by Brian Fagan
At about this time, Belzoni met and married his wife, Sarah. We know very little about her, except that she was about twenty years old when she met her future husband. She is variously described as being of English or Irish birth. The marriage was childless and one of perennial wandering in Europe and, later, Egypt. In the twenty-odd years of the Belzonis’ marriage, they never had a permanent home or strong family ties. Yet the marriage was apparently a happy one, although Sarah did not hesitate to go off on her own or remain behind if her husband’s activities bored her. She endured discomfort, hardship, and long separations with a remarkable equanimity. Her “Trifling Account” in Belzoni’s biography is an insight into an observant and basically shrewd woman who had a wry sense of humor and was respected by Turk and Egyptian alike. Sarah outlived Belzoni by almost fifty years, eventually dying in dignified obscurity in the Channel Islands in 1870, long forgotten by the general public.
Accompanied by his new wife, Belzoni became a familiar figure on the circus and fair circuit, performing in Scotland and Ireland as well as London and the provinces at all manner of entertainments. The Belzonis wandered the length and breadth of the British Isles, caged in by Napoléon’s campaigns and severe restrictions on foreign travel. But in 1812 Wellington liberated the southern ports of Spain, including Madrid, and Belzoni ventured abroad. His travel document has survived, showing that he was accompanied by his faithful Irish servant, James Curtin, but not by Sarah.
The pair visited Lisbon—where Belzoni may have performed in the São Carlos Theatre—Gibraltar, and Malaga before returning to England in time for a well-publicized series of performances in Oxford, Belzoni’s last recorded show-business appearances in England. The handbill of the first performance, at the Blue Boar Tavern, St. Aldate’s, Oxford, on Monday, February 22, 1813, offered an impressive bill of fare. A conjuring turn was followed by a performance on musical glasses. The “French Hercules” demonstrated “several striking Attitudes, from the most admired antique statues uniting Grace and Expression with Muscular strength.” A “Grand and Brilliant Display of Optical Illusions entitled the Aggrescopius” completed the performance.5
Before leaving England, Belzoni called on Charles Dibdin and told him that he had returned to recruit performers for theaters in Portugal. Whether he took any actors to Lisbon with him we do not know, but in mid-1813 the Belzoni family and James Curtin were in Lisbon and Madrid. After performing at various centers, the Belzonis traveled in Sicily, where we find them in November 1814 exchanging letters with the family in Padua.
Belzoni made no effort to visit his hometown. His wanderlust was turning him in the direction of Constantinople, one of the great centers of popular entertainment in the Western world. The sultan of Turkey was forever laying on vast popular festivals that often lasted for several weeks. Conjurers and wrestlers, acrobats and jugglers were in constant demand. Italians from Bologna, a town close to Belzoni’s home community, designed firework displays and illuminations, so he may have had connections at court. He knew, also, that the sultan made considerable use of foreign artists in entertainments and spectacles. Instead of returning home, the Belzonis crossed to Malta on their leisurely way to the Turkish capital. They lodged in Valletta for nearly six months, enjoying a respite from the constant strain of traveling and performing in strange places. It was here that Belzoni had a chance encounter with Captain Ishmail Gibraltar, an agent of Pasha Muhammad Ali, an event that changed his life.
Muhammad Ali’s thirty years of rule produced extraordinary changes, many of them far from permanent, for their ultimate success depended on the strong leadership of Ali himself. He himself described Egypt as “utterly barbarous.” He advised visitors from Europe not to expect the comforts and stability of home. Much of government was in the hands of Turks, but the reins of official expenditure were tightly controlled by Muhammad Ali. His trusted Armenian minister, Boghos Bey, was ordered to implement a European style of budget mechanism, with detailed accounts and a public audit system, that was successful in keeping Ali’s government out of the hands of European moneylenders, even if much corruption still remained.6 The pasha turned to Europe for expert advice on agricultural improvements, industry, and economic development.
Unfortunately, many of his most ambitious schemes were failures. The French engineer Linant de Bellefonds designed a barrage across the Nile that was supposed to permit complete irrigation of the delta, even in poor flood years.7 When it was completed, water seeped under the inadequate foundations. The pasha invested vast sums in cotton mills, a tannery, and other commercial ventures. The more elaborate factories failed. Machinery was neglected and never oiled, management sporadic. Peasant farmers were unused to the monotony and regularity of factory work and were soon recruited by force. All the same, Ali transformed many aspects of Egyptian life, with the help of European experts, some of them genuine, others pure renegades or the opportunistic dregs of society.
The pasha recruited most of his experts through chance encounter or with the help of numerous overseas agents. Ishmail Gibraltar, a sea captain, was one such agent, employed to search out engineers and industrial experts who would introduce new products and agricultural methods to replace those that were still in use almost unchanged from the days of the pharaohs.
Captain Gibraltar encountered Belzoni at a time when the strongman was contemplating the commercial value of his various talents in the relative peace of Malta. Belzoni and Gibraltar quickly became fast friends, a friendship that soon had the Italian talking of his idea for a new design of waterwheel that would revolutionize the Egyptian economy. The new water pump would be powered by one ox instead of many, be of simple and robust design, and be cheap to manufacture.
Gibraltar was sufficiently impressed by Belzoni’s enthusiasm and apparent expertise to arrange for him to visit Cairo and build a prototype for the pasha. Soon afterward, on May 19, 1815, Belzoni, Sarah, and James Curtin took ship for Alexandria, where they arrived three weeks later, only to be greeted by the news that the plague was raging in the town.8 Soon the Belzonis made their way ashore, stepping gingerly over the piles of garbage and through narrow streets. They sought lodging in a French house where they were isolated from the rest of the town in a state of quarantine, at that time about the only preventive measure against the plague that seemed to work.
The Belzonis’ introduction to Egypt was hardly auspicious. They began by succumbing to a stomach disorder that they carefully concealed from the other lodgers for fear that panic would ensue, for several Europeans had died of the plague in recent days. Giovanni and Sarah suffered under the uninspiring company of their neighbors in the quarantine house. The plague eased by the end of June, and Belzoni was able to get about the town. He called on the British and French consuls, then in Alexandria, who received him with interest. Colonel Ernest Missett, the British representative, was crippled by ill health and about to retire from his post. Apparently, he showed less interest in Belzoni than did the former French vice consul, Bernardino Drovetti, himself of Italian birth, who seems to have taken to the visitor and given him a great deal of assistance.
Drovetti gave Belzoni some letters of introduction to useful people in Cairo and seemed interested in the Italian’s hydraulic designs. One suspects that his motives were partly political, for he had already learned that the British planned to give the pasha a steam engine and pumping machine, gifts that had arrived in Alexandria in the company of a mechanic at about the time that Belzoni came on the scene. Belzoni must also have seen some of Drovetti’s antiquities and heard firsthand stories of the excitement and profits of archaeological discovery.
Colonel Missett’s residence was an important rendezvous for travelers to the Nile, even in times of pestilence and plague. When Belzoni called on the consul, he was introduced to William Turner, a young gentlemandiplomat who was in the middle of a leisurely tour through the Near East.9 This charming and intelligent young traveler took an immediate liking to the Belzonis and left an engaging descriptio
n of their journey to Cairo, for they joined company in hiring a boat to carry them up the Nile.
The journey was a fascinating experience for the newcomers, who took five days to make the trip across the Nile bar at the Rosetta mouth and journey through the lush delta country. After the heat and dust of Alexandria, the green oasis of Rosetta and the slow-moving Nile were a revelation, for the travelers were able to observe a way of life along its banks that had not changed for centuries. Then, on the morning of the fifth day, their small sailing boat came to Bulaq, the principal port of Cairo. Turner lodged at a convent, while the Belzonis set up house in a residence provided them by the pasha’s minister, Boghos Bey.
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Cairo was an imposing sight for the arriving traveler accustomed to the flat monotony of the Nile Delta. The domes and minarets of its many mosques rose above a pall of smoke from innumerable household fires. The city was a bustling, cosmopolitan metropolis, lying a little distance from the right bank of the Nile under the Mukattam Hills. Palm trees and cultivated fields bordered the river. The pyramids of Giza hovered on the skyline in the distance. For more than a thousand years, a city with imposing walls and a citadel had flourished on this spot. William Turner estimated that at least 250,000 people inhabited the streets and bazaars of the busy city, after Constantinople probably the most influential political and economic center in the Near East.
This sprawling commercial center was the terminus of long-distance caravan routes throughout North Africa and the Near East. Timbuktu, the Niger, Damascus, Aleppo, India, and possibly even the Far East could be reached by caravan. No one dreamed of traveling alone through the hostile desert, where drought, marauding raiders, and the crosscurrents of political intrigue could halt a caravan for weeks or even years. Thousands of merchants and their families spent their entire lives wandering over enormous distances, following trading opportunities and bartering all manner of commodities for other merchandise in kind. The bazaars of Cairo thrived on the caravan trade. Cotton, flax, grain, and a thousand and one useful and useless products of Near Eastern craftsmen passed along the caravan routes, in exchange for raw materials and exotic objects from Africa and Asia: slaves, gold, ivory, salt, spices, rhinoceros horn (a well-known aphrodisiac), ostrich shells, fine clothes, and china.
The city was a maze of narrow streets and dilapidated houses. Peddlers and street vendors thronged small alleys boasting of their wares. Small shops housed the many craftsmen for which Cairo was famous; goldsmiths and silversmiths lived in one quarter, while potters and leather workers had their own streets. One could buy, or experience, anything in Cairo— for a price. At night the city was quieter. Wooden doors blocked off many of the streets. The authorities locked the great gates of the central precincts each night. Huge mosques dominated the city’s architecture—among them al-Azhar, a major center of Islamic learning for more than a millennium, and the oldest foundation of all, the mosque built by Ibn Tulun in the ninth century.10
The anonymous laborers of ancient Egypt had shaped large granite blocks for pyramids and temples. Islamic contractors industriously quarried away at this convenient source of good stone for Cairo’s more imposing buildings and mosques. Beyond Ezbekiya Square with its gardens, flooded each August when the Nile rose above its banks, there were few open spaces. Much of Cairo consisted of decaying slums. New shacks and hovels rose on the ruins of old ones. Piles of garbage strewed both streets and courtyards, the home of countless scavenging animals.
Few Europeans lived in Cairo except for some consular representatives, a handful of French merchants who had stayed on after Napoléon’s occupation, and a small community of government advisers and travelers. Solid wooden doors isolated the European quarter from the rest of the city, closing off the residences at sunset and in times of plague, riot, or political hostility. A visitor would lodge in the European quarter or, if space was not available, would take up residence at Bulaq, the main port for Cairo to the northwest of the city. The pasha and other wealthy Cairenes built luxurious summer palaces with cool gardens in this quarter of the city. Of the French occupation, little remained. Napoléon’s grand plans for great boulevards and impressive buildings had come to nothing. The tiny French community preserved some French interests in the city, which continued to flourish in a decaying, hothouse atmosphere of fast-flowing trade, constant political instability, and intrigue. No one with any taste for the Islamic world could resist the tawdry charm of Cairo.
The Belzoni family disembarked at Bulaq and took up lodgings in a house allocated them by Boghos Bey. His generosity did not extend to palatial lodgings. Their first Cairo residence was hardly inspiring. The windows were boarded up, there was no lock on the front door, and the roof was in danger of collapse. Sarah laid out their sheets and mattresses on the floor of one of the least-ruinous and cleaner rooms. They took their meals sitting on the floor and waited for an audience with the pasha.
Boghos Bey arranged the interview for a week later, but the encounter never took place. Belzoni was riding to the citadel on an ass when a cursing Turkish soldier on horseback, angry at foreigners because he had been ordered to learn European drills, struck him with his sharp stave on the right leg. The blow struck off “a piece of flesh in triangular form two inches deep and pretty broad.” The gash on his leg laid him up for several weeks. When the interview eventually did materialize, Belzoni was politely received. He described his invention and undertook to build a prototype “which would raise as much water with one ox, as the machines of the country with four.” Muhammad Ali was “much pleased with my proposal,” wrote Belzoni, “as it will save the labor and expense of many thousands of oxen in the country.”11
The building of the prototype took longer than had been anticipated. Turkish soldiers in Cairo mutinied and attempted to storm the citadel. They were rebuffed by the guards and embarked on a rampage of looting and destruction. Belzoni rashly entered the city at the height of the mutiny and was robbed of all his money and his passport when attempting to return to Sarah in Bulaq. The pasha remained inside the citadel for more than a month until the mutiny, over the adoption of European drills in the military, had subsided. But eventually things quieted down, and life returned to normal. The Belzonis moved into a small home near the pasha’s palace at Shubra, then an upscale suburb, now one of the most crowded areas of the city. They lived off a small subsistence allowance from the government. The pump was to be erected in the nearby pasha’s garden.
Meanwhile, their friend William Turner was busy visiting notables in Cairo and arranging various excursions in and around the city, among them a trip to the pyramids. Belzoni joined the party for the donkey journey out to Giza by moonlight. Soon after sunrise, the travelers stood at the chilly summit of the Great Pyramid of Khufu, admiring the fine view of Cairo and the Nile spread out at their feet. After breakfast, they explored the interior of the pyramid and fired off their pistols in Khufu’s burial chamber, a deafening pastime that must have caused them acute discomfort. Belzoni does not seem to have exhibited anything more than the tourist’s usual curiosity about the pyramids.
The long delays in obtaining materials and parts for a pump left Belzoni with much time on his hands. The Belzonis had time to go on another excursion with Turner, this time to Saqqara, where more pyramids and the famous mummy pits were to be seen. The Nile was in flood, so they traveled by boat across the flooded fields. After a night in the open, they mounted donkeys for the ride to the famous Step Pyramid built for the pharaoh Djoser (2668–2649 BC), although, of course, the visitors did not know this. They climbed to the top of the pyramid and then breakfasted in its shadow, before deciding not to visit the mummy pits, for the local people told them that ladders and a lamp were necessary. One of the servants was dispatched to fetch a mummy of an ibis. Half an hour later he returned with a narrow jar sealed with a clay stopper, which, he assured them, was a genuine antiquity containing a mummified bird. The Europeans laughed at him, whereupon the furious Arab dashed the pot to the gr
ound and picked up a small bundle of decaying mummy fabric from the broken pot, indeed the remains of a mummified bird. Such jars were commonly empty and sold to gullible tourists as genuine antiquities.
These side trips were but intervals between Belzoni’s frantic efforts to build a prototype machine for the pasha. He was delayed on all sides. The pasha’s chief engineer was sick, good-quality wood was not available, and permits for construction could not be obtained. Belzoni’s plans were quietly opposed by many bureaucrats, strongly resistant to many of the reforms proposed by the pasha, who respected Western ways of doing business.
By mid-1816, Belzoni’s pumping machine was complete, “built on the principle of a crane with a walking wheel, in which a single ox, by its own weight alone, could effect as much as four oxen employed in the machines of the country.”12 Belzoni demonstrated his invention before the pasha and “several connaisseurs in hydrauliks.” The demonstration took place in the palace gardens, where his prototype machine stood alongside six saqquias, the traditional waterwheels used for thousands of years on the banks of the Nile. Belzoni drove an ox into his treadmill drum. Water cascaded down the irrigation channels in the pasha’s garden. The owners of the six saqquias lashed their oxen into a frenzy, trying to emulate the flood of water pouring from Belzoni’s waterwheel.
The pasha was impressed, conferred with his advisers, and pronounced that Belzoni’s machine was as good as four saqquias. But his advisers, who sensed reduced manpower and profits, were unimpressed at the efficiency of yet another European invention, and the pasha hesitated. He knew he would lose serious face if he was perceived publicly as economizing on either manpower or oxen. To stall for time, he asked what would happen if men replaced the ox in the treadmill. A crowd of excited Arabs jumped into the treadmill wheel. James Curtin, Belzoni’s young servant, joined in. The wheel moved merrily and the water flooded, until the Arabs suddenly jumped out, leaving the young boy by himself as a counterweight to the mass of water. He was flung out of the wheel and broke a leg. Belzoni’s machine was doomed to failure after that. Ali’s Turkish admirers were relieved. No pasha in his right mind would adopt a pumping machine so lethal as this sinister new device. Belzoni’s hopes and ambitions as a hydraulic engineer collapsed around him in a few minutes.
