In her introductory blog Deirdre discussed Charles Edwin Wilbour, the American Egyptologist whose collections form the backbone of the Museum’s Egyptian holdings. This post is about Wilbour’s interest in Egypt. Some of the photographs and documents illustrated here are in the Library Display Cases at the Brooklyn Museum until May 2010.
Wilbour spent his winters in Egypt, working at sites throughout the country from 1880 until his death in 1896. Wilbour travelled from site to site by train, postal steamer, or hitching a lift on the steamer belonging to the Department of Antiquities. By the time of his visit in 1886, however, he had decided to buy a dahabiya (houseboat), which would accommodate him, his visiting family, and his library in greater comfort.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Wilbour’s calling card. Charles E. Wilbour Archival Collection, [9.4.026], Notebook 3A
Travelling by dahabiya was simple: you used the prevailing wind to sail upstream (south), and drifted downstream (north) with the current. This method had changed little over millennia—the Egyptian hieroglyph for ‘travel north’ is a boat with its sail furled, and ‘travel south’ a boat with its sail raised.
Wilbour never regretted the purchase of The Seven Hathors: “Greece and Italy are delightful, but the moment when I feel twice as much alive comes to me when the Nile banks begin to slide past the dahabiya from Bedresheyn to Aswan.”
The following excerpts from Wilbour’s letters to his mother and aunt show his acquisition of The Seven Hathors, and its maiden voyage:
Cairo
November 29, 1886
Thursday Arminius the Copt came to my terms about his dahabiya, declared before witnesses that she was mine, and I went over to raise the Stars and Stripes on her. … We have in the house part a space 16 2/3 feet by 54 feet, just nine hundred square feet, and on the deck about seven hundred feet more covered in by canvas. Below I have to stretch a little to reach the ceiling, so there is no danger of Dora bumping her high hat. I think we shall be comfortable and only wish you had an Enchanted Carpet to transport you suddenly to this Land of the Sun.
Cairo
Monday December 13, 1886
They [Wibour’s wife Charlotte (‘Lottie’), their children, Victor, Evelyn, and Dora, and Evelyn’s husband Ned] arrived Wednesday after a bad voyage and ever since Lottie and I have been running about buying the things for housekeeping. You may get almost everything here, but you have to bargain which takes time.
Lantern Slide Collection: Views, Objects: Egypt. General Views\People [selected images]. View 051: Egypt – Market at Kasr-en-Nil., n.d., T. H. McAllister, Manufacturing Optician. 49 Nassau Street, New York. Brooklyn Museum Archives (S10|08 General Views_People, image 9794).
They are all very much pleased with the boat and instead of wanting to wait and see the splendours of Cairo are anxious to be off up the river. There are yet carpenters and plumbers and painters at work, but Victor says that it seems like home. Lottie is already speaking of the things she will put over to do next year and so her occupation in Egypt which was to be for this winter only, seems already growing to be like the English. We go out mostly afternoons to the boat and see the sunset there, which is gorgeous.
Lantern Slide Collection: Views, Objects: Egypt. General Views\People [selected images]. View 088: Egypt – Sunset on the Nile., n.d. Brooklyn Museum Archives (S10|08 General Views_People, image 9831).
… We have held Council over the boat’s name and have concluded to call her The Seven Hathors. It lends itself to hieroglyphic decoration and Egyptians will call her “Seven,” Seba. We find the Seven Hathors on most of the more perfect temples. In the sky they are the Pleiades. Being a wooden boat she would almost float if full of water, but in order to make a life boat I am having four hundred empty petroleum cans sealed up to be put in her holds at its sides. If she should ever fill with water they will lift seven tons and so prevent her from sinking. I have done this so that Lottie might sleep better…
Seven Hathors
December 20, 1886
We came on board Saturday the eighteenth and have not digested our trunks. And yesterday we took on board four hundred dollars worth of provisions, so you see we have a considerable chaos …
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Wilbour’s Notebooks: cover and supply list for the Houseboat. Charles E. Wilbour Archival Collection Notebook 2N, Notebook 2O and Notebook 3C.
Approaching Beni Suef
December 29, 1886
… Lottie has been struggling this far with our belongings and the rear room is beginning to get into shape. The deck is still pretty much chaos… We bought an eight-dollar sewing machine and Dora has been running it today. The Library is still encumbered with many eatables. But the machine begins to work and when we got back from Saqqara Lottie said she was glad to get “home”. It is a pleasure to have a moving house and ours is as big as the one Columbus first crossed in.
Tuesday January 4, 1887
We sailed to Bibbeh, where next morning we visited the Coptic Convent and Ned made a sketch in the Church of it… New Year’s Day we put up our streamer. The blue end of it was a cook’s apron. A Hathor hieroglyphic is applied to it in white and then on the white and red streamers below is a hieroglyphic 7, thus:
Brooklyn Museum. Wilbour Library of Egyptology. Travels in Egypt: Letters of Charles Edwin Wilbour (Brooklyn, 1936), p. 418.
Altogether it is our American colors adapted to our Seven Hathors name. When we get where there are good Pharaonic Hathors to copy Ned will do something for the decoration of the boat. At Minya we hope to find letters, and butter from Isigny in France, sent up from Cairo by post. Hitherto I have not eaten butter in Egypt. Even at Shepheard’s Hotel they do not have good butter…
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Thank you for this fascinating post. Wilbour’s houseboat excursion sounds like an idyllic existence. What could be better than to while away the days cruising on the Nile examining ancient monuments with family and friends? Alas, one would have to be a Hedge Fund Manager these days to afford such a lifestyle. Do the records indicate how Mr. Wilbour came to be able to afford such a life of leisure and scholarly activity? Thanks.
Hi Clem,
From a wealthy New England family, Wilbour was certainly a man of considerable means, and his family had a strong philanthropic streak – as well as Brooklyn, Wilbour endowments have benefited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Brown University.
Wilbour seems to have made his money in the 1860s in journalism, as manager of the New York Tribune, president of the New York Printing Company, and stenographer and examiner of accounts in the New York Superior Court stenographer. These posts were controlled by the Tweed Ring. Wilbour was not an inner member of the Ring, but clearly felt that he should keep a low profile after the worst of its corruption was exposed: he left New York for Paris in the early 1870s, and didn’t return to the US until 1881. He never again spent more than a few months over here.
For more information on Wilbour, and the history of Egyptology in the US, John Wilson’s Signs and Wonders Upon Pharaoh (Chicago, 1964) is a readable account widely available from online booksellers, and can also be downloaded free online from the Oriental Institute of Chicago here:
http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/pubs/catalog/misc/signs.html
a shorter account of Wilbour’s career and the founding of the Wilbour Library is here:
http://www.archaeology.org/online/reviews/wilbour/
Amazing and fascinating entry. The list of provisions appears to include gin and fois gras! Good for them!
Actually, Wilbour was in fairly deep with the Tweed Ring. The New York Printing Company was a scheme set up by Wilbour, Tweed and two other cronies, and it instantly was awarded (by Tweed) all the printing business for the City and County of New York. They charged what might be thought of as exhorbitant rates; after an initial investment of $10,000 each, the Company returned each investor around $75,000 the first year. Even sweeter was Wilbour’s editorship of the New York Transcript, a newspaper Tweed owned which printed all official city notices. With a circulation of less than 100 copies per issue, in 1869 the City paid $534,000 for advertising in it. When the Ring went down, the Printing Company was foreclosed by the Receiver for the Ocean National Bank (another Tweed operation); the Receiver was a New York lawyer named Theodore Davis, whose Egyptological collection went to the Metropolitan when he died.
oooh! that was so fascinating… I felt like I was there on the barge while Wilbour was jotting down notes in his journal. And to think his wife is wearing a “tall hat” on the barge down the Nile! Fashion demands us to look spritely where ever we find ourselves! Thank you, Tom, the diary snippets you choose help me to see Wilbour’s personality.
Linda
Thank you for the extra information, John – for me it’s an interesting Egyptological coincidence that Theodore Davis turns up as well.
Do you have a reference handy for the sums you mention? We’d like to be able to add it to our files on Wilbour.
The primary source is an indictment/forensic accounting document put together by Samuel Tilden, which put Tweed away; it was published in the New York Times on October 26, 1871, the same day Tweed was arrested. Also, see articles in the Times on October 23, 1871 for the Printing Company and December 8, 1873, for the Transcript. Best single book on the subject (which mentions Wilbour) is Kenneth Ackerman’s “Boss Tweed” (Carroll & Graf, 2005).