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The Nile Expedition, sometimes called the Gordon Relief Expedition (1884–1885), was a British mission to relieve Major-General Charles George Gordon at Khartoum, Sudan. Gordon had been sent to Sudan to help the Egyptians withdraw their garrisons after the British decided to abandon Sudan in the face of a rebellion led by self-proclaimed Mahdi ...
Gordon at Khartoum. Chenevix Trench, Charles (1979). online The Road to Khartoum: a life of General Charles Gordon. Elton, Godfrey Elton, Baron. Gordon of Khartoum: The Life of General Charles Gordon (Knopf, 1954). OCLC 28574063. Nicoll, Fergus. The Mahdi of Sudan and the Death of General Gordon (Sutton Publishing, 2004). ISBN 9780750932998 ...
Gordon was born in Woolwich, Kent, a son of Major General Henry William Gordon (1786–1865) and Elizabeth (1792–1873), daughter of Samuel Enderby Junior.The men of the Gordon family had served as officers in the British Army for four generations, and as a son of a general, Gordon was raised to be the fifth generation; the possibility that Gordon would pursue anything other than a military ...
The Desert Column, a force of approximately 1,400 soldiers, started from Korti, Sudan on 30 December 1884; the Desert Column's mission, in a joint effort titled the "Gordon Relief Expedition", was to march across the Bayuda Desert to the aid of General Charles George Gordon at Khartoum, Sudan, who was besieged there by Mahdist forces.
Along the way, a messenger from Khartoum reached them [2] and told Earle and Brackenbury that Gordon wished them to come quickly. Even further down the river to Khartoum, they received word that the Mahdists were reported near Hamdab. With a force of natives under a Mudir, the River Column marched forward. After finding out that Gordon's aide ...
The force arrived too late: the first troops on steamboat reached Khartoum on 28 January 1885, to find the town had fallen two days earlier. The Ansar had waited for the Nile flood to recede before attacking the poorly defended river approach to Khartoum in boats, slaughtering the garrison, killing Gordon, and delivering his head to the Mahdi's ...
When the Mahdists reached Khartoum, an attempt was made to use him to induce the commander Charles George Gordon, now Governor-General of Sudan, to surrender. This failing, Slatin was placed in chains, and on the morning of 26 January 1885, an hour or two after the fall of Khartoum, Gordon's head was brought to the camp and shown to the captive.
The sacking of Khartoum and the killing of General Gordon and the massacre of thousands of civilians at the hands of Mahdist warriors in January 1885, together with the failure of the relief effort of General Wolseley's Nile Expedition, prompted the British government to revive plans to build a railway between the port of Suakin on the Red Sea and Berber on the River Nile some 300 miles north ...