The Blue Nile

by Alan Moorehead

In the first half of the nineteenth century, only a small handful of Westerners had ventured into the regions watered by the Nile River on its long journey from Lake Tana in Abyssinia to the Mediterranean-lands that had been forgotten since Roman times, or had never been known at all. In The Blue Nile, Alan Moorehead continues the classic, thrilling narration of adventure he began in The White Nile, depicting this exotic place through the lives of four explorers so daring they can be considered among the world's original adventurers -- each acting and reacting in separate expeditions against a bewildering background of slavery and massacre, political upheaval and all-out war.

Genres: History, Africa, Nonfiction, Travel, Adventure, Egypt, Historical

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Alan Moorehead was lionised as the literary man of action: the most celebrated war correspondent of World War II; author of award winning books; star travel writer of The New Yorker; pioneer publicist of wildlife conservation. At the height of his success, his writing suddenly stopped and when, 17 years later, his death was announced, he seemed a heroic figure from the past. His fame as a writer gave him the friendship of Ernest Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw and Field Marshall Montgomery and the courtship and marriage of his beautiful wife Lucy Milner.

After 1945, he turned to writing books, including Eclipse, Gallipoli (for which he won the Duff Cooper Prize), The White Nile, The Blue Nile, and finally, A Late Education. He was awarded an OBE in 1946, and died in 1983.

Reviews

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alan Moorehead's The Blue Nile is a loose follow-up to his earlier White Nile, continuing the story of European exploration and conquest of Egypt and Central Africa. Unlike his previous book, which had a fairly clear narrative through line, Blue Nile is a collection of loose, dramatic vignettes spread out across a century. The first section covers James Bruce's 1770s exploration of Ethiopia (Abyssinia); the second dramatizes Napoleon's ill-fated conquest of Egypt in the 1790s; the third loosely follows Muhammad Ali's efforts to secure Egyptian independence from the Ottomans, and expanding his empire into the Sudan; the fourth, and best segment recounts the bizarre 1868 Abyssinia Expedition, later dramatized in a Flashman novel, where 13,000 Anglo-Indian troops marched overland to rescue hostages from the "mad" King Theodore. Moorehead's travelogue writing style is as luxuriant as ever, and the book relishes exotic travel stories and thundering battle scenes; but here the prose often comes across as a decorous diversion. He never finds a way to thread these stories together; indeed, his selection of tales seems arbitrary, and his coverage disappointingly mixed. The Napoleon segment trails off after the Battle of the Pyramids; he digresses from Muhammad Ali's rise to side stories of minor European explorers. The final chapter is the most compelling, because it provides a clean narrative structure and protagonists (the stout General Napier and erratic King Theodore) as clear-cut as Gordon and the Mahdi at Khartoum - though even here, we wonder why the author chose this colorful but peripheral campaign instead of Ethiopia's later, successful defiance of Italian invaders. Still, anyone who enjoyed The White Nile (or Moorehead's work generally) will likely appreciate the follow-up - just don't expect a narrative as carefully crafted or cohesive as its predecessor.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book - Alan Moorehead is to Nilotic Africa what Peter Hopkirk is to Central Asia, except that Moorehead did it decades earlier. That said, I cannot give this the 5 stars it probably deserves unless I could upgrade Moorehead's The White Nile to 6. The White Nile is simply the better book, if only because the White Nile itself is the better story.

The White Nile focuses on the exploration of the Nile and the search for it's source, telling a number of other stories along the way but all still in the service of the greater history of the river itself. However, there is no such thread in The Blue Nile, since it's source was never truly in question; the entire story of the Blue's exploration is fully told in the book's first 50 pages. After that, the book focuses on three separate stories - the French in Egypt, the Turks in the Sudan, and the British in Ethiopia - which in descending order have less and less to do with the river proper, until in the final section on Ethiopia, the river is barely mentioned at all. And so the overarching theme of Blue is more of a stretch than in White.

Still, those three stories are riveting, and additionally benefit from being ones I had never heard before, (whereas I was already familiar with at least the basics of most of The White Nile's stories - Burton/Speke, Gordon/the Mahdi, Stanley/Livingstone, etc). The tale of a young Napoleon invading Egypt while still in his 20's presents a much different picture of Bonaparte than the one painted in his Waterloo years; and the story of Emperor Theodore of Ethiopia is just insane, both literally and figuratively - I cannot wait now to read Flashman on the March, the last book in that excellent series, which brings together Flashman and Theodore, (talk about a match made in literary heaven!).

So yes, by all means a resounding recommendation for The Blue Nile. Just remember to think of it as a delicious and surprising dessert following the more substantial main course of The White Nile, and you'll be able to enjoy them both in the proper perspective.

AUDIOBOOK COMMENTS: Great narration by British actor Patrick Tull, in full-on Nigel Thornberry mode. However, I would recommend reading rather than listening; it helps keep the various people and places straight by seeing them spelled out. And even though the book would greatly benefit from more maps and pictures (perhaps they're in the hardcover version; I merely looked at the paperback), just being able to refer to the main map in the front of the book helped everything make a lot more sense.

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

[Eliszard · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We are back at Jericho: the trumpets blow, the walls fall down and an age vanishes in an instant." writes Moorehead in the epilogue of The Blue Nile, which summarizes perfectly the spirit of the book. Unlike The White Nile, which described almost as in a mystery all the expeditions to discover the source of the river, there aren't many explorers nor much mystery in The Blue Nile. The location of the river source is settled early on, and although there are explorers/savants/military types who contribute to fill in geographical details, the real focus of the book seems to me the beginning of globalization.

In The White Nile, the protagonists were people - explorers, missionaries, merchants who encountered, lived and did business with locals. Here the focus is much more on the (violent) encounter of civilizations, from Napoleonic France in Egypt to Victorian Britain in Abyssinia. The emphasis on individuals (Napoleon, his lieutenants and his savants, Theodore and Napier) is deceptive, because they really stand for the advancing, Western, global modern versus the disappearing age of isolation and "savagery".

The essence of this clash is captured in the rather absurd British expedition to Ethiopia in 1868. In order to rescue a handful of frankly annoying Europeans who were kept somewhat prisoners by Emperor Theodore, and more importantly to rescue a wounded racial pride, the British mounted an extraordinary campaign. It involved 4,000 European soldiers, 9,000 'native' ones (a mix of Turks, Persians, Egyptians, Arabs, Sikhs, Hindus and who knows who else), Indian elephants to transport heavy artillery ("A seasick elephant was a formidable thing, and in the Calcutta moorings they had to face a cyclone" p235), camels and mules for the lighter artillery, horses, a fleet of 280 sail and steam ships, and the setting up of an entire city, Zula, complete with 2 piers, a railway , hospitals, storehouses and condensers to desalinize water. Except for the piers, everything else was dismounted and taken away at the end of the campaign. (The campaign ended with a handful of British casualties, thousands of Ethiopian ones, the prisoners rescued, and the British out of the country, at least for a time).

Aside from some comments that have not aged well ("The Arab compromised, schemed and bargained, the Ethiopian made rash hysterical gestures to satisfy his pride; and both races, when aroused, were absolutely ruthless" on p276 - sounds like is could easily be a fair description of French and British behavior throughout this period), the book is a pleasure to read, engaging, very well and passionately written, and very useful to understand a lot of what is going on in that area of the world today.

[Jamie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moorehead’s two books about the Nile tell dramatic stories of exploration and conquest, and are full of amazing adventures and larger than life characters. They are very well written, although through both The White Nile and The Blue Nile the recurring themes of destruction and bloodshed run like a red thread.

In this book Moorehead first recounts the search for the origins of the Blue Nile, whose source waters were nowhere near as difficult to locate as were those of the White Nile, which passes through trackless swamps, past vast cataracts, through deep canyons, and over great waterfalls to a starting point that is still debated today. After all, every lake is fed by rivers, which are fed by streams, which consolidate rivulets, so who can tell which, if any of them, is the one true source?

After establishing the river’s s origins the rest of the book focuses on three key events in the area’s history between 1798 and 1868, all of them bloody encounters between “civilization” and native cultures: Napoleon’s invasion, the Egyptian conquest of the Sudan, and Britain’s tragicomic Ethiopian rescue mission.

Napoleon’s decision to invade Egypt was not the madcap miscalculation it is sometimes described as in modern histories. If he could have controlled the country he could then have pushed through sparsely populated Sudan all the way to the mouth of the Red Sea, which would have enabled him to threaten England’s vital trade with India. He was not successful, partly because his supply lines from home were interdicted by the Royal Navy, and partly because of the hostility of the people. Eventually, even though he himself managed to slip away back to France, his army in Egypt was forced to surrender. The expedition had noted scientific triumphs, such as the Rosetta stone, and it did succeed in weakening the brutal, repressive rule of the Mamluks, who showed magnificent courage in their cavalry charges as they were scythed down by French musketry and grapeshot.

The withdrawal of the French left the Mamluks vulnerable, and eventually Ottoman general Muhammad Ali managed to consolidate power. He played an important part in modernizing the country but also embarked on a number of military adventures to expand his territories and bring back gold and slaves. His armies brutally depopulated large parts of Sudan, pillaging and enslaving wherever they went. It reminded me of a line from Will Durant’s Our Oriental Heritage about another Egyptian conqueror, “Thutmose I … subjugated [Syria] from the coast to Carchemish, put it under guard and tribute, and returned to Thebes laden with spoils and the glory that always comes from the killing of men.”

And finally, there is the story of the British Abyssinian expedition of 1868. Mad king Tewodros, beset by civil wars and encroachments on his territories, reacted by taking missionaries hostage. The British, in a grand imperial show of no-one-does-that-to-us-and-gets-away-with-it, mounted a mission to rescue the captives and punish the captors. They built an entire temporary city on the Red Sea, and from it launched a force of 13,000 British and Indian troops, 26,000 support personnel, and 40,000 animals, including elephants. After great difficulties they reached Tewodros’s lands and slaughtered the natives opposing them. They then laid siege to the capital, captured it, massacred its people, killed the king, sacked the city, and rescued their missionaries. I guess that sure showed them.

Both of Moorehead’s books on the Nile are excellent. The White Nile was published in 1960, and The Blue Nile in 1962, so some of the scholarship is no longer current, and some of his white-man’s-burden observations are no longer palatable, but he writes so well, sweeping the reader along with is stories. He is definitely worth reading.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

In "The Blue Nile", Alan Moorehead gives a crash course in the history of European invasion along the course of the Nile from its mouth at Rosetta to the source of the Blue Nile in Lake Tana, Ethiopia. From Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, to the British invasion of (or "expedition to", as it is called elsewhere on the internet) Ethiopia in 1868, Moorehead draws a vivid picture of the peoples and cultures along the Nile River, and the major changes that came to them in the 19th century. Moorehead's writing is electric with his enthusiasm for the subject, and smattered with wonderful imagery. I'm not a fan of reading about battles or military campaigns, but I would read about every last one of them if Moorehead were the writer. I was able to envision the different charges and positions, the condition of the combatants, etc through Moorehead's deft descriptions.

A great survey for anyone with an interest in the region.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly captivating. Moorehead brings to life the conquerors, tribal rulers, and European explorers of the Blue Nile in the 19th century. For those who slept through seventh grade geography class, the Blue Niles starts in Ethiopia, flows up through eastern Sudan and then meets the White Nile at Khartoum, forming the no-color-in-the-name, famous Nile that eventually dumps into the Mediterranean in Egypt.

And what a band of characters Moorehead describes. He clearly admires most of them, despises a few, and thinks all of them quite mad. A typical paragraph:

"Nothing is more intriguing in African exploration in the nineteenth century than the casualness with which it was often undertaken. A group of friends meet and discuss a trip abroad. Shall it be Vienna, Naples, or the Canary Islands? Or possibly Africa? Yes, of course, Africa. They know nothing about Africa....The gunsmith in the Strand supplies them with firearms, the banker gives them draft on Cairo, the hatter furnishes sun-helmets with flaps at the back, and off they go as light-heartedly as if they were setting off for the south of France to avoid the English winter."

Here Moorehead describes Napoleon Bonaparte:

"Yet he was still a gauche figure in the Parisian salons, long uncombed hair straggling down to his shoulders, a sallow complexion, sombre blue eyes, an air of fatigue and dull restlessness, a short, thin, ugly body covered with clothes that were ill-kept and too big for him. His sword draggled [yes, "draggled"] ineffectually at his side. Perhaps these outward effects might not have counted for much among intelligent people, but he was generally silent, and when he did speak it was with an ungainly Corsican accent. In brief, he is the intense young genius who is perfectly conscious of his own superior powers and just as perfectly unable to see how he will ever manage to express them."

Then Moorehead tackles Josephine with just as much gusto and keen observation. Just beware, that this book, originally published in 1960, is definitely not very politically correct. There is a preference for the Christian religion and educating the "savages." Unfortunately, this was still the norm fifty years ago, even amongst "enlightened" anthropologists and "objective" journalists. If you let that go, you'll learn about a part of the world most Westerners have never really learned about, let alone, visited.

[Al · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an extremely well written book, and it ended all too soon. Moorehead starts with a highly descriptive section on the environment of the Blue Nile, beginning with its source at Lake Tana in Ethiopia, and he describes the change in landscape from mountains and jungle to waterless desert. The book is organized into four sections: "The Reconnaissance", which covers early European exploration in the 17th and 18th centuries; "The French in Egypt", which is about Napoleon's invasion and the breaking of Mameluke power; "The Turks in the Sudan", which describes the Turkish invasion of the Sudan in the quest for slaves; and "The British in Ethiopia", about the British column which invaded to rescue a large group of European prisoners held by the Ethiopian emperor Theodore II. Moorehead's writing and his powers of description help the reader to understand how the native people lived and adapted to the climate.

Perhaps the best summary is found in the epilogue: "Three abortive cavalry charges against modern firearms had destroyed the isolation of the Nile valley from Lake Tana to the sea. None of these engagements, whether of the Mamelukes against the French at the Battle of the Pyramids, of the Shaiqiya tribesmen against the Turks at Korti, or of the Ethiopians against the British at Magdala, had lasted more than an hour or two...Yet these were genuine crises: once their defenses were breached none of these countries were ever to be the same again....But perhaps it is in the nature of history to declare itself through apparently small events; certainly such catastrophes as the mass killings on the Somme and at Passchendaele in the First World War decided nothing."

This was a truly enjoyable book which went by quickly and well worth the time to read.

[cool breeze · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alan Moorehead’s The White Nile is one of the most captivating histories I have ever read. His companion follow-up book, The Blue Nile, is also very good, but doesn’t quite reach the same heights. This is largely because the source material isn’t quite as compelling. Part 2, Napoleon in Egypt, is certainly fascinating, but it is a relatively brief episode. Part 1, James Bruce’s explorations, and Part 3, the Turks in the Sudan, are of comparatively minor importance. Part 4, the British invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) to rescue hostages from King Theodore, who may well be insane, is the second-best of the sections. For those interested in Napier and Theodore, Flashman on the March is a fictionalized, but historically accurate, and very funny account.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a remarkably well written book and I enthusiastically recommend it to anyone who enjoys history. There are so many fabulous characters, intrepid explorers and extraordinary rulers and conquerors that are part of the story of the exploration of the Blue Nile, and Alan Moorehead leads the reader deftly through the complex cast of characters and myriad sights and events. Like the best of adventure stories, I could hardly put it down!

[Declan Carmody · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty interesting, not quite as captivating as the White Nile, but the stories about the French invasion of Egypt and England's incursions into Ethiopia are still very interesting.

[Natalied]

An engaging read for anyone interested in the peregrinations of mainly European explorers along the course of the Blue Nile down from Ethiopia, through the founding of the city of Khartoum by the Turks, and on past the marvels of ancient Egyptian civilization into the Mediterranean. A bit dated in tone, but good story-telling and history.

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author of The Blue Nile, Alan Moorhead, was an Australian journalist based in London, who famously covered the War in the Desert in 1941 (that’s the UK [Goodies] v the Italians and the German Afrika Korps [Baddies]), but later he branched out and wrote this, published in 1962, which is one half of his history of the European relationship with the River Nile, the other half being entitled, unsurprisingly, The White Nile.

The search for the source of the Nile was always of interest to Northern Europeans, who were continuous explorers (and ‘collectors’ of antiquities from around the world, of course) but it became an obsession in the nineteenth century. I hadn’t realised before reading this book that Napoleon had invaded Egypt, and pushed somewhat down into Nubia and Sudan, and he had this novel idea of building a canal to join the Mediterranean and Red seas, but it did not happen in his time; nevertheless, he was a man of vision.

The Blue Nile gives a potted history of some of the early explorers and travellers who ventured from Egypt, following the river south to try to find treasure, gold … and the source of the Nile, of course. He covers the French invasion is some detail. While there, the French carried out an enormous survey of Egypt, including a census, and the result was a 20-volume history and narrative of the country at the time, and its monuments, which was subsequently devoured by later explorers and invaders. The Rosetta Stone was also found around this time; it had to be surrendered to the British in 1801, but Napoleon kept an impression of it, which was carefully studied in France.

After this comes details of the Turkish invasion, led by Mohammed Ali (no, not that one), and their relationship with the Egyptians/Sudanese.

The book is lavishly illustrated, mostly with line drawings and paintings from the nineteenth century, to lend authenticity and give you an idea of how people back then would have seen the desert country and the river, including those of the principal personalities. After covering later explorers, he moves on to the British invasion of Ethiopia in 1867-68. The source of the Blue Nile is in Ethiopia, so this is relevant here.

The Emperor, Theodore, had imprisoned the British Consul, British Envoy, and about thirty other Europeans. The British government tried to negotiate with him, sending friendly messages and presents, and assuring him of British friendship, with a request to release the prisoners. This failed to do the trick, so national pride dictated that an army be sent to free them.

This entailed sending thousands of troops, support staff and hangers-on from India in 230 ships, at enormous expense. On arrival at Zula on the coast (in Sudanese territory), the British built two jetties to facilitate the unloading, including two condensers to convert seawater to fresh, then constructed telegraph lines and a railway line 30 miles across the desert to the foot of the mountains, so that their troops could be moved quickly and safely to their jumping-off point. They had 20,000 pack animals, including about 60 elephants, which were there to carry their artillery pieces, given that they had to travel 400 miles along treacherous mountain paths and through passes at 8,000 or 9,000 feet elevation. It was an incredible undertaking merely to free less than 100 people from captivity.

The book goes into fine detail about this campaign, and there is a chapter dedicated to its leader, Lt. General Robert Napier, afterwards Field Marshal Lord Napier – his statue stands in Whitehall to this day.

Moorhead’s style is conversational and easy to read, and he outlines all the important facts in an interesting, readable way. Just before beginning to read this book, I read When The Emperor Dies (Mason McCann Smith), a very good novel based on this invasion, that McCann Smith wrote after getting inspiration from Moorhead's book. Having read it, I enjoyed Moorhead’s book all the more.

My version is the Folio Society version of Moorhead’s illustrated version, which was first published in 1972. It benefits greatly from the maps and illustrations, and is bound in moiré silk. Recommended.

[John Benson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having seen this book and its companion book, THE WHITE NILE, in many homes I visited during my childhood years in East Africa, I finally decided to read them together, though Alan Moorehead said not to do that. It is worth reading them together. This book covers the years 1798 to 1868 and cover the Blue Nile branch of the river from its start in Lake Tana in Ethiopia to its connection with the White Nile near Khartoum and then on the Nile Delta by Alexandria, Egypt. Alan Moorehead is a wonderful writer and he brings the personalities of that time frame out so well as he looks at the European conquest of Egypt and Sudan and then English incursions into Ethiopia. He brings out a sense of the geography of the river and its unique history well. Well worth reading even though these two books were first written in the early 1960s.

[Christopher Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This sequel to The White Nile probably ought to have been a prequel, as it deals with a time period earlier than that book. Instead of a search for the source of the Nile River, this deals with the history and nations surrounding the upper Nile, including pharaohs, Napoleon, and Emperor Theodore.

Again, Moorehead tries to take a more balanced, factual approach, finding more than the historically lurid depictions of various figures and events, and he does well at this. The White Nile is a more engaging and interesting, even heroic book with more dynamic and amazing figures, but there are some heroic figures in this book as well.

[JW · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as fulfilling as Moorehead's "The White Nile" but then neither is the river. Moorehead focuses on the conquest of the area from Bonaparte to the Turks and finally the Brits enter the scene. There is less here on the exploration of the river than discussed in his "White Nile" which I found disappointing yet he makes for an excellent guide taking us through the history of the Nile region and his writing is both engaging and thorough. Recommended, but I'd go for "The White Nile" first.

[Palmyrah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is history written as tales of brave adventure. The subject is the discovery of the Blue Nile by Western civilization, and the end of the isolation of its remote hinterlands and their peoples. Moorehead begins with an account of early explorations, then moves on to the tales of conquest: first, Napoleon’s star-crossed adventure in Egypt, which revealed the antiquities of Egypt to western eyes for the first time since the retreat of Roman power from Africa; next, the horrific empire-building of Muhammad Ali, which brought the Sudan under Egyptian control following Napoleon’s retreat from Egypt; and finally an account of Napier’s 1867 expedition to Ethiopia to rescue European prisoners, including a British consul, held there by the ruler of the country, the mad, brilliant, extravagantly cruel Theodore.

All three countries fell in a series of fantastic, anachronistic battles between mediaeval cavalry on one side – the Mamelukes of Egypt, the Shaiqiya warriors of Sudan and the Emperor Theodore’s Christian knights – and modern Western armies on the other. In every case these confrontations ended in overwhelming defeat for the defenders; they were massacred.

Moorehead writes evocatively of the landscapes and moods of the Nile, describing the countries through which it flows, their peoples and rulers, the ruins left by earlier Nilotic civilizations. He has an engaging eye for nature and particularly for birds. The book ends with his personal account of a journey by helicopter up the Blue Nile gorge below its source at Lake Tana. In 1962, when this book was written, this part of the river was unnavigable and the sides of the gorge could not be traversed on foot. Thus he leaves the reader with a view that only one Westerner before his time, Col. R.E. Cheesman, had ever seen.

Upholders of Professor Said’s Orientalist thesis will find much to despise in this book. Its sources include some of the fathers of what has come to be called Orientalism: Denon, Flaubert, Burkhardt. And the view of the Nile and its peoples presented in the book often seems very close to Lady Duff Gordon’s descriptions of Egypt, with the author approvingly quotes: ‘The real life and the real people are exactly as described in that most veracious of books, the Thousand and One Nights.’

Yet there is no jingoism here, nor any kind of apparent prejudice. Bear in mind that views have changed since the 1960s, and that a fifty-year-old history book is itself a historical artifact that should not be made the subject of anachronistic judgements. If you do this, you will find much to praise, and very little to damn, in this excellent book. I now have an eager eye out for Moorehead’s other works, including the companion volume to this one, The White Nile.

[Ebookwormy1 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another excellent history from Alan Moorehead.

I never knew the Ethiopians ate raw meat, or of their King Theodore and his defeat by the English.

I never understood the tribal wars between the Arabs and black Africans in the Sudan (Darfur ring a bell?), and I was never fully aware how much the Arab slave trade of black Africans was ingrained in the culture and lifestyle of eastern Africa.

Why didn't the Ethiopians go down into the desert and why didn't the desert dwellers penetrate the hills?

And why wasn't the course of the Blue Nile mapped until the 1950s?

Nor could I understand how the Sphinx was "discovered", I mean, how do you forget about something like that?

Or the lifestyle and culture of the, rather strange, Mameluke.

Finally, I never really grasped what Napoleon was trying to accomplish via his invasion of Egypt and how the French lost Egyptian influence to the English.

Now, I get it. You will too, if you read this well documented, well articulated history of the Blue Nile Basin. This book is a companion to "The White Nile", which I also highly recommend (see my review).

The White Nile, Moorehead, 2000
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've had The Blue Nile on my list of things to read for a long time. It's been sitting around the house for several years, always pre-empted by something else. I finally read it. It's not quite what I expected. I had expected it to be a single narrative about the exploration of the Blue Nile. Instead, it's a collection (non-fiction)of four distinct adventures regarding exploration of the Blue Nile in the early 1800's. The first and third of the stories are about rather obscure people, and make for rather slow reading. The second and fourth are about Napoleon in Egypt, and the British in Ethiopia, respectively.

The portion of the story about the British, rescues the book. Here, some British explorers find themselves taken hostage in Ethiopia, and the British government finds themselves in a situation in which they feel honor compels them to bring the full weight of the empire to the rescue. The account of that rescue is fascinating, because it's no small operation. England literally comes to Ethiopia.

So, the book has slow moments, but ends on a high note. It would also benefit from a few more maps.

[Kkopp · Rating 5 out of 5]

As good as The White Nile was, this book is even better, in part because the characters are so unexpected (and less well known than those who populate the companion volume) and in part because the world and adventures described are so amazing.

While I was very familiar with Napoleon's Egyptian adventure from Herold's book and other sources, and I had read a bit about Napier's invasion of Abyssinia, Moorehead is such a master of historical narrative that the entire sweep of history in the Eastern Sudan and Ethiopia is made real in the most wonderful way.

As other readers have noted, by all means read both volumes. Once I had finished the one I couldn't help but take up the next and read them both straight through. If you enjoy well-written history don't miss Moorehead's Gallipoli, a marvelous work...

[Alonzo Church · Rating 5 out of 5]

A combination travelogue and popular history, this is a great read for armchair travelers, armchair explorers, and armchair warriors. (Does this make this an ideal book for boys of all ages? Sounds like it.)

Essentially, this is a story on how “modernity”, as defined in a Western-centric way, came to Egypt, the Sudan, and Ethiopia. Tied into this is a sweeping description of the Lower Nile, and the branch of the Nile that flows from the Ethiopian mountains. It’s a tale that features Napoleon, and a couple of rather sordid little colonial wars, and some unusually casual exploration expeditions.

This has some of the most elegant prose I have bumped into in a while, and the author has a great sense of the telling detail. In short, this is engrossing and informative. Do read if books about exotic places or the rise of Empire appeal to you at all.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although not as much adventure, & exploration, as the White Nile; still a very interesting book about the countries that the Blue Nile runs through- Ethiopia, Sudan & Egypt during the period of 1790's-1870. Invasions, war, political intrigue, & religious conflict were the bulk of the activities affecting that section of the world during this time period. Some beautiful, lyrical descriptions of the Blue Nile & countryside surrounding it were scattered throughout.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoroughly entertaining read about the 18th and 19th century clash of cultures between Europeans and the inhabitants of Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia. The stress here is on colorful characters: eccentric and sometimes woefully underprepared European explorers, and megalomanic rulers (including Napoleon, representing the Europeans and the Emperor Theodore, representing the Ethiopians). Much of the history here was completely unknown to me.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second of two books on the European exploration and exploitation of the Nile River regions of Africa, it benefits from more exciting historical subjects- Napoleon & Theodore of Ethiopia, for example - and the more direct conflict of multiple civilizations & theologies. Read both it and it's predecessor - 'The White Nile' for a great introduction into African history, even with a very English voice.

[Jake Stephens · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling view of the exploration of the Nile by the West -- and glimpses of both the rigors and beauties of the land. Worthwhile context for contemplating the ebb and flow of civilization as you realize exactly how far the great Egyptians ebbed out of the annals of time -- literally covered in sand -- and the barbarism which followed. Quite worthwhile.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This serves as a companion to Alan Moorehead's The White Nile. Whereas that book was more about the race to discern the source(s) of the Nile River, this one is more about the history of the region. It was also my introduction to the Emperor Theodore of Ethiopia and the British invasion which overthrew him.

[Sarah Sammis · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is slanted towards the history of battles fought over lands in the region and has only glancing information on things like the arts and culture of the region. The chapters on the French invasion of Egypt does have some interesting observations on the reactions of the various groups to being invaded and occupied that are still relevant given the present day mess in Iraq.

[Matthew Kuhlman · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5. A fascinating read about the clash of civilizations along the Nile river in the 19th century: the French invasion of Egypt, the Turkkish invasion of Sudan, and the British invasion of Ethiopia. Each conflict was minor at the time but resulted in opening one of the last remote regions of the world.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Along with "The White Nile," this is a great general introduction to a region and historical period that doesn't get the attention it deserves.

[Fröken Humle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Extremly racist against blacks, but unfortunately - as far as I know - still the only book that in a comprehensive manner describe the early European exploration of East Africa.