Charles George Gordon was born on 28 January 1833 near the Woolwich arsenal, where his father, Major (later Lieutenant General) Henry William Gordon served as Inspector of the Carriage Department. Gordon’s mother, Elizabeth, was the evangelical and fundamentalist daughter of a prominent whaling-ship-owning family. He was one of their five sons and six daughters. Gordon himself gave up on church-going, later writing ‘What husks the Evangelical religion is’,1 and committing himself to the Bible itself as the source of his faith. Because of a disciplinary proceeding in his senior year at Woolwich, Gordon’s graduation was delayed by six months. He thus missed selection into the Royal Artillery and was instead commissioned into the Royal Engineers on 23 June 1852.
After training at Chatham, Gordon served at Pembroke Dock, where he experienced a spiritual awakening through the influence of a fellow officer, Captain Drew. Arriving at Balaclava in January 1855 and being assigned to the siege works before Sebastopol his first experience of being under (as it turned out, friendly) fire for the first time led him to embrace fully evangelical beliefs. There he also befriended the young Captain Garnet Wolseley, who, despite his superior rank, served under Gordon on engineering projects, and Lieutenant Colonel Sir Charles Staveley, under whom he would serve in China and who would become his brother Henry’s father-in-law. After Sebastopol’s capture in September 1855, Gordon was assigned to blow up its fortifications and docks. He also met for the first time the Piedmontese Bersaglieri, Captain Romolo Gessi, who would later play a significant role in his life.
Now an acting Captain, Gordon was assigned to the Rumanian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia and the border territory of Bessarabia in May 1856 to help to draw their boundary line with Russia under the terms of the Treaty of Paris that ended the Crimean War. For the next year he trundled (often with Gessi acting as interpreter) back and forth between the Danube, the Ottoman Kurdish and Armenian provinces, and Constantinople, developing an idea to map the world of Judaism and Christianity. After a spell back in England, during which he was elected a member of the Royal Geographical Society, Gordon continued with to his duties as boundary commissioner and, in early December 1859 he returned to England to find he had been promoted to Captain and second Adjutant at Chatham.
28 January 1833 |
Charles George Gordon born at Woolwich Educated at Fullards School, Taunton, and Royal Military Academy, Woolwich |
23 June 1852 |
Commissioned into Royal Engineers |
17 February 1854 |
Promoted Lieutenant |
1 January 1855 |
Arrived in Crimea |
6 June 1855 |
Wounded before Sebastopol |
18 May 1856 |
Posted to the Turco-Russian Boundary Commission |
22 February 1858 |
Elected Fellow of Royal Geographical Society |
1 April 1859 |
Promoted Captain |
1860–62 |
Service in China |
30 December 1862 |
Promoted Brevet Major |
24 March 1863 |
Appointed Commander, ‘Ever Victorious Army’ |
16 February 1864 |
Promoted Brevet Lieutenant Colonel |
28 June 1864 |
Relinquished command of ‘Ever Victorious Army’ and awarded the Chinese rank of ti-tu (Provincial C in C or Field Marshal) |
1 September 1865 |
Appointed CRE, Gravesend |
15 November 1871 |
Appointed to Danubian Commission and as Vice Consul at Galatz |
16 February 1872 |
Promoted Brevet Colonel |
5 July 1872 |
Promoted Major |
18 October 1873 |
Accepted offer to become Governor of Egypt’s Equatoria provinces in southern Sudan |
December 1876 |
Resigned as Governor of Equatoria |
24 December 1876 |
Accepted appointment as Governor General of the Sudan |
5 May 1877 |
Formally invested as Governor General in Khartoum |
29 July 1879 |
Resigned as Governor General |
2 March 1880 |
Declined command of Natal Colonial Forces |
28 April 1880 |
Appointed Private Secretary to the Viceroy |
2 June 1880 |
Resigned as Private Secretary |
21 March 1881 |
Appointed CRE, Mauritius |
24 March 1882 |
Promoted Major General |
2 April 1882 |
Again offered command of Natal Colonial Forces |
27 September 1882 |
Resigned as Commandant General of Natal Colonial Forces |
15 October 1883 |
Offered appointment as Governor of (Belgian) Congo |
18 January 1884 |
Accepted offer to become Governor General of the Sudan |
21 January 1884 |
Formally appointed Governor General |
18 February 1884 |
Arrived at Khartoum |
26 January 1885 |
Killed at Khartoum |
Appointed CB, 1864
Having volunteered for service in China, Gordon left England in July 1860, joining Lord Elgin’s expeditionary force at Tientsin in September as a Brevet Major and second in command of an engineering unit.2 Following the surrender of Peking (Beijing) on 13 October, Elgin ordered the destruction of the Emperor’s Summer Palace as a reprisal for the torture and killing of British emissaries by three of the Emperor’s generals and to encourage the Emperor to sign a peace treaty. Gordon later said that he regretted his participation in the place’s destruction. Serving under the command of Staveley, now a Lieutenant General and C in C of the Madras army, Gordon stayed on for eighteen months, visiting the Great Wall, and then returning to Shanghai where he came under the influence of American Methodists and a Jewish Lithuanian merchant who introduced him to Jewish Hasidic fundamentalism.
On Staveley’s recommendation, Gordon was appointed to command a multinational military force, the 2,100-man so-called ‘Ever Victorious Army’, at Sunkiang on 24 March 1863. This mercenary force had been created in June 1860 by Shanghai-based British, French, American and Chinese merchants to defend imperial and foreign interests against Taiping rebels.3 The force was originally led by an American adventurer, Frederick Townsend Ward, who trained the force in western tactics and achieved several victories against the Taipings, but was killed in September 1862. Gordon became its fourth commander, replacing a British Marine Captain named Holland who had been defeated trying to capture Taitsan. The British Consul General characterised Gordon as the only British officer who had no enemies in the international community. He had few friends but he was much respected. He spoke French, which pleased the French, and French officers with whom he had served in the Crimean War thought well of him. Again he was respected in the American community and the influential Methodists spoke well of him. Of course, he had Staveley’s support and Gordon’s own father enjoyed the esteem of the War Office in London, which duly approved the appointment. It seemed there could be no better choice.4 Gordon was made a Mandarin and General in the Chinese army subject to the authority of Li Hung-chang, Kiangsu Futai (provincial governor) and commander of the province’s military forces.
In March 1863, another former commander of the ‘Ever Victorious Army’, an American called Henry Andrea Burgevine, who had succeeded Ward but had then been dismissed for striking a Chinese official, appealed to the American Minister, Anson Burlingame, to have him restored to his command. In turn, Burlingame appealed to the British minister, Frederick Bruce, who had already registered his objections to having a serving British officer in command of a Chinese force. Bruce referred the matter to the Chinese regent, who left the matter to Li. The latter rejected the appeal, recording in his diary: ‘It is a direct blessing from Heaven, I believe, the coming of this British Gordon…. He is superior in manner and bearing to any of the foreigners I have come into contact with and does not show outwardly that conceit which makes most of them repugnant in my sight.’5 Bruce ordered General W G Brown, who had replaced Staveley, to intervene, but he refused to do so and, to make his intentions perfectly clear, Li promoted Gordon to tsung-ping (Major General – the second highest rank in the Chinese army).
In April 1863 Gordon, carrying a short rattan cane – later referred to as ‘the wand of victory’ – captured Taitsan, avenging Holland’s defeat, and suppressed a mutiny among his own men, who had not been paid and resented Gordon’s prohibition of looting in the town: he received a commitment from the Chinese to establish a regular payment system for his soldiers. In May Gordon captured Quinsan and Chunyi, the keys to a complex canal system, and refurbished a small naval force to cut off the enemy’s retreat to Soochow. Gordon’s great tactical strengths – thorough planning, full reconnaissance and indirect tactics – appeared for the first time in these battles.
Without consulting Li, Gordon wrote to the rebel leadership in June 1863 offering to mediate peace. At the time, Bruce and the British director of Chinese customs were plotting to supplant provincial forces with a national Chinese military commanded by Europeans. The Chinese Imperial commander, General Ching, whose plan for an offensive against the rebels had been rejected by Li in favour of Gordon’s, also coveted Quinsan as his headquarters. Consequently, Gordon offered Li Hung-chang his resignation, but it was refused.
On 1 August Burgevine, who had assembled a mercenary force at Shanghai, stole a gunboat and joined the rebels at Soochow. Gordon, who had vouched for Burgevine’s good character when rumours about his intentions had surfaced in July, decided to stay on. In October, at the culmination of a complex series of plots and counterplots, Burgevine and other westerners were turned over to Gordon by the rebels in return for weapons and ammunition. After more twists and turns, which (along with rumours, spread by General Ching that Gordon was negotiating separately with the rebels) alienated Li from Gordon, Burgevine left China for Japan.
Gordon’s first (night) attack on Soochow on 27/28 November was the first defeat suffered by the ‘Ever Victorious Army’ since Gordon had assumed command. The next day, however, a key fortification was captured. After much negotiation and intrigue, the Taiping leader in Soochow surrendered the city to Ching on 5 December. Gordon held the ‘Ever Victorious Army’ outside the city to enable the surrender to be a purely Chinese affair and to keep his force from participating in its looting. To offset the booty on which his troops counted, Gordon asked Li to award them with an extra month’s pay. When Li offered only half that amount, Gordon submitted his resignation for a second time. Then, on 6 December, despite Li’s promises of safe conduct, the Soochow rebel leaders were executed under mysterious circumstances on Li’s barge. Gordon was enraged by the betrayal. Accordingly, he offered sanctuary to the rebel leader’s son, withdrew to Quinsan, and resigned again.
In one of several attempts to heal the breach, Li sent Gordon a military medal and reward of 10,000 taels from the Emperor. Li also sent him two rebel battle flags, which Gordon rejected. In February 1864, however, Li accepted responsibility for the deaths and Gordon accepted the possibility that ‘the Futai has some extenuating circumstances in favour of his action … I think we can scarcely expect the same discernment that we should from a European governor’.6 Gordon resumed command of the ‘Ever Victorious Army’. Bruce, who feared that Burgevine might return from Japan as a Confederate agent, now supported Gordon.7 In the same month, Gordon received promotion to Brevet Lieutenant Colonel in the British army.
Attacking a heavily defended Kitang in March, Gordon was wounded in the leg and forced to withdraw after sustaining over 100 casualties. With Gordon thus sidelined by his wound, his army then failed to displace rebel forces outside the town of Waisso. Nonetheless, on 11 May 1864 the rebel fortress of Changzhou on the Grand Canal fell to the Imperial and ‘Ever Victorious Army’ forces. Gordon also helped plan the assault on the rebel capital of Nanking, though Chinese pride dictated that the ‘foreign devils’ not participate in the final victory on 19 July 1864. Hung Hsiu-ch’uan, the ‘Heavenly King’, committed suicide and some 100,000 rebels were killed or committed suicide in the attack and its aftermath.
Under public pressure following the newspaper reports of the Soochow ‘massacre’ the British government had withdrawn its Order-in-Council that permitted serving British officers to serve in the Chinese army and Gordon ended his service there. He refused any cash reward but accepted the rank of ti-tu (provincial C in C – the equivalent of a Field Marshal), the right (the first accorded to a ‘foreign devil’) to wear a Yellow Cape (the highest award in the Ch’in empire for military service) and a peacock feather in his hat.
Gordon left China in November 1864. Though he tried to slip away quietly, the banks of the canal were lined with Chinese soldiers setting off fireworks and artillery and playing martial music. In China he was known as ‘The Great General Ko’ and in Britain as ‘Chinese’ Gordon. About the publicity he was getting at home, he wrote to his sister, ‘I do not care a jot about my promotion or what people may say, I know I shall leave China as poor as I entered it.’8
On returning to England, Gordon took up residence in Southampton with his parents and several of his brothers and sisters. He also welcomed his old friend turned recruiter for Garibaldi, Gessi. Gordon admired Garibaldi but Gessi failed to recruit Gordon to the cause of Italian Unification. Gordon’s father, who died in September 1865, had requested that his son be appointed CRE at Gravesend and Gordon took up the post just a few weeks before his father’s death. He was tasked with the erection of new fortifications on the Thames to protect London in the event of a possible French invasion.
Finding his official duties minimal, Gordon became concerned about the poor and destitute waifs and elderly in Gravesend. He made contact with various religious groups, all of whom believed that the poor should be morally regenerated and spiritually reclaimed from drink and prostitution, but did little to alleviate their poverty. He finally worked with a Nonconformist couple named Freese to write tracts of his own on the subject and he held garden parties at his official residence, with the leftovers being distributed to the poor. He also brought coal to the poor, ordered his gardens divided into allotments where they could grow vegetables, volunteered to teach at the local ragged school and invited some of the boys into his official residence at Fort House to sleep, giving them new clothes and boots when they left. In the autumn of 1867, he opened a ragged school of his own. For almost five years he devoted over 30 hours weekly to these endeavours. Based on Revelations 1:6 he called the boys ‘Kings’ and used the terms ‘Lambs’ (as Christ’s followers were known) and the Chinese wang (princes of the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace) to their faces, but wrote privately of his efforts: ‘How far better to be allowed to be kind to a little Scrub than to govern the greatest kingdoms.’9
Gordon volunteered for the Abyssinian expedition in 1868, but was refused on the grounds that its soldiers were all to be drawn from the Indian army. Then, in November 1871, in response to accumulated resentments at the War Office about Gordon’s international fame and among his peers about his rapid promotions and Nonconformist attitudes, he was appointed the Foreign Office representative on the multinational Danubian Commission and Vice Consul at the Black Sea port of Galatz (Galati). At a plenary session of the Danubian Commission in May 1872, Gordon presented his idea of a Danube–Black Sea canal, which would speed commerce by shortening the distance by 250 miles and create a waterway wholly controlled by a single country (Rumania). The British government had little interest in the idea and, in his disappointment, and depressed that two of the boys that he had sponsored in England had died, Gordon was intrigued by a thinly veiled offer by the Egyptian chief minister, Nubar Pasha, to replace Sir Samuel Baker as Governor of Egypt’s Equatoria Province with a salary of £10,000. Gordon responded that he would think about it if Nubar could suggest the canal project to the Ottoman Sultan, Abdul Aziz, to whom Egypt still owed nominal allegiance.
Frustrated by continued indifference to his canal idea and by the general inaction of the Danubian Commission, as well as his failure to gain a transfer to Wolseley’s campaign against the Asante, Gordon accepted Nubar Pasha’s renewed offer on 18 October 1873 and suggested that Gessi accompany him. In September, he received permission from the British government and was appointed a general of the Turkish army. His task was to solidify Egyptian control of the southern Sudan’s ivory, foodstuffs, cotton and slave-trading wealth. Gordon formally accepted his appointment on condition that he could operate independently from his immediate superior, Ismail Ayub Pasha, the Governor General of the Sudan, though he would take care not to affront him. He accepted only £2,000 as his salary, showing the Egyptians ‘that gold and silver are not worshipped all over the world’.10
Gordon believed that the Khedive’s motives were honest,11 but that Nubar and the Egyptian bureaucracy were not committed to the venture and had employed Gordon as a sop to public opinion in the country that now largely controlled Egypt’s economy. After a difficult journey, Gordon arrived at Khartoum on 13 March 1874.12 While there, he failed to detect the intimate relationships between government officials and the slave trade, but did issue decrees outlawing private armies, establishing ivory trading as a government monopoly, and banning the importation of gunpowder into Equatoria. This hampered the ability of slavers to maintain private armies and destroyed one of their chief covers, but also deprived the non-Muslim native tribes of a major source of income and drove many of them into uneasy alliance with the slavers.
On 16 April 1874 Gordon arrived at Gondokoro, where he found that military discipline had dissipated as the Egyptian garrison had not been paid in months and was compensating by taking bribes and engaging in the trading of African girls. The wily ruler of Buganda, Mutesa, who had participated in Egypt’s slave trade since the 1840s, sent emissaries to Gondokoro to greet Gordon when he arrived there. Gordon responded by sending gifts and greetings. Gordon himself left Gessi in charge and returned to Khartoum, where he obtained chests full of Maria Theresa silver dollars (thalers) to pay his expenses in Equatoria. When he returned in May, he and his lieutenants decided to send the useless Egyptian garrison north to man a new fort – established by Gordon on his way back south – at a Shillook tribal village where the Sobat river joined the White Nile. At the northern boundary of Equatoria and therefore closer to Egypt, he hoped this would rebuild their morale: instead they soon developed a thriving trade in Somali slaves.
Frustrated by his lack of transport and by the need to deal with large numbers of freed blacks, Gordon concluded that the real evil was less slavery itself than the trade that brought the slaves north. He suggested, therefore, that instead of abolishing the slave trade, it should become a state monopoly under the control of a European director to rid it of its worst abuses. The proposal was rejected by the Khedive. In January 1875 a party of 500 ivory porters, led by Wad el-Mek, arrived at Gondokoro, adding to Gordon’s available manpower and enabling him to send out three scouting expeditions. One, headed by a Union army veteran, Charles Chaille Long, moved westward into Makraka country to recruit porters and troops, but, ill, Long returned to brief Gordon in March and was sent back to Cairo.13 A second expedition down the Nile to Lake Albert was led by a recently arrived Royal Engineer subaltern, Chippendall, who was prevented by a smallpox epidemic from reconnoitring all the way to the lake and rejoined Gordon at Kerri. He helped Gordon to construct the outpost there, and, having developed a huge growth on his neck, left for Cairo in late July. The third, to Mutesa of Buganda, was led by a French Arabist, Ernest Linant de Bellefond, who was surprised to find Henry Stanley there on a Christianising mission when he arrived at Mutesa’s capital. Linant and Stanley joined forces to proselytise Mutesa and Stanley left convinced that he had converted him, making Mutesa a darling of British evangelists. The psychopathic ruler was now confronted, however, by new threats/opportunities from competing interests. Mutesa therefore sought to enlist the British in his war against the Bunyoro, and failing to do so, conscripted and detained Linant’s men. They escaped and Linant reported back to Gordon in August.
Once Gordon’s steamers finally arrived in July 1875 and having, he thought, secured the north, Gordon now undertook what he regarded as his chief logistical responsibility in Equatoria. This was to build a string of forts one day apart southward from Gondokoro to Baker’s last surviving outposts at Foweira and Fatiko and thence, through Mrooli (deep in hostile Bunyoro country) to the northern end of the Great Lakes. His soldiers would then transport, in sections, metal steamers around Fola (Makada) Falls and their launch onto the lakes would open that region to Christianity and the ‘legitimate trade’ that were the harbingers of civilisation.14
On 25 August 1875 Linant was killed, falling victim to a Bari ambush as he and forty-three men crossed the river to burn their village in retaliation for earlier attacks: only one survived. Within three months, seven of Gordon’s ten staff members – all alienated from him – died or returned to Khartoum and one of his captains committed suicide. Nonetheless, at the end of September, he established his first fort at Rejaf and by the year’s end, he succeeded in setting up forts at Bedden, Kerri, Dufilé, Moogie and Patiko. He also had the 50-ton steamer Nyanza assembled at Dufilé, and pushed southward to Lake Albert. Wishing to avoid ‘the inordinate praise which is given to an explorer’,15 Gordon gave Gessi the honour of sailing onto Lake Albert. Nuehr Agha, who had come with Gessi, was sent south in January to establish two new outposts at Urondogani (Murchison) Falls at Lake Albert and at Cositza (Ripon Falls) at Lake Victoria at the edge of Mutesa’s domain. Mutesa forced him to build his fort at his capital at Rubega instead and 160 of his men were kept virtual captives there.
Nuehr got word back and himself reported to Gordon in mid-August. A German-Jewish doctor, Edouard Karl Oskar Theodor Schnitzer, who had entered Turkish service and converted (at least outwardly) to Islam, adopting the name Emin Pasha, had been invited by Gordon (in desperate need of a medical officer) to join him, despite his dislike of both Jews and apostates. Emin had arrived in May, and Gordon now sent him with Nuehr and ninety additional soldiers to Rubega to meet with the now thoroughly confused Mutesa, who had also received a British Christian mission sent by Stanley. Emin turned out to be a skilful negotiator, his mission ended successfully and they returned with the garrison stranded there earlier, but without a formal treaty. When, in 1878, Gordon concluded that the lakes region would never pay the costs of Egyptian control, he appointed Emin governor of Equatoria.
Gordon went home in October 1876, leaving an American, Colonel Prout, in charge. In Cairo Gordon claimed he had accomplished his mission to the extent possible and tendered his resignation to the Khedive. The Khedive offered him the Governorship of the Sudan and Gordon promised to think it over while in England. As Governor of Equatoria for three years, Gordon had not eradicated the slave trade, though he had limited, albeit less so than he thought, the slavers’ access to riverine transport routes, and made the purchase of slaves less secure as an investment. The price of slaves declined in Khartoum during Gordon’s tenure, because the purchaser could not be sure that he could keep his investment in captivity. Nor had he secured Egyptian control over the Lakes or over the Buganda or Bunyoro peoples of that region, or imposed administrative or legal control over any of the territory he charted. But he had extended southward Egyptian control of the Nile from Sobat to within 60 miles of Lake Victoria, increased the ivory trade to make his administration more economically self-sustaining and, in immediately imperceptible ways, roused both the expectations and fears of the peoples he encountered about the impacts that the northern conquerors might bring with them. While there, bouts of melancholia afflicted him periodically, his relations with his own small cadre of officers remained for the most part formal and distant – that with his men mostly indifferent and condescending – and his willingness to learn about or establish direct relations with the native peoples virtually non-existent, although he admitted that ‘I cannot govern without knowing the language … I am quite like a blind man, I grope my way by instinct.’ All agreed that as a leader he was ‘incorruptible, conscientious, and even-handed’.16 Given the meagre resources at his disposal, and the climatic and ecological obstacles he faced, and the complex politics of the region, these were considerable accomplishments. Financially, he was still not rich, but his Equatoria service did enable him to endow the annuity paid to his brother’s widow and to buy his sister Victoria a small house.
Gordon arrived back in England in December 1876 as the Turks suppressed a rebellion in Bulgaria. As the Tsar threatened to come to their aid, there was some talk of the British government looking for a way to thwart Russian Balkan ambitions by recommending Gordon, already technically in Turkish service, as temporary Governor of Bulgaria. He discussed the possibility with the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Derby, but nothing came of it. Instead Disraeli, along with members of the royal family, supported the Khedive’s plea for Gordon to return.
Gordon accepted his commission and sailed from England on 31 January. In Cairo, the Khedive informed him that he was now a Field Marshal of the Egyptian army, that Egypt was about to conclude an anti-slavery treaty with Britain and that he hoped that Gordon would assist in carrying out its terms. But the Khedive had a more urgent matter for Gordon. In 1874 the Swiss governor of Massawa, on the Red Sea across from Aden and technically part of the territory that Gordon was to administer, took advantage of a succession crisis in Abyssinia to seize one of its northern provinces, Bogos, and convinced the Khedive to seize the neighbouring Hamaçem province. The new Abyssinian Negus (King), Johannes, who also laid claim to Massawa, defeated the invading Egyptian force and sent an envoy to Cairo to negotiate the restoration of the antebellum boundary. The Egyptians imprisoned him until the British Consul secured his release, further angering Johannes. At the same time, a nominally Egyptian chieftain, Walid al-Michael, who controlled territory on both sides of the border, launched raids into Abyssinia, killing a district governor. Johannes demanded that the Egyptians turn him over for punishment. The Khedive made extricating Egypt from this quagmire Gordon’s first assignment. Gordon thus travelled to meet with Walid, offering him, on Egypt’s behalf, either an Abyssinian or an Egyptian governorship in return for his good behaviour. With nothing resolved, but with Johannes’s attention turning to internal problems – chiefly an ongoing campaign against the Shoa – and Walid promising to stand down, Gordon left for Khartoum.
On 5 May 1877 Gordon was formally installed as Governor General. He initiated a series of proposals and reforms, promising, after he surveyed the deplorable state of the city’s sewers, that pumps would be installed to bring river water into the city, abolishing flogging (though he retained the right to punish miscreants according to Islamic law), restoring privileges to the ulema, and making himself accessible to the public by placing a locked complaint box outside his office where anyone could anonymously make a complaint or report official misconduct. Despite these reforms, and much to Gordon’s chagrin, administrative corruption continued, even within his own palace.
Gordon also wrote to Johannes offering to confirm the border and promising Egyptian neutrality in his war against the Shoa, but Johannes angrily rejected the offer, though the next year he accepted the terms. Gordon was immediately confronted with several pressing issues. There were 6,000 Bashi-Bazouk mercenary frontier guards who were out of control; and there was a threat of an uprising against them. Egyptian authority in general in Darfur and Bahr al-Ghazil, where Haroun al Rashid, the nephew of the slain Sultan of Darfur, was leading a Baggara rebellion in northern Darfur, was under pressure. In the south, Suleiman bin Zubeir, 22-year-old son of Zubeir Pasha, was threatening to join the rebellion with a bazinger slave army – they were also slave hunters – he had raised at his slaving capital of Shaka.
Faced with this rebellion and a complete lack of response by the Egyptian garrisons there, Gordon, his staff and his 300-man camel corps set out for Darfur. Arriving at the Egyptian border fort of Foggia, several hours in advance of his support force, on 7 June, he impressed its governor and garrison with his bearing, splendid uniform, and medals, and browbeat them into compliance. Gordon next led 150 men to relieve the siege at El Fasher. Learning of his advance, Haroun withdrew to Jebel Mara. Gordon had no wish to confront the rebel horsemen even with the whole of his ‘rag-bag and bob-tail’ force of 2,700 second-rate Egyptian soldiers, Bashi-Bazouks, and ‘loyal’ Sudanese tribesmen. With the siege lifted, Gordon moved to secure the road between Foggia and El Fasher and, between June and early October, secured most of the oases that slave caravans might frequent.
Desperate to find an effective administrator for Darfur, Gordon wrote to the explorer Richard Burton in June 1877. Burton, who was working in a British consular office in Trieste, refused, saying ‘you and I are too much alike. I could not work under you, nor you under me’.17 In September Gordon returned to Dara to confront Suleiman, who had pillaged his way there with his army. Again resplendent in his Egyptian uniform, Gordon used broken Arabic, body language and hand gestures to berate the chieftains. When they submitted to his authority, convinced that attacking an Englishman would unleash perpetual vengeance against them by the British, Suleiman had no choice but to do the same. Despite Suleiman’s pleas for the position, Gordon made one of Zubeir’s now ‘reformed’ officers, Idris Abtar, governor of Bahr al-Ghazil, with the disgraced and disgruntled Suleiman his second in command.