Navigating Imperial Rivers

While the Canadian Voyageurs on the Nile in 1884–85 have been explained at length in books by Colonel C.P. Stacey and by Roy MacLaren, in Mohawks on the Nile: Natives among the Canadian Voyageurs in Egypt, 1884–1885, Carl Benn has focused on the approximately 60 Mohawks in the contingent, confirming their value to the British expedition to save General Gordon and enriching our understanding of Canada’s First Nations in the late 19th century.

Like other forms of behaviour, imperialism tends to repeat itself. Benn’s readers will slide easily into drawing parallels with our engagement in Afghanistan. Having invested heavily in the Suez Canal as a shortcut to their Asian empires, Britain and France felt entitled to seize power in an Egypt driven toward bankruptcy by its wildly extravagant Khedive. Since the British played the major role in managing Egypt, they inherited Egypt’s problems with its own colonial acquisition, the Sudan. There, the son of a Nile boat builder, Muhammad Ahmad bin Abdullah, had proclaimed himself al Mahdi or “Expected One,” a non-Quranic, end-of-days Islamic tradition. As Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad proclaimed a holy war to restore Islamic law, slaughtered non-supporters as apostates, massacred Egyptian officials and garrisons and, with thousands of primitively armed but fanatical followers, routed the Egyptian armies, some of them led by the British, sent to save them.

By 1884, Britain’s prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone, concluded that the wisest policy would be to abandon the Sudan to its zealous leader, and isolate the region from the rest of the world. Gladstone’s chosen agent for this policy was Major-General Charles Gordon, a British soldier who had played an imperial pro-consular role in China during its bloody Taiping Rebellion and who had already served as Sudan’s governor. Reappointed as governor, Gordon was commanded to report on the situation and, if advisable, to withdraw.

If Gladstone was serious, he sent the wrong man with the wrong orders. After a week on the job, Gordon realized that he would leave Sudan to brutal, slave-trading barbarians. His Egyptian troops and their families would be left to die. “If Egypt is to be quiet,” Gordon reported, “Mahdi must be smashed up.” By March 1884, Mahdists had besieged Gordon and his soldiers in Khartoum. He could not hold out forever. Sir Evelyn Baring, Britain’s consul general in Egypt, and its effective ruler, foresaw that the British press and public would turn Gordon into such a hero and martyr that Gladstone would have to save him. So it happened. By the summer, Gordon had transformed Gladstone’s fervent desire to avoid war into a command to rescue his disobedient envoy, and Britain’s “General Fixit” was on the scene. In 1880, Sir Garnet Wolseley had defeated the Khedive’s army at Tel-el-Kebir. Now he must lead an expedition up 3,200 kilometres of a seemingly impassable Nile River to Khartoum.

Fifteen years before, Wolseley led 2,000 British and Canadian troops across another impassable route from Lake Superior to Lower Fort Garry to crush Louis Riel’s Métis empire in Manitoba. Wolseley’s success there launched his career. It had been made possible by the tough, skillful voyageurs, most of them Native Canadians, who had transported him and his troops along uncharted rivers and rushing streams without losing a single life. Surely they could do as much to get his army through the cataracts of the Nile. Gladstone’s government approved. On August 20, 1884, the Colonial Office passed a request to Lord Lansdowne, the governor general of Canada. Happy not to be asked for troops, the prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, gave his blessing. Lansdowne assigned the recruiting to his military secretary, Gilbert Elliot, Lord Melgund. With help from a few militia officers, Melgund finished his job in about three weeks. On September 15, 1884, 388 members of the voyageur contingent sailed from Quebec City. Among them were about 60 Mohawks.

No one reminded Wolseley that, by 1884, most Canadians travelled by rail or road, not by canoe. Voyageurs were older and scarcer than he could know. Imperial romanticism led unqualified whites to claim boating skills they utterly lacked; racism, Benn suggests, made it easier for recruiters to accept them while Natives and Métis with more experience were left behind. Even in 1870, the Mohawk voyageurs had a special reputation and Benn’s account focuses on the men recruited from the Mohawk communities of Kahnawake, Akwesasne and Kanesatake. He gives them added weight by reproducing contemporary accounts by Louis Jackson, senior foreman of the Mohawks, and by James Deer, an articulate 18 year old.

Benn, best known as a local and First Nations historian and as chair of Ryerson University’s history department, places the Mohawk contribution in the broader context of a reserve economy that encouraged young Mohawks to support their families by skilled and often dangerous jobs far beyond their communities, while women raised the young and cared for the limited territory available for farming. Risking death from Mahdist fanatics in Egypt was not far different, Benn suggests, from rigging high steel for railway bridges or big-city sky-scrapers or, for that matter, from forming war parties against European intruders in the 17th century or piloting canoes or rafts of logs for 19th century entrepreneurs.

Benn mocks the British assumption that Mohawks would respond to old loyalties to the Empire. Mohawks responded primarily to a well-paid invitation to demonstrate scarce skills and to prove their masculinity. When their contracts expired, with General Gordon yet to be rescued, few responded to appeals and doubled salaries. They went home. Wolseley’s staff officers agreed that the Canadian voyageurs had worked hard and efficiently, save for the mostly white “pseudo-boatmen.” Like other Canadian bush workers, the voyageurs assumed that they were free to enjoy themselves during their long journey to and from Egypt. Drinking and absenteeism posed chronic problems for the militia officers placed in command by Melgund.

Inter-group conflict was another problem. Deer described murderous assaults on his fellow Mohawks by French-Canadian voyageurs, even on the train that carried both groups from Halifax to Montreal. He could offer no explanation beyond jealousy why the Mohawks had been the best boatmen in the entire Canadian contingent. Benn begs not to differ.

As civilians under contract, the Canadians were not warriors, nor, with the heavy woollen coats and trousers provided as clothing, were they well or suitably equipped for the Egyptian climate. British authorities seem to have been respectful of their status, sensible in imposing discipline and generous enough to compensate them for working on the Sabbath and in providing for the families of the men who drowned in the muddy and turbulent Nile. One of them, Louis Capitaine, was furious, according to Deer’s account, at being displaced as helmsman by a British officer. After he was sent to the bow to fend off rocks, his anger was evident in such violent paddle strokes that he lost his footing, fell in the Nile and drowned. His fatherless family received his year’s pay in a lump sum.

In the Red River, the campaign medal was reserved for soldiers and militia. Voyageurs on the Nile received both the British and the Egyptian campaign medal, although none was killed or wounded in action. Nor did anyone blame them that Wolseley’s expedition failed. In a desperate message in early December, Gordon warned that he could hold out no longer. Khartoum fell on January 26. By nightfall, Gordon was dead. Returning voyageurs spent that day at Wadi Halfa, winning prizes in a hurriedly organized sports day. Soon after taking Khartoum, Muhammad Ahmad respectfully invited Queen Victoria to accept his authority. His letter was returned unanswered.