About the Book
In the winter of 1849, Florence Nightingale was an unknown 29-year-old - beautiful, well-born and deeply unhappy. After clashing with her parents over her refusal to marry, she had been offered a lifeline by family friends who suggested a trip to Egypt, a country which she had always longed to visit.
By an extraordinary coincidence, taking the same boat from Alexandria was an unpublished French writer, Gustave Flaubert. Like Nightingale, he was at the crossroads in his life that was to lead to future acclaim and literary triumph. Egypt for him represented escape and freedom as well as inspiration.
But as a wealthy young man travelling with male friends, he had access to an altogether different Egpyt: where Nightingale sought out temples and dispensaries, Flaubert visited brothels and harems.
In this beguiling book, Anthony Sattin takes a key moment in the lives of two extraordinary figures on the brink of international fame, and provides a fascinating insight into the early days of travel to one of the greatest tourist destinations on the planet.
About the Author
Anthony Sattin is a specialist in the Middle East and the author of several highly acclaimed books, including Lifting the Veil, The Pharaoh’s Shadow and The Gates of Africa. He discovered and edited Florence Nightingale’s letters from her journey of self-discovery up the Nile in 1849-50. He has been a regular contributor to the Sunday Times and Conde Nast Traveller for many years and his work has appeared in a range of publications in the UK and abroad. He is a broadcaster on both radio and television.
For more information visit his website: www.anthonysattin.com
A WINTER ON THE NILE
Florence Nightingale, Gustave Flaubert and the Temptations of Egypt
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Copyright © Anthony Sattin 2010
Anthony Sattin has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
The author would like to thank the following for permission to quote from their works:
Professor Lynn McDonald, Professor Gérard Vallée and Wilfrid Laurier University Press for permission to quote from The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale.
Éditions Gallimard for the right to quote from Jean Bruneau’s edition of Gustave Flaubert: Correspondance.
Grasset publishers and M. Pierre-Marc de Biasi for permission to quote from Voyage en Egypte.
The American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, for permission to quote from Florence Nightingale in Rome, edited by Mary Keele.
Yvonne Neville-Rolfe for permission to quote from the unpublished letters of Edward Stanley Poole.
Mark Bostridge and Viking Publishers for permission to quote from Florence Nightingale, The Woman and Her Legend.
Michael D. Calabria and the State University of New York Press for permission to quote from Florence Nightingale in Egypt and Greece: Her Diary and ‘Visions’.
Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. If notified, the publisher will be pleased to rectify any errors or omissions at the earliest opportunity.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
Hutchinson
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780091926069 (Hardback)
Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Anthony Sattin
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Map
Introduction
1. Footfall
2. The Cairo Ferry
3. Words of God
4. Coming Out
5. Rabbit Stew
6. The Rose of Cities
7. The Stream of Time
8. Hunting the Bee
9. Grace and Truth
10. To the Holy Isle
11. Daydreams and Old Dust
12. Settling the Question
13. Cairo and Alexandria
14. Destiny
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Picture Section
Copyright
For my mother Mona and in memory of my father Gerald Sattin
Also by Anthony Sattin
An Englishman in India (Editor)
Florence Nightingale’s Letters from Egypt (Editor)
Lifting the Veil
Shooting the Breeze
The Pharaoh’s Shadow
A House Somewhere (Editor)
The Gates of Africa
‘One wonders that people come back from Egypt and live lives as they did before’–
Florence Nightingale, Luxor, New Year’s Eve, 1849
‘The Orient, Egypt especially, smoothes away all the little worldly vanities. After visiting so many ruins, one doesn’t think of building shacks’ –
Gustave Flaubert, Cairo, February, 1850
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Discovery
I first came across this story in the British Library’s old Reading Room. The catalogues there were large, heavy, leather-bound albums, their thick pages covered with hand-pasted strips. These strips were clues to the whereabouts of millions of books, pamphlets and documents – an irresistible invitation to roam around the written world. In the late-1980s, I spent months under the library’s soaring nineteenth-century dome researching material for a book I was writing about travellers in Egypt. One morning, flicking through the catalogues, I came across an entry that simply read, ‘Nightingale, F., letters from Egypt’.
It is not always easy to recognise eureka moments, but I knew instantly that this was one. I knew that Florence Nightingale had risen to fame during the Crimean War and then fought a lifelong battle to improve health care in Britain, but I had no idea that she ever went to Egypt or that she wrote about it. Yet it never once occurred to me that the Nightingale F. of the catalogue could be anyone other than Florence. I filled in the request slip, returned to my desk and waited.
Time can be infuriatingly inconsistent. The moments we want to treasure can often pass impossibly quickly. In this case they did not. Service at the old library was a regular, if slow, affair. An hour might have passed, but it seemed like a day. Then one of the silent librarians laid a slender volume on the desk beside my pile of travellers’ tales.
Letters from Egypt arrived as 23 sections of unbound, printed pages and carried the name of no author on either its cloth box or title page. The letters were written during the winter of 1849–50 and had been printed four years later, around the time that Nightingale went to the Crimea, a journey that would bring her enduring fame. The volume was marked For private circulation only. Since then, some long-gone librarian had identified the author as Nightingale, F.
Florence Nightingale believed that destiny plays a large part in deciding what becomes of us. Living in a time of peace and advanced public welfare, a person with similar talents, strength and desires would not necessarily scale the peaks that she did. Had she lived now, she might have worked in health-care management, putting in a lifetime of efficient and anonymous service before collecting a pension on retirement. Maybe she would have married and worried about how to juggle the work/life balance. Perhaps she would have been happy.
At another time, I might have passed by that entry in the catalogue or done no more than mention it in the book that I was writing, as I eventually did. But I knew an editor who was setting up a publishing company and whose list was still open. When I explained what I had found, she was interested. When she saw some of the letters, she was as excited as I was. Whatever we had read or been told about Florence Nightingale, no one had ever suggested that she could write so well, or be so lively, entertaining and passionate, or that the journey to Egypt was so full of temptations, so rich in possibilities, so significant in her struggle to fulfil herself.
Cecil Woodham-Smith’s 1950 biography devotes less than three pages to the Egyptian journey and makes no mention of the letters. Recent biographers have acknowledged the letters, but few have recognised the significance of the journey itself to her, the exception being Professor Gérard Vallée, editor of the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, Volume 4, who wrote of her achieving clarity in the direction her life should take and intensity in her dialogue with God during that interlude. The transformative nature of the journey was immediately obvious to Nightingale herself; at the beginning of her five months in Egypt, she wrote that she wondered how ‘people come back from Egypt and live lives as they did before’.1
I had no great interest in either the angelic Lady of the Lamp or the grumpy reformer who, for much of the last 50 years of her long life, agitated for better health care, much of that time from within the confines of her bedroom. But I found and continue to find this young Florence fascinating. She is serious and spiritual, but also full of life and wit. She is a young woman getting over a disappointment in love and searching for her own path in life, battling her family and prepared to give up an existence of great comfort and privilege to do something she thinks is worthwhile. Determined and independent, she is a Florence for our time.
Florence Nightingale’s Letters from Egypt was published in London and New York in 1987 and was well received in the press. The New York Times was most enthusiastic and described it as ‘a major publishing coup, and, simultaneously, in its own way, a major Egyptian discovery’. The reviewer also thought that it was ‘perhaps the best personal travel account of Egypt ever written’. Sales boomed.
That might have been the end of the story, the royalty payments dwindling over the years, the memory a happy one. But destiny, fate, luck, had not finished with the story.
I returned to the book I was originally writing and to other accounts of travelling in Egypt. Among them was that of the great nineteenth-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert. A selection of his writings from Egypt was available in English, chosen and translated by the American author Francis Steegmuller. The New York Times had called Nightingale’s account ‘more satisfying even than Flaubert’s roistering letters and journals. Well, actually, Flaubert is better on the brothels, Nightingale on the temples, and her writing is no less accomplished.’ The critic Edward Said attacked Flaubert for being imperialist and for not taking Egyptians on their own terms. (Said does not mention Nightingale, perhaps because he did not know that she travelled in Egypt.) But even he acknowledged that the Frenchman was scrupulous in the way that he reported events, people and settings. Said also noted that Flaubert delighted in bizarreries.2
I knew that Flaubert went to Egypt in the 1840s, around the same time as Nightingale. But it wasn’t until I came to write about them, under the British Library dome in 1987, that I realised Flaubert had arrived in Alexandria just a few days before Nightingale, in November 1849. When I compared their descriptions of leaving Alexandria, I discovered that they boarded the same boat to Cairo on the same day.
I wrote about this at the time and some perceptive reviewers picked up on it. One pointed out that I had managed to get them on to the boat but could take them no further. That challenge has nagged at me ever since. This book is my attempt to answer it.
Consequences
Florence Nightingale feared fame. Wary of its consequences, of the guilt and impositions that would inevitably follow, she wanted to work without recognition. She would do things for the joy of them, for the satisfaction of doing them well, of fulfilling her calling. But reputation came all the same and within five years of her return from Egypt, and one year of her arrival in the barracks hospital at Scutari, across the Bosphorus from the Topkapi Palace, she had become one of the most famous women in the world.
Her mythical status was first embroidered in newspaper articles and then summed up by the American poet Longfellow:
A Lady with a Lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land,
A noble type of good,
Heroic womanhood.
While her name inspired people, her presence often terrified them, as Lady Emilia Hornby discovered during the Christmas of 1855. At a reception held by the British Ambassador in Constantinople, her ladyship watched in awe as Lady Stratford, the ambassador’s wife, led in the angelic young woman. ‘Yes,’ she wrote in a letter home, ‘it was Florence Nightingale, greatest of all now in name and honour among women. I assure you that I was glad not to be obliged to speak just then, for I felt quite dumb as I looked at her wasted figure’.3
Months later, in the summer of 1856, peace returned to the Crimea. After the nurses she had brought with her had been sent home and the last of the official papers filed, the ‘wasted’ Florence Nightingale and her aunt Mai, who had been looking after her while she was looking after so many others, made plans to return to England. Nightingale declined the British government’s offer of a warship to bring her home. Instead, she and Aunt Mai booked passage anonymously on a ship called the Danube, stopping at Athens and Messina on the way to Marseille. The only clue to Nightingale’s special status was the presence of a messenger sent by Queen Victoria to ease her passage across borders.
On 5 August 1856, while the government and army still hoped to bring her home in triumph and the press devoted itself to speculating as to her whereabouts, ‘Mrs and Miss Smith’ left Paris and reached London unnoticed. Nightingale spent that night in the south of the city, keeping a promise she had made to visit the Bermondsey Convent, five of whose nuns had worked with her in Turkey. The following afternoon she took a train to the family house, Lea Hurst, in Derbyshire. She made it as far as the local station before she was recognised by a family acquaintance, Lady Auckland.
The Nightingales had known their younger daughter was on her way, for they had already received what her mother called Florence’s ‘spoils of war’. First there was a one-legged orphan sailor boy, who had spent ten months in Nightingale’s Scutari hospital. He was followed by a Russian orphan named Peter and a Crimean puppy, a gift from some soldiers. And then came Florence herself. Aunt Mai had written to warn of the dread her niece had of the proposed heroine’s welcome, so her return was a quiet one. ‘A little tinkle of the small church bell on the hills,’ her sister Parthenope wrote, ‘and a thanksgiving prayer at the little chapel next day, were all the innocent greeting.’4
But Queen Victoria had not forgotten her. A little over two weeks after Nightingale’s return, Sir James Clark, the royal physician, wrote inviting her to stay at his house in Scotland. The air would be good for her, he suggested, and, in case she was missing the point, added that his house was very close to the royal estate at Balmoral, where the Queen would shortly be in residence: Her Majesty knew of Sir James’s invitation.
Queen Victoria wished to hear Nightingale’s story first-hand and without any generals or ministers present. The two women met at Balmoral on 21 September and the Queen was later quoted as saying that: ‘I wish we had her at the War Office.’ Prince Albert recorded in his diary that ‘she put before us all the defects of our present military hospital system, and the reforms that are needed. We are much pleased with her.’5
Nightingale was commanded to remain in Scotland. Over the following days she attended a church service with the Queen, a ball at which she was seated with the royal family, and a meeting with Lord Panmure, Secretary of State for War. When she returned south with a promise that a Royal Commission would look into the health requirements of the army, Nightingale knew something she did not know in Egypt: that all the struggle and tribulation she had suffered over the past few years had not defeated her. She had triumphed.
Two years after meeting the royal family, Nightingale published one of her key works, Notes on Matters Affecting the Health of the British Army, in which she laid out her thoughts and observations on the spread of infection in army hospitals. She followed this in 1860 with her most famous work, Notes on Nursing, which established the role and responsibilities of nurses in a way that remains relevant today. That same year she also opened the Nightingale School of Nursing at London’s St Thomas’ Hospital, paid for by a public subscription that had raised over £50,000 (more than £2.5 million today) in her name while she was in the Crimea. The school and the publications were the foundations on which the modern nursing profession was built.
While Florence Nightingale was in Scotland attending Queen Victoria, Gustave Flaubert was in Paris, as he described it, losing his virginity as a writer.
For as long as he could remember, and he was now thirty-four years old, he had wanted to write. More than that, he wanted to be a great writer. The son of an eminent surgeon, Flaubert, a failed law student, an epileptic, a loner, had devoted himself to the pursuit of literary perfection. For the five years since his return to France from Egypt, he had been at work on a novel which related the tragic tale of a doctor’s adulterous wife in Normandy. For years he had retreated to his family home beside the Seine outside Rouen. When he was not at work on this story, he was writing long letters to friends, telling them about the difficulties he was having. He suffered in his relative isolation, sharing a house with only his mother and his young niece whose upbringing he supervised. Writing from lunchtime to late at night, he was so deeply immersed in his work that it was difficult for him to do anything else. Then, on 1 October 1856, while Florence Nightingale was still in Scotland, Flaubert went into print.
His novel was published in instalments in a literary magazine called La Revue de Paris, part-owned by Maxime Du Camp, the writer with whom Flaubert had travelled to Egypt. Their friendship had cooled since their return to France, in part because Flaubert had dragged his feet over getting into print: Du Camp was more the ‘publish and be damned’ sort of writer. In the event, Flaubert was the cause of their both being damned. When his novel appeared, the State Prosecutor accused him and his publishers of immorality. Public attention intensified after a French court threw out the case. When critics looked at the work, they recognised Madame Bovary as being one of the finest of all novels. Its author was set on the course he had always wished for himself. He could not have imagined a better storyline.
Nor could he have imagined that more than a century after his death, he would still be regarded as one of the great writers of his age. In 1853, while at work on Madame Bovary, Flaubert identified that the greatness of fiction lay not in its ability to amuse or arouse us, but in the way that it could make us dream. His achievement, in Madame Bovary and in parts of his later works Salambo and Sentimental Education, was that he succeeded in doing all three. In the process, he transformed the novel.
So here were two of the most celebrated people of the nineteenth century making parallel journeys. There were obvious differences: she was more sophisticated, more experienced, better connected and came from a wealthier family. As a man, he enjoyed the sort of freedom she longed for. Her instincts led her towards the dead world of tomb and temple, his towards the living in cafes and brothels. But the similarities are more striking, for they were at the same stage in their lives, both in their late twenties, both in despair of ever fulfilling their dreams, but on the cusp of achieving more than even they had dared hope. Of course neither knew what fate had in store for them. But we know that Florence Nightingale goes to the Crimea and returns a heroine. We know that Gustave Flaubert goes home and begins to write Madame Bovary, and that the scandal and the brilliance of the book make him one of the best-known novelists of any age.
Part of the fascination of writing this story has been in thinking about all the ‘what ifs?’ Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert make a deliciously unlikely couple, but they only ever lie together between the sheets of this book. At times I imagine them roaming up the Nile together, concocting scenes of seduction and outrage, of love in Luxor and unbelievable nights behind pyramids, watching them jointly face the temptations of Egypt, revelling in their common fascination with the past and the lessons it has to teach us. But just as I once turned down a serious offer from a serious publisher to write a biography confirming that Nightingale was gay (she was not), so I could not bring myself to take them further than they chose to go. Florence Nightingale never spoke to Gustave Flaubert and, as far as I know, was never even aware of his presence. He seems to have observed but not approached her. Why would it have been otherwise? At this point, they were mere faces in a crowd. Had they made the journey six or ten years later, things might have been different. But there is no need to change the historical record, especially when I have such eloquent witnesses.
Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert both wrote lengthy and frequent letters home to their families and friends, and kept diaries or journals. Much of the Nightingale material has long been available, though not as accessible as it is now. Twenty years ago, there was no other available version of her Egypt letters than the one I found in the British Library and later put into print. These letters were the story that she wished to tell her family. A small blue pocket diary, also held in the British Library but obviously intended for her eyes only, gives an insight into her most private thoughts and frequently tells a different story: one of personal anguish. Curiously, there is also a second pocket diary, a red one, begun on 1 November 1849, the day she took the train from London to Folkestone, and ended on 15 July 1850, when she was on her way home to England. As a result of a radio programme I made in 2000 about Nightingale in Egypt, it was sent anonymously to Claydon House, the home of Nightingale’s sister. This second diary gives details of Nightingale’s movements and has many notes that she later worked up into long letters home. All this material has now been gathered into one of the many volumes of the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, overseen by the dedicated Professor Lynn McDonald, with the Egypt volume expertly edited by Professor Gérard Vallée.
Gustave Flaubert never intended to publish his travel journal and was even more against the idea after 1851 when Du Camp, his travelling companion, published an account of their Egyptian journey while omitting any mention of Flaubert’s presence on it. When Du Camp suggested that Flaubert might also write up a portion of their journey, he replied that travel writing was a low form of literature. ‘Incidents gleaned abroad,’ he insisted, ‘might be used in a novel, but not in a straight account.’6
Flaubert wrote long letters home on a regular basis, even though the opportunities to post them were few and far between. He also kept a journal, part of which he worked into a narrative, Le Cange, after his return. Francis Steegmuller published a selection from Flaubert’s letters, journal and Le Cange in 1972, but the full version of the original 240-page autograph manuscript of Flaubert’s travel journal was not available to him, only emerging after a sale in Paris in April 1989. Neither the full journal nor the complete letters have been translated into English, so for most quotations in this book I have returned to the original French and made my own translations.
I have also made my own judgments on spelling. There is no universally agreed convention on the transliteration of Arabic, but I have attempted to be consistent in my spelling of Arabic and Turkish words, using -a not -eh (so dahabiya not dahabeeyeh), -sh not -ch (so pasha not pacha).
With a book this long in gestation, it is impossible to thank all the people who have helped or inspired me, but I must start at the beginning with Anne Furniss, who commissioned the original volume of Florence Nightingale’s Letters from Egypt, and David Fordham, who designed it. I have had generous advice, guidance and encouragement from Sue Baxter and the staff at the National Trust’s Claydon House, and from Deborah Manley, Dr Robert Morkot and the many enthusiastic members of the Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East (ASTENE), who travelled with me on the Nile and answered my queries online. Professor Lynn McDonald approached me many years ago, at the beginning of her vast, ongoing publishing project, and has been supportive ever since. Thanks also to Dr Jason Thompson who has provided information over the years, to Emily Weeks, who was generous in sharing information on J. F. Lewis, and to her father, Professor Kent Weeks, ever an inspiration.
I owe thanks to the librarian and staff at the British Library, who first brought me the Nightingale letters and many other books and papers, and to the librarian and staff at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and the Wellcome Institute Library. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Christopher Phipps, former librarian, and staff at the London Library where I have conducted research, read, written and sought refuge all my writing life. Caroline Worthington, director of the excellent Florence Nightingale Museum, and Kirsteen Nixon, her helpful assistant, kindly allowed me to see some of the personal possessions that survived Nightingale’s journey in Egypt. I am also extremely grateful to Christine Walker of the Sunday Times and Sarah Spankie at Condé Nast Traveller, who sent me back to Egypt.
Many friends have helped in many ways and to all of them I am extremely grateful, especially to Brigid Keenan and Alan Waddams, who lent me a house where I wrote a considerable part of this book; to Adrienne Gaha, Tim Maguire and Brooke Fitzsimmons, who provided essential space and understanding in London; and to Mark Skeet and Max Mulhern, who took the manuscript apart at an early stage. My agent Gillon Aitken of Aitken Alexander has provided guidance and sound judgment from the beginning. I owe Caroline Gascoigne endless thanks for commissioning the book for Hutchinson, as well as being so solid in her support and so thorough in her editing. Tess Callaway, my copy editor Lynn Curtis, and the designer Glenn O’Neill have all been enthusiastic and inspired in their suggestions and help, and to them and all at Hutchinson I wish to express my gratitude.
My mother Mona and my late father Gerald Sattin always supported my writing projects and I am forever grateful for their help. But of all the people who have lived with this project, none have lived closer than my two sons, Johnny Paris and Felix, who have been dragged into tombs and temples in Luxor, bookshops in Paris and libraries in London, and my wife Sylvie, who has had to share me with the shades of Flaubert and Nightingale. They have all seen more of my back than my front during the writing of this book. Only they know how much it has meant to me to shake this idea out of my head and give it life on the page.
1
Footfall
‘Flo is in such a state of enchantment, it would do your heart good to see her’ – Selina Bracebridge to Fanny and William Nightingale from Alexandria
Alexandria, 18 November 1849
Charles Bracebridge Esquire believed that men were best at making decisions on these matters. Although it was only nine o’clock in the morning, he had decided it was too far and already too hot to have the three women walk to their hotel. Instead he ushered them into a horse-drawn carriage. Their luggage would be sent after them.
The omnibus drove out of the port gates, the travellers inside it relieved to be on dry land again. They rattled along narrow dirt streets, through the crowded huddle of shops and houses in the Turkish town, and emerged on to a road that traced the great arc of the harbour. They turned east. Behind them now were the cream, crenellated towers of a fifteenth-century fort and the remains of the ancient lighthouse. Ahead, halfway around the bay and at the edge of the city, lay their destination.
Frank Square, the heart of Alexandria’s European quarter, was larger than anything they knew of in England. Its centre was a straggling open space, which, when not filled with camels or donkeys carrying bales of cotton or bundles of goods off the boats, was used as a parade ground for the pasha’s troops. Perhaps out of respect for the Christians who lived or worked around the square, the parade was never held on a Sunday, so today it was quiet and empty.
The square stood open on one side to the harbour and the Mediterranean beyond; the little English party had seen enough of that for now. On the other sides it was enclosed by tall, palatial buildings. Some were occupied by foreign consulates, several housed the offices of international trading companies and two served as hotels. One of these carried the sign of the Hotel d’Europe. In spite of the Francophile name, it had been opened a few years earlier by Mr Hill, an Englishman, and was the hotel of choice for the British traveller. The French generally stayed across the square at Monsieur Coulomb’s Hotel d’Orient. The cooking at the Hotel d’Europe was quite good and the proprietor civil, which was about as much as one could expect from a hotel in such a place at this time. So at half-past nine on the morning of 18 November 1849, this is where Mr Bracebridge led the three women in his care: his wife Selina, a servant by the name of Trautwein, and the Bracebridges’ friend, twenty-nine-year-old Florence Nightingale.
Miss Nightingale stepped into the Hotel d’Europe’s courtyard and stood between the baggage being brought in from the street and the washing hanging in the backyard. She was 5’8”, tall for a woman at that time, and slender. In a photograph taken a few months after her arrival in Alexandria, she is shown with her head down and her eyes lowered towards a book. It is as though she is trying to hide the full force of her character and its increasingly steely determination behind a demure, retiring façade. A hint of a smile on her lips, she looks as enigmatic as a sphinx. She wears her chestnut hair in the fashion of the day, parted in front and pulled into a bun behind. Her neck is bare, her collar open, a string of stone beads hangs over her bosom and a striped silk shawl – perhaps bought in Egypt – is wrapped around her shoulders. She appears thoughtful, powerful and determined.
A little before ten, another Englishman arrived at the Hotel d’Europe. An air of importance hung about this gentleman like the most pungent of perfumes from the souk. Heads turned as he passed. This was Mr Gilbert, Her Britannic Majesty’s representative in the port, and he had come to pay his respects to the new arrivals. This was an uncommon event: the consul did not turn out for just anyone, especially given the number of British travellers arriving in Alexandria these days. The visitors, however, were friends of his sister, Lady d’Oyley, and he had come as a courtesy.
Mr Gilbert met the new arrivals in the courtyard, where they were waiting for some India-bound travellers to leave so that they could move into their rooms. He stayed only as long as form dictated, which was long enough to welcome them, enquire after their journey and offer the protection of one of his Turkish janissaries. This young man was called Ali. Not, the consul assured them, that they needed a guard or had anything to fear. True, there had been some incidents – only a few weeks before the British clergyman in Alexandria, Mr Winden, had had something thrown at him in the street – but Gilbert knew how to deal with that sort of behaviour. He had summoned the headman of the district in which the outrage had been committed and, although he knew the man was innocent, had had him tied up and prepared for a flogging. Then he let him go. Gilbert had made his point and the headman had understood it: when he left, he kissed the consul’s feet and promised that this sort of incident would never happen again. If Ali were not needed to protect the new visitors, however, he would at least be of use in escorting them to the places they wished to see: an elegant protector in long flowing robes, with an embroidered waistcoat and carrying a large stick.
The travellers had spent the best part of a week on the Mediterranean: three days’ sailing from Marseille, a six-hour stopover at Malta – time to do no more than change ships – and then a run of almost four days to Alexandria. The Merlin had been crowded. The men, Mr Bracebridge among them, had spent much of the voyage up in the saloon, talking, smoking and drinking. With that sort of behaviour going on above deck, the women spent more time below than they would have wished. With 17 people occupying bunks in that long, narrow cabin, both privacy and comfort were elusive. Even washing had been difficult. Now that their bags were safely in the hotel, what the women most wanted was a bath. In Alexandria, that meant leaving the hotel.
Soon after Mr Gilbert left for the consulate, a small procession emerged from the d’Europe’s gate with Ali and his stick at its head. Behind him walked the three European women. Selina Bracebridge at forty-nine years old was shorter and stouter than her friend, but not as large nor as stout as Trautwein, Florence’s German maid, known as Trout. The morning was sunny and, although it was the beginning of winter and Egyptians were already wrapped in several layers of clothing, the women felt the heat as they walked away from the sea and the now busy square. At the end of an avenue of palms, bananas and trellised petunias, they came to a quiet garden. In it was a long, low building, the hammam.
There were public baths in Britain, but women of Nightingale’s class would not have needed to use them. Perhaps Selina Bracebridge had visited a hammam on earlier visits to Beirut or Istanbul, but Nightingale had not. All she could compare it with were the baths she had seen at Pompeii. She was later to describe it as ‘the joy of the East’.1 Now she walked with a light step into the first large, marble-clad chamber and undressed.
Victorian painters made much of this kind of scene, their fantasies allowed full rein by the steam, the party atmosphere, and above all by the imagined ease of a group of naked women. The hammam emerged from their paintings as the antechamber to an Eastern brothel, a visual feast of flowing tresses and generous, pert breasts, a place that reeked of sensuality and that promised sexual licence. The reality, of course, was more than a little different: it was unusual for people to go naked in a hammam and the young Englishwoman would have followed custom and covered herself with a towel.
A marble-tiled passage led to the high-domed, octagonal hot room, where she sat and waited. It being considerably warmer than an English June inside the hammam, she began to perspire. Rivulets of sweat ran down her back. When the attendant was available, she was taken, flushed, into a side-chamber for what she called ‘the process’. Sitting on the marble floor, she was scrubbed with a handful of palm fibres, massaged with oil, and had her limbs manipulated. It is easy to imagine her emerging, slowly and carefully on the wet floor, clean, glowing, relaxed. She must have felt as though she had stepped into a tale from the Arabian Nights.
After the hammam, since it was Sunday and their journey had ended happily, the whole party joined Mr Gilbert for a service at the solemn little English church.
*
The following morning, long before daylight, Florence Nightingale went to the table in her room, lit a candle and began to write a letter home. ‘Yes, my dear people, I have set my first footfall in the East and oh! that I could tell you the new world of old poetry, of Bible images, of light and life and beauty which that word opens.’2
She knew her parents and elder sister Parthenope were longing to hear about the journey and her reaction to it. She also knew that they would carefully weigh her words for their enthusiasm, for the excitement they expressed. The Bracebridges were travelling to Egypt for pleasure and out of curiosity, but Nightingale had been sent abroad for far more complicated reasons. She had been unhappy for years.
This misery had grown out of a clash between her family’s expectations of the life she would lead and her own idea of her destiny. They wanted her to marry while she wanted to do something useful with her life: to work. In particular, she wanted to nurse. But she lived in an age when it was unthinkable for a woman of her position to do so. It had been bad enough when she was still a teenager; it was worse now she was twenty-nine and had long been of marriageable age. But how could she marry when marriage meant agreeing to obey a husband? It was no easier staying single, however. Like other women of her time, she was not free to do as she pleased and her family had steadily refused to allow her to pursue her dreams.
The conflict had come to a head in the months before her departure and she had become ill with grief, tension and worry. She hoped a trip to Egypt would restore her health and spirits; her family hoped it would allow her to reconcile herself to the idea of marriage. There was also undoubtedly the desire just to have her out of the way for a while, to bring an end to the daily confrontations, the shouting and tears. The expectation she felt is apparent in a note she wrote to her mother, at the beginning of November 1849, while waiting at Folkestone for a boat to cross the Channel: ‘I hope I shall come back and be more of a comfort to you than ever I have been.’3
There are two distinct images of Florence Nightingale. There is the popular one constructed by newspaper reporters and embellished by public sentiment, the sugar-sweet heroine of the Crimean War, the Lady of the Lamp who tirelessly walked the wards of wounded soldiers, both literally and figuratively bringing light to their darkness. The other is a cantankerous old woman – old, by her own admission, long before her time – who campaigned on health care and public welfare reform from the privacy of her home, badgering politicians and advising medical professionals. Florence Nightingale lived to be ninety and in some ways, at certain times, both of these images of her were correct. But the bright young woman who stepped on to the Alexandria dock four years before the Crimean War, who was fussed over by her German maid, who undressed to be scrubbed and oiled in the hammam, and was awake before anyone else in the hotel because she was too excited to sleep, this Florence Nightingale is neither of them.
The person who inhabits the pages of this book is young and fun, girlishly slim with striking good looks. She loves opera and likes to dance. She is disarmingly bright and endlessly, sometimes tiresomely, questioning. She is a woman with a quest, fighting to make a place for herself in the world and yet at times desperate enough to want to leave it. She is stubborn and opinionated, but also damaged and now very vulnerable.
We tend to think of travelling on the Nile as a pleasurable experience, and for most modern tourists that is precisely what it is. But the campaigning English writer Harriet Martineau, who was in Egypt just a few years before Nightingale, had found her journey up the Nile ‘as serious a labour as the mind and spirit can be involved in’.4 It was no less strenuous for Florence Nightingale. She described the physical journey to Cairo and up the Nile to Abu Simbel in long, eloquent letters to her family. But there was also a more dramatic, more extraordinary, interior journey, a mental voyage that we can trace in the tortured observations she recorded in notes and a diary that she intended to be for her own eyes only. These private thoughts reveal that while on this journey, more than anywhere else and at any other time, Nightingale came to understand the nature of the service to which she had been called. Her travels in Egypt allowed her to define that calling, to build up the mental reserves she needed to face further conflict with her family and, by the end of it, to take instruction in nursing.
She had wondered for many years why she was not satisfied with the comfort, privilege and love in which she had been nurtured. By the time she left the Nile she understood why this was. Moreover she was reconciled to the fact that she could never be satisfied with that life, no matter how hard she tried. Once the question was settled in her own mind, it was only a matter of time before she changed her circumstances.
But for now, during these first days in Alexandria, she was content to think about nothing more than passing her time here agreeably. They had a week to wait before the next boat left for Cairo – a week in which to do some shopping and see the sights.
Most cities grow from the seeds of smaller settlements, but Alexandria was always destined to be a metropolis. The man who gave it his name wanted it to be the hinge that would hold together two very different worlds: the old one of Ancient Egypt and the brash new world of Hellenistic Greece. To achieve that, Alexandria needed to be ambitious and innovative, and it succeeded. Just a couple of hundred years after its founding, at the time of its most famous ruler, Cleopatra, it was second in size only to Rome. Its glory was eclipsed soon after, but the rot did not set in until the seventh century CE, when the city fell to the Arabs. Its new conquerors wanted as little as possible to do with the place; they preferred to be on the eastern – Arabian – side of the Nile and for that reason they created a new capital, Cairo. They condemned Alexandria to a long, slow slide into decay that was only halted a few years before Nightingale arrived, when Muhammad Ali Pasha, ruler of Egypt since 1805, developed the port to encourage trade with Europe.
Twelve hundred years after the Arab conquest, Florence Nightingale did not exaggerate when she wrote that ‘there is not much to see here, nothing but the perpetual feeling of being in the East, the eastern colouring and eastern atmosphere’.5 In 1849, as now, most of the ancient city was covered by modern buildings or by rubble, and there was nothing left standing above ground that conjured up the magnificence of the past in the way that the Pantheon or Colosseum did in Rome.
The city’s iconic Pharos, the lighthouse that had been one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, had crumbled away over centuries. When it was finally completely levelled by an earthquake at the beginning of the fourteenth century CE, it served as an eloquent symbol of the city’s decline. Nightingale does not even mention the large fort that the Sultan Qait Bey built on its foundations in the 1480s, now one of the modern city’s main attractions. The only remnant of the nearby ancient palace complex with its museion and library was a pair of obelisks. These had originally stood in Heliopolis, near Cairo, but were moved in the first century BCE to the façade of a temple Cleopatra built to honour the memory of Mark Antony. By the 1840s, the temple had disappeared and one of the obelisks had fallen. In 1819, Muhammad Ali Pasha gave it as a present to Britain, although the British government was loath to pay for its removal and it was not until 1878 that it was brought to the Thames where it still stands. So there it lay, alongside its twin, which was later moved to New York’s Central Park. Consul Gilbert escorted them to see ‘Cleopatra’s needle’, as Nightingale called it, the day before they left for Cairo. But she did no more than list the visit in her diary.
Four days after her arrival, she made the 15-mile journey east along the coast to Abukir Bay, but the site of Nelson’s great victory over Napoleon’s fleet also failed to stir her British heart. She made no effort to hide her disappointment, describing ‘a dreary plain of white sand covered with white stones, a scanty fringe of palm trees in the distance, the broken wall of Nicopolis, built by Augustus; in the foreground, a road, many inches deep in sand, through which we waded – it looked like the shroud of an empire’s body’.6 She went for a walk along the beach to see the breakers roll in and watched the sun setting over the distant prospect of Alexandria.
She was not alone in failing to become excited about Abukir. The British historian Sir John Gardner Wilkinson, who had just published the first English-language guidebook to Egypt, his Hand-Book for Travellers, warned that ‘the only distinction now enjoyed by that place is, its being the abode of state prisoners sent by Mohammed Ali [the late pasha], to repent of their misdeeds in this lonely spot’.7 Even Alexandria’s ancient catacombs, which Nightingale saw the following day and which Wilkinson thought were remarkable in size and elegant in design, she found ‘rather a farce’8 after the ones she had seen in Rome. Pompey’s Pillar, the city’s most famous attraction, fared no better, though she was clearly amused by the way she reached it. ‘The donkey is very small and you are very large (the Egyptian is a very tall race), and you sit upon his tail … After mounting – a feat which is effected by curling your right leg round your saddle bow (the saddles are men’s and nothing but the fear of men would have prevented me from riding astride) – you set off full gallop, running over everything in your way, and the merry little thing runs and runs like a velocipede.’9
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