Past Perfect: Over the Bounding Main

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Celebrating the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the Ottoman viceroy in Egypt made a gesture of pharaonic proportions: He bequeathed a 3,500-year-old obelisk, now called Cleopatra’s Needle, to the United States. This 70-foot-high, 193-ton granite stela was one of a pair of obelisks erected by Thutmose III (1479–1425 B.C.) in front of a sun temple in Heliopolis, near Cairo; 1,500 years later the two were floated down the Nile to Alexandria to grace a Roman temple to Julius Caesar. (In 1801 one of these obelisks was presented to the British, who erected it on the banks of the Thames.) In 1878 a 37-year-old U.S. naval commander, Henry Honeychurch Gorringe (above), was selected to deliver Cleopatra’s Needle to New York’s Central Park. Gorringe was exactly the man for this daunting, if somewhat ludicrous, task. The son of a Swedish missionary to Barbados, he ran away to sea at age 14, traveled the world, and was even shipwrecked off the coast of India. In 1862 he enlisted in the Union navy; after the war, he made lieutenant commander and was given an old steamer charged with mapping Mediterranean coastlines. Once plans were made to transport Cleopatra’s Needle to the United States—that is, once William H. Vanderbilt agreed to finance the project—Gorringe was called into service. Faced with vacillating Egyptian officials, drunken sailors and uncooperative equipment, he managed to erect the stela in Central Park near the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where it still stands) on January 22, 1881. Gorringe published his memoir, Egyptian Obelisks (from which the quotations on the following pages are taken), in 1882, and he resigned from the navy the following year. He then became the owner of a ranch in the Dakota territory and even convinced Teddy Roosevelt to try buffalo hunting. Still in character, Henry Honeychurch Gorringe died at the age of 44 while attempting to climb aboard a moving train. His grave near Nyack, New York, is marked by an obelisk-shaped monument.—Ed.

Celebrating the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the Ottoman viceroy in Egypt made a gesture of pharaonic proportions: He bequeathed a 3,500-year-old obelisk, now called Cleopatra’s Needle, to the United States. This 70-foot-high, 193-ton granite stela was one of a pair of obelisks erected by Thutmose III (1479–1425 B.C.) in front of a sun temple in Heliopolis, near Cairo; 1,500 years later the two were floated down the Nile to Alexandria to grace a Roman temple to Julius Caesar. (In 1801 one of these obelisks was presented to the British, who erected it on the banks of […]