Theodore Roosevelt Abroad

by J. Lee Thompson

  Figure 4 TR, Sir Frederick Jackson, Frederick Selous, and Dr. Edgar Mearns on an engine platform en route to Kapiti. Courtesy the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.

  Figure 5 TR with his first elephant, in Kenya. Courtesy the Theodore Roosevelt

  Figure 6 Kermit, TR, and an African Cape buffalo, Courtesy the Theodore Roosevelt

  Figure 7 TR and the German Kaiser, May 1910. Courtesy the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.

  Figure 8 TR, on the far right, as Special Ambassador at the funeral of Edward VII, May 1910. Courtesy the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.

  Figure 9 TR with a teddy bear at Cambridge Union, May 1910. Courtesy the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.

  Figure 10 TR, waving his hat, welcomed back to New York in June 1910. His niece Eleanor and her husband Franklin Roosevelt stand by the smokestack. Courtesy the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.

  Figure 11 Punch cartoon, March 23, 1910: TR and the Sphinx.

  Figure 12 Punch cartoon, May 11, 1910: Lion in Trafalgar Square with a sign reading “Not to be shot.”

  Figure 13 Punch cartoon, May 4, 1910: “Roosevelt’s Straight Talk to Effete Civilisations.”

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  Chapter 5

  Down the Nile: Khartoum to Cairo

  A few days before the Dal reached Khartoum, a flotilla of boats carrying the journalists barred from the safari intercepted Roosevelt on the Nile. Among the newspapermen was at least one friendly face, John “Cal” O’Laughlin of the Chicago Tribune, who, as an acting assistant secretary of state at the end of TR’s administration, had been present at the final “tennis cabinet” gathering a year before. O’Laughlin recalled his first glimpse of a beaming TR on the deck of the Dal, dressed in khaki and under an American flag swinging his olive green helmet in reply to the frantic hat waving of the press who crowded the railing of his vessel, the Abbas Pasha. Roosevelt had lost the care worn look O’Laughlin remembered from the last White House days, his face was brown, his moustache lightened by the sun showing “more than a few gray hairs.” He heartily welcomed the journalists as the “vanguard” of the civilization he had left behind a year before.1

  The pressmen were eager to quiz the former president about his journey and to ask his opinion of President Taft, who had been left in charge explicitly to carry on Roosevelt’s policies, but had instead, as we have seen, among other things supported the controversial PayneAldrich Tariff and dismissed TR’s man Gifford Pinchot from the Department of Forestry. The Colonel, however, was willing to discuss such matters only “off the record” and told each as he spoke to them separately that anything they published would be denied. He would only authorize the statement that he had nothing to say about politics. Of course Roosevelt’s silence only led to ominous headlines to that effect in the U.S. papers. Jusserand sent one such clipping to him along with a letter in which he declared that “It is pleasant to think that Africa has not changed you in any way . . . Mute you went into the desert, dumb you return.” In addition to sharing the itinerary which he had drawn up for TR’s visit to Paris, the Frenchman told Roosevelt that he had gone to the Smithsonian for a glimpse of the fruit of his labors. “But we found there under glass, only 2 or 3 skulls, 2 rats and one hedgehog.” They were assured, however, that before long “your expedition would make a better show in the museum.”2

  At Khartoum on March 14 the local British officials once again greeted Roosevelt with “more than friendly enthusiasm.” He stayed at the yellow stucco Governor’s Palace, where twenty-five years before, General “Chinese” Gordon had been slain by the jihadist dervishes of the Mahdi. To TR’s great regret the Governor-General, Sir Reginald Wingate, had been forced to Cairo by an illness and in his absence the Colonel’s host was Sir Rudolph Slatin Pasha, the inspector-general. An Austrian soldier who had joined the Turco-Egyptian administration in the Sudan, Slatin had been imprisoned by the Mahdi and had endured more than a decade of captivity of one sort or another. He made his name (and that of Wingate who had played a part in his escape) by recounting his harrowing tale in Fire and Sword in the Sudan.3 This Roosevelt had devoured and he peppered a surprised Slatin with questions and observations.

  The Dal docked just in time for TR and Kermit to meet the train which carried Edith and Ethel south from Wadi Halfa. After their separation of just ten days less than a year, Theodore’s homesickness and Edith’s worries both vanished at the rail station. She found her husband in “splendid condition” and noted that he had “lost that look of worry and care” which had been “almost habitual” in the White House years. Edith was also heartened to see that the adventure in Africa had transformed her beloved Kermit from pale youth to tan and sturdy manhood.4She even approved of the wisp of a moustache he had grown. Edith brought along clothes for both men and at Khartoum Roosevelt shed his khaki safari accoutrements, donning a gray sack suit. As a reward for her forbearance of his yearlong safari, Theodore meant to give his wife a prolonged second honeymoon in Europe, which she had also scouted in her own peregrinations over the past year, but almost all their plans were scuppered by events.

  At Khartoum, Roosevelt finished a “preliminary statement” summing up the accomplishments of the expedition, which he dispatched to Walcott. In this he noted that Heller had prepared 1,020 mammal specimens, mostly large, while Loring had prepared 3,163 and Mearns 714, for a total of 4,897 mammals. Almost 4,000 birds had also been prepared, almost all by Mearns and Loring. To these mammals and birds were added about 2,500 reptiles, amphibians, and fish, for a grand total of 11,397, not including thousand of invertebrates and plants.5 TR also regretfully said goodbye at Khartoum to his companions of the last year, the expedition’s hunters and naturalists, all of whom he came greatly to like and respect. He wrote to Leslie Tarlton a few months later, “you do not need to be told my feelings for you, and for that old trump R. J. [Cuninghame]. I shall always count you both as among my real friends.”6 In his report to Walcott, the Colonel declared that the hunters had “both worked as zealously and effectively for the success of the expedition as any other member.”7 Loring and Mearns had proved indefatigable collectors of small animals and birds, while Heller and Roosevelt collaborated on a two-volume study, published four years later as Life-Histories of African Game Animals, a significant contribution to the scientific literature. No three better men, TR wrote, “could be found anywhere” for such an expedition as theirs. He and Kermit also had a sad parting from “our faithful black followers, whom we knew we should never see again.” It had been an interesting and a happy year but he was “very glad to be once more with those who are dear to me, and to turn my face toward my own home and my own people.”8

  From Khartoum, TR had hoped to travel as a private citizen and even to handle all the family’s travel arrangements himself. However, as with the safari, he soon had to admit the impossibility of this notion and accepted the volunteer services of two members of the press contingent, who were also friends, Cal O’Laughlin, and Lawrence Abbott of the Outlook, which TR had agreed to join as a contributing editor once he returned to America. Roosevelt had invited Abbott to meet him at Khartoum and he had escorted Edith and Ethel down from Cairo. The pair acted as private secretaries to Roosevelt until he reached England.9 Both men, with the Colonel’s blessing, took advantage of their position to send home articles detailing the trip and TR’s view of things, international and domestic.10

  Roosevelt himself sent off the last installment of his own book. He wrote the “Foreword” at Khartoum, beginning the work (and continuing his rehabilitation in Shakespeare) with a quotation from Henry IV, Part II: “I speak of Africa and golden joys.” He went on with no mean nature prose of his own

  The hunter who wanders through these lands sees sights which ever afterward remain fixed in his mind. He sees the monstrous riverhorse snorting and plunging beside the boat, the giraffe looking over the tre
e-tops at the nearing horsemen, the ostrich fleeing at a speed that none may rival, the snarling leopard and coiled python with their lethal beauty, the zebras barking in the moonlight, as the laden caravan passes on its night march through a thirsty land. In afteryears there shall come to him memories of the lion’s charge, of the gray bulk of the elephant, close at hand in the somber woodland; of the buffalo, his sullen eyes lowering from under his helmet of horn; of the rhinoceros, truculent and stupid, standing in the bright sunlight on the empty plain.

  These things can be told. But there are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm. There is delight in the hardy life of the open, in long rides rifle in hand, in the thrill of the fight with dangerous game. Apart from this, yet mingled with it, is the strong attraction of the silent places, of the large tropic moons, and the splendor of the new stars; where the wanderer sees the awful glory of sunrise and sunset in the wide waste spaces of the earth, unworn of man, and changed only by the slow changes of the ages through time everlasting.11

  With his writing duties completed, Roosevelt was free to join his family in a busy schedule of sightseeing. In their three days at Khartoum they took a camel trip into the forbidding desert, visited the battlefield of Omdurman just across the Nile, where Lord Kitchener famously had defeated the Khalifa (the Mahdi’s successor) in 1898, watched native dancers and reviewed an impressive parade of Sudanese troops. They were also extended a rare invitation to the Egyptian and Sudanese Officer’s Club. Slatin saw this as an opportunity to enlist Roosevelt’s aid with the officers whose continuing loyalty he and all the other officials questioned in light of a new menace, the growing power of the anti-British Nationalist party in Egypt, which had reclaimed the Sudan after Kitchener’s victory. Three weeks before at Cairo, Boutros Ghali Pasha, the Coptic Christian Egyptian prime minister (whose namesake grandson would one day be secretary-general of the United Nations), had been assassinated by a Muslim Egyptian nationalist who saw Ghali as a tool of the British. This act not only stirred fears of unrest in Egypt, but also in the Sudan, where Wingate had been forced to stamp out a minor rebellion the previous year.

  The youthful assassin of Boutros, though immediately captured, had not yet been tried and Roosevelt was asked at a dinner at the Governor’s Palace what action he would have taken had he been the British Agent. To TR the matter was a simple one. He would immediately have brought the murderer before a drum-head-court-martial. As there was no question about the facts, which the Nationalists did not deny, he would have been sentenced to death and taken out and shot. Then, if the Home Government cabled, “in one of their moments of vacillation to wait a little while, I would cable in reply: ‘Can’t wait, the assassin has been tried and shot.’ ” The government could recall or impeach him if it wished, “but that assassin would have received his just deserts.” After this remark, Lawrence Abbott recalled that one of the British officers, Colonel Asser, told him, “By Heaven! I wish that man were my boss!”12

  Some Egyptian officers of the Sudanese army had greeted the news of the murder of Boutros Ghali with cheers and there was no little fear of disloyalty, understandable since the original British occupation of Egypt in 1882 had come in reaction to an officers’ revolt at Alexandria which posed an unacceptable threat to the Suez Canal, Britain’s lifeline to India and the Far East. Slatin asked Roosevelt to address the officers at Khartoum which, he believed, would do “a very real good.” The Colonel readily agreed and told Slatin that the fact that he, an Austrian, was the British representative only underscored the fundamental truth that English rule in the Sudan was “really the rule of civilization, and that every believer in justice and progress all over the world should uphold it.” Consequently, at the Egyptian Officers Club on March 17, Roosevelt urged the men to stay out of politics and tried his best to “use such language and arguments as would add to the self-respect of my hearers” while at the same time speaking with “unmistakable plainness as to their duty of absolute loyalty,” and the “ruin which would come to both Egypt and the Sudan unless the power and prestige of English rule were kept undiminished.”13

  The day of his speech, Roosevelt’s party boarded a special train for Wadi Halfa, where the government steamer Ibis waited to begin the next segment of the voyage down the Nile. By coincidence the steamer carried the same name as the luxurious lateen-sailed houseboat, complete with servants and crew, on which a thirteen-year-old Theodore and his parents had sailed the Nile for two months thirty-eight years before. When he first saw Alexandria on November 28, 1872, he recorded: “How I gazed on it! It was Egypt, the land of my dreams; Egypt the most ancient of all countries; a land that was old when Rome was bright, was old when Babylon was in its glory, was old when Troy was taken! It was a sight to awaken a thousand thoughts and it did.” On that trip, young Theodore was able to add Egyptian bird specimens to the “Museum” he had started in the family’s Manhattan brownstone. He later wrote that his “first real collecting as a student of natural history” started in Egypt and at least three of the birds remain in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.14

  In 1910, on the week-long journey to Cairo, the party paused at major and minor sites, the first being Abu Simbel, with its four colossal figures of Ramses the Great. Ethel read descriptions from their Baedeker’s guide and her father was indignant to find initials carved in the rock of the ancient chambers. If he had his way the vandals would be treated as similar miscreants in Yellowstone Park, who when apprehended were forced to “return and remove every trace of their despicable work.”15 TR had apparently forgotten his own youthful sacrilege in 1872, when he shot birds from a column of the Ramesseum at Thebes. The Ibis stopped at the island ruins of Philae, formerly the garden-like “Pearl of the Nile,” but sadly under water half the year since the 1902 completion the Aswan dam, a modern wonder they visited as well. At Aswan for the first time, crowds of American and English tourists gathered to see the former president.

  From Luxor, the chief tourist center of Upper Egypt, they took an excursion to the nearby massive ruin at Karnak in a moonlight tour led by a British Egyptologist. Roosevelt also visited the American Presbyterian mission school for girls. There he praised the education of native women, who along with men, he asserted, must be elevated to a new status based on respect for the individual.16In the long run, the Colonel told the students, “a fig tree is judged by the fact that it produces figs and not thistles.” Rehearsing a theme he would raise many times in the following months, he asserted that book knowledge was not all. Education must be practical as well. “You women must learn to cook and keep house, but at the same time you must have the literary knowledge and trained mind to enable you to take your proper place as counselor of the families.” To O’Laughlin, however, Luxor was most notable as the place Roosevelt received a warning that if he mentioned the assassination of Boutros in a planned speech at the new Cairo University he might suffer the same fate. This threat only ensured that the address, which the Colonel dictated at Luxor, included a pointed condemnation of the murder.17

  Arriving at Cairo on March 24, the party was greeted by the American Consul-General Lewis Iddings and TR’s old friend and “tennis cabinet” member Oscar Straus. Now the U.S. ambassador at Constantinople, Straus briefed his former chief both on conditions in Turkey and politics at home, where “much ground had been lost.” The Colonel paid a call at the Abdin Palace on the Khedive Abbas, the titular ruler of Egypt, and in return he received Abbas at the American Agency, the first of many such reciprocal visits he continued across Europe. At the same time Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Iddings called on the Khediva, described as a “beautiful woman of about thirty years, with sad eyes and a pathetic manner,” who, if local gossip was true, “was about to be replaced by an Austrian woman who has first place in the affections of the Khedive.”18

  The Roosevelts stayed at Shepeard’s Hotel, the home away from home of visiting Englishmen
, and a powerful symbol of British rule which would be burned down forty-two years later during another nationalist uprising—one which would finally force out the British. The first night the family saw the Sphinx and pyramids in the moonlight. The next day they visited Saqqara, burial site of the rulers of ancient Memphis, the capital of Egypt’s old Kingdom, twelve miles south of Cairo. Abbot recounted Roosevelt’s reaction to a temple carving which showed a witness in a law court being horribly tortured before a judge to gain a confession. TR commented that he wished “that those pessimists who believe that civilization is not making steady progress” could see it. Here was a king “portraying as one of the virtues of his reign a state of vicious cruelty which would not have been tolerated by Tammany Hall in its worst days of corruption.” The “water cure,” he was sorry to say, had sometimes been practiced by Americans in the Philippines, “but it was practiced secretly, and no man who employed it would have been willing to have the fact inscribed upon his tombstone.”19

  That evening Roosevelt dined with the modern rulers of Egypt, Sir Eldon Gorst, the British agent and consul-general, and Sir Reginald Wingate, who in addition to being governor-general of the Sudan, was also Sirdar (commander) of the Anglo-Egyptian army which enforced British policy on the ground. Wingate and Roosevelt agreed in the “methods of action” needed to maintain British rule and the Sirdar thanked him for “all you have done to help forward our task in the Sudan.”20 The more conciliatory Gorst, who spoke Arabic and had decades of experience in Egypt, had the bad fortune in 1907 to follow a legend in Lord Cromer, who for the previous quarter century had run Egypt, called the “Veiled Protectorate” because it had not been officially annexed by Britain, with an iron hand.21Theoretically, the British hierarchy only advised Egypt’s ruler, the Khedive, and his government, staffed in the main by a non-Egyptian Turco-Circassian elite, headed by a prime minister. The Khedive in turn made a substantial yearly payment to the Sublime Porte for the privilege of ruling Egypt according to a firman (license) granted by the Ottoman Sultan at the beginning of his reign.