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Updated: June 8, 2025
The journey from Gubat to Khartoum being entirely by water, Lord Charles Beresford, a well-known naval officer, had been attached to Stewart's force, with orders "at once to take over and man any steamer or steamers that were either there or in the vicinity," and to "use every means in his power to get one or more of the steamers into an efficient state."
"We are not to make back to Gubat, then?" asked Reece in surprise. "No," said Strachan. "Matammeh has not been carried?" "Not yet; I suppose it may be soon; everybody seems to expect it. But I don't see the use now." "Why not?" "Well," said Strachan, "one hates to be the bearer of bad news, but it must come. The expedition has been too late: Khartoum has fallen."
I rode up and looked at the remains of the little fort and the loopholed walls on the south end of Metemmeh, close to which I had ridden on 21st January 1885, and got hotly fired at for my pains. Then I walked over the ruins of the Guards' triangular fort at Gubat.
Many of their perilous adventures seem to belong to romance rather than to reality: the tiny gimcrack boats struggling with the strong stream of the cataract, running the gauntlet of the Arab guns, dropping disconsolately down the river with their terrible news, or wrecked and stranded on the sandbank; Stuart-Wortley rowing to the camp before Metemma for help; Beresford starting in the remaining steamer; the bursting of the boiler by a Dervish shell; Benbow mending it in a single day; Wilson's rescue and the return to the entrenchment at Gubat.
The loss in these conflicts, at Abu Klea on the 17th, and at Metemmah on the 19th, was appalling for the Arabs, but such victories often repeated would soon have done for the conquerors. The entire force reached Gubat on the Nile on January 20th, and there they found the four steamers which Gordon had sent down. Originally there were five steamers, but one had been sunk.
The expedition for the rescue of General Gordon was tediously boated up the Nile, with the result that the "desert column" which Sir Herbert Stewart led so valiantly across the Bayuda reached Gubat just in time to be too late, and was itself extricated from imminent disaster by the masterful promptitude of Sir Redvers Buller.
About nine o'clock in the morning we reached Bacon, whence I rode across a very flat country to San Roque, where the road leading to Gubat took a sharp turn to the south-east, and presently became an extremely bad one. They come from Mindanao and from the north-west coast of Borneo.
The delay that occurred between the arrival of the English force at Gubat, and the start up the river for Khartoum, has been freely criticised by the press.
Steadily advanced the English troops over the ridge of sand, firing carefully while the fugitives were within range; then down to the Nile at Gubat, near Matammeh, victorious indeed, but having paid a high price for victory. "If them Arabs takes to shooting straight, and won't come on any more, it strikes me we shall be in a hole," said Thomas Dobbs to Grady.
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