‘At the junction, the current really picked up. The White Nile comes crashing in against Tuti – you can see from old maps that the shape of the alluvial island has changed quite considerably even from colonial times – and the two rivers funnel past the western edge of the island north towards Egypt and the Mediterranean. By now the current was perhaps at the speed of a gentle jog – which feels fast when you judge your movement against the land.
‘But it’s a river! The current runs parallel to, not against, dry land. If you don’t mind where you land, the fastest river current in the world in a straight-banked river is actually irrelevant. Just be ready to walk a couple of miles in your trunks. I listened to the ever more insistent traffic. I could see waves of it passing over the six-lane bridge to Omdurman to the south.
‘The current was so fast it seemed best not to plop along. Conserve energy midstream, then, when the time is right, plough quickly to the shore, fast and furious. When I could see the Mahdi’s fort ahead of me, I whirled my arms and gave the two Niles my best front crawl. In the middle of large bodies of water you lose real perspective so I just couldn’t tell how far across I was. I saw Mahmoud and his battered yellow taxi waiting . . . then I backstroked a little, looked up again, and he was gone. I was already overshooting.
‘I no longer had any fear the river would drown me. But I had a keen interest in limiting how far north I landed and in how much of the city’s effluents I’d be exposed to. I buried my face in the water again and whirled into my best front crawl. I looked up and looked up and I was still offshore hundreds of yards down from where I’d intended to land. A bridge was coming up and beyond it some kind of industrial complex which wouldn’t be a whole lot of fun, but I still seemed quite far out to midstream.
‘Until I put my legs down.
‘And discovered that, even though I was fifty yards off the shore, the water was only thigh deep. A meander had cut out a huge swathe of shallow bank on the western side. So I waded ashore to wait for Mahmoud, who had driven round; he was performing his prayers. He was all smiles and appreciation in time-honoured sledging tradition – respect to the event. Ten minutes later we were back at the Acropole Hotel in time for breakfast, nursing our secret, debriefing George Pagoulatos, the nervous proprietor, a little pleased with ourselves.’
34 • Fuzzy-wuzzy
The Nile said to the crocodile, ‘I can live without you but you cannot live without me.’ Nubian proverb
This was the river they were fighting over. On the one hand the British, on the other the men with hairstyles. Who were these demon soldiers of the desert, the so-called fuzzy-wuzzies, one of the tribes who supported the mad Mahdi, and considered by the British to be a great menace?
There were clues in the caves at Beni Hassan on the banks of the Nile about 125 miles south of Cairo. The wall paintings are extraordinary. One long sequence of two men wrestling allows you to reimagine, exactly, the martial arts of 4,000 years ago. It was at Beni Hassan that Bruce Chatwin saw paintings depicting a people making obeisance to the Pharaoh, wearing their hair in the style of the ‘fuzzy-wuzzies’, the Beja nomads of Egypt and Sudan (called fuzzy-wuzzies by the British, the Beja were notoriously fierce warriors). The pictures were 5,000 years old; the Pharaohs were long gone but the Beja are still here.
I went down to the Nile at Minya, after seeing the caves at Beni Hassan. Unlike the grotty grey of Cairo, Minya is sparkling clean, an efficient urban centre. I hired a felucca to see what the Nile would feel like. It was perhaps a little wider than at Cairo – the Nile again reverses expectation by widening as you go up towards the source, at least as far as the Sudan. The river was windy, but despite Herodotus claiming there was no breeze caused by the Nile, it is always windy and almost always blowing from north to south, against the current and helping any boat to go upstream. The boat I hired was piloted by a solemn old sailor who smoked in the high breeze, cupping his fag end expertly when we went about.
It was in Minya in the early nineteenth century that Ibrahim Pasha, the son of Muhammad Ali, returning from his expedition to subdue Senaar in Sudan, heard about the prevalence of robbery along this stretch of the Nile. Several villages were known to participate in a kind of piracy here. He commanded that the kiasheff, leader of one of these supposedly criminal villages, supply him with the robbers who had disturbed this part of the river. The chief would not talk, so to compel him he was given 500 lashes of the kourbash, a terrible punishment indeed. The kourbash is a braided strap, about a yard long, of hippo hide; its hard edge and narrow whip-lashing tip were notorious for cutting the victim. It was a much hated tool of Ottoman suppression along the Nile; as Churchill would write, ‘Patriotism does not grow under the Kourbash.’ (Strangely, the chicote used by Congo slave traders and the sjambok of the apartheid regime in South Africa were both whips made of hippo hide.)
But even after 500 lashes this man did not confess or reveal a single name. Ibrahim then ordered him to be stripped and beaten with redhot rods of iron. Incapable of resisting such torture, the man gave up 200 names, 150 of whom were executed. In view of the way the information was obtained, it is quite probable they were all innocent.
Before visiting Beni Hassan I’d been to a cultural festival on the Red Sea coast at Marsa Alam. The Brits and the Turks are long gone, but here were Beja dancers, fuzzy-wuzzies, not fighting now but laughing and performing music with a one-stringed violin and drums – still here and still with the same hairstyles.
35 • Iroquois Indians on the River Nile
‘Oh tongue, I am slapped for you,’ cried the ear. Sudanese proverb
The Beja did for poor old Gordon in the end, but not before the Gordon relief expedition under General Lord Wolseley tried their best to save him, in 1884–5. There was a considerable delay in setting out up the Nile to Khartoum (the overland route was blocked by desert and hostile tribes). The problem was the cataracts, the rapids that turn the White Nile intermittently into a whitewater torrent between Aswan and Khartoum. No ordinary boatmen were deemed able to battle such rapids. Experts were needed – and were fetched, from Canada. Which is how Indians of the Caughnawaga branch of the Iroquois tribe ended up fighting the Red Nile.
‘My name is Louis Jackson and I am one-half Caughnawaga Indian; having lived all my life with them I know their language. When General Lord Wolseley expressed a desire for the best Canadian boatmen to take the Gordon relief expedition up the Nile he asked for Caughnawaga Indians. I had no intention of going as I had heard discouraging talk about the Egyptian River Nile, moreover I was engaged in securing my crops. But it was explained that I, owing to my command of English, was best suited to go and look after our Caughnawaga boys, so, in the end I agreed.
‘The Caughnawagas are strictly speaking an offshoot of the Mohawks, one of the divisions of the Six Nations, formerly in occupation of the area now called New York, and known to the French by the general name of Iroquois. Long ago they were resettled at the head of the rapids of the St Lawrence river opposite Lachine, on a tract of land ten miles square or 64,000 acres. Unlike many of our aboriginal brothers their spirit did not fade on this small area of land, for they quickly became the true masters of the river, and the rivers of the Canadian Provinces are without end. With some small mixture of white blood the Caughnawagas maintained always their Indian customs, manners and language; also the alertness and powers of endurance of their forebears. They know water well; they know how to take a birch canoe over rocks and cataracts as well as any man alive. Without them the relief army of the Nile would have been lost. Lost once perhaps going upstream, lost for certain coming back down again. Of course it did no good, Gordon was dead from the start, but that didn’t matter. The Caughnawaga Indians did their part, eighty-five of them and five lost, all told.
‘Colonel [James] Alleyne told us an army is only as good as its rations. We had good rations and so did those who came after us, because we ferried their rations up stream, over rock and backwater, past the worst of the falls and rap
ids of the Nile. We had Armour’s beef, bacon, preserved meat, mutton – salted and tallow sealed – vegetables, Ebswurt’s crushed peas which boiled long made a tasty soup, pickles, pepper, salt, vinegar, hard biscuit, flour, oatmeal, rice, sugar, tea and coffee, tinned cheese, jam, lime juice, tobacco. Each boat was of the York type, not exactly, but similar, keeled whalers for sailing; and fitted out to carry ten days’ rations, good rations as I have listed above, for a hundred men. And the boat could carry ten men with all kit and military accoutre ments and about ten hundredweight of ammunition. Peter Canoe, who had no English, spoke better with the Arab swimmers we had than those who knew that language. The Caughnawagas are proud of never swimming, they are practically born in a canoe and when they leave it they are prepared to die rather than swim. James Deer, when he saw the rapids, said we had been better in our birch canoes, and he was right, but they couldn’t have been handled by the soldiers who knew oars but not paddles. (And we had brought paddles all the way from the St Lawrence, expecting canoes.)
‘Our ship took us to Alexandria and then by steamer we went through Egypt. We saw cattle lying perfectly still in the water with just their heads out. The sight scared my boys as to what the heat would be like further south. And it was terrible heat, but there was always a wind. We called the Nile the windy river because it is windier than any river we know in Canada – almost always a north wind which is the most useful against the current.
‘The river itself in many places was about the same width as the St Lawrence opposite Caughnawaga, which the boys remarked on often. In one settlement of the Egyptian people we saw people in small mud huts and more rats at a glance than I had ever before seen in all my life. Their own boats were made of wood, about twenty feet long, with gunwales three feet high, made of mud, hard baked mud that kept out the water very well; the sails were peculiar, overhanging the mast at the foot. The sheep in this place looked like dogs dragging long tails on the ground and the dogs looked like the Esquimaux dogs I have seen in Manitoba.
‘At one place we stopped before reaching Assouan, the only place we stopped by day, a young Christian Egyptian took me to a sacred tree of great healing power. If you wished a person to be cured you drove a nail into that tree, and I must remark that nails are scarcer than money in this country. The tree is nothing much to look at, studded with nails of all patterns it goes up about four feet then lies along the ground for about thirty feet.
‘At Abu Simbel I heard there were great statues sixty feet high with toes three feet long but I regret I did not see them as I was fully engaged in collecting the cholera belts for my men. Everyone, soldiers and voyageurs, was required to wear these belts made of strips of flannel twelve to fifteen inches wide. I was told by soldiers who had long served in Egypt and the Soudan that they were very useful against the cold and damp that helped spread cholera and dysentery.
‘The British soldiers were all fit and young; I saw none over the age of thirty. Nevertheless, before leaving the Nile I had the pleasure of seeing two of my Iroquois carry off the first prizes for running at the United Services Sports day held under the patronage of the Wady Halfa station commandant.
‘We moved further and further up river, lining the boats past the long lines of cataracts. Going up some minor rapid with eight Dongolese on the line, having just passed the worst place a couple of the men ashore fell to fighting and the rest let go the line to join in or part them and I was left at the mercy of the river. That was something of variety! These Dongolese were entirely unused to boats and did just the opposite of anything you would expect. They are all excellent swimmers and able to cross the river at almost any place. When making long distances they make use of the goatskin bottles they use for carrying water, but full of air; scolding was no use as they neither understood nor cared. I may mention another peculiarity of theirs. Each had many scars all over his body. When one fell sick I saw the reason: he was cut by another and the cut was filled with sand.
‘As the river fell with the season we saw more crocodiles. Peter Canoe said he had the moccasin on his foot eaten by one and we were polite enough not to disagree. Colonel Alleyne and Abbé Bouchard, with the help of a powerful glass, pronounced one brute sunning himself on the exposed rocks far off, to be twenty-five feet long. When I signalled for dinner all headed for the shore and it was here Louis Capitaine was so unaccountably lost, within sixty feet of the shore. Louis had the bow oar in Peter January’s boat and rose when nearing the shore. He was as sure-footed a Caughnawaga Indian as any but he lost his footing and fell into the foul stream. One hundred feet passed before he was seen to rise. Lieutenant Peter, a good man, and always quick to the rescuing, threw a life preserver, though it was far from Louis who was certainly having his trouble staying afloat. Lieutenant Peter ordered in our best Arab swimmer, Suleiman, and without these swimmers we would have been a spent force long ago. Suleiman dived like an arrow, slicing into the water, and in a few strokes was at the spot where Louis had been. But in our watching of the swimmer, in that brief moment, Louis Capitaine was lost from sight. I was sixty yards behind Peter’s boat and I swung wildly at the water, stirring it up with my twelve-foot beech oar, plunging those horrible depths as best I could, which was no good at all. But my grief was nothing to that of Colonel Alleyne, who took the whole blame for it on his shoulders. I believed he would cry but he did not, but he did not eat a thing that we offered that evening when we came in to make our fires and cook up the Armour’s beef rations they gave us each day. Suleiman kept swimming the waters until nightfall and found Louis’s helmet which he held to his chest; he was shivering. Colonel Alleyne held an inquest that night and despatched me to the telegraph station at Semnah to send the sad news of Louis’s death. He hired native swimmers to keep searching and left money for a decent burial if they found the body; but as we moved on I do not know if they ever did. There is an epitaph to this story: a few weeks later Colonel Kennedy showed me a copy of the Ottawa Free Press. In it there was a long and colourful account of the death of a man called Captain Louis Jackson. We all thought it bad but Peter said in his high laughing voice that now Louis Capitaine had got his promotion my widow ought to get his pension.
‘I must mention a curious sight I saw at the funeral of an Egyptian. Before lowering the body into the grave they put a small coin into his mouth. It is their belief that the dead must cross the river to reach their “happy hunting grounds” and the penny is to pay the ferryman.’
(Based on Our Caughnawaga Indians on the Mighty River Nile as told by Louis Jackson.)
36 • The Maxim and the Nile – a short history of a machine gun
After you throw the spear you cannot catch the end of it, nor the words you have spoken in haste. Ethiopian proverb
The Gordon relief expedition failed. Even if the army had set out earlier they might still have been beaten by the huge forces of the Mahdi, lacking as they were that crucial piece of equipment, the single most useful tool in subjugating Africa to colonial rule: the Maxim machine gun. When General Kitchener returned (he had been on the staff of the relief expedition), this time as leader of the forces set to avenge the humiliation of Gordon’s murder, he would have with him his Maxims. There had been mechanised guns before, but none this light, so efficient and so fast firing. The basic design remains in vestigial form in all machine guns to this day, proving the Mephistophelian genius of Hiram Maxim.
Hiram Maxim was probably someone you would not want to know. As well as inventing the world’s most efficient killing machine circa 1880 he was a multiple bigamist who upped and left his family in America and never returned. He had lawsuits pending with almost everyone he dealt with. He never forgot a slight. He was also a mechanical genius. His other credits include the first tethered flight (with an aircraft powered by two steam engines), a bronchial inhaler called ‘the pipe of peace’, an incandescent lightbulb (it is still debated today whether he or Edison or Swan got there first), various radio appliances and an early helicopter.
; The Maxim was the world’s first fully automated machine gun. It was a breakthrough because it was genuinely automatic – the recoil of each shot advancing the next bullet into the chamber. Though not light at sixty pounds, it was much lighter than the six-barrelled Gatling gun. Since the barrel is a large part of any gun’s weight – and cost of manufacture – having only one was far preferable to having six or more. Also the Gatling required hand cranking, whereas the Maxim conformed to the magical idea of automaticity, with one touch of the trigger enough to set it chattering death across the battlefield. This meant that only one person was needed to operate it – another important advantage over the two-man Gatling gun. The final feature of the Maxim that made it so effective was its comparatively long range – over 2,000 yards – compared to the Gatling gun’s 400 yards.
In his expedition to relieve Emin Pasha in 1887 Stanley took with him: two tons of gunpowder, 350,000 percussion caps, 100,000 rounds of Remington ammunition, 50,000 rounds of Winchester ammunition, and a prototype Maxim machine gun with its portable stand. Stanley was outraged that people should think he needed this to fight his way across Africa – why, he explained, he had already done that armed only with Snider rifles. This great load of ammo and the Maxim were intended for the use of Emin Pasha when they reached him. Yet, in the end, Stanley had to use the Maxim against the Wasukuma tribe during the last, supposedly easy stage, of his expedition to relieve Emin Pasha in 1887–9. In the thirty-two years since Burton and Speke’s first crossing in 1857, an increasing number of explorers and then missionaries had crossed the plains between the Indian Ocean and Lake Victoria. Stanley noticed how high the transit fee known as the hongo had become – some missionaries being charged £270 to cross three days’ distance of land. Guns, too, were not so unusual. When the Wasukuma began massing, Stanley attempted to make peace, but to no avail. Wasukuma entered his camp and killed a man; seventeen were shot by Stanley’s Wangwana porters in retaliation. The Wasukuma were bunched around the camp in their hundreds, waving spears and rattling long knives against shields. Stanley had earlier, during peace negotiations, been struck at by a spear and had not retaliated. Now he did. The Maxim was set down from the bier on which it was being carried. The barrel was carefully attached, the cartridge belt unwound. This would be the first time in history that an automatic machine gun would be fired in anger. It was probably Lieutenant Stairs, the rearguard commander, who fired. The results were electrifying. Only one man was killed, since everyone else fled. The noise alone, 600 rounds a minute, suddenly shattering the silence of the savannah, sent the attackers running for their lives.
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 42