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Chapter 2 The Voyage to Veracruz 1. Embarkation at Alexandria The French provided one of their smaller troopships, the frigate La Seine (plate 2) commanded by Frigate Captain Jaures.1 The Sudanese force, detached from the 19th Regiment of the Line, were embarked on the night of 7-8 January 1863 at Dar al-Maks, the old customs house, in a secluded spot just outside the Alexandria harbor entrance. They had come by the new railway from Sa'id Pasha's Barrage fortress, the Qal'a al-Sa'Idiyya, on the Nile 24 kilometers downstream of Cairo. Private'Ali Jifun, the Sudanese chronicler , was serving there with a mountain gun (howitzer) battery when, "one day, an order arrived for all Sudanese to hand over the guns and proceed to the port." The total strength embarked was 447 men. There were three officers, Major Jabaratallah Muhammad, the battalion commander, a white, possibly Syrian, veteran of Ibrahim Pasha's campaigns against the Ottoman Sultan, and two blacks, Captain Muhammad Almas and 1st lieutenant Husayn Ahmad. A civilian translator-interpreter, an Egyptian named Ahmad Efendi 'Ibayd, accompanied them. Among the other ranks were at least two men regarded as Lower Egyptians by domicile; three or four possibly came from outside the Egyptian Sudan, including one Somali from the Horn of Africa and one Burnawi from the Chad Basin. The rest, the great majority, were exslave conscripts from the black peoples of Southern Dar Fur, the Nuba Mountains, the Ethiopian borderlands, and White Nile Basin: Shilluk, Dinka, Nuer, Jur, and Bari, the whole ethnic mixture typical of the Nizam infantry. The Sudanese troops went aboard wearing their Egyptian uniforms with equipment pretty well complete in all items. They carried their firearms; their 21 22 Black Corps d'Elite ammunition was stored in cases in the hold. We have no description of these muzzle-loading weapons; the troops called them shishkhana,2 an indication that their barrels were rifled, but they were not of the same calibre as the French. It would have been over-complicated and uneconomical for the French ordnance to have procured nonstandard ammunition for a single battalion , so, on their arrival at Veracruz, their Egyptian rifles, and presumably, bayonets, were put into store and returned to the battalion at the end of the campaign. In their place the standard, muzzle-landing, French rifle was issued to them.3 Commandant Jaures's favorable report on the state of the regular troops contrasts with his brief comment on the squalor of the "recruits" conscripted ad hoc off the streets of Alexandria by the police just before sailing: "nearly all of whom had no other clothes but pieces of blue cotton material or some other torn covering."4 In Egypt secrecy is always relative. For the first four days after the battalion sailed nobody beyond the dockside and the city markets was aware that anything rumor-worthy had occurred. Five days after La Seine had left, the Alexandria correspondent of The Times cabled his editor a misleading report: "The Viceroy has placed at the disposal of France 800 negro slaves. They are to be embarked in a French war steamer and dispatched to Mexico."s The consul-general of the United States waxed indignant over servants' rumors. He told his secretary of state that no black doorkeeper in Alexandria would open a door during the embarkation for fear of being crimped by the press gangs, and that many black servants had run away to spend a week in the desert for fear of impressment.6 2. The Transport La Seine T a Seine steamed out of Alexandria harbor early on 8 January 1863. Such 1...Jwas the official secrecy of their departure that the Egyptian War Office did not tell the men where they were going, and they suspected the worst. 'Ali Jifun admitted that he shared the perplexity on board but was not unduly alarmed. "Although I had by this time been accustomed to variety of every kind, still, this French troopship, crowded with almost 500 Sudanese, many of whom had never seen the sea before, afforded quite a new experience, and the first few days we suffered very much."7 Officially the ship had accommodation for 15 officers and 350 other ranks. On this voyage therefore, she was overcrowded. La Seine was launched in 1856 and scrapped in 1884. Her displacement was 2,153 tonnes, her length at waterline 72.70 meters, beam 11.60 meters, [18.223.196.211] Project MUSE...

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