The Second Cataract, photographed before 1872: this image is representative of the kind of information the planners of the Gordon Relief Expedition had to work with and suggests how challenging the effort of moving troops by whaleboat would be once the army began its journey south from Wadi Halfa.
At times, significant muscle power had to be deployed to move steamers and smaller watercraft, as occurred when two steamers were pulled through the Second Cataract, with the first requiring the labour of four thousand Egyptian soldiers and the second consuming the energies of fifteen hundred British regulars. The Nile’s current not only was very strong, but it flowed north against the expedition as the troops tried to hurry towards Khartoum. The experiences of Frederick Denison illustrated the power of the river: on one occasion it took him fifteen days to travel upriver between Wadi Halfa and Dal, a distance of 137 kilometres, but less than two days to go the other way when the Nile flowed in his favour. Beyond watercraft and the use of railways, hundreds of camels carried supplies along the banks of the river, many of which were managed by Arabs brought in from Aden because of their particular expertise in managing those beasts.16
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On the day the voyageurs finished their first job of moving whaleboats at the Second Cataract to the Royal Navy camp on October 28, 1884, Major-General Sir Evelyn Wood, the commanding officer of the Egyptian army, visited the steersmen and inspected Louis Jackson’s gang. That evening, thirty-six Mohawk boatmen, along with Foreman Jackson, were selected to become the first members of the Canadian contingent to venture farther upriver (with most of the rest of the Iroquois remaining in camp under the supervision of the other Kahnawake foreman, François Delisle). Jackson’s mission was to test the capacity of the whalers with less than full loads and with oversized crews of voyageurs, as well as to determine where portages would have to be established for those who came afterwards and where officers would need to be posted to supervise the army’s movement through problematic stretches of river. One of the discoveries they would make, for instance, was that the army would need to portage the whaleboats more often if the vessels were loaded to capacity. Jackson’s group set out on the train that bypassed the cataract to Gemai, where the army had established a dockyard to repair vessels after their trials through the Second Cataract and to fit them up for the next phase of the campaign, and where most of the soldiers would board their boats for the next stage of the advance on Khartoum. The Mohawks pitched camp for the night; then on October 29, they sailed to Saras, over thirty kilometres farther upriver from Gemai, where they loaded each whaler with two tonnes of supplies and a small number of passengers before continuing a short distance to camp for the night. According to Jackson, the current was swift and the river was as narrow as three hundred metres at some points. For much of the next day Jackson’s six crews assessed their boats under operational conditions, explored different channels, and enjoyed racing against each other when the river was smooth enough to do so. Near the end of the day, however, tragedy struck: the Mohawks suffered their first loss when Louis Capitaine of Kahnawake fell overboard in rough water. Despite throwing him a life belt, oars, and rope, and notwithstanding the efforts of an Arab swimmer to save him, Capitaine perished, and his body was lost. The senior British officer with Jackson hired some local people to try and recover his remains and provide a decent burial. At the time, there was a rumour that Capitaine — an excellent swimmer — may have chosen to end his life because he had expressed distraught thoughts immediately beforehand, such as by throwing his cup into the Nile and remarking that he soon would follow.17
By November 3, Jackson’s men reached the Dal Cataract. Thus, with their mastery over the water affirmed but with the sad loss of one of their own, the Mohawk voyageurs began the period in which they did the bulk of their work, with their efforts being concentrated from the end of October 1884 to the middle of January 1885 as they sweated under the blazing sun on the desert river, tormented by flies and insects (which regularly invaded cuts, causing infections, or intruded into people’s eyes, inflicting discomfort). The voyageurs toiled for up to fourteen hours each day, seven days a week, although at the beginning of the labour-intensive period of Nile service many of them objected to working on Sundays (and some were fined for refusing to fulfil their duties). Back in the lumber camps, the Sabbath was a day to rest, enjoy recreational activities, and attend to washing and other chores. The men’s opposition to Sunday work in 1884 mirrored an episode on the Red River Expedition in 1870 when Iroquois pilots refused to give up their day off, but which Garnet Wolseley overcame in the Canadian forests with an offer of extra pay for additional effort.18
The Mohawks lost another man in Louis Jackson’s gang on November 16, 1884, in a difficult stretch of water less than two kilometres north of the Ambikol Cataract, one of the challenging secondary torrents between the better known Second and Third cataracts. At the time, there were four voyageurs in one boat when its rudder broke. Three of them struggled to shore with the help of ropes. However, eighteen-year-old John Morris from Kahnawake tried to swim without assistance, but the current pulled him under and he disappeared from sight. Eight days later, one of the Canadian officers, Captain Egerton Denison, spotted Morris’s decomposed body floating downriver and had his remains recovered and buried. These two deaths possessed an added degree of sadness to them: Capitaine left a young family behind in Canada; while the youthful Morris (who presumably had not developed his piloting expertise fully by that stage in his life) had signed up for Egyptian service against his father’s wishes. Fortunately, no additional Mohawks lost their lives (although they seem to have left Montreal assuming that they would endure higher casualties). Sixteen members of the Canadian contingent in total died: six from drowning, eight from enteric fever, smallpox, dysentery, or other malady, and two from accident by falling from a train near the end of their Egyptian service. A large number of men became sick during the campaign, and one Mohawk, John Hops, fell victim to mental illness, nervous breakdown, or some uncertain disease that medical personnel interpreted as an affliction of the mind, so he was sent to the Royal Victoria Military Hospital at Netley in England for rest and treatment before he returned to Canada.19
On October 29, just after Jackson’s gang had set out on its exploratory trip, more whalers began to head upriver from Gemai once the other voyageurs assembled there after moving boats through the Second Cataract. Along much of the river from Gemai southward, six to ten soldiers typically pulled the oars of each boat and followed the orders of their voyageur pilot, who either took the rudder or stood in the bow with an oar, pole, or paddle to guide the whaler from the front, depending upon the condition of the river at any given point, as had occurred on the Red River fourteen years earlier. In more challenging rapids, two voyageurs typically took charge of each vessel. When the waters were even rougher, boats normally were towed upriver from the river bank, but one or more voyageurs often stayed on board to steer, occasionally with a soldier or some other man to help, while other voyageurs directed the efforts of people from the bank and contributed their own muscle to the tasks at hand. On these occasions some of the cargoes often had to be portaged, but the men discovered that the whalers generally were easier to manoeuvre if half the supplies were left on board to give them sufficient weight to cut through the water. At some places the river presented barriers that were so formidable that the whalers and cargoes had to be portaged without any attempt to force the watercraft through. To speed the effort, the army stationed Egyptian soldiers and local labourers at portages to perform much of the work of carrying goods and boats. Occasionally large numbers of men came under Mohawk supervision, such as at one point when Jackson led twenty-three whalers manned by local Dongolese labourers, or on another occasion when he directed 375 Dongolese boatmen and Egyptian soldiers (along with his “Caughnawaga boys”) in an attempt to shift an eight- or ten-metre-long, steam-powered navy gunboat (called a pinnace) that had run up on some rocks, filled with water, and blocked a channel that other vessels needed to travel through on their way upriver.20
A major difference between the Nile and Canadian rivers, which made the job harder and the going slower in Sudan, was its muddy character. At times the brown water made it difficult, and even impossible, to see submerged rocks and other hazards, which the voyageurs found to be intensely frustrating in comparison to their North American experience. However, some people, such as the Saulteaux Ojibway foreman, Henry Prince, could discern the presence of hidden