The Nile voyageurs : recognition of Canada's role in the Empire, 1884-1885

In the late summer of 1884, Canada's Governor General received a request from the W arOffice to engage several hundred "Voyageurs" for service with the British army in the Sudan.The voyageurs from Canada were required to pilot boats through the cataracts of the Nile,so that General Garnet Wolseley's relief expedition could reach General Charles Gordon,who was besieged in Khartoum, by a self-proclaimed prophet called the Mahdi. Newspapersand documents reveal that many in Canada considered this request to be a great complimentto the country. It was the first time that Britain had requested a body of Canadians for animperial expedition. S o m e Canadians thought the expedition would be an opportunity forCanada to play a bigger role in the empire. Others in Canada expressed ambivalence towardsthis particular group of m e n as their representatives on an imperial campaign. The NileVoyageurs were civilian, mostly working class men, with a proportional over-representationof Aboriginal and francophone men. The largest group of m e n was from Ottawa, many ofw h o m were shantymen w h o worked in the timber trade.This study introduces and examines a large body of letters written by the Nile Voyageurs onthe expedition, as well as a range of other newspaper items and manuscript documents. Thestudy is a labour history, a history of settler-aboriginal relations, an imperial history, ahistory of Canadian identities, a study of the militia, a series of regional histories and a studyof politics, society and culture in the 1880s. This episode provides a glimpse of colonialCanada before the Northwest rebellion and the full implementation of the Indian act. Itexplores Canada's imperial identity on the eve of the Imperial Federation movement, theCongo Conference and Britain's new expanded empire. The project introduces a criticaldiscourse method based on the theory of recognition articulated by Axel Honneth. Honneth'stheory of recognition will be used as the basis for the textual analysis, it will inform a critiqueof the cultural struggles in various social situations and it will also serve as the basis for anunderstanding of public memory as intersubjective recognition across time.