, but it is hard to believe that Gordon the Royal Engineer would have approved. Afterwards his admirers hunted everywhere for relics, some of them of dubious authenticity. The Royal Engineers Museum contains a fragment of the wooden staircase where he was thought to have died, said to have been removed from the palace at Khartoum when it was demolished in 1898; any doubts about its authenticity would be dispelled in the mind of the believer by the silver case topped with a cross that holds it, just like a medieval reliquary. More bizarrely, the museum houses a box said to have come from Rudolf von Slatin, containing among other things one of Gordon’s teeth, his last match and pencil, and the corpse of a fly said to have walked on his nose!
The Gordon Relics Committee was concerned not with these kinds of relics but with the important collection of ethnographic, historic and archaeological artefacts that Gordon amassed during his various postings, including much material from the Sudan. A remarkable display of this material in the Royal Engineers Museum at Chatham was one of the inspirations for this novel. Gordon had a considerable interest in archaeology, in common with many of his fellow engineer officers – men who by vocation were concerned with structures and artefacts – and like many of them he was a devout though idiosyncratic Christian, fascinated by the Holy Land and the discoveries being made there and in surrounding lands touched on by the Bible. Two of the engineers on the Gordon relief expedition, Kitchener and Wilson, were among the foremost field archaeologists of the nineteenth century, responsible for surveys in Palestine that remain the basis for archaeological knowledge of the Holy Land today. They were also close friends of Gordon’s, and as the senior intelligence officers of the relief expedition were deeply implicated in everything that went on. All three men would have shared a fascination with the archaeology of Egypt and the desert to the south because of its biblical connections; it is possible to imagine them joining together on the kind of collective endeavour envisaged in this novel, with Gordon’s search for artefacts allied to his own yearning for the personal revelation in the desert that he might have imagined inspiring Akhenaten, as well as the Mahdi.
The events of 1884–5 had a dramatic impact on archaeology in Egypt. The war with the Mahdi and the rise of jihad in the Sudan in the 1880s has much modern resonance, but the fascination with this period today stems not only from the grip that the Gordon relief expedition held over the nation – indeed, the world – at that time, but also from the fact that many in Britain today have ancestors who served in Egypt and the Sudan, or visited during the early years of British rule. My own maternal great-grandfather went to Egypt with the 6th Dragoon Guards in 1882, arriving shortly after the battle of Tel el-Kebir; my daughter’s maternal great-great-grandfather was a civil engineer who worked on the first Aswan dam in the 1890s, when he lived with his family in Cairo. Aside from those who were stationed in Egypt, the opening in 1867 of the Suez Canal, the ‘Gateway to India’ and the primary motivation for British interest in Egypt, meant that the thousands travelling to and from India who had previously gone via the Cape of Good Hope now went past Egypt, and a stopover in Cairo to see the pyramids, and Luxor became as obligatory as the sites of Greece and Rome had been to the ‘Grand Tourists’ of a century before. The fascination today with ancient Egypt stems from the accessibility of its monuments after the British takeover, not only to wealthy travellers but also to soldiers and their families going to and from India. From that perspective, the war with the Mahdi and his successors – drawing the British ever further into involvement with Egypt and the Sudan – is closely interlinked with the rise of Egyptology as a discipline, and the development of archaeological investigations which eventually led to fabulous discoveries such as Tutankhamun’s tomb.
In the 1880s, the more adventurous tourists could travel by boat on the Nile to Akhenaten’s capital at Amarna and the temple at Abu Simbel, its original site now submerged deep beneath the waters of Lake Nasser just north of the border with Sudan. Few ventured further south into the Nubian desert, where the Aswan dam has greatly changed the appearance of the Nile today, inundating the cataracts that proved such an obstacle to Wolseley’s expedition in 1884. The surrounding desert remains much as it was then; at the battlefield of Abu Klea, the British zariba can still be traced, and it is possible to find the odd Martini-Henry cartridge, but it is a place like others of much greater antiquity in the desert, from the time of the pharaohs and even earlier, where the wind and the scorching sun seem to have reduced evidence of human endeavour to the same dusty footprint.
Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi, died in the same fateful year as Gordon, whether by illness or by poison is uncertain. The possibility that his assassination was ordered by the British cannot be ruled out; Kitchener’s intelligence network and loyal Ababda followers could have found a way to infiltrate his camp. Kitchener had sworn to avenge Gordon, to take a dervish life for every hair on Gordon’s head, a promise amply fulfilled in 1898 when he led his army against the Mahdi’s successor at the battle of Omdurman, just outside Khartoum; but his desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb earned the opprobrium of Queen Victoria herself, and helped to fuel a new generation of jihadists.
Today at Khartoum there is little left that was visi
ble in 1885, with the palace being a more recent structure and the course of the Nile having altered the appearance of the foreshore and Tutti island. However, the palace was built on the site of the original, and it is possible to look out on it from the far shore of the Blue Nile as my character Mayne does, from the site where an abandoned fort is marked on contemporary maps. The disposition of the Mahdi’s forces and the appearance of Khartoum in its final days are documented by eyewitness accounts, including that of Colonel Wilson, who came within sight of the palace in the steamer Bordein the day after Gordon died.
Outside the city at Omdurman, the tomb of the Mahdi has been restored; Omdurman is also the site of one of the few surviving relics in Sudan of the 1884–5 campaign: the hull of the Bordein, saved from scrapping in 2010 and now on display. The site where the Abbas was wrecked, the basis for the dive in this novel, has never been investigated underwater, though the account of guns and equipment being thrown overboard suggests that artefacts must still exist on the bed of the Nile; the site was visited by Colonel William Francis Butler several months after the wrecking, when he saw much material strewn about. My inspiration for its appearance comes from a wreck of similar size, date and depth that I have dived on frequently in Canada, in a fresh-water environment that would have preserved timber and metal in a similar way to the Nile. You can see a film of me diving at night on that wreck, and another of me shooting a Martini-Henry rifle, as well as images of medals, contemporary illustrations of the Nile campaign and portraits of the main historical characters involved, on my website www.davidgibbins.com.
The quotes at the front of the book, and the quote on the Leviathan in Chapter 6, are derived from an 1885 edition of the King James version of the Bible; at the front of the book and in Chapters 14 and 21 (the letter from the Mahdi) from The Journals of Major-General C. G. Gordon at Kartoum, printed from the original mss (cited above); in the Prologue (the hymn to Sobek) from Papyrus Ramesseum 6 (EA10759.1), translated in the British Museum online Research Catalogue; in Chapter 3 (the Semna dispatch) from Semna Despatches 80–1 (BM10752), also in the British Museum online catalogue; in Chapter 4 (War Office report on Semna) from Lieutenant Colonel H. E. Colvile, History of the Sudan Campaign, compiled in the Intelligence Division of the War Office (1889); in Chapter 9 (on crocodiles) from Plutarch, Moralia 75; and in the Author’s Note from William Francis Butler, The Campaign of the Cataracts (cited above), and Rudyard Kipling, Barrack-Room Ballads (1892).
Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7) Page 38
