“In the end,” Baker claimed, “every opposition was overcome; hatred and insubordination yielded to discipline and order. A paternal government extended its protection through lands hitherto a field for anarchy and slavery…. The White Nile, for a distance of 1,600 miles from Khartoum to Central Africa, was cleansed from the abomination of a traffic which had hitherto sullied its waters. Every cloud had passed away, and the term of my office expired in peace and sunshine. In this result I humbly trade God’s blessing.”31
Claiming total victory, Baker then admitted his utter failure to create more than a skein of forts in the wilderness. “I was most thoroughly disgusted and sick at heart,” he confessed, helpless before the obvious truth that the slavers relied on “some high authority behind the scenes.” Their vessels plied the White Nile “in triumph and defiance before the wind, with flags flying the crescent and star, above a horrible cargo of pest-smitten humanity, in open contempt for my authority.” Like the floating morass of the Sudd, the slavers had parted where Baker hacked a path and silently closed behind him. The policing of the White Nile only forced the slave caravans onto remote, waterless overland paths. From Cairo, Alexandria, Massowa, and Suakin, Egyptian smugglers continued to trade Sudanese slaves across the Islamic world. Ismail had found a bargain in Baker. Thirty thousand pounds of borrowed money had bought a new province.32
With Ismail’s salary Baker bought a country seat in the shires, its hall and billiard room decorated with the taxidermist’s catalogue that constituted Samuel’s souvenirs. In the garden, Florence designed an avenue of cypresses that led to an African “palaver hut” giving expansive vistas over the Devonshire fields, should Sam develop a late taste for negotiation. From retirement, he fired periodic elephant gun invectives at the Letters Page of the Times. The Egyptians, he warned, could not be trusted, the Africans were incorrigibly idle and superstitious, and the humanitarian pieties of trade and prayer would never stop the slave trade. A clash of civilizations was brewing on the Nile between Muslim custom and Western ambition, and Khedive Ismail’s client state was part of the problem.
“The first thing that must be done to civilise a savage country,” Baker fumed, “is to annex it.”33
2
The Engineer
1873–79
Charles George Gordon, Governor General of the Sudan, 1879.
I will take divine aid from any of those who may be dispensing it.
—Colonel Charles Gordon, R.E., 18811
AT AN EMBASSY PARTY in Constantinople, Nubar Pasha met a certain colonel in the Royal Engineers. His current duties—reporting on the free passage of shipping on the Danube and inspecting the British war graves of the Crimea—suggested a career on the sidelines of the Eastern Question. Nubar asked the colonel if his regiment might contain a suitable successor to Samuel Baker. The candidate must organize a vast, chaotic wilderness, expunge the great barbarism of slavery, and open a lost tract of Africa to civilization. Suddenly, as if struck by the colonel’s reserved manner and intense gaze, Nubar wondered if the task might interest the colonel himself?
Colonel Charles George Gordon had clear blue eyes, and their sapphire glow gave him a visionary aspect. “What eyes they were!” marveled his underling Arthur Stannard. “Keen and clear, filled with the beauty of holiness, bright with an unnatural brightness, their expression one of settled feverishness, the color blue-grey, as is the sky on a bitter March morning.” Yet they were not what they seemed. Color-blind, Gordon lived in a monochrome world, discriminating the value of postage stamps by peering at their numerals.2
Born at Woolwich, a garrison suburb on the Thames, Gordon had the migrant childhood of an army child. His father, Henry, was an officer in the Royal Artillery, and the family followed him from posting to posting—Woolwich, Dublin, Leith, and Corfu—their transits marked by promotions and deliveries; Henry reaching the rank of major general, his wife, Elizabeth, a tally of five boys and six girls. Somewhere in the middle of the sequence, “Charley” was the youngest boy in a brood raised on the values of the army and the church: faith, duty, and hard work. At ten, he left Corfu for the ritual brutalities of an English boarding school, and at thirteen he passed into another adolescent underworld, the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich.
The stocky cadet raised in the shadow of the barracks seemed ideal officer material. Physically fearless, Gordon had a quick, practical mind unburdened by intellect, and an artist’s hand for mapmaking. Yet he would not conform to authority, exceeding the cadet culture of pranks, brawls, and petty rebellion that inspired him to butt a fellow cadet in the stomach, tumbling him down a flight of stairs, or to release a plague of mice into the house of the academy’s commandant. Berated for a minor infraction, Officer-Cadet Gordon tore off his epaulettes and threw them on the floor. Later, he beat a younger boy around the head with a bone hairbrush. For bullying, Cadet Gordon lost six months’ seniority, and with it the chance to follow his brothers and father into the Royal Artillery. Instead he was disinherited into a lieutenant’s commission in the Royal Engineers.
Although Gordon never forgot the slight, he had found his home. The Royal Engineers was meritocratic and unconventional. The officers of the regular army bought their commissions, but an Engineer earned his through mastering the science of modern warfare. The mechanic of empire, he built bridges, barracks, and forts, laid explosives, and commanded native irregulars. Skirting the snobs and social climbers, Gordon now stood a greater chance of swift promotion.
Unfortunately, the empire first needed Gordon at the naval fortifications at Pembroke, on the damp coast of Wales. Lonely and lost, he found pantheist solace in country rambles. A local couple, Captain and Mrs. Drew, identified the turbulent, troubled young officer as a soul in need of salvation. Guided by their gentle evangelizing, Gordon began a lifelong habit, an autodidactic dig through the occult fringe of Victorian religion. Shunning church services as conformist and inauthentic, he read the Bible every day using the calendar devised by Robert M’Cheyne, the “Prophet of Dundee,” taking for his study guide the Commentaries of Thomas Scott, which revealed the hidden sense of every verse. God, he learned, was everywhere, an invisible hand in history: “No such thing as chance, every emotion is felt for the great object, His glory.”3
Short and stocky with curly hair and fashionable sideburns, Gordon spoke quickly with a slight stammer. His letters flowed with an untutored facility, the stammer replaced by a compulsive “D.V.”—Deo Volente, God willing—attached to any mention of the future. In 1854 he secured a posting to the front. In the Crimea, the British and French, having neglected to seize the port of Sebastopol when it was available, now besieged its Russian defenders, among them the young Leo Tolstoy.
Yet the War Office had neglected to plan for the Russian winter. The soldiers slept on the frozen ground without overcoats or tents, and subsisted on raw salt pork. Without fodder, cavalry horses chewed off each other’s tails and ran crazed through the camp. By January 1855, the British had eleven thousand fit soldiers, and twenty-three thousand invalided out by dysentery, cholera, starvation, frostbite, gangrene, and self-inflicted wounds. At the hospital in Scutari, the ward floors seethed with rats, and dysenteric patients lay in their own filth. While the Russian public read of the heroic, brutal defense in Tolstoy’s Sebastopol Sketches, the British public had the Times’ correspondent William Russell. His telegraphed reports raised an outcry, forcing the dispatch of winter kit and nurses, among them Florence Nightingale.
Tolstoy’s characters progressed from nervous idealism to shellshocked fatalism, but Gordon found war thrilling. The Royal Engineers blasted trenches and gun emplacements from the rocky ground, fortified captured positions, dug mines for explosives, and prepared detailed sketches of the enemy lines. Gordon lay on the frozen mud in front of the British trenches, deliberately drawing Russian fire so he could plot the firing positions in his sketchbook. “I do not think I was ever in better health, and I enjoy the work amazingly,” he wrote to his mother.
Dismissing Russell’s reports as “an atrocious fib,” Gordon’s letters home dwelled more on the beauty of the Crimean spring. “Our wounded have everything they want, and all comforts,” he reported. “I have got a splendid outfit, and two chamois leather vests and drawers.” Unwilling to leave after the Russian withdrawal and the end of the war, and awarded the Legion d’Honneur by Britain’s French allies for his bravery, Gordon stayed on for three years as a member of the commission charged with mapping the new Russo-Turkish border. He returned to Britain at the end of 1858 but, bristling at the peacetime diet of dress uniforms, parades, and dinners, he escaped as soon as he could to China.4
Britain wanted to trade Indian opium for Chinese silver, but the Manchu emperors did not want an epidemic of addiction. Prime Minister Lord Palmerston had already applied “gunboat diplomacy” to force the Manchus to grant Europeans the right of residence, trade, and garrison at seventeen “treaty ports,” and to cede Hong Kong as a British naval base. In 1860, when the Manchus refused to open China to Free Trade, a British force under Lord Elgin went up the river to Beijing. Gordon was among the soldiers who looted and burned the Summer Palace, and sent souvenirs back to his family and the regimental Mess.
The advent of European trade and Christian missionaries tipped feudal China into the Taiping Rebellion, a civil war setting newly evangelized Christian peasants against the corrupt cities. Its leader, Hung-Sen Tuen, called himself the Heavenly King and believed he was Jesus’ brother. He announced a Dynasty of Perpetual Peace that slid into mass starvation, beheadings, crucifixions, and the ingathering of wealth among the revolution’s leaders. By August 1860, the Taiping were at the gates of Shanghai, the largest Western entrepôt. The Shanghai merchants raised a militia of Taiping deserters officered by hard-drinking American mercenaries and dubbed them the Ever Victorious Army. When the British and French governments took over the defense to protect their trade interests, Gordon became the Ever Victorious Army’s new leader.
Gordon inherited a rabble of varying strength, where uniforms were optional and supplies irregular. With strict discipline, uncompromising courage, and calculated modesty, he turned it into a crack brigade. Spurning any salary over his British army pay, he lived mainly on raw eggs sucked from the shell and tea from a pot carried under his arm. He went into battle in his Royal Engineers’ undress uniform, armed with nothing more than a lit cigar and a short cane, his Wand of Victory. He wept over his wounded, but shot mutineers and captured enemy officers. With a natural gift for irregular, small-scale warfare, he outmaneuvered the Taiping by launching ferries and gunboats on the canal system around Shanghai. Fighting sixteen battles in as many months, in June 1864 he took Nanking. The Heavenly King committed suicide, and the Taiping Rebellion collapsed. The Manchu emperor appointed him to the ranks of mandarin and field marshal, the empress gave him a solid gold medal, and Queen Victoria made him a Companion of the Bath. At home, he became a hero.
As uncomfortable with attention as he was compelled to seek it, Gordon told his mother to keep his return secret. He bought a bowler hat and a secondhand suit, which he squashed and soiled, and slipped away from the Mess without saying good-bye. The subterfuge failed. His troops had festooned his launch with the banners of the Ever Victorious Army, and as it carried him to a waiting steamer, they fired off rockets, cannons, and horns for the “Great General Ko.”
It was worse at Southampton. He stepped off the boat as “Chinese” Gordon, the iconic product of patriotic journalism. Loathing his celebrity, he refused invitations to dinner, edited out references to his bravery from accounts of his battles, and scratched his name from the empress of China’s medal before donating it anonymously to a charity for starving cotton workers. With fifteen months’ leave still remaining, Gordon asked to return to duty. The War Office distrusted celebrities and eccentrics. Pettily, it sent one of the army’s most brilliant soldiers to supervise a mixed force of masons and drain-diggers at the fortifications of Gravesend on the Thames Estuary.
After a decade of violent adventure and purposeful proximity to death, Gordon fell into depression by the gray Thames. The death of his father deepened his gloom. “Is this all we have come to?” he wondered at the deathbed. In mourning and with little else to do, Gordon fought “the doles” with icy baths, more brandy in his water than usual, and a return to his religious speculations. Struggling toward a mystical personal theology, he began an intense correspondence with his sister Augusta, an Evangelical spinster twelve years his senior who shared his desire “to be too closely acquainted with G-d.” He spent his evenings reading at his kitchen table with a saucer of tea and a hunk of stale bread, or with August and Octavia Freese, local Evangelicals who shared his taste in heavy theology and clean jokes. It was months before Octavia Freese realized that the sad, sunburned colonel in her parlor was “Chinese” Gordon.5
Relief and revelation came one evening as he dressed for dinner. The Gospel of St. John lay on the dressing table before him: “Whosoever confesseth that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God.”6
“Something broke in my heart,” he recalled, “a palpable feeling, and I knew God lived in me.” Gordon had found “the great secret of the new life,” “the key to happiness and holiness”: “the indwelling of God.” Born again, Gordon bounced from misery to ecstasy. He devoted himself to sharing the revelation. Shy of buttonholing strangers, he printed up a pamphlet, pressing copies into people’s hands, flinging handfuls from train windows, strewing them across the fields on his country walks. He imparted the great secret to the poor, elderly, and sick of the Workhouse infirmary, gave his afternoons to teaching the urchins of the Ragged School, and attended deathbeds to pray the departed into Heaven. But he reserved his greatest efforts for young and poor boys, his “scuttlers” and “kings.”7
Turning his house into a school, Gordon gathered boys from the cottages and slums of Gravesend and the barges and fishing boats of the river. He scrubbed new recruits in the horse trough, then stood them before a mirror. “You see a new boy, don’t you?” he asked. “Well, just as you are new outside, so I want you to be new inside.” Priming his scuttlers with Christ, cricket, and cheese sandwiches, he found them jobs in the army, plotting their progress on a giant map of the world, its trail of pinpricks marking the travels of Jack, Willie, Alex, and dozens more. Only shyness held him back. “There were boys running about worth millions, and I could not have the courage to speak to them,” he confided to Octavia Freese after one expedition into the backstreets. When he dared approach a prepubescent sinner, the rewards were thrilling. “Great blessings in Perry Street. Got three rough lads into a room and found they were kings! A country lad of Our Lord’s, a Hebrew 14 years’ old, has fallen to me, and I hope to get him a job in the Survey.”8
“The creature is in bondage, waiting for the redemption of the body.” Ears tuned to celestial harps, Gordon missed the clanging erotic overtones of his mission. When Gordon soaped his rough lads, Sigmund Freud was still a Viennese schoolboy. Victorians prized the innocence of children, and found the notion of childhood sexuality repugnant. Pederasty was an unmentionable Turkish vice or, as a contemporary study explained, A Problem in Greek Ethics. Progressive science held “male love”—the term “homosexuality” did not yet exist in English—to be an “inversion” caused by brain malformation at the foetal stage. To Christians, the body was God’s temple: “Do not disgrace the throne of Thy glory.”9
Apart from matronly spiritual companions like his sister Augusta or Octavia Freese, Gordon avoided women. He withdrew when he sensed a friendship developing and fled from physical desire; using the fashionable Spiritualist terminology, he called the body the treacherous “sheath” of the spirit. “I wished I was a eunuch at 14,” he admitted in a letter to his evangelist friend, Reverend R. H. Barnes. In another letter, Gordon traced this wish to an unspecified “breach” that had occurred at boarding school. “I never had a sorrow like it in all my life.” The physical world itself seemed
irredeemably corrupt. “The world contains the people of two kingdoms, acknowledging two separate kings and two separate systems of government. The one is an everlasting, undefiled and incorruptible kingdom; the other is mortal, defiled and corruptible. Christ is the King of the Kingdom of God, and the Devil, Anti-Christ, is the King of the Kingdom of Earth.” His sexuality, crushed in the struggle with satanic physicality, remained as arrested in development as it was furtive in expression. “We are so hampered by our carnal nature that it is not easy to speak as one should.”10
After a biblical exile of seven years by the rivers of Gravesend, Gordon secured a posting to another backwater, Galatz in Turkey. He said good-bye to his mother and her irritating requests that he marry and joined the international commission regulating free navigation on the Danube. The work was dull, Galatz was muddy, and his career stalled. Letters arrived reporting the death of Gordon’s mother, and the demise of favorite scuttlers in imperial adventure; “the doles” descended again. When Gordon met Nubar Pasha at the British Embassy in Constantinople in September 1873, he was ripe for a born-again career that promised virtuous struggle, brutal conditions, and eternal glory. So enthusiastic and naïve was he that he did not wonder if Nubar had deliberately tracked him down in order to make his apparently spontaneous offer.
Returning to Gravesend to pack, Gordon left England on January 28, 1874, as the morning papers carried the death of David Livingstone in Central Africa. The last words of the abolitionist missionary beseeched and challenged the enlightened conscience, “May Heaven’s high blessing come down on every one, American, English or Turk, who will help this open sore of the world.” The great Evangelical cause, the redemption of Africa, needed a new figurehead. Before Gordon left, he sketched the Freeses a last postcard. Shaded by a single palm, a stick figure walked an empty road toward a low sun. The message read, “Isaiah 35. Goodbye.”11
Three Empires on the Nile Page 5