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Chapter 1 A Cablegram from London

In 1884, Canada was a self-governing dominion within the British Empire, occupying most of its current land mass after having expanded enormously following the 1867 confederation of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the United Province of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec). In that modernizing Victorian country of four and a half million people, telegraph lines provided rapid communication between its capital of Ottawa, its other major centres, and a good portion of the rest of the North American continent. Even much of the world beyond stood within a few hours’ reach because of the transatlantic cable, which had been laid across the ocean floor from Ireland to Newfoundland in 1866, and which allowed people to connect to other parts of the globe using lines emanating from Europe. On August 20, 1884, the Colonial Office at the imperial centre in London sent a cablegram across the Atlantic to Canada’s governor general, Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, fifth marquess of Lansdowne. Because of the time of year, the message — in cipher — reached him at his summer residence within the Quebec Citadel instead of his primary home at Rideau Hall in Ottawa.¹ Decoded, the note said, in part, “it is proposed to endeavour to engage three hundred good voyageurs from Caughnawaga, Saint Regis, and Manitoba as steersmen in boats for Nile expedition — engagement for six months with passage to and from Egypt.”² Eight days later, London sent another cablegram, increasing the request to five hundred men.³

The “Caughnawaga” and “Saint Regis” mentioned in the cablegram were Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee) territories with mostly Mohawk (or Kanienkehaka) populations on the Saint Lawrence River. Today we generally know them as Kahnawake and Akwesasne (and in the end, a third Mohawk community, Kanesatake, or Oka, on the Ottawa River, also contributed men for service in Africa). Imperial officials intended the reference to Manitoba to indicate native rather than white river pilots from that part of the country, although the aboriginal people who came from there were not Iroquois, being Saulteaux Ojibways instead. The British government needed skilled voyageurs to guide whaleboats full of troops and supplies through the perilous cataracts of the Nile River in Egypt’s rebellious province of Sudan. The objective of the expedition was to rescue one of the heroes of the age, Major-General Charles Gordon, who had begun the sixth month of his defence of the provincial capital of Khartoum against thousands of Muslim nationalists led by a man known to his followers as “the Mahdi.” About two weeks after Lord Lansdowne received London’s request, his military secretary, Gilbert Elliot, Viscount Melgund, travelled to Kahnawake to join a Canadian militia officer in recruiting Mohawks. Then, on September 15, 1884, three-and-a-half weeks after the Colonial Office had sent the first note, the “Canadian Voyageur Contingent” sailed from Quebec City on what would be a remarkable journey for its members as they participated in the campaign to save General Gordon.⁴ In the end, the expedition would fail: the whaleboats would not reach Khartoum, the city would fall, Gordon would be beheaded, and Britain would abandon most of Sudan to the nationalists until the latter 1890s. Despite the army’s lack of success, the story of the Mohawk journey to Sudan is a good one that can capture our imagination and reveal much about the Iroquois world. It also presents us with an opportunity to consider how native people in eastern North America faced the challenges and opportunities of modernization as well as their relations with the larger world within frameworks that both emerged from and protected indigenous cultural values. Additionally, the story of the Mohawk boatmen, placed within the contexts of Britain’s intervention in the Arab world and the shared experiences of the Canadian Voyageur Contingent, reminds us that aboriginal history, if it is to be comprehensive, often ought to be understood within broad settings beyond the narrower realms that tend to structure scholarly inquiry about the First Nations.

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The call for Mohawks and Ojibways to pilot boats up the Nile River through the desert, in what contemporaries called the “Soudan War,” was inspired by the British army’s Colonel William Butler, who promoted the idea to the man who would lead the “Gordon Relief Expedition,” General Baron Wolseley. Like many others in the Victorian military, Butler and Wolseley had served in different parts of the world, gaining experience that informed their thoughts as they pursued their careers and the interests of the empire. These two soldiers (and some of their fellow officers who would participate in the Nile campaign) had spent time in Canada, where they had encountered expert river pilots — many of whom were aboriginal — during the Red River Rebellion. Late in 1869, shortly after the dominion had assumed sovereignty over the vast western and northern interior regions of the continent, but fifteen years before Lansdowne received the cablegram from the Colonial Office and sixteen years before the Canadian Pacific Railway connected central Canada to British Columbia, rebellion had broken out in today’s Manitoba, led by the famous Métis visionary, Louis Riel. Once the snows cleared in the spring of 1870, Garnet Wolseley (then a colonel) led eleven hundred Canadian militia volunteers and British regular soldiers from Ontario to Manitoba to assert the government’s authority. Wolseley achieved his objective without the loss of a single man en route, and without bloodshed at his destination, as Riel and his followers had fled before the advanced elements of the expedition approached the rebel stronghold of Upper Fort Garry in today’s Winnipeg. Butler, then a lieutenant, had gone ahead of the rest of the force to gather intelligence (and even had interviewed Riel during the days of the rebel leader’s provisional government) and had seen what the best Canadian and First Nations boatmen could do on the lakes and rivers of the continent’s interior. After the rebellion, Butler reported on conditions in western Canada, and in response to his recommendations Ottawa formed the North-West Mounted Police in 1873 to bring law and order to the region. He also published a popular book in 1872 on the Canadian west, The Great Lone Land. Like several other senior officers in Egypt who had served with Wolseley in Canada (and later in the Second Ashanti War of 1873–74 in West Africa), Butler became part of Wolseley’s “Ring.” This was a group of individuals who the general collected around himself because of his need for capable staff officers at a time when the British army did not produce enough men with the necessary qualifications for that kind of work. As a member of the Ring, Butler was in a good position to promote the idea of engaging Canadian boatmen on the Nile to Wolseley’s sympathetic ear.

Moving Wolseley’s troops and supplies along the first half of the two-thousand-kilometre route, from Toronto on Lake Ontario to Prince Arthur’s Landing (now Thunder Bay) on Lake Superior, was comparatively easy because the army could use railways in the populous regions of southern Ontario and steamships on the upper Great Lakes. However, the long journey from Prince Arthur’s Landing to Fort Garry was much more difficult because it ran mainly through a forested wilderness largely without roads in a region with few resources to support the expedition. (There was a better route to the seat of rebellion, via rail through American territory to Minnesota, from which the march to Manitoba would be easier, but President Ulysses Grant would not allow British and Canadian troops to travel through the United States, and his government belligerently delayed one of the expedition’s steamers at the American lock at Sault Sainte Marie between lakes Huron and Superior.) Wolseley solved the problem of getting from Prince Arthur’s Landing to Upper Fort Garry primarily by employing small boats along the region’s waterways, as would be the case along much of the Nile in the 1880s. That part of the journey in 1870 involved carrying supplies around forty-seven portages and running eighty kilometres of rapids, which the force accomplished through utilizing the piloting skills of boatmen or voyageurs. These individuals typically worked in the fur trade, rafted timber, guided travellers, or most commonly laboured as forwarders who moved goods along the country’s rivers and lakes in small boats, especially where schooners and steamers could not go in the years before railways and roads came to dominate most of the country’s communications lines. Canoes of aboriginal design or inspiration had been employed for generations — including large freight canoes — but from the 1700s onwards people increasingly adopted wooden bateaux and other small craft. On the Red River Expedition, the army used a variety of keel boats, averaging somewhat less than ten metres in length. Each vessel generally had two voyageurs to perform the tasks of bowman and steersman, along with eight or nine soldiers to pull the oars under their supervision. When necessary, everyone got out and towed the vessels through hazardous sections of the waterways or portaged them and their cargoes around impassable rapids and other barriers. At the time, it rained for the equivalent of almost eight of the thirteen weeks of the journey west from Prince Arthur’s Landing, which added to the discomfort caused by the hard, physical demands of the work to be done and all of the other annoyances of the Canadian forests, such as the great clouds of mosquitoes and blackflies that made life a misery for everyone. There were somewhere between sixty and one hundred Iroquois men along with over three hundred other aboriginal and white voyageurs on the expedition.⁵ The natives in general and the Mohawks in particular acquitted themselves so well that Wolseley described them as “the most daring and skilful of Canadian voyageurs.”⁶ A junior British officer, Lieutenant H.S.H. Riddell, echoed the sentiment, calling the Iroquois, who mainly came from Kahnawake and who regularly learned piloting on the rough Lachine Rapids near their home, “skilful” and the “finest boatmen in Canada.”⁷ Another veteran of the campaign, Captain G.L. Huyshe, expressed his view that “a very small percentage” of the boatmen in 1870 “were really ‘voyageurs,’ excepting about one hundred Iroquois Indians drawn from the villages of Saint Regis and Caughnawaga in the neighbourhood of Montreal, who, with scarcely an exception, were splendid fellows, and without whom it is not too much to say that the troops never could have reached their destination.”⁸

With their Red River experience in 1870, it was natural for Butler, Wolseley, and others who had been on the campaign to hope to recruit the same kind of people for the new mission in Egypt, and hence the cablegram asked specifically for recruits from Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Manitoba (and which silently implied a rejection of river pilots who were not native). In the end, however, the almost four hundred men who would sail to the Middle East represented a broader section of Canadian society, both white and aboriginal, although about sixty of those who joined up were shantymen, voyageurs, and river pilots from Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Kanesatake, whose ranks included as many as ten veterans of the Red River Expedition along with at least one former soldier from the American Civil War of 1861–65.⁹

The Red River Expedition at Kakabeka Falls, 1870, as envisioned in an oil painting by Frances Anne Hopkins in 1877 — an artist who was familiar with the world of the fur trade and the Canadian interior.

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The three Iroquois communities that sent men to Egypt shared similar origins in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, long before Britain conquered Canada from France in the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63. In the early 1600s, when Europeans began to penetrate the lower Great Lakes beyond the Saint Lawrence River, the majority of the people they encountered spoke one or more of the various Iroquoian languages of the region, such as the population of the several nations of the Huron (or Wendat) Confederacy near Georgian Bay in today’s Ontario, or the Eries who lived to the west of present-day Buffalo. Like the Hurons, the Iroquois formed a confederacy. At the time, it comprised five nations occupying the land between the Hudson and the Genesee rivers in modern New York: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. During the great struggles among the First Nations of the period, the famous conflicts between natives and newcomers, and the colonial wars that pitted France against England, hundreds of Iroquois moved north to Roman Catholic missions and allied with France. The earliest group (including Algonkian speakers as well as Iroquoians) formed a multi-ethnic settlement at La Prairie or Kentake on the Saint Lawrence River in the 1660s. The community soon came to be dominated by Mohawks, and subsequently established a permanent home in 1716 at Kahnawake on the Saint Lawrence, across from Montreal and Lachine. In the eighteenth century, three other Iroquois missions formed under similar conditions, two on the Saint Lawrence at Akwesasne and Oswegatchie (today’s Ogdensburg, New York) and a third on the Ottawa River at Kanesatake, which included a sizeable number of Algonkians until their descendants moved away in the 1860s. The inhabitants of these predominantly Iroquois settlements aligned with natives at other missions along the Saint Lawrence. By the mid-eighteenth century, a number of these Iroquoian and Algonkian villages became known collectively as the “Seven Nations of Canada,” and established their central council fire at Kahnawake.

Beyond the shift to New France, there were other important changes to Iroquois settlement patterns. Hundreds of individuals from the Five Nations within the British colony of New York resettled in the Ohio country in the mid-1700s, forming a group called the Mingos, while others moved westward somewhat later to take up land on the south shore of Lake Erie, becoming known as the Sandusky Senecas. Other natives relocated within traditional Five Nations territory. The best known were the Iroquoian-speaking Tuscaroras, who left colonial North Carolina in the early 1700s in the face of white hostility to settle near the Oneidas, and who joined the Iroquois Confederacy to form the sixth nation of the famous League of the Iroquois. Others, such as the Algonkian-speaking Delawares, moved away from the Atlantic seaboard to live under Six Nations suzerainty in New York and Pennsylvania. After the American Revolution established the independence of the United States from Great Britain and created the Canadian-American border in 1783, about one-third of the Iroquois in New York left the new republic to live within territory controlled by the British in modern Ontario, at Tyendinaga on the north shore of Lake Ontario and along the Grand River north of Lake Erie. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, the Americans forced the people of the Six Nations who remained behind in the United States to alienate most of their lands and move onto reservations, and, in 1806 Americans closed down Oswegatchie. In Canada, several hundred people from Akwesasne, Kanesatake, and Kahnawake moved to the west, largely to today’s Alberta and British Columbia, at the end of the 1700s and in the early 1800s, as a result of their long-standing engagement in the western fur trade. In the early nineteenth century, ongoing pressure from whites to force the Iroquois to vacate New York along with other tensions saw Six Nations people continuing to settle in Ontario (where a group of Oneidas re-established themselves on the Thames River) or moving to Wisconsin, Kansas, and Oklahoma, while the Mingos and Sandusky Senecas lost their territories in Ohio at the same time. Today, as in the 1880s when the Canadian Voyageur Contingent formed, there are Iroquois reservations in New York, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma (although one that existed in Pennsylvania in the 1880s was lost in the 1960s). North of the Canadian-American border, Six Nations reserves are to be found in Ontario and Quebec. Beyond residing in these communities, many Oneidas, Mohawks, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras pursue their lives elsewhere, especially in Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, Buffalo, Rochester, and other places around the lower Great Lakes. The move to urban centres began long ago, with some Mohawks and other Iroquois taking up residency in various Great Lakes cities before the 1880s as part of a larger phenomenon in which people left rural areas and small towns to seek opportunities in North America’s urban centres. However, the number of such individuals from the Iroquois world was comparatively small in the latter nineteenth century, with most remaining on their reservations and reserves or finding work within the rural and forested parts of the continent, primarily on a seasonal basis.

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The August 20, 1884 cablegram from London asking for voyageurs reached the governor general at about one in the morning the next day. An hour later, Lord Lansdowne telegraphed Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald at his summer home near Rivière-du-Loup, two hundred kilometres east of Quebec City. Lansdowne enclosed a copy of the message and informed Macdonald that he would send Lord Melgund (who had fought in Egypt two years earlier) “to ask you first whether you see any objection to the scheme, and then for your advice as to the best means of carrying it out.”¹⁰ That pair of phrases respected Canada’s sovereignty within the empire because it left the decision to participate to Macdonald, yet it made Lansdowne’s wishes for support clear. (At that time, the governor general represented the British government on matters of foreign affairs in addition to fulfilling the viceregal office, unlike today where the position solely represents the monarch.) Macdonald agreed that recruiting could occur, but decided that the effort should be British rather than Canadian because the situation in Egypt failed to meet two important criteria that would encourage him to make an official dominion contribution. First, he did not believe the United Kingdom was threatened directly; and second, he thought the Sudanese crisis did not concern Canada. Politically, allowing men to be recruited as an imperial enterprise was a reasonable compromise among the diversities of Canadian opinion over the nation’s connections to Great Britain. At the same time, Macdonald did not want to spend money on British ventures and felt constrained by the Militia Act because it restricted the country’s participation in foreign wars. As a result of the prime minister’s views, the governor general’s office did most of the work in organizing the voyageur contingent rather than the dominion’s Department of Militia and Defence, and the boatmen’s contracts and other relations were with London rather than with Ottawa. The Macdonald government nevertheless assisted Lansdowne, such as recommending militia officers to lead the contingent and directing its officials to inspect the ship that the War Office in London had chartered to transport the boatmen before it left Canada for Egypt.¹¹

The telegram from Lansdowne to Macdonald, moreover, said Melgund should “not lose a moment in putting himself in communication with the agents for these Indian settlements” where Butler and Wolseley assumed the men they needed would be engaged for the expedition.¹² However, there was a delay, and good voyageurs from Manitoba and northern Ontario, both native and white, who had been, or could have been recruited, were not organized in time for the departure from Canada. Of the ninety-two men who did come from that region, about half were inexperienced whites who would prove to be an embarrassment to the contingent, although there also were excellent Métis and native voyageurs in their ranks who would provide sterling service on the Nile.¹³ At the same time, central Canada, where most Iroquois lived, had changed since the Red River Expedition of 1870, which meant that there would be some challenges to overcome in assembling the contingent. Most notably, there had been a steep decline in the small boat forwarding business in eastern Canada, from which London assumed most recruits would come, because the expansion of roads and railways as part of the nation’s modernization allowed people to bypass the rivers and lakes where the forwarders’ skills previously had been needed. Aware of that change, individuals in Ottawa advised Melgund that there might not be enough aboriginal or other pilots from the freighting trade available to sign up for the campaign. Instead, they assumed that the majority of recruits would need to be chosen from among the shantymen of the timber industry, particularly from the Ottawa River. These people overwhelmingly were white, but included respectable numbers of natives within their ranks because men from Kahnawake, Akwesasne, Kanesatake, and other aboriginal communities had been employed by Ottawa Valley lumber companies for decades.¹⁴ Beyond the Ottawa River, Iroquois people worked in lumbering elsewhere in the Great Lakes region, such as Oneidas in Wisconsin, Senecas in southwestern New York, and Mohawks from Wahta (or Gibson) in Ontario’s Muskoka region (this last reserve having been established in 1881 by individuals from Kanesatake).¹⁵ Shantymen, especially among the non-natives, often were farmers or farmers’ sons who laboured in the forests or on timber drives along the country’s rivers and lakes on a seasonal basis, but included some men who found employment in the industry throughout the year. They cut trees during the winter, drove logs part way downriver at the time of the spring thaw, corralled them into booms for crossing large bodies of water, and assembled great log rafts to float the timber once they passed the barriers that prevented the use of these behemoths farther upstream. Shantymen also worked in mills and rowed various kinds of small boats full of provisions back to the timber camps. Mohawks in particular were valued for their ability to pilot timber rafts through the rapids on the Saint Lawrence River, with the Lachine Rapids near Kahnawake being the most famous of several difficult stretches of water that had to be overcome in moving the timber harvest to Quebec City where it could be loaded onto ships for export to British and foreign markets. Independently of the timber industry, Mohawks also earned money piloting steamships and other vessels through the hazardous rapids at Lachine. Many Mohawks favoured rafting over shanty work and thus were over-represented in comparative terms on the rafts. Beyond possessing the boating skills required for the Nile, shantymen knew how to camp, cook, and otherwise look after themselves in rough conditions because they spent much of the year toiling in environments away from their families and from established settlements.¹⁶

Along with the assumption by people in Ottawa that white men would be needed to fill the ranks of the contingent because of the changing nature of the economy and the scarcity of native river pilots, surviving records suggest that at least some Canadians who advised the governor general’s office wished not to hire First Nations voyageurs for racial rather than practical reasons. At one point, Lord Lansdowne noted that he had been “assured by the most competent authorities” that there was “every reason for preferring a force composed of white men or partly of white men and partly of Indians to one composed exclusively of Indians and half-breeds.”¹⁷ Some of the people who offered such advice included officials from various lumber companies. Another person who shared the desire to choose non-natives (and who helped to organize the contingent) was E. Matthew Bell Irvine, who had been responsible for land rather than water transportation on the Red River Expedition. He thought the Mohawks, while good, were not quite as excellent for the task as the natives from Manitoba and northwestern Ontario, although they certainly had been superior to the white boatmen in 1870. Yet, Irvine argued that capable white Canadians could be found if sufficient care were taken in the recruiting process. This view seems to have echoed a common opinion in the press that distinguished the First Nations from the rest of the population and that wanted people from the dominant society to participate in the imperial adventure to show the world what the Canadians could do and to enjoy the accolades that would flow to them from their contributions to the expedition. However, finding places for these would-be heroes could be achieved only by shunting the natives aside. Despite this pressure in Canada, military authorities in far-off London reaffirmed the army’s desire that a significant portion of the contingent be made up of aboriginal boatmen. At the same time, one of Ottawa’s advisors, the lumber broker J.T. Lambert, believed the required number of recruits only could be assembled if aboriginal steersmen were included to fill out the ranks. However, through a combination of the changing economy and the attitudes of individuals who informed Lansdowne and Melgund, the Canadian Voyageur Contingent would sail for Egypt with far fewer First Nations pilots than Wolseley and Butler had assumed would be sent.¹⁸

Lambert took on a major role in recruiting voyageurs, focusing on the Ottawa area, which provided the single largest portion of the contingent. A few Iroquois joined up in the capital as part of that effort, possibly because they were employed more or less full-time in the forest industry, unlike most of their fellow Mohawks. Recruiting took place in central Canada in towns where shantymen could be found, such as Peterborough, Sherbrooke, and Trois-Rivières, and the governor general wrote to leading Roman Catholic clergymen to gain their assistance in engaging suitable francophones for the expedition. While Lambert made contact with the Mohawks, the primary links to Kahnawake were through Lord Melgund and a militia officer who would serve on the expedition, Captain Alexander MacRae (a veteran of Red River and an experienced hand in river work). Melgund and MacRae focused their efforts on Kahnawake; thus the majority of Iroquois in the contingent came from there rather than from Kanesatake and Akwesasne, presumably because time was short and because the first village met the quota of Mohawks set by officials in Ottawa.¹⁹ In 1884, the Iroquois population in Canada and the United States totalled between fifteen and sixteen thousand souls, with somewhat more than half of them residing north of the border, of whom over four thousand called Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Kanesatake home. Therefore, had they visited the other two Mohawk territories, Melgund and MacRae probably could have increased the size of the Iroquois component of the contingent in fulfilment of London’s original wishes.²⁰

Some of the voyageurs recruited in Ottawa in 1884 before receiving their campaign clothing: a few Mohawks joined in the Ottawa area and did not form part of the Kahnawake contingent.

In the 1880s, Kahnawake occupied fifty square kilometres of territory, consisting mainly of rural areas, a quarry that provided two-or three-dozen jobs, and a waterfront village with shops, houses, and other buildings. Some of these structures were described as “elegant and comfortable” in the Canadian Indian Department’s 1883 annual report. In 1885, the department recorded that there were “several good and beautiful farms” at Kahnawake and “the crops are very good,” while an annual agricultural exhibition on the reserve provided encouragement for farmers to improve their efforts. At the time, about fifty individuals in the community were considered to be farmers, although many more had small garden plots. Approximately three hundred men — representing the majority of Kahnawake’s adult males — typically worked away from home in the lumber industry for part of the year, while others sought lucrative employment elsewhere, such as in American circuses or on the Canadian Pacific Railway. Most women supplemented their family incomes by sewing beadwork for both local and American vendors, receiving “fair pay” in supplies of food according to the 1883 edition of the Indian Department’s report, although by 1886 this activity seems to have fallen off to a noticeable degree. Kahnawake was too small for the size of the population, with almost half of its sixteen hundred people holding no land at all, a situation made worse by encroachments by neighbouring whites, imbalances among the size of property holdings, and expropriations for railway and other purposes related to Canada’s Victorian-era industrial expansion. Given Kahnawake’s location across the Saint Lawrence River from Montreal, then the dominion’s largest city, with a population of 160,000, it was almost inevitable that the forces of modernization would be felt among the reserve’s inhabitants and would affect land use independently of Mohawk desires. The restricted size of the community meant that there were disputes about such issues as access to firewood and the right of some residents to occupy land because they had a white father or otherwise were not thought eligible to hold property. Despite these tensions, which could be severe at times, life in the village, in the words of the Indian Department, was “very peaceful.”²¹

At the time Lansdowne oversaw recruiting voyageurs, the Turtle, Great Bear, Old Bear, Wolf, Snipe, Deer, and Rock clans each selected a chief to form a council to exercise leadership in Kahnawake, although not all of the chiefs participated in its political life and other communal affairs at the time.²² It was these chiefs who needed to deliberate on the governor general’s appeal for steersmen, which he sent to them on August 26, 1884. The Montreal Daily Star picked up the story the next day, under the title, “Caughnawaga Warriors for Egypt.” It reported that “A sensation” had been caused “by the reception of a notification from the governor general by the chiefs that the British government wishes to secure the services of fifty of the most experienced river men in the tribe for the transportation service in the Egyptian expedition.” The article said that news of the request “spread all over the village, and the younger Indians jumped at the offer with enthusiasm” while “several of the petty chiefs … expressed their willingness to raise the party, but if it is raised it will probably be under the direct management of the council of chiefs, who are to meet to consider the matter.” The Star concluded with the hopeful statement that “the old warlike spirit of the Iroquois appears to have been aroused and there is little doubt but that a full band of the ever faithful allies of the British will answer the call to duty in the far East.”²³ Despite the paper’s enthusiasm and the arrival of Captain MacRae two days later, only a small number of people expressed a willingness to join up until Lord Melgund joined MacRae and spoke with Louis Jackson, who would become the lead foreman from Kahnawake. Yet, when Lansdowne’s military secretary first approached the Mohawks, he found that they “hung back very much,” even though their memories of the mission to Red River were positive and they learned how Wolseley had put his faith in them to meet his needs in the Sudan War. Melgund thought their reluctance arose from a desire for higher wages than London offered at the time.²⁴ Yet, Jackson, who wrote one of the two Mohawk memoirs of the expedition reproduced later in this book, recorded that when people heard that it was “the express desire of General Lord Wolseley to have Caughnawaga Indians form part of the Canadian contingent, the required number was soon obtained, in spite of discouraging talk and groundless fears.”²⁵ He did not elaborate on the details of the talk or fears, but there were claims in the press that the boatmen would not survive in the desert. For example, one Ottawa newspaper, copying a story from the London press, quoted an army officer who had served in Canada and who announced that “Iroquois Indians taken from the frosty climate of Canada” would not be able to withstand the heat, which “would be fatal to the Lachine Indians,” and therefore Wolseley would need “stretchers and ambulances” for them “instead of boats.”²⁶ Meanwhile, a Conservative opposition member of the British Parliament, Stavey Hill, criticized the enrolment of voyageurs, and even travelled to Canada to warn people not to go, claiming that any who went to Egypt faced certain death. (For his part, Colonel William Butler thought Hill’s behaviour dissuaded at least some natives from joining the contingent.)²⁷ As well, when the request from Ottawa first arrived at Kahnawake, some individuals wondered if the proposal to recruit Mohawks was genuine, while others who were willing to go were dissuaded from doing so by the women of the community.²⁸ Another concern centred on the nature of the engagement. Mohawk leaders were willing to have their people navigate boats, but they did not want to them to serve as combatants, and therefore needed a promise that their men would not be called upon to take up arms, which the authorities assured them would not occur and which the governor general reaffirmed in his farewell address at the time the contingent left Canada.²⁹

Notwithstanding these concerns, fifty-six recruits — six more than had been requested — signed up in addition to several Iroquois who joined “gangs” formed in Ottawa. As was common in the lumber industry, the foremen or “bosses” seem to have taken the direct lead in selecting recruits rather than the more senior officials, at a ratio of approximately one foreman to twenty or twenty-five labourers, with the foremen of the sixteen gangs of the Canadian contingent coming from the same towns and villages as their men, for the most part. Thus it was natural that two older and more experienced Kahnawake individuals, Louis Jackson and François Delisle, became foremen.³⁰ However, we do not know how much they had to defer to the council chiefs in choosing people. The chiefs may have been reluctant to let younger men go, given that newspaper reports indicated that enthusiasm was centred among the more youthful shantymen, because in the end the majority of Mohawks in the contingent were older. Yet, their greater years may have represented the chiefs’ response to Lansdowne’s particular desire to obtain the most qualified river pilots possible. Thus, while shantymen in Victorian Canada in general tended to be younger, of those Mohawk voyageurs whose ages are known to us, only 39 per cent of the men were between eighteen and twenty-four years old. Another 39 per cent were between twenty-five and thirty-nine, and 22 per cent were over forty. (Most of the volunteers in this older group were between forty and fifty years old, but one was sixty-six and another, Ignace Three-Rivers, seems to have been a majestic seventy-four, but somehow was regarded as capable of undertaking the hard work that lay ahead of him once he reached North Africa).³¹

Given the age range, it is no surprise that of those Mohawk voyageurs whose marital status is known for 1884, 63 per cent were married, or had been married before and were single, or were married or living in a common-law relationship for the second or third time.³² The majority of the Iroquois did not speak English, largely being Mohawk and French speakers, understanding enough English for “boating purposes but no more” according to Foreman Jackson.³³ (The growth of proficiency in English at Kahnawake tended to occur later, around the beginning of the twentieth century, when large numbers of men found employment across North America in the construction industry.)³⁴ In contrast to the Ojibways from Manitoba, all of whom were literate, only six Mohawks had enough education to sign their names to their engagement forms.³⁵ Formal schooling run by the Roman Catholic Church had been part of the landscape at Kahnawake for a long time, but attendance levels were low in comparison to many other reserves in eastern Canada, apparently because of the poor quality of the instruction and language barriers between the francophone teachers and their students.³⁶

The main village at Kahnawake, circa 1885.

Once things were settled at Kahnawake, Captain MacRae and Ottawa’s local Indian agent, Alexander de Lorimer, oversaw the Mohawk recruits before they joined their fellow river pilots from elsewhere in Canada to embark for Egypt.³⁷ Command of the Canadian Voyageur Contingent was placed in the hands of a member of Wolseley’s staff from the 1870 expedition (and a veteran of the Fenian Raids), the Toronto lawyer, alderman, and militia officer, Major Frederick Charles Denison of the Governor General’s Body Guard, who received a brevet to lieutenant- colonel for the expedition. The contingent’s Roman Catholic chaplain, the Reverend Arthur Bouchard, had served as a missionary in Sudan and spoke Arabic, while the medical officer, Surgeon-Major Hubert Neilson of the Regiment of Canadian Artillery, not only was a veteran of Red River, but had been a Red Cross observer in Serbia during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877. All of the officers were Canadian and drawn from the nation’s militia, except for one, who, although Canadian, came from a British regiment. As a group, they were more familiar with boat work and military campaigning than might have been expected, although they generally were not as proficient as regular army officers and later would have some difficulty maintaining discipline among their men.³⁸ Most of the foremen and pilots in the contingent were adept at their jobs to a greater or lesser degree, aside from forty-five or so white individuals from Manitoba who possessed few qualifications for the demanding tasks that lay ahead. Naturally, even the experienced boatmen possessed varying levels of skill. One report said the most able among them comprised about one-quarter of the contingent, with most of these superior recruits coming from the ranks of the Mohawks and the Ojibways who provided about one-fifth of the total number of boatmen and foremen. (We need to take these figures as being impressionistic rather than precise because other observers presented somewhat different assessments, as we shall see below.)³⁹ In addition to seven officers and a hospital sergeant, the contingent comprised, according to Denison, seventy-seven “Indians” (including natives from Manitoba), ninety-three French-Canadians, 158 other Canadians, thirty-six “English and Scotch” (by which he meant British immigrants), and sixteen men from elsewhere in the world, for a total of 388 individuals (although the number who would serve in Egypt was 385).⁴⁰ Some of those the commanding officer classified as “Canadians” were Métis and presumably included people with some Iroquois blood beyond the sixty or so Mohawks directly associated with Kahnawake, Kanesatake, and Akwesasne. At the same time, some of the voyageurs in the Kahnawake contingent undoubtedly had ancestries that included other aboriginal and European nations because of intermarriage and other such reasons, although one Montreal newspaper, Le Monde, affirmed that all of them were “sauvages” — a word that does not have quite the negative connotation as its English-language equivalent.⁴¹ It also is possible that there were people within the contingent whose ancestry included African origins, but the historical record does not allow us to confirm that. The officers enjoyed military status, pay, and allowances, whereas the foremen and boatmen were civilian employees hired on contract, although they were subject to military discipline. Beyond the voyageurs, a small number of other people from Canada would serve in the campaign as civilian steamboat pilots (mainly between Aswan and Wadi Halfa) and in the British army and the Royal Navy.⁴²

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After tearful goodbyes from relatives at the wharf at Kahnawake and at the quayside in Montreal (with some people begging their men not to go), combined with enthusiastic farewells from public officials and some alcohol-infused celebrations among white and native boatmen alike, the bulk of the contingent set sail on September 14, 1884. Their ship was the Ocean King, a 1,632-tonne, 107-metre steamer built in Scotland in 1878, which had been fitted with five hundred berths for the Canadian Voyageur Contingent and which received praise for the quality of its ventilation, sanitary arrangements, and other comforts.⁴³ She made stops at Trois-Rivières and Quebec to pick up more recruits (including some Mohawks who missed the boarding in Montreal but who caught up with the ship by rail). At Quebec the contingent underwent a military-style inspection and an official send-off from Lord and Lady Lansdowne in the presence of various dignitaries, including the Canadian minister of Militia and Defence, Adolphe-Philippe Caron.⁴⁴ The governor general delivered a bilingual speech to the assembled crowd, praising the English, French, and First Nations men in an address that generated cheers from the voyageurs in return and which, according to Surgeon-Major Neilson, “inspired them with new courage and enthusiasm.”⁴⁵ One ill-tempered observer at the departure was a Roman Catholic clergyman, Henri Têtu, who revealed both his class and racial prejudices when he described the voyageurs as an “assemblage estrange,” with the whites in the ranks consisting of swarthy, hardened, and wild shantymen, and with the “Iroquois de Caughnawaga” presenting their “sinistres visages” to the world. Such a rough group, in Têtu’s view, would not represent Canada well on the international stage, although the logic of his perspective would suggest that he was less concerned about the competence of the voyageurs to fulfil their tasks on the Nile than their appearance, which presumably could have been improved if the contingent had been formed entirely of respectable-looking white men. At least some of his discomfort was alleviated after the officers distributed uniforms on board the ship because he also objected to their “habits de toutes couleurs.”⁴⁶

The clothing purchased in Canada and issued on the Ocean King included grey woollen undershirts and drawers; socks; blue flannel twill shirts; soft, felt grey hats with wide brims; thick, grey tweed trousers; belts; and Norfolk jackets — a range of garments that would strike British observers upon the contingent’s arrival in Egypt as unsuitable for the local climate. The foremen received suits in a somewhat lighter shade of grey than the rest of the men, and the officers acquired tropical uniforms, complete with swords and revolvers, by the time they reached the Nile. In addition, the voyageurs received boots and knee-high moccasins, grey blankets, rubber groundsheets, towels, tumplines to help portage supplies, and canvas bags for carrying their possessions. On board the Ocean King they were supplied with straw mattresses, extra blankets, pillows, and towels to use while making their way to Africa. After they arrived in Egypt, British military officials provided them with additional items, including tropical helmets, standard army field dressings for wounds, and cholera belts, the latter being wide flannel wraps worn around the stomach and which were thought to prevent cholera and dysentery. These belts were common in hot climates in the army until the early twentieth century, but in 1884 and 1885, they were of immediate importance to those who wore them because cholera was making one of its periodic drives across the planet at the time, and would strike in both Egypt and Canada.⁴⁷ Naturally, once on campaign, the men of the Canadian contingent received cooking and camping supplies as well as tents, which one voyageur said were “of the best kind.”⁴⁸ Beyond the official issue of gear, individuals brought along personal items of clothing and equipment, including knives and handguns. In addition, an optician in London, England, Mr. B. Laurence supplied 450 pairs of blue-tinted glasses to preserve the voyageurs’ eyes from the glare of the tropical sun (and gave instructions that, if there was an extra pair, the Canadians should present it to “El Mahdi with Mr. Laurence’s compliments”).⁴⁹

Two voyageurs wearing variations in their official clothing issue: the man on the left sports a tropical helmet and knee-high moccasins; the one on the right has boots and a grey felt hat. Both wear the thick tweed trousers provided in Canada and carry large paddles for guiding their boats.

To keep everyone content on their journey to Egypt, Lord Melgund supplemented the Ocean King’s food stores with such supplies as beans, cabbage, and apples, since he knew that shantymen were not accustomed to limits on the quantity of food they ate while working in the bush, where they subsisted largely on pork and beans. His efforts more or less doubled the standard military allowance that the British government had arranged to almost one kilogram of meat and a similar amount of vegetables per day. On board the ship, London’s rations included bacon and other meats, potatoes, rice, peas, flour for bread and puddings, butter, biscuits, oatmeal, sugar, molasses, tea, raisins, spirits, and other items. Throughout the expedition, the voyageurs received their food as part of the compensation offered for their services (along with their travel costs), which differed from many other employment situations at the time where workers had to pay their board and other expenses. Beyond attending to their dietary needs, Lord Lansdowne donated games along with books and magazines in English and French to make the journey more congenial.⁵⁰

Once out of the Saint Lawrence, the ship coaled at Sydney, Nova Scotia, and then again at Gibraltar on the boundary between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. At Sydney, some of the men got drunk and caused trouble. One inebriated character staggered into the local courthouse, determined to wish the magistrate goodbye; but when a constable on the scene tried to usher him out of the building and avoid embarrassment, he knocked the officer to the ground. Three men deserted in Sydney (none of them Mohawks), while the contingent’s sole Maritimer joined up at that point.⁵¹ The ten-day trip across the ocean to Gibraltar that followed was marked, in the words of Louis Jackson from Kahnawake, by “a fine passage and good treatment,” although some men were seasick, with the natives seeming to suffer more than the others. Yet, there was grief aboard the Ocean King when one of the Ojibways from Manitoba died on the Atlantic crossing, and the officers and men of the contingent committed his remains to the sea in a shipboard funeral service. At Gibraltar, Colonel Denison gave the voyageurs leave to go ashore, and once again some drank too much. Two intoxicated Ojibways gave a demonstration of their impressive physical prowess when they defended themselves successfully from half-a-dozen police officers and several bystanders who attempted to arrest them (but once on the Nile this same pair proved to be truly excellent boatmen, while none of those fined by Denison for misbehaviour at Gibraltar was a Mohawk). Others, such as Mohawk James Deer and his friends, behaved more respectably, enjoying a “splendid day” visiting Gibraltar’s fortifications, its “chief attraction,” in Deer’s view. Like Louis Jackson, Deer wrote a pamphlet about his adventures, also reproduced later in this book.

The Ocean King then steamed across the Mediterranean, and as the ship cruised along the coast of North Africa, the contingent’s medical officer delivered lectures on the virtues of temperance. Boatman James Deer noted that many around him were sufficiently impressed as to kiss their Bibles (supplied by evangelical Christians in Montreal at the time of the Ocean King’s departure) and swear that they would be abstemious, although he observed sadly that once in Egypt some of them slid back into their old ways. Along with the surgeon’s talks, the chaplain, Arthur Bouchard, shared his insights on Egypt and Sudan, gained from his earlier experiences in North Africa. Beyond listening to sobering lectures, the voyageurs spent their time in happier pleasures, such as tug-of-war competitions and other sports on the deck of the ship, and they also attended church parades, with Father Bouchard leading worship for the Roman Catholic majority and Frederick Denison for the Protestant minority in his command. Most of the Mohawks with a connection to Christianity were Catholics, although some likely had Anglican or Methodist affiliations. (The Ojibways in the contingent were Anglicans.) Off Malta, the Ocean King passed one of the steamers carrying “our boats” to Egypt, according to Neilson. A day later, the men watched the eclipse of the moon. The ship had a piano and some people brought fiddles along with them, allowing everyone to enjoy concerts and dances, while various other pleasures, such as the sight of “whales, porpoises, and other monsters of the deep” that Deer mentioned in his memoir offered agreeable diversions for all, whether native or white.⁵²

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The great historic events behind the departure of the Ocean King from Quebec at the end of the summer of 1884 unfolded far outside the world in which its passengers had developed the skills the army needed to convey troops and supplies up the Nile River. One critical problem that led to Great Britain’s intervention into Egyptian affairs was the security of the Suez Canal. When it opened in 1869, the 171-kilometre waterway cut the time required to sail between Europe and Asia dramatically as ships no longer had to travel all the way around the African continent to reach their destinations. However, London feared that the canal, possessing enormous importance for the trade and security of the British Empire, might fall into unfriendly hands because Egypt had become unstable through the corruption and incompetence of its government. Britain met that challenge in part by purchasing 45 per cent of the shares of the Suez Canal Company from Egypt’s cash-starved khedive in 1875. (Egypt at the time was part of the Ottoman Empire, and the sultan of Turkey was the khedive’s overlord. However, Constantinople — now Istanbul — exercised little authority in Egypt in a relationship that suited European powers well.) A second major worry was the country’s financial condition: European bankers feared that massive loans made to the khedive might not be repaid. As it was, the interest on the almost hundred-million-pound debt exceeded Egypt’s national revenue. Therefore, in 1879, European powers, led by France and Britain, had the sultan install a new khedive, Tewfik, to co-operate with them in bringing stability to the country’s economy. That action infuriated growing nationalist fervour among people who sought independence from both European and Turkish control at the same time that Anglo-French officials took over Egypt’s treasury, customs office, postal system, railways, and ports, and then cut spending in education, defence, and other areas to set the stage for repaying the loans. Conditions deteriorated sharply in 1881 and 1882, as represented by riots that saw fifty expatriates killed in Alexandria and thousands of other foreigners flee the country for fear of their lives. At the same time, nationalists within the Egyptian army threatened violence to force themselves into Tewfik’s cabinet. In the manoeuvring surrounding those developments, European powers sided with the impotent khedive against the nationalists, and Britain and France dispatched warships to Alexandria to undermine his opponents. The nationalists strengthened the harbour defences and refused a series of ultimatums to remove their newly installed artillery. The Royal Navy, without French participation, responded by bombarding the city’s seaward fortifications into submission in July 1882. British forces occupied Alexandria, seized control of the Suez Canal, and, under the command of Lieutenant-General Sir Garnet Wolseley, defeated the nationalists in the battle of Tel el Kebir in September after rebel leaders had “cancelled” Egypt’s debt and threatened to block or destroy the canal. The British restored Tewfik’s authority, but found themselves in effective control of Egypt’s civil and military affairs. They hoped to implement local reforms and stabilize the situation so they could withdraw most of their forces within a short period, but they ended up remaining in the country for the next seventy-four years.

At the same time these issues were being decided, outraged morality in the United Kingdom demanded that the queen’s ministers exercise leadership in suppressing the slave trade in Egypt’s province of Sudan and the neighbouring equatorial regions to the south, which an English-born general had failed to do at the head of Egyptian forces early in the 1870s. (That a Briton should command Egyptians was not unusual at the time. Non-western countries often recruited Europeans and North Americans into the senior ranks of their civil services and militaries in order to obtain expertise that was not available locally and to build useful affiliations with powerful nations, while dominant industrial countries also regularly imposed their soldiers, administrators, and entrepreneurs on reluctant and less-powerful states in pursuit of their own goals.) Later, while employed by the Egyptian government, Charles Gordon tried to end slavery in the south. He was an evangelical Christian who respected Islam but who had an unusually erratic persona — in fact, some observers thought he was a lunatic. He had fought with the British army in the Crimean War in the 1850s and then gained fame in the 1860s in China at the head of Qing government forces in one of history’s greatest bloodbaths, the Taiping Rebellions. Between 1873 and 1879, he served as Egypt’s governor general of Equatoria (in today’s southern Sudan and northern Uganda) and then of all Sudan. He took up the anti-slavery cause with fervour, which, combined with his war against corruption, caused enormous resentment among the region’s powerful, who had built their fortunes by graft and by the sale and abuse of many tens of thousands of souls from central Africa and elsewhere. Despite short-term successes, Gordon, like his predecessor, did not achieve a lasting victory over the slavers or dishonest officials in the province.

As Britain took control of Egypt, a powerful challenge emerged in Sudan from Muhammad Ahmad ibn ‘Abdullahi, the deeply religious son of a Nile boat-builder, who claimed to be descended from the Prophet Muhammad. He was proclaimed the Mahdi, or the “Expected One” of a Muslim tradition that fell outside of the Koran and that awaited the arrival of a temporal and spiritual saviour near the end of time. He rose against the Egyptians in 1881 and threatened to bring a holy war to all of North Africa and to the Muslim world beyond in hopes of restoring Islamic law from the time of the Prophet as he interpreted it (while regarding Muslims who did not support him as apostates). He won a series of victories over poorly trained and undisciplined Egyptian troops, most famously in November 1883 when an overwhelming number of his followers destroyed ten thousand soldiers commanded by a British-born officer near El Obeid. In London, Liberal prime minister William Gladstone wanted to avoid entanglement in Sudan, an immense region of desert, forest, and swamp, totalling two-and-a-half million square kilometres, of which only somewhat more than four thousand were cultivated. The British government thought the land of fourteen million inhabitants was of no value to the interests of the empire but believed it represented a huge drain on Egypt’s fragile finances and security. Hoping to contain the Mahdist threat from spreading to other parts of the Muslim world, Gladstone believed it safe politically to ignore anti-slavery critics at home and persuade the Egyptians to abandon most of their southern province until the crisis had passed and authority could be reasserted at some future date. As part of the plan, Gladstone and the Egyptians wanted someone to go to Sudan, either to evacuate the garrisons, officials, and Europeans in the troubled region or to report on the situation (the orders were unclear). Afterwards, they planned to maintain garrisons only on Sudan’s Red Sea coast and its northern border to protect the Suez route to the East and the security of Egypt proper.

The London Illustrated News and The Graphic sent artists to Egypt and Sudan, and their efforts provided readers with representations of the conflict that appealed to the Victorian imagination. The prints were reproduced in popular histories published immediately after the war and thus enjoyed a life beyond the limits of an ephemeral newspaper illustration. This picture of one of Muhammad Ahmad’s supporters was titled “Follower of the False Prophet.”

Gladstone chose the wrong man for the job when he bowed to political, public, and press pressure to send Major-General Charles Gordon. Reappointed governor general in 1884, and accompanied solely by one staff officer, Lieutenant-Colonel J.D.H. Stewart, Gordon left England for Sudan, reached Khartoum on February 18, 1884, and took command of the garrison of 7,500 Egyptian and Sudanese soldiers in the city of over thirty thousand inhabitants, of whom a large percentage were slaves. Despite his instructions, Gordon was not the kind of man merely to report on local conditions or organize a retreat, the latter of which would have been logistically complicated in any event and would have taken at least six months with the river transport available to him because the number of Egyptian soldiers spread around Sudan, along with their dependents, expatriates, and other vulnerable people, totalled about twenty thousand individuals. One person at the time who recognized the magnitude of the problem was Britain’s consul general to Egypt (and its de facto ruler), Sir Evelyn Baring. He thought the policy of withdrawal was the best one, but was “not sure if the extreme difficulty of carrying it out, or the consequences to which it must almost invariably lead” were “fully appreciated at home.”⁵³ In looking back on the events of 1884–85 in his memoirs, Baring felt that it was a mistake to send a Briton rather than a local person to Khartoum, especially such a famous one, because public opinion might necessitate committing a relief expedition to save him even though the government wanted to turn its back on the province.⁵⁴

For his part, the inconsistent and erratic Gordon decided shortly after arriving in Khartoum that the challenge posed by Muhammad Ahmad had to be met through military action. His conclusion, sent in a brusque telegram to his superiors eight days after his arrival in the Sudanese capital, declared that, “if Egypt is to be quiet, Mahdi must be smashed up.”⁵⁵ Although he continued to change his opinions frequently in the weeks that followed, the Sudanese governor general may have been emboldened to take such a firm stand to some extent because he assumed that Britain would be forced to commit troops despite Gladstone’s unwillingness to do so. At the same time, Charles Gordon’s important friend, Garnet Wolseley, victor of Tel el Kebir, disagreed with Gladstone’s policy and thought that evacuating Sudan would be “the worst of ignorant, cowardly folly” and assumed that even an evacuation would require the help of British forces, although he probably believed that the British could launch a successful campaign that would result in the long-term occupation of the territory.⁵⁶ General Gordon’s views ought not to have surprised anyone: before leaving England he had stated his opposition to abandoning Sudan, worrying that the revolt could inflame the entire Muslim world if it were not crushed. While favouring Sudanese independence, or at least a weaker Turco-Egyptian presence in the province, he believed a ruthless Mahdist dictatorship represented the wrong answer to the Sudanese question. Other officials, such as Baring, hoped the situation could be stabilized at least until the garrisons could be evacuated by employing someone else to govern the province in the interim. However, the only individual who seemed like a possible candidate in place of Gordon was a notorious and unsavoury anti-British slave dealer, Zobeir Pasha, and Sir Evelyn could not generate any enthusiasm for the man in London, so Gladstone ended up sending Charles Gordon to Khartoum.

Despite wanting to turn his back on Sudan, Gladstone’s concern about the security of its Red Sea ports led him to land sailors and marines from Royal Navy warships in Suakin in February 1885, and then to dispatch soldiers to augment this force. The British next won battles over the Mahdists at El Teb and Tamai early in 1884 in an attempt to disperse the region’s hostile forces, although the long-term value of these victories was small. Looking ahead, Suakin also might serve as a point for evacuating Egyptian forces from Sudan, as the port was accessible via a caravan route from Berber on the Nile, and such an initiative might obviate the need to dispatch British troops to Khartoum. Yet while the rebellion’s leaders suffered defeat in northeastern Sudan, Muhammad Ahmad’s armies won victories over Egyptian troops in other encounters in 1884, cut the telegraph line to Khartoum, and began their famous siege of the Sudanese capital in March of that year. As the months passed, they increased their pressure on the city as various tribes joined the revolt, eventually swelling insurgent numbers around the capital into the tens of thousands. Then, late in May, the rebels captured Berber, which likely would make an evacuation northwards from Khartoum impossible after that date without the intervention of the British army.

“The Camel Corps for the Nile Expedition”: the Sudan War would pit a small modern British army, equipped with accurate rifles, artillery, and early machine guns, against one the world’s last great medieval-style forces, armed mainly with swords, spears, and shields.

William Gladstone was enraged that Charles Gordon had not fulfilled his assigned tasks in the four months he had been in the Sudanese capital. However, the prime minister, with a slow reluctance, bowed to intense pressure to try and save the popular hero. (Gordon probably could have escaped Khartoum on his own with a few followers, or even with a portion of the garrison, but his highly developed sense of honour prevented him from abandoning the thousands of other people for whom he felt responsible.) About six months after the siege began, at the beginning of August 1884, the prime minister obtained parliamentary approval to finance a British expedition to rescue the governor general trapped in Khartoum in what was developing quickly into something of a forlorn hope. Nevertheless, the timing was advantageous in terms of providing the army with the opportunity to use the rising waters of the Nile to hasten movements upriver in the autumn because the river was much easier to navigate at that time in comparison with the annual period of declining waters or “low Nile.”

Military authorities had been studying how to overcome the challenge of moving upriver to Khartoum for some months before the government’s decision to attempt a rescue. A number of senior army and navy officers wanted to build a railway between Suakin and Berber to advance an expedition and to create the means for maintaining long-term control over Sudan. Yet, the route — whether by rail or overland — was difficult in the extreme, its life-giving and essential wells could be destroyed or poisoned, and it was vulnerable to attack by the Mahdists, who preserved their capacity to fight after their battles with the British. Yet it was attractive because the 750-kilometre route from Suakin to Khartoum, via Berber, represented the shortest practical distance between a port the British could control and the besieged capital. Nevertheless, Garnet Wolseley, now a full general and titled Baron Wolseley of Cairo after his 1882 victory, preferred a different plan to the railway scheme, and it was his idea that the army would adopt. He wanted to send a force up the Nile from Cairo to Khartoum, either on the river or along its banks, with Alexandria serving as the primary port connection to the outside world and with the northern Sudanese market town of Wadi Halfa (called “Bloody Halfway” by British soldiers) serving as a base for operations in the rebellious province. The distance between Alexandria and Khartoum was almost three thousand kilometres, but the route boasted far better communications as well as something of a transportation infrastructure and, naturally, plenty of water to sustain soldiers, horses, and camels. Wolseley’s troops would face few problems through Egypt itself to Wadi Halfa because of railway lines along part of the river as well as the availability of steamboats — including a number maintained by the famous tour operator, Thomas Cook — and the ease with which additional transport could be arranged on the northern part of the Nile. Wadi Halfa, situated about ten kilometres north of one of the Nile’s treacherous barriers, the Second Cataract, was the centre of an area where the army established a series of camps, depots, and repair yards at both ends of the cataract that would serve as the jumping-off point for transporting the bulk of the matériel and men of the army of about ten thousand as it moved farther upriver into the heart of the rebellious territory.⁵⁷ From the south end of the Second Cataract, small boats piloted in large part by voyageurs from Canada were to be the primary means of getting through the remaining four major cataracts and many smaller but still formidable patches of rough water. That part of the route ran for fifteen hundred kilometres to Khartoum through desert or semi-desert dominated by Muhammad Ahmad’s forces in a region where there were very few local resources available to supply the army. The main cataracts were extensive ranges of rapids, often were uncharted, and changed regularly, thus creating a situation in which the voyageurs would need to explore the waterways to find usable channels in addition to deploying their other skills in manoeuvring the boats through the rapids. Recognizing that the army would not be able to move rapidly, Wolseley planned to split his force into “River” and “Desert” columns if necessary at Korti, deep within Sudan’s boarders, with the latter to use horses and camels to ride overland to Metemma on the Nile and save time by bypassing the great bend in the river. From Metemma, the Desert Column could use steamboats Gordon had anchored there to open communications with Khartoum. In that eventuality, the River Column would continue upriver to capture Abu Hamed and Berber before joining the Desert Column in whatever subsequent operations were needed to complete the mission.