Mohawks on the Nile. Carl Benn
with their vital supplies of water. Charles Gordon had stationed four small armoured steamers near Metemma, which could be used to bring part of the Desert Column upriver with some speed, open communications with Khartoum, and provide its beleaguered garrison with at least a token number of British soldiers to augment the Egyptian troops and let the Mahdists know that more imperial reinforcements were coming. While the number of men that could be carried by the little Sudanese steamers was not significant, some officers hoped that the arrival of British troops in Khartoum would undermine the rebels’ resolve (although both Gordon and Wolseley thought the chances that the plan would have much of an impact were limited). The rest of the Desert Column either could follow the steamers upriver to Khartoum if circumstances allowed for a quick move, or it could shift downriver in expectation of reuniting with the River Column, which left Korti on December 28 and which had been charged with taking Berber so it could be used as another staging point for further operations. Additionally, the move upriver toward Berber was intended to keep some of the Mahdist forces positioned there and prevent them from acting against the Desert Column. Unfortunately, a host of problems, including a shortage of camels, combined with the British army’s lack of familiarity with these animals in this, their first campaign with them, along with two large-scale attacks on the force, retarded the Desert Column’s movements, causing it to take twelve days to reach the Nile rather than the six originally anticipated.
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Despite the army’s transportation problems, slow progress, and the worsening situation in Khartoum, the March 9, 1885 expiry of the voyageurs’ six-month contracts came into view in early January; so thought turned to sending the Canadian contingent home by the deadline. The majority of boatmen wanted to return to North America rather than sign up for further service even though officials asked them to do so and offered higher pay and additional benefits. The motivations behind the voyageurs’ desires for wishing to end their service both were mixed and not completely clear to us today. One of the officers, Captain Telmont Aumond of the Governor General’s Foot Guards from Ottawa, may have discouraged men from staying for now unknown reasons, although he denied doing so and Colonel Frederick Denison affirmed the captain’s integrity by saying Aumond had performed “excellent work” in Egypt.33 Some voyageurs worried about the heat of the approaching Sudanese summer or did not feel healthy enough to continue because sickness had afflicted a large number of them (although, in general, the Mohawks endured the climate and its challenges better than the others). Some men could not stand the prospect of continuing up the Nile on a diet of bully beef, hardtack, and the other limitations of army rations in a region without access to much fresh food. Others wanted to return to Canada to fulfil pre-existing commitments or wished to re-engage for only three months when the authorities preferred them to renew for six. Some voyageurs were not satisfied with the amount of extra pay offered. Undoubtedly, many just wanted to see their families or had had enough of the adventure. Presumably, some were reluctant to travel into the more dangerous regions out of fear for their personal safety, as by January 1885 the River Column, accompanied by elements of the Canadian contingent, moved into territory where Muhammad Ahmad’s forces monitored their movements closely and where the voyageurs found themselves dodging the odd stray bullet.34
The majority of Mohawks, who were working in the Dal region for the most part at that time, wanted to go home, likely for the same reasons that influenced the rest of their compatriots, but there were other incentives too. Some individuals in Louis Jackson’s gang fell afoul of the army: Surgeon-Major Hubert Neilson noted that a number of them refused to obey orders and “bolted with a boat,” while James Deer recorded that ten Mohawks left their post without permission, were arrested, held prisoner for a few days, court-martialled, and fined for their behaviour. Later, in Canada, these men said they had been directed to stay at a particular location by a British officer who spoke to them in English, which they did not understand, and, after waiting three days, chose to move downriver to a location where they knew some of the other voyageurs were working. At the time, however, Neilson described them as “idiots,” which, combined with Deer’s memory of the event, suggests that there was more to the problem than the claim that it was a simple mistake based on language. Yet, the fines were comparatively mild for such insubordination, so perhaps the authorities did not take the problem too seriously.35
Beyond any altercation affecting those ten individuals, there was a pressing need for the majority of Mohawks from Kahnawake to go home because they wanted to participate in the redistribution of land that was scheduled to occur on the reserve on May 1, 1885. That event was part of a Canadian government initiative to address land shortages and tensions surrounding property disputes (and to encourage native people to adopt Euro-American values as they affected the ownership and utilization of property). Concern to be on hand for the allocation probably accounts for the fact that three of the five or six Mohawks who did remain with the army in Sudan did not come from Kahnawake, even though that community provided the majority of the Iroquois steersmen. As it was, one Mohawk told The Montreal Daily Star that he and many of his friends would have stayed on the Nile if they did not have to come home because of the land question.36 Louis Jackson, for unstated reasons, but perhaps because of the upcoming property redistribution, was one of the people who chose to leave. Jackson’s decision seems to have been important because Colonel Denison believed that most of the Iroquois — his best voyageurs — would have stayed had their popular foreman been willing to continue in the boat service. If he was correct (although he may not have realized how important the land question was), Jackson’s impact paralleled practices in the lumber industry where a foreman’s choice to stay or leave an employer played a large role in the decision of the men who he had recruited to work in the camps.37
In the end, only eighty-three boatmen, six foremen, and two officers (Paymaster William Kennedy of the 90th Winnipeg Battalion of Rifles and Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Denison) continued travelling upriver, including regions beyond Korti. The contingent’s surgeon-major and chaplain worked elsewhere in Egypt and another officer did not return to Canada at that point because of illness. The number of men could have been larger, but Denison refused to re-engage the incompetent white men from Manitoba, who, of all people, were willing to continue. Those voyageurs who agreed to remain with the campaign received an increase in pay of twenty dollars per month above their previous forty- dollar rate along with new clothes and other benefits. Most of these men were anglophones, and Denison wished that more First Nations men had decided to stay because his remaining voyageurs not only were smaller in number but weaker in skill, even after weeding out the worst of the lot.38
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At about this time, on January 17, 1885, the Desert Column, as it made its way overland, came under attack at Abu Klea in the Gordon Relief Expedition’s first major battle. The British beat off the Mahdists in a clash that was typical of the Sudan War of 1884–85: outnumbered but well-disciplined British soldiers armed with modern weapons — including early machine guns — defeated extraordinarily brave nomadic and pastoral men from the various tribes that made up Sudan’s population. Only a small percentage of the Muhammad Ahmad followers had equivalent arms (mostly captured from the Egyptians) and these were inferior to those of imperial forces, while the tribesmen’s proficiency with them was limited. Instead, most carried spears, swords, and shields, and fought by charging quickly at the British to engage at close quarters where they could use their weapons effectively. Since they moved so fast and in such large numbers, and since there was little or no cover, the soldiers at Abu Klea formed a large, tightly packed “square,” in which they stood shoulder to shoulder and faced outwards towards their enemy. This stance allowed them to present four “fronts” to their opponents so that the Mahdists could not find any vulnerable flanks or rear to turn. The square was an old defence used by infantry in the musket era of earlier decades against fast-moving cavalry, but it had become obsolete in European warfare because of the massive firepower available to Western armies after the mid-1800s. Nevertheless, it continued to be effective in colonial warfare against opponents armed with obsolete forms of military technology. As was typical of the battles of 1884–85, Abu Klea saw hugely lopsided casualty figures: in fifteen ghastly minutes of combat, the British force of eighteen hundred soldiers (plus several hundred native labourers) suffered 168 killed and wounded; while the Mahdists, who numbered in excess of ten thousand, left eleven hundred bodies