London's Egyptian obelisk nearly sank off Spain inside an iron ship built around it
To get a 3,400-year-old obelisk from Alexandria to the Thames, engineers sealed it inside a floating iron tube with a rudder and a mast and towed it out to sea. A storm in the Bay of Biscay forced the crew to cut it loose, and six sailors died trying to reach it. Days later Spanish fishermen found it still drifting.
The granite came from Aswan, and the column was first raised at Heliopolis around 1450 BC on the orders of Thutmose III, whose inscriptions run down the middle of each face. Some two centuries later Ramesses II added columns of text celebrating his victories. In 12 BC, under Augustus, the Romans moved it to the Caesareum at Alexandria. At some point it toppled, and lying buried in sand protected most of its carvings from the weather. The link with Cleopatra is only a nickname; the stone predates her by well over a thousand years.
Muhammad Ali, ruler of Egypt, offered it to Britain in 1819 to mark victories over the French at the Nile and Alexandria, but the government would not pay to ship it. The anatomist Sir William Wilson finally put up about 10,000 pounds in 1877. John Dixon designed a cylinder 92 feet long, nicknamed Cleopatra, which was assembled around the stone and set off behind the ship Olga that September.
After the storm of 14 October, the Olga rescued the cylinder's crew and reported it lost. A Glasgow steamer towed it to Ferrol and claimed salvage, eventually settled at 2,000 pounds, before a tug brought it to the Thames in January 1878, when Gravesend schoolchildren got a holiday. A site outside Parliament was tried with a wooden mock-up and rejected, and the obelisk went up on the Victoria Embankment on 12 September 1878. Under it lies a time capsule holding cigars, hairpins, a baby's bottle, a railway timetable and photographs of a dozen celebrated beauties of the day.
Two bronze sphinxes were added in 1881, apparently installed facing the wrong way. A German bomb on 4 September 1917 left shrapnel scars on the western one, which have been kept as a memorial.
Source: Cleopatra's Needle, London
