Napoleon's Egypt: Invading The Middle East - Reenactor.ru

9THE FESTIVAL OF THE REPUBLICThe northeast remained insecure, and the unstable situation threatenedFrench control of Egypt’s easternmost Mediterranean port and entrepôtfor Delta rice crops, Damietta. “Daily,” Niello Sargy reported, “theArabs attacked our boats on Manzala Lake, pillaged them, and assassinated the escorts.”1 The Bedouin who formed the political power in the northeasternprovinces of the Delta allied with the peasant fishermen who controlled the 700-square-mile lagoon known as Lake Manzala. The lake was important to theFrench as a transportation route, and only by controlling it could they secureDamietta, an important port city that it abutted. The villagers along the shores ofthis enormous lagoon and on the Matariya Islands, an archipelago within it, wereskilled sailors and fishermen. General Andréossi, who was later charged to reconnoiterthis body of water, reported that they owned some five or six hundred skiffsthat had a monopoly on the right to navigate the lake or fish in it. “Along with theBedouin, they were the tyrants of the lake and the riverine lands.” They owedtheir allegiance to the great tax farmer (multazim) Hasan Tubar. The French sawTubar, whose family had produced the paramount chieftains in that area for fouror five generations, as the instigator of the revolts in the northeast.The brackish water of the lagoon became fresh during the annual inundationof the Nile. It was between three and eight feet deep, and well stocked withfish. The Matariya villagers, owing to their relative isolation, had not had anoutbreak of plague for thirty years, unlike the rest of the country, which had sufferedfrom several debilitating epidemics. One had devastated Cairo as recentlyas 1791. Still, Millet reported that the swamps produced other fevers “that arequite frequent.” About 1,100 men lived in the isles, not counting their wives andchildren. They dwelled in huts, built of adobe or sometimes kiln-hardenedbricks, that covered every square inch of the islands.