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Introduction

An extraordinary event in the history of the Iroquois Confederacy occurred in 1884 and 1885 when about sixty men from the Mohawk nation participated in a British military expedition in Sudan, which at the time was a province within Egypt rather than the independent country that it is today. These men, drawn from native communities on the Saint Lawrence and Ottawa rivers, served in a force sent up the Nile River to rescue Major-General Charles Gordon from Muslim nationalists who besieged him in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. To transport the troops, the government of the United Kingdom deployed soldiers from both the Egyptian and its own armies, sailors from the Royal Navy, civilian employees and contractors, and boatmen from West Africa and Canada. Almost four hundred individuals formed the Canadian Voyageur Contingent (or Nile Voyageurs) to pilot specially designed whaleboats upriver, including Iroquois Mohawks from Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Kanesatake. The aboriginal men proved their excellence on the treacherous waters of the Nile and won praise for their contributions from the army’s senior officers and a range of other observers. Today, the image of North American indigenous people taking part in a Victorian imperial adventure in Africa seems incongruous in comparison to how we normally perceive First Nations history. However, Mohawk service on the Nile fell within a number of important norms in Iroquois cultural practices, work patterns, and alliance relationships, which we will examine in the pages below along with exploring the fascinating events that unfolded between the late summer of 1884 and the spring of 1885.

This book presents several elements that I trust will capture the richness of the story of the Mohawks in the Sudan War for modern readers. The first and longest section comprises my historical narrative and analysis of the Iroquois adventure, focused on placing native involvement in a larger perspective. The two components that follow are memoirs written by Mohawk veterans of the campaign, Louis Jackson’s Our Caughnawagas in Egypt and James Deer’s Canadian Voyageurs in Egypt, both of which were published in 1885, and which present the immediate perspectives of people who lived through the events of the period and therefore complement the modern interpretation in this book. Very few copies of either text survive, with the result that these documents, particularly James Deer’s, are not well known. (Deer’s work was self-published and may have enjoyed only limited distribution, and unlike Jackson’s booklet, is not mentioned in the two main studies of Canadian participation in the Sudan War, Roy MacLaren’s Canadians on the Nile or Charles P. Stacey’s Records of the Nile Voyageurs, nor is it cited in Harold Raugh’s extensive bibliography, British Military Operations in Egypt and Sudan.) Thus it is a pleasure to present these important documents in an accessible form within a contextualized study where they can be understood more fully than might be possible on their own. In addition, this book includes a selection of primary documents by Euro-American witnesses to Iroquois efforts or to closely related events, an annotated roll of the Mohawk boatmen, and other information, along with maps and a collection of period images to enhance appreciation of the story. To help readers keep track of the people mentioned, pertinent information (such as whether someone was a Mohawk or what an individual’s military rank was) forms part of each person’s entry in the index.

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There are several approaches in employing terminology related to both native peoples and the Arab world today, which suggests that an explanation of my approach in Mohawks on the Nile may be warranted. To make the book accessible and clear to a wide audience, I normally used the common terms of standard Canadian English rather than those that other authors might employ, such as in other Euro-American situations or in parts of the Iroquois world. For instance, I employed “First Nation,” as is common in Canada, rather than “Native-American,” as we might expect to see in a U.S.-based publication; and, for the most part, I did not use aboriginal words, such as “Haudenosaunee” in place of “Iroquois,” in situations where those terms have yet to become common in mainstream English, but I did so when they have done so, such as “Kahnawake” rather than the old spelling, “Caughnawaga.” Words like “white” and “native,” while awkward in addressing North American history, remain functional, so I used them, but without capitalization in recognition of their limitations. In the case of Egyptian and Sudanese names, I followed the spelling recommended by the Sudan Archives at Durham University in the United Kingdom, again for the sake of accessibility for modern English-language readers (such as “Asyut” in place of the Victorian “Assout,” and “Khartoum” instead of the Arabic transliteration “al-Khartum”).

In preparing Louis Jackson’s and James Deer’s memoirs for publication, and in quoting other primary sources, I presented the historical documents faithfully in recording the words in the order in which they were written. However, to make them easier to understand I usually wrote out abbreviations in full and regularized punctuation, numbering, capitalization, and spelling. While I refer to the Mohawk community near Montreal as “Kahnawake” in my own prose, I left the term “Caughnawaga” unchanged in the historical texts by Deer, Jackson, and other writers as it seemed more appropriate to do so. I also left grammatical errors in place where they could not be mended through punctuation, but I adjusted sentence and paragraph breaks where such interventions strengthened the coherence of the texts. Deer’s memoir included a sports and a tour program from his time in Egypt, and these have been presented within his text where he placed them originally, but with minor adjustments to the formatting for the sake of clarity. Occasionally I inserted an extra word or two within Jackson’s and Deer’s narratives in square brackets to help make better sense of the documents or to correct an error. The endnotes that accompany Deer’s and Jackson’s sections are mine, designed to clarify points and explore comments that might be obscure to modern readers. (Neither work had any citations originally.) The distances mentioned by Jackson, Deer, and their contemporaries tended to be estimates and some of the dates for events they recorded are inexact; therefore, readers might wish to refer to the “Distances in Egypt and Sudan” and the “Chronology” in the appendices for clarification. Louis Jackson’s memoir included several illustrations, and one of them, his portrait, is presented in Appendix I. However, the other pictures have not been included because they are copies of poor-quality images from a map published in a British newspaper, The Graphic, on October 25, 1884. (Those prints can be seen in an electronic version of Our Caughnawagas in Egypt through the online catalogue of the University of Toronto libraries.) The pictures I have presented in their place in Jackson’s section of Mohawks on the Nile cover the same themes, but have more documentary value.

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This book began as a paper at the 2005 meeting of the Annual Conference on Iroquois Research within the very congenial, mountaintop surroundings of the Rensselaerville Institute in upstate New York. I would like to express my appreciation to the people who attended that gathering for their insights and suggestions, which helped formulate my subsequent research and interpretation. In addition, very special thanks go to Gerald F. Reid of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, for sharing his research with a rare generosity of spirit, for which I am most grateful, and then for multiplying his thoughtfulness by peer-reviewing an earlier version of the text, thereby enabling me to strengthen it considerably. A second person who was most gracious in providing information and serving as a reviewer was Sue Ellen Herne at the Akwesasne Museum, whose contributions also enhanced the end result significantly and who likewise deserves my sincere gratitude. A third peer reviewer was Laurence Hauptman, the respected historian in Iroquois history from the State University of New York in New Paltz, whose contributions also generated a debt of gratitude on my part. As well, I would like to acknowledge my thanks to Salli and Ernest Benedict at Akwesasne for their interest and for offering information about their ancestors who served on the expedition and for providing additional insights to improve my understanding of the Mohawk voyageurs in the Sudan War. Ottawa-based freelance historians Donald and Dianne Graves deserve recognition for kindly undertaking skilful research for this project on my behalf at Library and Archives Canada, and thus supplemented my own efforts. Philip Coppack, my colleague in the Faculty of Arts at Ryerson University, enthusiastically deployed his expertise as a geographer familiar with the latest map-making technologies to work out the distances between various points along the Nile River to correct the great mass of conflicting data that exists in the primary and secondary literature, and to him goes a special word of appreciation. Food historian Fiona Lucas of the City of Toronto Museums and Heritage Services provided welcomed insight into the diet of the voyageurs, and Kevin Hebib, of the same organization, charitably mended my photographs of illustrations from period newspapers. As well, my thanks go to the following people for their help: John Carter of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and to Ann Crichton-Harris, Robert Malcomson, Anthony P. Michel, and Fred Shore. Jane Hogan of the Archives and Special Collections at Durham University Library never failed to help with her expertise and sensible advice on the Sudan, and I am indebted to Ms. Hogan for her guidance. Beyond the Durham University Library, the staff at other institutions also were generous, especially those at the Griffith Institute at the University of Oxford, Library and Archives Canada, the McCord Museum, the National Army Museum in England, the New Brunswick Museum, Ryerson University Library, the Toronto Public Library, and the University of Toronto libraries. My thanks goes to the Ontario Arts Council for a grant that allowed me to undertake more research than would have been possible otherwise at a time when I worked in the museum field and had no other access to support for this study. Toward the end of this project, I made a career change, becoming chair of the Department of History at Ryerson University, and through the generosity of my new home institution, I was able to have maps drawn for this book through the good offices of the chair of the Department of Geography, Shuguang Wang, who arranged for the fine cartographical effort undertaken by Ryerson’s Paul Du, to whom I also am grateful. Before sending my manuscript off to the publisher, Ann Joan Procyk reviewed my text and, as usual, caught mistakes that I was able to correct before final submission to Dundurn Press. Finally, I must acknowledge my appreciation for the commitment of my publishers, Barry Penhale, Jane Gibson, and Kirk Howard, in having the faith to bring out Mohawks on the Nile, as well as to the rest of the people at Dundurn who worked on this project, particularly senior editor Shannon Whibbs and designer Courtney Horner.

Toronto

April 2009

“Hauling whaleboats through Bab el Kebir, the great gate of the Second Cataract.”