The Golden Boats

The Age of Sail on the Nile

One of the most evocative images of travel in Egypt is that of the dahabiya Nile boat, with its great lateen sail. The name, which can be translated as ‘Golden One’, is usually derived from the Arabic word for gold, and traced back to gilded state barges used by the Medieval rulers of Egypt. While the dahabiyas of modern times may not have been gilded, they still suggest privilege and luxury, travel rather than tourism, and leisurely days spent reclining under an awning or on a sofa in a saloon cabin as the banks of the Nile slipped past. Is this a romantic dream, or was that the reality?

Until the nineteenth century, travel to Egypt was not common, and within it often hazardous. Most journeys along the Nile were from Alexandria, the port of entry to Egypt, to Cairo, and few Europeans ventured further upriver. With no regular demand from foreign travellers, the vessels that would have been used were those passenger craft that normally plied the river. The most common of these were the cangiah, the maa’sh, and the dahabiya.¹ The cangiah was only small, about 9-12 metres long and 2-3 wide, with one or two masts and a two room cabin which occupied the centre of the boat. The maa’sh seems to have been a larger boat used mainly for cargo, but which must sometimes have been adapted with cabins for passengers. It could have up to three masts. The dahabiya was a double masted vessel with a large cabin at the rear, which also carried oars and had a small row boat as a tender.² All these types of boat had triangular lateen sails, well adapted to catching light winds, and were of shallow draft to lessen their chance of grounding on the many and shifting Nile sandbanks. The mainsail of a dahabiya was huge, and the yardarm that carried it could be up to 30 metres long or even longer. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the increasing number of travellers and tourists created a definite, if seasonal, market for dahabiyas. Most people aimed to travel up the Nile as far as the First Cataract at Aswan, some beyond that to the Second Cataract in Nubia, but before the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 some were en route to India, and would only travel as far as Qena or Luxor before going overland to the port of Quseir on the Red Sea.

The Handbook for Travellers in Egypt, by the great pioneer Egyptologist J G Wilkinson, was first published in 1847, and updated editions were still being published at least as late as 1873. In this edition, he described the voyage by dahabiya as the domain of those with ‘time to spare, and the money to spend’. He lamented that since Nile travel was no longer dominated by archaeologists (like himself), artists, and invalids, it had become the domain of ‘the rich and idle, to whom money was no object’ and costs had soared,³ but in truth it had always been for those who could afford it. The cost of dahabiyas varied, and the principle applied that you got what you paid for. Amelia Edwards, author of the classic One Thousand Miles Up The Nile, travelled with her companions on the Nile in 1873. They had the choice of two or three hundred dahabiyas, and hired one of the largest, with seven sleeping cabins, one of them double. Even then there were bigger, with eight to ten cabins and two saloons. Those wealthy enough would hire a separate boat for their dragoman, servants, and supplies not carried in their own boat. The trip was a leisurely one. Wilkinson reckoned that to the First Cataract at Aswan and back would take a minimum of six to eight weeks, but that assumed favourable winds both ways, and limited stops. For those with sufficient funds and time, three or even four months could be spent on the Nile if going as far as the Second Cataract.

The Nile journey started at Cairo, where arrangements had to be made for a boat, crew, and provisions. Some travellers handled all this themselves, but the norm was to contract with a dragoman. A combination of guide, interpreter, foreman, and logistics manager, they would be responsible for organising everything, including crew, supplies, linen, and crockery, apart from supplies of wine and spirits. Some were Egyptian, but there were also many who were Maltese, Greek, or Syrian. Unsurprisingly, they varied in competence, reliability, honesty, and price. Equally unsurprisingly, the rule of thumb for dragomans as well as dahabiyas was that you got what you paid for. There were two ways of paying them, by the trip, or by time spent, and there could be disadvantages to both. If paid by the trip, the dragoman would be inclined to hurry on when the wind was favourable, limiting the amount of time that could be spent on shore excursions, if by time they had every incentive to find reasons for delaying the progress made each day. The usual compromise was to contract for the trip, including a stated number of days stoppage, with an additional charge per extra day. When the American William Prime cruised the Nile in 1860, he and his companions were quoted £225 to Aswan and back, with fifteen days stoppages and an additional charge of £3 for extra days, with an additional £67 10s (£67.50) to the Second Cataract and back including three days stoppages.⁴

The size and cost of dahabiyas varied with the number in the party, but the later in the season travellers went looking, the smaller the choice, and by implication the lower the quality of the boats that remained. Some recommended sinking the boats first to get rid of rats and other vermin, before refloating them and loading. The Anglo-Irish writer and Member of Parliament Sir William Gregory (whose wife Augusta is better known as co-founder of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin) travelled on the Nile in the winter of 1855-56. Somewhat ominously, their dahabiya was dubbed ‘El Berghoot’ (al barghuth), or The Flea. It lived up to its name, and was crawling with them, and it took more than a week to reduce their numbers to insignificance.⁵ It is difficult to be certain, but the writer who only identified herself as ‘A Daughter of Japhet’ also hired a dahabiya of the same name in 1858, and complained of a dreadful smell coming from under the planks of the saloon. These were removed, and two of the crew spent hours bailing out the filthy water under them. Cleaning the boat continued the next day, and the hold was whitewashed with quicklime to sterilise it before it sailed.⁶

The provisions which could be purchased further up the Nile were very limited, although the crews stopped at certain places, particularly Asiut, to purchase flour and bake supplies of bread which were dried for storage and provided much of their meals during the journey. Supplies for the travellers were far more lavish. Gregory lists rice, dried apricots, potatoes, bread, biscuits, marmalade, oranges, sauces, two large hams, sherry, marsala wine, champagne, gin, arrak (raki) and plenty of bottled beer. There was also beef, a half sheep, cages of live chickens, turkeys and pigeons, and cases of eggs and vegetables. Further vegetables, fruit, eggs, and chickens would be bought on the way if available, and passengers often hunted pigeons and other game as well. Water for the trip came from the river, but was left in large tanks for the sediment to settle out and filtered. The provisions were largely stored on deck, while the luggage of the passengers was stowed in the cabins. The layout of all dahabiyas was similar, with a large cabin at the rear of the boat rising about five feet above the deck with its floors sunk about two feet below. It was divided into a saloon, also used as a dining room, single or double cabins, closets, and bathrooms and toilets. Larger vessels could have more than one saloon. The roof of the cabin was shaded by an awning, and used to relax on. The American traveller William Prime hired a dahabiya about seventy feet long by thirteen wide, and his cabin was about six feet by four, with a bed only two feet wide. Sometimes couches in the saloon doubled as beds. All food was cooked on deck, in a tiny kitchen, and meals provided for the passengers were not shared by the crew, who had to make do with their own far less varied provisions, although it was traditional to buy a sheep for them to feast on at one point.

Once under way, everything was dependent on the wind. In theory, the north wind took the dahabiya up-river, and on the return voyage the main yardarm was taken down and stowed, the smaller mizzen yardarm and sail were moved to the main mast, deck planking was taken up to reveal benches for the crew to row from, and oars were unshipped. In practice, contrary winds could hinder progress up the river, sometimes for days at a time, and when there was no wind the crew had to track the boat, or pull it from the bank with ropes, and this usually meant that only about four or five miles a day progress could be made, at considerable effort. Locals could also be press ganged into pulling the boat. At Aswan, a similar technique was used to haul the boat upriver through the First Cataract. Although the name suggests a waterfall, it was a stretch of rapids about four miles long where the river ran through a maze of granite boulders and small islands. Smaller boats were naturally easier to navigate through the Cataract, and at this point the normal crew handed over to local specialists commanded by the Sheik of the Cataracts as pilot. Those wishing to see the great temples of Abu Simbel had to continue to the Second Cataract, where they were located before their relocation when the creation of the new Aswan dam flooded Nubia to create Lake Nasser. Before the creation of this dam ended the Nile floods, how difficult the transit of the cataracts was largely depended on the amount of water flowing through them. On the return from the Second Cataract or beyond, the current could take the boat through, but this was a fairly nerve-wracking experience involving expert piloting to avoid wrecking the boat. In theory, again, the current and rowing by the crew would take the dahabiya back to Cairo, with stops en route for leisurely exploration of temples and other monuments, but adverse winds could still cause days of delay.

The heyday of the dahabiya was not to last long. The railways began to extend through Egypt, but an initial lack of accommodation along the way meant that they did not provide much competition. Instead it was steam vessels, which were already coming in on the Nile by the 1860s. When the Prince and Princess of Wales visited Egypt in 1869, their dahabiya was the last word in luxury, but was essentially just a barge towed by a steam tug. Thomas Cook and Sons were operating steamers from 1869, and from 1872 were exclusive agents for the Khedive. The virtues of steamers were extolled around this time in a small book authored by a certain R Etzensberger. As he was Cook’s representative at Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, in charge of berths and victualling on steamers, and the book was published by Cook’s,⁷ a fair degree of bias can perhaps be assumed when he listed the drawbacks of dahabiyas, even though Cooks did operate some. The drawbacks included the tensions and arguments which could arise over weeks or months spent cheek by jowl in cramped conditions, and the difficulty, given their slowness, of dealing with illness, firearm accidents, and even deaths on board, but he also made some telling points in favour of steam. These naturally included the delays when dahabiyas were becalmed or struggling against contrary winds, which steamers were far less prone to, and what he suggested was sight-seeing the wrong way round, beginning at Aswan, due to the need to continue up river as long as northerly winds held, and make stops on the way back when the current was constantly flowing. Most tellingly, though, the time taken by a sailing vessel increased the cost of the journey, and by the early 1870s the cost of a first class dahabiya was £90-£120 for three to four months. Against this, the cost of a trip by steamer was around £44, all-inclusive apart from donkey hire on second or night visits, and it could be done, for those with less time as well as less money, in three weeks rather than three months. It was not long before competition from steamers forced dahabiya prices down to £60 or even lower.

Technology and progress may have ended the era of the sail dahabiya, and few now would wish on a crew the hard physical labour which they involved, but like the great tea clippers and the warships of the Napoleonic era, sail on the Nile had an elegance that still makes it romantic, however different the reality may have been.

1. Mentioned by Edward Lane, author of Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), and Sir J G Wilkinson, Handbook for Travellers in Egypt (1847). ↩︎
2. 
   More detail can be found in Ziad Morsy’s MA thesis:
   http://www.cmauch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Traditional_Sailing_Boats_of_Egypt.pdf ↩︎
3. 
   Wilkinson, Handbook for Travellers in Egypt, 1873, p. 319.
   https://archive.org/details/handbookfortrave00john_1/page/318/mode/2up ↩︎
4. 
   William Prime. Boat Life in Egypt and Nubia. 1857.
   https://archive.org/details/boatlifeinegypt01primgoog ↩︎
5. 
   William Henry Gregory. Egypt in 1855 and 1856.
   https://archive.org/details/egyptin18551856t02greguoft ↩︎
6. 
   A Daughter of Japhet’. Wanderings in the Land of Ham’.
   https://archive.org/details/wanderingsinland00daugrich/page/n5/mode/2up ↩︎
7. 
   R Etzensberger.
   Up the Nile by Steam
   . c. 1872.
   https://archive.org/details/wanderingsinland00daugrich/page/n5/mode/2up ↩︎