Invasions of Gaza and Jaffa, from Napoleon to Muhammad Ali

Alderson, Ralph Carr. Notes on Acre and some of the Coast Defences of Syria. (In): Papers on Subjects Connected With the Duties of the Corps of Royal Engineers.

€ 2,800.00

A detailed and illustrated record of British and French attacks on Acre, Jaffa, and Gaza from 1799 to 1840. Written by Ralph Carr Alderson (d. 1849), a lieutenant-colonel in the Corps of Royal Engineers who had recently visited Ottoman Syria and Palestine and personally sketched the scenes illustrated in plates of Gaza, Jaffa, Haifa, and Acre. His plates are quite fine, with "Gaza from Samson's Mount with the Egyptian Encampment" used as the frontispiece for the entire volume (the full book itself covering a variety of international and domestic projects of the Corps of Royal Engineers, of which Alderson's chapter is of the greatest importance).

Alderson's text covers important historical ground, but his footnotes - which take up whole pages - are of even greater interest, being based on his personal observations of towns and fortifications as of 1841. Gaza he describes as "the principal town on the southern frontier of Syria", of great strategic importance and "the first place where an invading army from the south can receive supplies after crossing the Desert", which is "surrounded by gardens which produce fruit in abundance, and the prickly pear hedges grow to such an immense size that troops might be bivouacked or encamped in the gardens in the plain [...] surrounded by a natural abatis perfectly impenetrable." This careful approach to detail is levelled on topics of all kinds, such as the earthworks surrounding fort of El Arish, the ruins and weather of Ascalon, and Jaffa's harbour ("only adapted for vessels of small draught" but serving as "the sea-port of Jerusalem").

A sweeping history of invasion by the French, the Egyptians, and the Ottomans, annotated with an engineer's eye for detail.