survived shipwreck by swimming ashore at Benghazi, explored Abyssinia and reached the source of the Blue Nile, won the confidence of the royal family (and the admiration of a beautiful princess) by using his amateur medical skill to treat smallpox and the plague, and astonished the warriors by showing them how to break wild horses and by his marksmanship. “His intrepid bearing and his great physical strength and agility fitted him,” says his biographer, “to overawe a barbarous people.”
His own countrymen were less easily impressed, and his account of his adventures was disbelieved by the educated (and caused some scandal) although it sold well in book form. Brace’s overbearing style and touchiness were no help, and Fanny Burney noted that “his grand air, gigantic height, and forbidding brow awed everybody into silence.” He retired to Scotland in dudgeon, and died when, hurrying to show a lady to her carriage, he tripped and fell downstairs, landing head first, and never regained consciousness. Since his death virtually everything that he related about Abyssinia has been proved to be true. (James Bruce,
[16] The Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, married Princess Alexandra of Denmark on March 10, 1863. Other matters which may have commanded the Foreign Office’s attention about this time were the Greek Assembly’s election of Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s second son, as King of Greece (an honour which was declined); the division of Poland into provinces by Russia; Maori risings in New Zealand, and the advance of French troops on Mexico City which led to the installation of Maximilian as emperor. [p. 25]
[17] Public pessimism was such that Holland and Hozier devoted space to it in their official report. Letters to editors “drew ghastly pictures of the malaria of the coast and the insalubrity of the country. At one time the expedition was to die of thirst, at one time to be destroyed by hippopotami. Every beast antagonistic to the life of man was… to be found in the jungles or the swamps. Animals were to perish by flies, men by worms. The return of the expe dition was regarded as chimerical, the massacre of the prisoners as certain.” The report also noted the “merciless” rise in insurance companies’ rates for officers volunteering, “who were regarded as rushing blindfold into suicide.” But competition for places was fierce, and newspapers were besieged by would- be special correspondents, [p. 27]
[18] The 33rd Foot were the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, also known as the West Yorkshires, but consisting largely of Irishmen, and notoriously ill-disciplined. But they were to be, with the 4th Foot (King’s Own), and the 45th (Sherwood Foresters), the van guard of Napier’s force, [p. 30]
[19] George Alfred ('G.A.') Henty (1832-1902) shares with R. M. Ballantyne the leading place among writers for boys. He was born in Trumpington, educated at Westminster and Cambridge, and volunteered for hospital service in the Crimean War. This led to his appointment as organiser of the Italian hospitals in the 1859 war with Austria, but after a brief interval in which he worked as a mine manager in Wales and Sardinia, he returned to his first love, military journalism, and for ten years followed the drum with Garibaldi in the Tyrol, Napier in Abyssinia, Wolseley in Ashanti, the Russians at Khiva, and the Turks in the Serbian war of 1876. He covered the winter campaign in the Franco-Prussian war, was in Paris during the Commune, and in Spain with the guerrillas in the Carlist rebellion. Most of his work was for the
Henty’s boys’ stories were hugely popular, and in them he covered a vast range, mostly of military and naval campaigns, skilfully blending juvenile derring-do with well-researched back ground. As a typical Victorian, imbued with patriotic pride and holding by straight and sturdy old-fashioned values, he is well out of step with modern fashionable thought, but even today his books, antique in style and outlook though they are, can be of great value to the student of history. He was a good writer with a fine descriptive gift, and can give a more vivid and convincing picture of a period and its people than most academic historians; as an example I would cite his
Henty’s memoir of the Abyssinian War,
[20] This implied criticism does less than justice to Brigadier-General (later Sir) William Merewether, who was one of the stars of the expedition. An experienced frontier fighter in India, where he served in the Scinde Horse (Flashman’s “Scindees') he was also a shrewd and decisive political officer, and was agent at Aden when the Abyssinian crisis arose. It was as a result of his urgings that a reply to Theodore’s letter was eventually sent, and he kept in constant touch with the prisoners. He carried out the first recon naissance and chose Zoola as the beachhead, and as political officer was in charge of intelligence for the expedition, [p. 34]
[21] There is little to add to Flashman’s description and assessment of Captain Charles Speedy except to note that he was in fact six feet six inches in height and broad in proportion. A splendid picture of him in full Abyssinian costume is held by the Army Museums Ogilby Trust; he is indeed an overpowering sight, [p. 35]
[22] This suggests that a much greater quantity of silver was carried up to Napier with Flashman’s party than the contents of a single strong-box. Half a dozen riders would hardly be needed to carry 2000 dollars, large coins though they were. [p. 36]
[23] The flogging of the driver caused understandable indignation, but whether the Rev. Johann Krapf was responsible is unclear. He was an old Abyssinian “hand” with a great affection for the country, and it was for his long experience of Africa that he was enrolled in the expedition. He was apparently the first explorer to report snow in Africa, on Mount Kilimanjaro, [p. 43]
[24] The popular fame of Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904) rests on his memorable greeting to Dr Livingstone, and to a lesser extent on his African exploration, but he was also a first-class reporter, and his despatches from the campaigns which he covered for the
Captain Speedy’s anxiety is a tribute to Stanley’s reporting skill, but it is not clear why he refers to him as “the Chicago wallah” when Stanley was working for a New York paper, [p. 47]
[25] George Broadfoot and Lord Elgin, Flashman’s political chiefs in the Punjab and China respectively, [p. 58]
[26] Napier was married twice. His first wife, by whom he had three sons and three daughters, died in 1849, and he married his second wife, Mary Cecilia Scott, in 1861, when he was 50 and she was 18. According to Alan Moorehead, “She appears to have run his household in Bombay—and it was an entertaining household where good dinners were served and French was spoken—with something of her husband’s air of quiet authority.” They had six sons and three daughters. (Moorehead,
[27] Speedy here is referring to the Blue Nile, which flows from Lake Tana south- eastwards before looping west and north-west to join the White Nile at Khartoum in the Sudan. James Bruce reached the source of the Blue Nile in 1770 and supposed he had reached the source of the main Nile river, but this (the White Nile) was not conclusively identified until 1860-2 when John Hanning Speke and James Grant traced its course from Lake Victoria, which Speke had discovered some years before. Grant served as a polit ical officer on Napier’s Abyssinian expedition. (See also Note to p. 131.) [p. 61]
[28] Several members of the expedition mention the lady in the tower as a mysterious figure, but there is much disagreement about her and the whereabouts of her captive husband. To one writer she is a “princess” whose husband is held by Kussai of Tigre; Stanley and another name the captor as King Theodore himself; Holland and Hozier’s official account agrees with Flashman that the per secutor is Gobayzy of Lasta. She is also variously described as 'high-born and disconsolate', “inconsolable', and pining away her life “in incessant grief
