The Long Journey of Cleopatra’s Needle
by Tony Perrottet
London is littered with exotic artworks pillaged during its 19th century heyday as the seat of the British Empire. But certainly no Victorian relic has had a more colorful journey than Cleopatra’s Needle, a 3500-year-old, 68-feet-high ancient Egyptian obelisk that looms, flanked by two bronze sphinxes, in front of the Embankment Gardens by the Thames.
The red marble obelisk was carved in the quarries next to the River Nile in 1380 BC, to honor Pharaoh Thutmose III, and moved by Queen Cleopatra to Alexandria around 40 BC. Rediscovered by archaeologists in the early 1800s, it remained in Egypt until 1877, when the British Government decided that it wanted a suitable memorial to commemorate Lord Nelson’s 1801 victory over Napoleon in Egypt. At the time, Egypt was a British possession, and the authorities easily parted with their national treasures. But the logistics of transporting a 180-ton monument to London were hugely complex. A doctor named Sir William Wilson organized a public fund of £10,000 to build a special cigar-shaped pontoon, called The Cleopatra, for the obelisk, which had to be towed by steamship through the Straits of Gibraltar.
The plan was fraught with mishaps. The boats hit a storm off the coast of France and the Cleopatra was cut loose and abandoned; six crew members of the towing boat were drowned in a rescue effort. (A plaque records their names at the obelisk’s foot today). Miraculously, the Cleopatra did not sink. Instead, after bobbing about for four days, the mysterious iron cigar-boat was found by a Spanish trawler and towed to port.
After endless legal wrangling and more British fund-raising, the sea-battered relic was safely towed by sea the rest of the way to London, where the obelisk was erected in 1878 to great fanfare. Today, it remains less a memorial to Nelson’s hard-won victory than to the obsessive perseverance of the Victorian Age.
