The Ocean King then steamed across the Mediterranean, and as the ship cruised along the coast of North Africa, the contingent’s medical officer delivered lectures on the virtues of temperance. Boatman James Deer noted that many around him were sufficiently impressed as to kiss their Bibles (supplied by evangelical Christians in Montreal at the time of the Ocean King’s departure) and swear that they would be abstemious, although he observed sadly that once in Egypt some of them slid back into their old ways. Along with the surgeon’s talks, the chaplain, Arthur Bouchard, shared his insights on Egypt and Sudan, gained from his earlier experiences in North Africa. Beyond listening to sobering lectures, the voyageurs spent their time in happier pleasures, such as tug-of-war competitions and other sports on the deck of the ship, and they also attended church parades, with Father Bouchard leading worship for the Roman Catholic majority and Frederick Denison for the Protestant minority in his command. Most of the Mohawks with a connection to Christianity were Catholics, although some likely had Anglican or Methodist affiliations. (The Ojibways in the contingent were Anglicans.) Off Malta, the Ocean King passed one of the steamers carrying “our boats” to Egypt, according to Neilson. A day later, the men watched the eclipse of the moon. The ship had a piano and some people brought fiddles along with them, allowing everyone to enjoy concerts and dances, while various other pleasures, such as the sight of “whales, porpoises, and other monsters of the deep” that Deer mentioned in his memoir offered agreeable diversions for all, whether native or white.52
————
The great historic events behind the departure of the Ocean King from Quebec at the end of the summer of 1884 unfolded far outside the world in which its passengers had developed the skills the army needed to convey troops and supplies up the Nile River. One critical problem that led to Great Britain’s intervention into Egyptian affairs was the security of the Suez Canal. When it opened in 1869, the 171-kilometre waterway cut the time required to sail between Europe and Asia dramatically as ships no longer had to travel all the way around the African continent to reach their destinations. However, London feared that the canal, possessing enormous importance for the trade and security of the British Empire, might fall into unfriendly hands because Egypt had become unstable through the corruption and incompetence of its government. Britain met that challenge in part by purchasing 45 per cent of the shares of the Suez Canal Company from Egypt’s cash-starved khedive in 1875. (Egypt at the time was part of the Ottoman Empire, and the sultan of Turkey was the khedive’s overlord. However, Constantinople — now Istanbul — exercised little authority in Egypt in a relationship that suited European powers well.) A second major worry was the country’s financial condition: European bankers feared that massive loans made to the khedive might not be repaid. As it was, the interest on the almost hundred-million-pound debt exceeded Egypt’s national revenue. Therefore, in 1879, European powers, led by France and Britain, had the sultan install a new khedive, Tewfik, to co-operate with them in bringing stability to the country’s economy. That action infuriated growing nationalist fervour among people who sought independence from both European and Turkish control at the same time that Anglo-French officials took over Egypt’s treasury, customs office, postal system, railways, and ports, and then cut spending in education, defence, and other areas to set the stage for repaying the loans. Conditions deteriorated sharply in 1881 and 1882, as represented by riots that saw fifty expatriates killed in Alexandria and thousands of other foreigners flee the country for fear of their lives. At the same time, nationalists within the Egyptian army threatened violence to force themselves into Tewfik’s cabinet. In the manoeuvring surrounding those developments, European powers sided with the impotent khedive against the nationalists, and Britain and France dispatched warships to Alexandria to undermine his opponents. The nationalists strengthened the harbour defences and refused a series of ultimatums to remove their newly installed artillery. The Royal Navy, without French participation, responded by bombarding the city’s seaward fortifications into submission in July 1882. British forces occupied Alexandria, seized control of the Suez Canal, and, under the command of Lieutenant-General Sir Garnet Wolseley, defeated the nationalists in the battle of Tel el Kebir in September after rebel leaders had “cancelled” Egypt’s debt and threatened to block or destroy the canal. The British restored Tewfik’s authority, but found themselves in effective control of Egypt’s civil and military affairs. They hoped to implement local reforms and stabilize the situation so they could withdraw most of their forces within a short period, but they ended up remaining in the country for the next seventy-four years.
At the same time these issues were being decided, outraged morality in the United Kingdom demanded that the queen’s ministers exercise leadership in suppressing the slave trade in Egypt’s province of Sudan and the neighbouring equatorial regions to the south, which an English-born general had failed to do at the head of Egyptian forces early in the 1870s. (That a Briton should command Egyptians was not unusual at the time. Non-western countries often recruited Europeans and North Americans into the senior ranks of their civil services and militaries in order to obtain expertise that was not available locally and to build useful affiliations with powerful nations, while dominant industrial countries also regularly imposed their soldiers, administrators, and entrepreneurs on reluctant and less-powerful states in pursuit of their own goals.) Later, while employed by the Egyptian government, Charles Gordon tried to end slavery in the south. He was an evangelical Christian who respected Islam but who had an unusually erratic persona — in fact, some observers thought he was a lunatic. He had fought with the British army in the Crimean War in the 1850s and then gained fame in the 1860s in China at the head of Qing government forces in one of history’s greatest bloodbaths, the Taiping Rebellions. Between 1873 and 1879, he served as Egypt’s governor general of Equatoria (in today’s southern Sudan and northern Uganda) and then of all Sudan. He took up the anti-slavery cause with fervour, which, combined with his war against corruption, caused enormous resentment among the region’s powerful, who had built their fortunes by graft and by the sale and abuse of many tens of thousands of souls from central Africa and elsewhere. Despite short-term successes, Gordon, like his predecessor, did not achieve a lasting victory over the slavers or dishonest officials in the province.
As Britain took control of Egypt, a powerful challenge emerged in Sudan from Muhammad Ahmad ibn ‘Abdullahi, the deeply religious son of a Nile boat-builder, who claimed to be descended from the Prophet Muhammad. He was proclaimed the Mahdi, or the “Expected One” of a Muslim tradition that fell outside of the Koran and that awaited the arrival of a temporal and spiritual saviour near the end of time. He rose against the Egyptians in 1881 and threatened to bring a holy war to all of North Africa and to the Muslim world beyond in hopes of restoring Islamic law from the time of the Prophet as he interpreted it (while regarding Muslims who did not support him as apostates). He won a series of victories over poorly trained and undisciplined Egyptian troops, most famously in November 1883 when an overwhelming number of his followers destroyed ten thousand soldiers commanded by a British-born officer near El Obeid. In London, Liberal prime minister William Gladstone wanted to avoid entanglement in Sudan, an immense region of desert, forest, and swamp, totalling two-and-a-half million square kilometres, of which only somewhat more than four thousand were cultivated. The British government