In July 1874 Mary Ann Christian Chadwell – a diarist and distant cousin of mine – rolled up her bedroom carpets in Welbeck Street, London, got her financial affairs in order, acquired a suitable passport and a new diary and set off with a friend from Hastings whom she’d met some years earlier in Florence. The next four months saw the two women taking trains across northern Europe, sometimes stopping to see the sights, then pottering about the Swiss Engadine and to some lesser-known Alpine villages like St Moritz, finally reaching Pesth where they boarded a paddle steamer due to sail down the Danube, bound for the Black Sea. After an interesting voyage and a short stay in Constantinople (both experienced by Mary Ann for the second time), the pair crossed to Alexandria where they planned to take a steamer up the Nile.

Reading between the lines in Mary Ann’s diary, which is voluble about places seen but generally silent where personal thoughts and feelings were concerned, she and Emily Ripley were not ideal companions but both were intrepid and they shared a fascination with the outlandish hurly burly of unfamiliar foreign places. At Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, where they stayed a few nights and where Nile bookings could be made, Mary Ann bumped into a man from Wellingborough who turned out to be a neighbour of a friend of hers. Mr Blott was in Egypt for a second time with his wife and two teenage sons and had just engaged a dahabeeyah – the beautiful traditional Nile sailing ship – for their trip up river to see the archaeological and scenic sights. To the women’s great delight, he offered them tiny cabins on the ship, an opportunity they had felt was quite beyond their means. Two American men were also joining the party, the ship having one large double cabin and seven small ones, as well as a bath. Its generously proportioned saloon was painted white and gold and had green and gold brocade sofas. Mary Ann pronounced it clean and pretty and the arrangement was settled. Shopping for good hats followed as well as the ordering bottles of wine for the journey which would last five months.

According to census records William Blott was born at Higham Ferrers, and farmed 317 acres, employing 12 men and 4 boys at Poplars, Gold Street, Wellingborough; he was also ‘corn merchant and butcher’ and his business was successful enough to afford him and his family the luxury of distant travel.  His background was probably considerably different to Mary Ann’s and Emily’s, but as a practical man with his own tool kit, they appreciated the time and effort he spent fixing shelving into the various cabins in the ‘Bessie Kamak’ and generally making things ship-shape. Mrs Blott, (actually Georgina, but no Christian names saw light of day in Mary Ann’s diary,) rarely got a mention over the months of the trip but there were several remarks about Mrs Blott’s fear and trepidation at moments when Mary Ann was sensing exhilaration or fascination.  Relations within the confines of the dahabeeyah were not always to prove easy but Mary Ann’s experiences over the next few months were to give her – and all the other visitors on the boat - countless evocative memories which in her case would last her for several decades. [She died in 1909 when she was 93 and her diary came to a halt shortly before her death.]

To start with, the workings of the ship were of immense interest but it took time before Mary Ann could list by name and office the 17-strong crew. There was a Captain or ‘Reis’, a cook with a boy, a steersman, a First Officer, a camel man, a washerman with some underlings and the remainder were just crew, to some of whom Mary Ann gave nicknames, such as ‘singer’, ‘the unruly’ or ‘handsome man’.  More important than all of these was Ibrahim Ismail, the ship’s dragoman or manager, who directed operations with the help of two servants. A traveller on the Nile a few months later described the Nile dragoman’s role: “The great worry of the voyager in Egypt is about (choosing) a dragoman; his comfort and pleasure depend very much upon a right selection..... Ignorant of the language and of the character of the people, the stranger may well be in a maze of doubt and perplexity.  His gorgeously attired dragoman, whose recommendations would fit him to hold combined the offices of President of the American Bible Society and caterer for Delmonico, often turns out to be ignorant of his simplest duties, to have an inhabited but uninhabitable boat, to furnish a meagre table and to be a sly knave.” Mr Blott had not fallen into this trap.

The pastoral scenes along the Nile were endlessly enchanting to Mary Ann but she soon had to become immune to the regular jaunts by male members of the visiting party who liked to be taken in the ‘sandal’ (a small nippy sailing boat which they towed) to sand banks or to the shore for shooting. It saddened her seeing herons, cormorants, sand grouse, spoonbills and bee-eaters being skinned for later stuffing and displaying in cases back home, although some of the birds were cooked and produced at table.  As time went on she became used to dead animals on board and by the end of the journey she was helping to skin them and even musing on the possible effect that striking bird feathers would produce in a hat. She noted down – though probably didn’t follow up - the names of taxidermist and hatter to whom she could go in London and, at one point in later life, she made a fire screen as a wedding present, using brilliantly coloured feathers from the Nile. Arthur and Henry Blott liked to shout across the river whenever they passed high cliffs on the bank - the louder the echoes the better. The boys were also prone to inscribing their names on ancient stones, a well-established practice but one which by this time was deplored by lovers of Egypt and its ancient history. Boys will be boys of course and guests on the boat will have shrunk from criticising the Blott family. Arthur would later become a solicitor; Henry was to die at the age of 20.

Only five days into their trip south, a squall split their mast. They drifted down to the town of Minieh where Mr Blott failed to persuade the Governor to do the necessary to have it repaired immediately. Instead, he insisted they must wait several days for a replacement mast to come by train from Cairo. Far from being a patient man, this was the first of many fracas when Mr Blott argued vociferously with the ship’s Captain, crew members or Egyptians on shore. Many weeks on, Mary Ann, rarely one to air her opinions on others in her diary, could contain herself no longer and wrote that Mr Blott was not a gentleman! His bullying demands led on occasion to the beating of crew members by the Captain – one such hiding lost a sailor two teeth and he temporarily ran off into the desert. Mary Ann always came down on the side of the men, who worked incredibly hard, slept on the icy decks in winter and were invariably polite and kind to all the visitors. They sometimes handed her chunks of their delicious fresh bread which was a staple for them but was off the menu for the tourists. On the other hand meals were always good and varied, and she enjoyed following Ibrahim when he walked into town or village to pick up food – turkeys, chickens, geese, sugar, eggs, fruit, vegetables, charcoal and dates were often bought and there was the occasional purchase of a sheep. Sometimes the English party were so besieged by curious villagers that the crew had to chase them off with sticks. On one occasion the town Governor’s black slave took no time at all to dispatch the crowd with a whip. But there were also occasional kind-hearted invitations into people’s very basic houses or huts and there were gifts of dates, a rush basket, camels’ teeth and other souvenirs.

There were regular stops for archaeology though many more on the return journey, when the river’s flow was in their favour. Mr Blott, for one, had Murray’s Guide - the ‘Handbook for Travellers in Egypt’ – and possibly ‘Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians’, both by Sir John Gardner Wilkinson, a man whom Mary Ann had met in the 1850s when she had worked as a governess in the household of a Lord of the Realm.  Whether Mary Ann had her own guide or borrowed one, she was well informed about the places they saw, even where they were unexcavated and half buried in sand. At Aswan the ‘Bessie Kamak’ had to be manhandled up through the First Cataract – a thrilling feat of endurance for the crew and the local teams of men who engineered the raising of ships up through the rapids, and even endurance on the part of the English party watching with bated breath from the rocks to the side. A great number of the ancient sites, as well as countless villages described in the diary, from this point onwards are no longer to be seen. They lie at the bottom of Lake Nasser, with only a relatively small number of them having been rescued from the flooded section of the Nile valley.

At one point on the return journey rumours got about the small community of dahabeeyah travellers that Prince Arthur, third son of Queen Victoria, was on the Nile and they speculated which dahabeeyah or steamer might be his. Some days later they came upon a small steamer stranded on a sandbank. It was carrying the Prince’s retinue, while he travelled by dahabeeyah. The ‘Bessie Kamak’s crew helped with the irksome business of refloating the boat and the men were later rewarded with a package of cash from the Prince, sent with his note of gratitude to Mr Blott.

The last few days of the Nile trip were rushed as daily temperatures soared and tempers were frayed. Mary Ann, always placid, did her best to mediate when trouble arose. They all gladly skipped the pyramids which could be seen from Cairo and on their last night on board, played whist with glasses of champagne to hand. The crew got pay from each of the travellers on the final morning, Mr Blott having done the sums, and there were fond farewells too and a grand photograph including all the company. Mr Blott refused the Captain a letter of reference, accusing him of having been too weak with his men, but when the poor man came to Shepheard’s Hotel and pleaded for a testimonial, the Americans, Mary Ann and Emily had no hesitation in giving him their resounding recommendations.