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Chapter 2 The Voyageurs on the Nile

While the British army established its camps in and around Wadi Halfa, the Ocean King sailed into Alexandria harbour (which still showed the scars of the British bombardment two years earlier) on October 7, 1884. The next day, the officers and men of the Canadian contingent began their long journey south to take up their duties, covering the first part of the route on troop trains, from Alexandria on the Mediterranean to Asyut on the Nile, travelling via Cairo. Mohawk Boatman James Deer described the rolling stock as “something like cattle cars, open and without windows, so that the sand blew in upon us like drifting snow, giving everyone an extremely dirty and travel-stained appearance.” Foreman Louis Jackson from Kahnawake remembered the accommodations as uncomfortable and crowded, and commented on how the parched voyageurs all rushed for water at each stop along the line. (The contingent’s officers, in contrast, travelled in first-class carriages.) Despite the discomfort, Jackson took in the sights along the way, and remarked on how he saw fencing made from corn stalks that looked much like Canadian snow fences and which fulfilled a similar function by keeping the desert sands away from the tracks. At the first glimpse of the Nile during the afternoon of October 8, Jackson reflected on how it was about the “same width as the Saint Lawrence opposite Caughnawaga.”¹ From Asyut to Wadi Halfa, the voyageurs travelled on the river itself, aside from a short rail portage around the First Cataract. Most of them sat in barges and whaleboats towed by steamers, while others made the journey on the steamers themselves. Each night the contingent had to camp rather than continue on its way because sandbars in the river made travel dangerous in the dark. Their commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Denison, used the stops to purchase fresh meat, vegetables, dates, and other provisions for everyone to supplement the tinned “bully beef” (sold to the British by American meat packers), hardtack, tea, coffee, rum, lime juice, and other items that made up the army’s rations. These stops gave the Canadians time to see some of Egypt’s places of interest, including its ancient ruins, but Louis Jackson found the experience frustrating because the local people could not tell him anything about the great monuments that stimulated his curiosity. As they continued upriver, Colonel Denison told his men to keep their hair short and bodies washed to help preserve their health, and warned everyone that once they passed Aswan they would have to bathe only in shallow waters and in groups because of the threat posed by crocodiles. Despite the excitement of possible encounters with those giant reptiles, the members of the Canadian contingent generally thought the days spent travelling along the Nile to Wadi Halfa were pleasant.²

The move upriver through Egypt, however, was not without its troubles. On one occasion, during a scuffle over some melons, a Canadian shot and mortally wounded a local person. Frederick Denison conducted a thorough investigation, but could not establish who was responsible, so all he could do was confiscate the voyageurs’ handguns and fine three non-Mohawk men who were on shore at the time of the incident five pounds each. He also issued orders instructing his subordinates to conduct themselves “properly,” not touch the crops or belongings of the local population, and stay out of riverside villages, while reminding them that they fell under military disciplines, which meant that they could be court-martialled and shot for committing serious crimes.³ Shortly afterwards, when the Canadians still were making their way towards Sudan, Deer recorded that the governor of a town along the Nile invited the boatmen to visit him, treated them kindly, and gave them coffee and cigarettes. However, on their way back to the riverbank, they “were stoned by a party of five hundred Arabs, and some of our men” were “badly hurt,” without saying why they had been attacked, although the incident may have been related to the earlier shooting.⁴ At about the same time, one voyageur seemed to have disappeared from the main body, and the Canadians assumed that he had been murdered by local people. The contingent’s officers, with a party of men, and equipped with a surprisingly large amount of ammunition, prepared to “sally forth in a state of great excitement” according to one young British officer on the scene, Lieutenant F. Gore Anley, who, with his other imperial colleagues on board the steamer, thought the Canadians overreacted, and laughed when Surgeon-Major J.L.H. Neilson demanded that a strong guard be stationed around the boat. The incident ended when the “missing” man was discovered asleep behind a biscuit box. Yet, even the returning calm came close to ending in tragedy when a Canadian officer nearly shot one person while unloading his revolver.⁵ Beyond the awkward incident of the missing man, Denison and his fellow officers had trouble controlling their subordinates, according to Anley. One day they had to postpone their departure from a landing along the river for several hours because a number of voyageurs were slow to return to their vessels; and another time, despite being ordered to stay on board the transport, the voyageurs flocked ashore when they stopped, despite the shouts and efforts of the officers to prevent them from leaving. Both incidents of poor discipline reflected the long-standing customs of engaging in wild behaviour when shantymen back in Canada let off steam as they travelled from settled regions to the lumber camps where opportunities to indulge themselves would be few and where work would be hard, as would be the case once the contingent entered Sudan. Reflecting on their insubordination, Anley called the Canadians as a whole “dreadful,” yet thought that separately they were “very good chaps indeed.” However, he realized that some of them possessed little skill in boating, having finessed their way into the contingent merely to participate in the adventure. Lieutenant Anley also showed some gullibility when he observed that the natives among the Canadians were “dressed in the garb of civilization” claiming that “they only put on their war paint on great and solemn occasions.” He also enjoyed a ride in one of a pair of canoes the steersmen had brought along when “six Red Indians” made it “skip along at a tremendous pace”; and he took pleasure at a concert of boating songs given by the voyageurs for the benefit of their fellow travellers, which their officers probably hoped would temper some of the tensions caused by the unruly boatmen with their imperial comrades.⁶

The trip to the camps in and around Wadi Halfa took the Canadian voyageurs until October 26, 1884. Upon their arrival, General Lord Wolseley, who had been on the scene for three weeks, visited their camp (located somewhat south of the town itself at the north end of the Second Cataract) to give them their orders.⁷ Wolseley took some satisfaction when he saw the people who would be charged with mastering the challenges posed by the Nile, noting, with a soldier’s admiration and optimism, that they were a “rough-looking lot, but I hope I shall get plenty of work out of them. They won’t funk this river at all events.”⁸

It was at that point the voyageurs began to test the capabilities of their boats in rougher waters, at first without soldiers or cargoes, by ferrying one hundred of them south to a Royal Navy camp through a five-kilometre section of the sixteen-kilometre maze of rapids and waterfall that made up the Second Cataract.⁹ (Before the voyageurs had arrived, the first whaleboat to move through the Second Cataract had done so on September 25, and Arab labourers carried out much of the work of transporting the whaleboats through or around the cataract.) Originally, the army had expected to use a short pre-existing railway line to bypass that part of the river altogether, which would have put the Canadians farther upriver for their first posting, but its deteriorated rolling stock and poor condition meant that a large portion of the Gordon Relief Expedition’s men, equipment, and supplies had to travel through the difficult cataract until the railway’s capacity could be improved, which caused considerable disappointment because of the loss of critical time in moving toward Khartoum. An officer from the Royal Navy mitigated the problem as best he could by building a 2,300-metre portage around part of the cataract where men pushed boats along with rollers and levers, although the work was very hard and heavy. However, once engineers completed their improvements, the railway could transport over one hundred tonnes of supplies per day, exclusive of passengers.¹⁰

“The Canadian voyageurs’ first touch of the Nile.” The report that accompanied this illustration captured some of the naive enthusiasm of the period’s press coverage: “there are not many feathers and beads about our Red Indian volunteers, and they look very slovenly in their suit of woollen tweed, half moccasins, and regulation white helmet, but strong, sturdy looking fellows they are, and when in their blue flannel shirts, with sleeves tucked up, they look good enough for any boating requirements.”

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The design of the expedition’s watercraft had been inspired from various models, but mainly by double-bowed Royal Navy whaleboats (or “whalers” as contemporaries tended to call them). The navy’s design had been modified to address Sudanese conditions, on the recommendation of Colonel William Butler and Lieutenant-Colonel James Alleyne, both of whom based their views on their experiences on the Red River Expedition. Butler took overall charge of designing the vessels, procuring them, and then managing them during the campaign. As also influenced by his memories of 1870, as we saw above, he assumed they would be piloted by boatmen from Canada, having suggested the idea to Wolseley as early as April 1884. Each vessel could carry three or more tonnes of supplies, personal equipment, and up to a dozen soldiers, although usually there were fewer men on board. The whalers were ordered in August 1884 from several dozen manufacturers in the United Kingdom, who had to work swiftly to fulfil the army’s specifications, and naturally, given the pressing circumstances, the watercraft varied somewhat in size and their component parts were not always interchangeable. The 789 whaleboats acquired were somewhat more than nine metres long and two wide, and drew less than sixty centimetres of water. They weighed about 450 kilograms, which was much less than the standard Royal Navy whaler because Colonel Butler believed they had to be as light as possible in order to be portaged easily. Each boat had an awning to protect the men from the sun, and came with a removable rudder, two masts, lug sails, twelve oars, two boat hooks, six pushing poles, rope for tracking, towing and other needs, two grapnel anchors, and other necessities. A quantity of spare parts, materials for repairs, and tools were brought along. For instance, every whaler had a sheet of lead, pitch, paint, canvas, and other supplies, while every eighth boat had a tool chest along with additional supplies, and every twentieth vessel carried a grindstone, nails, and replacement tackle. For crew and passengers, each whaleboat had a bell tent, waterproof bags with blankets and other accoutrements, various tools (such as axes and spades), a portable stove with fuel and cooking equipment (including a water filter and fishing gear), dishes and cutlery, a lamp, cleaning supplies, and other articles. Items were designed to nest within each other or otherwise take up as little space as possible. Beyond these supplies, each vessel held six boxes of ammunition and enough rations to feed twelve men for one hundred days (beyond the small quantities of fresh food that the army purchased as it made its way upriver and the rations that it supplied en route in order to preserve the hundred-day store for the hard campaigning that lay ahead). An important idea behind the design of the boats and their allocations of equipment and supplies was to make each whaler and its men as self-contained and self-sufficient as possible.

When travelling, their crews employed whatever means of propulsion or combination of methods best suited the conditions they encountered. Poles, for example, were good in shallow water, but when the depth of the river was too great and the current too swift, track-lines could be used to haul the vessels from the riverbank. Once the voyageurs had gained some experience on the Nile, they came to the conclusion that the boats tended to sail best in groups of about ten. Such a number ensured that there were would be enough pilots from Canada to handle them, as not every vessel could have one or two of these boatmen on board, and therefore travelling in groups allowed the steersmen to move from boat to boat once each craft passed through a challenging stretch of water. As well, this number reduced the risk of collisions that might occur with a greater number of whalers in circumstances when the river caught the boats up and swept them along at high speeds.¹¹

The New York Times, basing a story on the words of some non-Mohawk voyageurs who returned to Canada in 1885 via New York, reported that the whalers “were poorly built and unsuitable.”¹² Louis Jackson, however, disagreed, declaring that the Mohawks were “pleased” with their boats, and stated that they were appropriate for their designated tasks. They were robust enough to take a fair amount of abuse, but were light enough to bring ashore and turn over without difficulty for repairs or to portage around impassable parts of the river. It was their light construction that seems to have been the main point of disagreement between those who liked the vessels and those who did not. However necessary it was to reduce the weight of the whalers, Butler’s design presumed that the men who would pilot them would be highly skilled — as the Mohawks, Ojibways, and some of the others were — but the majority of the Canadian contingent, including reasonably good pilots who made up the bulk of the boatmen, were not as proficient as the peculiar construction of the boats demanded. That fact suggests that the authorities in Canada ought to have been more aggressive in fulfilling London’s request to engage a force primarily composed of highly qualified native steersmen. Jackson’s only complaint about the vessels was the presence of keels on them, which he found unsuitable for navigating in fast-moving water at times, although he acknowledged that they had their value when the men had to tow the whalers through rapids from shore. (Another foreman, Alexander Morrison, noted that flat-bottomed boats would not have been able to carry as much cargo or make as much speed in smooth waters as did the whaleboats with keels.) Jackson conceded that other voyageurs had differing opinions about the watercraft, yet affirmed that the Mohawk crews thought they “could not be improved upon for the Nile service.” He liked the sails well enough that he brought one of them back to Kahnawake.¹³

In addition to the whaleboats, the army utilized steamers, barges (which brought many of the whalers from Cairo to Wadi Halfa), and indigenous Nile watercraft, along with sending men and supplies along Egyptian railway lines whenever possible. The Canadians also brought along two canoes, one for Colonel Denison and one to present to Lord Wolseley, which delighted him.¹⁴ Beyond the voyageur contingent and soldier crews who pulled the oars, over two thousand other people performed boat work on a regular basis, including sailors from the Royal Navy, soldiers from the Egyptian army, locally hired civilians, labourers supplied by contractors such as Thomas Cook, and West African “kroomen.” This last group, comprising 266 black pilots and two white officers, had been recruited in August 1884 as a result of Wolseley’s experience in the Ashanti War, where members of his Ring came to admire the Africans’ boating skills. (Wolseley felt that the kroomen were “admirable boatmen,” noting, with some patronization, that they were “a cheery lot and real Neptunes in the water” while other officers praised these steersmen for their contributions to the campaign.)¹⁵

The Second Cataract, photographed before 1872: this image is representative of the kind of information the planners of the Gordon Relief Expedition had to work with and suggests how challenging the effort of moving troops by whaleboat would be once the army began its journey south from Wadi Halfa.

At times, significant muscle power had to be deployed to move steamers and smaller watercraft, as occurred when two steamers were pulled through the Second Cataract, with the first requiring the labour of four thousand Egyptian soldiers and the second consuming the energies of fifteen hundred British regulars. The Nile’s current not only was very strong, but it flowed north against the expedition as the troops tried to hurry towards Khartoum. The experiences of Frederick Denison illustrated the power of the river: on one occasion it took him fifteen days to travel upriver between Wadi Halfa and Dal, a distance of 137 kilometres, but less than two days to go the other way when the Nile flowed in his favour. Beyond watercraft and the use of railways, hundreds of camels carried supplies along the banks of the river, many of which were managed by Arabs brought in from Aden because of their particular expertise in managing those beasts.¹⁶

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On the day the voyageurs finished their first job of moving whaleboats at the Second Cataract to the Royal Navy camp on October 28, 1884, Major-General Sir Evelyn Wood, the commanding officer of the Egyptian army, visited the steersmen and inspected Louis Jackson’s gang. That evening, thirty-six Mohawk boatmen, along with Foreman Jackson, were selected to become the first members of the Canadian contingent to venture farther upriver (with most of the rest of the Iroquois remaining in camp under the supervision of the other Kahnawake foreman, François Delisle). Jackson’s mission was to test the capacity of the whalers with less than full loads and with oversized crews of voyageurs, as well as to determine where portages would have to be established for those who came afterwards and where officers would need to be posted to supervise the army’s movement through problematic stretches of river. One of the discoveries they would make, for instance, was that the army would need to portage the whaleboats more often if the vessels were loaded to capacity. Jackson’s group set out on the train that bypassed the cataract to Gemai, where the army had established a dockyard to repair vessels after their trials through the Second Cataract and to fit them up for the next phase of the campaign, and where most of the soldiers would board their boats for the next stage of the advance on Khartoum. The Mohawks pitched camp for the night; then on October 29, they sailed to Saras, over thirty kilometres farther upriver from Gemai, where they loaded each whaler with two tonnes of supplies and a small number of passengers before continuing a short distance to camp for the night. According to Jackson, the current was swift and the river was as narrow as three hundred metres at some points. For much of the next day Jackson’s six crews assessed their boats under operational conditions, explored different channels, and enjoyed racing against each other when the river was smooth enough to do so. Near the end of the day, however, tragedy struck: the Mohawks suffered their first loss when Louis Capitaine of Kahnawake fell overboard in rough water. Despite throwing him a life belt, oars, and rope, and notwithstanding the efforts of an Arab swimmer to save him, Capitaine perished, and his body was lost. The senior British officer with Jackson hired some local people to try and recover his remains and provide a decent burial. At the time, there was a rumour that Capitaine — an excellent swimmer — may have chosen to end his life because he had expressed distraught thoughts immediately beforehand, such as by throwing his cup into the Nile and remarking that he soon would follow.¹⁷

By November 3, Jackson’s men reached the Dal Cataract. Thus, with their mastery over the water affirmed but with the sad loss of one of their own, the Mohawk voyageurs began the period in which they did the bulk of their work, with their efforts being concentrated from the end of October 1884 to the middle of January 1885 as they sweated under the blazing sun on the desert river, tormented by flies and insects (which regularly invaded cuts, causing infections, or intruded into people’s eyes, inflicting discomfort). The voyageurs toiled for up to fourteen hours each day, seven days a week, although at the beginning of the labour-intensive period of Nile service many of them objected to working on Sundays (and some were fined for refusing to fulfil their duties). Back in the lumber camps, the Sabbath was a day to rest, enjoy recreational activities, and attend to washing and other chores. The men’s opposition to Sunday work in 1884 mirrored an episode on the Red River Expedition in 1870 when Iroquois pilots refused to give up their day off, but which Garnet Wolseley overcame in the Canadian forests with an offer of extra pay for additional effort.¹⁸

The Mohawks lost another man in Louis Jackson’s gang on November 16, 1884, in a difficult stretch of water less than two kilometres north of the Ambikol Cataract, one of the challenging secondary torrents between the better known Second and Third cataracts. At the time, there were four voyageurs in one boat when its rudder broke. Three of them struggled to shore with the help of ropes. However, eighteen-year-old John Morris from Kahnawake tried to swim without assistance, but the current pulled him under and he disappeared from sight. Eight days later, one of the Canadian officers, Captain Egerton Denison, spotted Morris’s decomposed body floating downriver and had his remains recovered and buried. These two deaths possessed an added degree of sadness to them: Capitaine left a young family behind in Canada; while the youthful Morris (who presumably had not developed his piloting expertise fully by that stage in his life) had signed up for Egyptian service against his father’s wishes. Fortunately, no additional Mohawks lost their lives (although they seem to have left Montreal assuming that they would endure higher casualties). Sixteen members of the Canadian contingent in total died: six from drowning, eight from enteric fever, smallpox, dysentery, or other malady, and two from accident by falling from a train near the end of their Egyptian service. A large number of men became sick during the campaign, and one Mohawk, John Hops, fell victim to mental illness, nervous breakdown, or some uncertain disease that medical personnel interpreted as an affliction of the mind, so he was sent to the Royal Victoria Military Hospital at Netley in England for rest and treatment before he returned to Canada.¹⁹

On October 29, just after Jackson’s gang had set out on its exploratory trip, more whalers began to head upriver from Gemai once the other voyageurs assembled there after moving boats through the Second Cataract. Along much of the river from Gemai southward, six to ten soldiers typically pulled the oars of each boat and followed the orders of their voyageur pilot, who either took the rudder or stood in the bow with an oar, pole, or paddle to guide the whaler from the front, depending upon the condition of the river at any given point, as had occurred on the Red River fourteen years earlier. In more challenging rapids, two voyageurs typically took charge of each vessel. When the waters were even rougher, boats normally were towed upriver from the river bank, but one or more voyageurs often stayed on board to steer, occasionally with a soldier or some other man to help, while other voyageurs directed the efforts of people from the bank and contributed their own muscle to the tasks at hand. On these occasions some of the cargoes often had to be portaged, but the men discovered that the whalers generally were easier to manoeuvre if half the supplies were left on board to give them sufficient weight to cut through the water. At some places the river presented barriers that were so formidable that the whalers and cargoes had to be portaged without any attempt to force the watercraft through. To speed the effort, the army stationed Egyptian soldiers and local labourers at portages to perform much of the work of carrying goods and boats. Occasionally large numbers of men came under Mohawk supervision, such as at one point when Jackson led twenty-three whalers manned by local Dongolese labourers, or on another occasion when he directed 375 Dongolese boatmen and Egyptian soldiers (along with his “Caughnawaga boys”) in an attempt to shift an eight- or ten-metre-long, steam-powered navy gunboat (called a pinnace) that had run up on some rocks, filled with water, and blocked a channel that other vessels needed to travel through on their way upriver.²⁰

A major difference between the Nile and Canadian rivers, which made the job harder and the going slower in Sudan, was its muddy character. At times the brown water made it difficult, and even impossible, to see submerged rocks and other hazards, which the voyageurs found to be intensely frustrating in comparison to their North American experience. However, some people, such as the Saulteaux Ojibway foreman, Henry Prince, could discern the presence of hidden rocks by subtleties in the surface colour when the river was unclear, which undoubtedly was a skill shared among others in the contingent.²¹ In these trying conditions, the Mohawks and other boatmen regularly searched for the best routes through various channels for everyone to use on the ever-changing waters of the Nile River. They also repaired vessels, winning praise from the officer in charge of the Gemai dockyard, Lieutenant-Colonel C. Grove. In one report he called them “most excellent and willing workmen” who taught others “how to set about boat mending, as distinguished from ordinary carpentering.” In another document he recorded that they “were the best boat carpenters I had, and their conduct was perfect.”²² Many of the Canadian shantymen found that the labour required of them was comparable to what they were used to performing back on the waterways of North America. Foreman Alexander Morrison from Manitoba, who worked on the Ottawa River, told The Montreal Daily Star upon his return home that he even thought the Nile was less difficult to navigate than the Ottawa and its associated waterways, while one of the several Kahnawake men, whose surname was Jacob, noted upon his arrival back in Canada that he “had not found the work on the Nile half as hard as he had expected” and that if he had been asked to return, “he would start immediately” and try to recruit all his friends to go with him.²³ Others, however, complained that the rapids were more exhausting than they had expected.²⁴

“The First Battalion of the South Staffordshire Regiment pushing forward at the Hannik Cataract.” Canadian voyageurs are manning the bow and tiller, as indicated by their tweed trousers in contrast to the tropical uniforms of the soldiers.

Perhaps because of the nature of the river transport service, where watercraft were spread over long distances, the Mohawks, at least those in Louis Jackson’s gang, normally came under the command of British rather than Canadian officers. For much of their time piloting the whalers, the Mohawks concentrated their efforts south of the Second Cataract, between Gemai and the Dal Cataract (the upper end of which was at Sarkamatto), as was the case in the middle of November when most voyageurs served on that part of the river. During the earlier period of their work, they travelled long distances, with crews sailing the boats all the way from Gemai to Sarkamatto (with some then being sent farther upriver in smoother water, with only one voyageur accompanying every five vessels because the soldier crews had gained enough familiarity with the boats to manage the watercraft themselves for much of the time). From Sarkamatto, most of the members of the Canadian contingent at first returned north to Gemai to bring more whalers upriver. However, that practice caused delays when soldiers had to wait for them at Gemai, so the army introduced a new system to speed movement by stationing detachments of voyageurs at seven stretches of the river in fixed camps where the poor conditions on those portions of the Nile required their particular skills, thus concentrating the voyageurs’ talents where they were needed most. Louis Jackson’s gang, for instance, worked in and around the treacherous waters of the Dal Cataract from late December 1884 until the middle of January 1885. These camps, typically garrisoned by Egyptian soldiers, served as depots and resting places for British troops as they made their way upriver. The decision to post boatmen along the waterway made navigation easier because individual crews could monitor daily changes better in smaller and more familiar stretches of water and because it allowed two or more voyageurs to serve each boat where the rough waters dictated that extra care be taken. This arrangement, with its fixed camps for subgroups within the Canadian contingent, also was more comfortable for the men than earlier, when they had to move longer distances — a practice that had generated some complaint among them.²⁵

Sometimes the Nile offered smooth sailing and sportsmanlike challenges, providing welcomed relief from the hard toil that the Mohawks and other members of the expedition endured. Jackson recalled that the river presented them with “plenty of dodging and crossing the stream to get the side of the river with the lesser current,” and, combined with “the boats being such good travellers and answering their helms so well with a stiff breeze,” he and his men found themselves “in a genuine boatman’s paradise.”²⁶ A British officer who enjoyed good sailing was Captain Willoughby Verner of the Rifle Brigade. He recorded that “great emulation was shown by many of the boats’ crews to outstrip their comrades, and various degrees of nautical skill were displayed in booming out the lug sails and hoisting the awning [designed to protect the crews from the sun] as spinnakers,” which, the voyageurs probably found as exhilarating as the troops they piloted on their mission.²⁷

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In mid-November 1884, a twelve-day-old message from Major-General Charles Gordon in Khartoum got through Mahdist lines to reach Lord Wolseley as he advanced upriver. Gordon reported that he could hold out for forty days — until about the middle of December — but after that it would be “difficult.”²⁸ At that moment, the relief expedition still had a long way to go. As of November 28, only one boat (piloted by Henry Prince) had passed through the Third Cataract, which was over eleven hundred kilometres away from Khartoum. As it was, Wolseley did not expect to be able to concentrate his forces at Korti, almost nine hundred kilometres from the Sudanese capital by water, for the next stage of the campaign until the end of the year. Wolseley faced numerous challenges, ranging from a shortage of coal for steamers (which had halted the transport of troops and supplies farther downriver from Aswan to Wadi Halfa in late October and early November), to the modest staff organization available to him, to the inevitable collisions between personalities and imbalances of talents that mark any large enterprise. Various other factors on the river itself compounded his problems, such as the annual fall in the Nile’s water level that increasingly made travel difficult and the smaller number of highly skilled men from Canada than he had expected would be available to him. As much as possible, the expedition’s officers minimized the impact of these setbacks. For instance, when the coal shortage stopped troop movements from the north, officers in Sudan loaded dozens of otherwise idle vessels with extra foodstuff to send upriver to replace the rations being consumed in order to replenish supplies in preparation for future operations. Concerned with the lack of progress, Colonel William Butler sought permission to speed up travel by reducing the cargoes carried by the boats by about a third, and received permission to lessen the precious quantities of stores by one-sixth.²⁹ Anxiety over Gordon’s fate was a serious strain on British staff officers who thought, at best, a force moving upriver could not reach Khartoum until sometime in February 1885. As it was, the first British troops had not arrived in Korti below the Fourth Cataract until December 10 (where Wolseley established his headquarters on December 16, 1884), making it possible to save some time by sending part of the force — the Desert Column — overland to avoid the immense bend in the Nile.

Despite these problems, Wolseley reported optimistically that, “The English boats have up to this point fulfilled all my expectations” and that “the men are in excellent health, fit for any trial of strength, as a result of the constant manual labour.”³⁰ Yet, some of the watercraft had been destroyed in the harsh waters of the Nile, the soldiers’ uniforms were ragged in the extreme, and some men no longer had boots to wear after all their rough work.³¹ Amidst the hardships and anxieties of the campaign, Wolseley’s force celebrated Christmas as best it could even though necessity required officers and men to work that day. Like everyone else, the members of the Canadian contingent enjoyed a double issue of rations and boiled up some of their bully beef, hardtack, and vegetables into a stew they called “a fog.” Reflecting on the day, their colonel missed the snow of a typical Canadian Christmas — a sentiment likely felt by many of those under him as they commemorated that symbolic moment and all its associated memories in a part of the world so very different from the places where they had celebrated the Nativity throughout their lives. The voyageurs most likely joined in the general merrymaking, singing, and exchange of greetings that occurred along the river wherever the men of the Gordon Relief Expedition camped that night on their journey towards Khartoum.³²

Late in December, General Wolseley divided his force at Korti in two. He sent one of his subordinates in command of the Desert Column, with many of the men being mounted on camels, 265 kilometres across the inhospitable landscape between Korti and Metemma, a river town 185 kilometres north of Khartoum, thus cutting almost 430 kilometres off the famous bend in the river. Yet, he risked disaster should the troops fail to secure the wells en route that would provide the British with their vital supplies of water. Charles Gordon had stationed four small armoured steamers near Metemma, which could be used to bring part of the Desert Column upriver with some speed, open communications with Khartoum, and provide its beleaguered garrison with at least a token number of British soldiers to augment the Egyptian troops and let the Mahdists know that more imperial reinforcements were coming. While the number of men that could be carried by the little Sudanese steamers was not significant, some officers hoped that the arrival of British troops in Khartoum would undermine the rebels’ resolve (although both Gordon and Wolseley thought the chances that the plan would have much of an impact were limited). The rest of the Desert Column either could follow the steamers upriver to Khartoum if circumstances allowed for a quick move, or it could shift downriver in expectation of reuniting with the River Column, which left Korti on December 28 and which had been charged with taking Berber so it could be used as another staging point for further operations. Additionally, the move upriver toward Berber was intended to keep some of the Mahdist forces positioned there and prevent them from acting against the Desert Column. Unfortunately, a host of problems, including a shortage of camels, combined with the British army’s lack of familiarity with these animals in this, their first campaign with them, along with two large-scale attacks on the force, retarded the Desert Column’s movements, causing it to take twelve days to reach the Nile rather than the six originally anticipated.

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Despite the army’s transportation problems, slow progress, and the worsening situation in Khartoum, the March 9, 1885 expiry of the voyageurs’ six-month contracts came into view in early January; so thought turned to sending the Canadian contingent home by the deadline. The majority of boatmen wanted to return to North America rather than sign up for further service even though officials asked them to do so and offered higher pay and additional benefits. The motivations behind the voyageurs’ desires for wishing to end their service both were mixed and not completely clear to us today. One of the officers, Captain Telmont Aumond of the Governor General’s Foot Guards from Ottawa, may have discouraged men from staying for now unknown reasons, although he denied doing so and Colonel Frederick Denison affirmed the captain’s integrity by saying Aumond had performed “excellent work” in Egypt.³³ Some voyageurs worried about the heat of the approaching Sudanese summer or did not feel healthy enough to continue because sickness had afflicted a large number of them (although, in general, the Mohawks endured the climate and its challenges better than the others). Some men could not stand the prospect of continuing up the Nile on a diet of bully beef, hardtack, and the other limitations of army rations in a region without access to much fresh food. Others wanted to return to Canada to fulfil pre-existing commitments or wished to re-engage for only three months when the authorities preferred them to renew for six. Some voyageurs were not satisfied with the amount of extra pay offered. Undoubtedly, many just wanted to see their families or had had enough of the adventure. Presumably, some were reluctant to travel into the more dangerous regions out of fear for their personal safety, as by January 1885 the River Column, accompanied by elements of the Canadian contingent, moved into territory where Muhammad Ahmad’s forces monitored their movements closely and where the voyageurs found themselves dodging the odd stray bullet.³⁴

The majority of Mohawks, who were working in the Dal region for the most part at that time, wanted to go home, likely for the same reasons that influenced the rest of their compatriots, but there were other incentives too. Some individuals in Louis Jackson’s gang fell afoul of the army: Surgeon-Major Hubert Neilson noted that a number of them refused to obey orders and “bolted with a boat,” while James Deer recorded that ten Mohawks left their post without permission, were arrested, held prisoner for a few days, court-martialled, and fined for their behaviour. Later, in Canada, these men said they had been directed to stay at a particular location by a British officer who spoke to them in English, which they did not understand, and, after waiting three days, chose to move downriver to a location where they knew some of the other voyageurs were working. At the time, however, Neilson described them as “idiots,” which, combined with Deer’s memory of the event, suggests that there was more to the problem than the claim that it was a simple mistake based on language. Yet, the fines were comparatively mild for such insubordination, so perhaps the authorities did not take the problem too seriously.³⁵

Beyond any altercation affecting those ten individuals, there was a pressing need for the majority of Mohawks from Kahnawake to go home because they wanted to participate in the redistribution of land that was scheduled to occur on the reserve on May 1, 1885. That event was part of a Canadian government initiative to address land shortages and tensions surrounding property disputes (and to encourage native people to adopt Euro-American values as they affected the ownership and utilization of property). Concern to be on hand for the allocation probably accounts for the fact that three of the five or six Mohawks who did remain with the army in Sudan did not come from Kahnawake, even though that community provided the majority of the Iroquois steersmen. As it was, one Mohawk told The Montreal Daily Star that he and many of his friends would have stayed on the Nile if they did not have to come home because of the land question.³⁶ Louis Jackson, for unstated reasons, but perhaps because of the upcoming property redistribution, was one of the people who chose to leave. Jackson’s decision seems to have been important because Colonel Denison believed that most of the Iroquois — his best voyageurs — would have stayed had their popular foreman been willing to continue in the boat service. If he was correct (although he may not have realized how important the land question was), Jackson’s impact paralleled practices in the lumber industry where a foreman’s choice to stay or leave an employer played a large role in the decision of the men who he had recruited to work in the camps.³⁷

In the end, only eighty-three boatmen, six foremen, and two officers (Paymaster William Kennedy of the 90th Winnipeg Battalion of Rifles and Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Denison) continued travelling upriver, including regions beyond Korti. The contingent’s surgeon-major and chaplain worked elsewhere in Egypt and another officer did not return to Canada at that point because of illness. The number of men could have been larger, but Denison refused to re-engage the incompetent white men from Manitoba, who, of all people, were willing to continue. Those voyageurs who agreed to remain with the campaign received an increase in pay of twenty dollars per month above their previous forty- dollar rate along with new clothes and other benefits. Most of these men were anglophones, and Denison wished that more First Nations men had decided to stay because his remaining voyageurs not only were smaller in number but weaker in skill, even after weeding out the worst of the lot.³⁸

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At about this time, on January 17, 1885, the Desert Column, as it made its way overland, came under attack at Abu Klea in the Gordon Relief Expedition’s first major battle. The British beat off the Mahdists in a clash that was typical of the Sudan War of 1884–85: outnumbered but well-disciplined British soldiers armed with modern weapons — including early machine guns — defeated extraordinarily brave nomadic and pastoral men from the various tribes that made up Sudan’s population. Only a small percentage of the Muhammad Ahmad followers had equivalent arms (mostly captured from the Egyptians) and these were inferior to those of imperial forces, while the tribesmen’s proficiency with them was limited. Instead, most carried spears, swords, and shields, and fought by charging quickly at the British to engage at close quarters where they could use their weapons effectively. Since they moved so fast and in such large numbers, and since there was little or no cover, the soldiers at Abu Klea formed a large, tightly packed “square,” in which they stood shoulder to shoulder and faced outwards towards their enemy. This stance allowed them to present four “fronts” to their opponents so that the Mahdists could not find any vulnerable flanks or rear to turn. The square was an old defence used by infantry in the musket era of earlier decades against fast-moving cavalry, but it had become obsolete in European warfare because of the massive firepower available to Western armies after the mid-1800s. Nevertheless, it continued to be effective in colonial warfare against opponents armed with obsolete forms of military technology. As was typical of the battles of 1884–85, Abu Klea saw hugely lopsided casualty figures: in fifteen ghastly minutes of combat, the British force of eighteen hundred soldiers (plus several hundred native labourers) suffered 168 killed and wounded; while the Mahdists, who numbered in excess of ten thousand, left eleven hundred bodies on the field after carrying away an unknown number of their dead and wounded before retreating. The Sudanese, despite their defeat, retained their capabilities to re-engage with large numbers of men fairly rapidly — a common characteristic of the war. Two days later, at Abu Kru, the Mahdists again assaulted the Desert Column, but once more endured a lopsided and bloody tactical defeat at the hands of the British, who themselves lost a not-insubstantial 121 killed and wounded. The column continued its advance after this second fight and reached the Nile on January 20 near Metemma. However, after advancing against the town’s defences and sustaining more casualties the next day, its commanding officer abandoned the attack because capturing the town would have cost more in lives and munitions than Metemma was worth to him, while he also worried about the presence of a large number of insurgents operating freely in the region that threatened his exposed force. Therefore, he moved his troops to nearby Gubat, which he had secured before his march against Metemma. By this time, the Desert Column was weakened, having lost many men, camels, and horses, and having expended a large portion of its ammunition.

Part of the Desert Column’s square at the battle of Abu Kru, January 19, 1885.

At the same time that the Desert Column fought its way overland, the River Column, with 217 watercraft, continued its advance. Its senior officers hoped to reach Berber with the help of the reduced number of voyageurs, although the column had to travel through an area of turbulent rapids and deep gorges that made the boatmen’s toil more difficult than usual. In addition to using the whaleboats, many of the column’s three thousand soldiers moved along the banks of the river. Scouts and spies with the River Column brought in reports of Mahdist activity within a few kilometres of the army, and British pickets skirmished with Sudanese rebels on occasion, which raised fears that the whaleboats might be attacked at exposed points along the river, especially as, of necessity, they were spread out over long distances. Yet, the insurgents did not engage the soldiers advancing up the Nile in combat, but their presence slowed the British because they had no choice but to try to prevent being surprised. One extra precaution the force had to take was to use up time that it might have employed to travel to build fortifications when it stopped every night. Progress was such that it took until the end of January for the column’s forward elements to reach the Fourth Cataract. Then, on February 5, the River Column halted, even though its officers already thought it could not rendezvous with their compatriots in the Desert Column at Gubat until March. Its soldiers and boatmen wondered why they had been ordered to stop, but welcomed a rest and an opportunity to wash and mend their tattered clothing.³⁹