Gordon, CHARLES GEORGE ('Gordon Pasha'), was born at Woolwich, 28th January 1833, fourth son of General Gordon, Royal Artillery, by his wife Elizabeth Enderby, and descended from the Gordons of Park, a cadet branch of the House of Huntly. From school at Taunton he passed in 1847 to the Military Academy, Woolwich; in 1852 entered the Royal Engineers; and saw his first active service in the trenches before Sebastopol, where he served from January 1855 to the end of the siege, being once slightly wounded. After the fall of the south side Gordon proceeded to Kinburn, returned again to Sebastopol, and was employed in the demolition of the docks and destruction of the forts; and he was subsequently engaged in surveying the new frontier between Turkey and Russia in Europe and Asia. In 1860 he went to China and took part in the capture of Peking and the destruction of the famous Summer Palace near that city. In 1863 he was appointed to the command of a Chinese force officered by Europeans and Americans, and during that and the following year was engaged almost incessantly against the Taiping rebels in the rich provinces of Cheh-kiang and Chiang-sü. In two campaigns he fought thirty-three actions and took numerous walled towns, crushing the formidable rebellion which had so long wasted the fairest provinces of China. This feat of arms achieved in the space of eighteen months, and at a cost of only £200,000, placed the young major of engineers in the foremost rank of the soldiers of his day.
Returning from China in 1865, 'as poor as when he had entered it,' he was appointed to the ordinary engineer duties at Gravesend, where he remained for six years, devoting the greater part of his spare moments to relieving the want and misery of the poor, visiting the sick, teaching, feeding, and clothing the many waifs and strays among the destitute boys of the town, and providing employment for them on board ship. In 1872 he quitted Gravesend for Bulgaria, where he remained as commissioner on the Danube for nearly two years.
At the close of 1873 he accepted employment under Ismail, Khedive of Egypt, and, proceeding to the Soudan, took up the work which Sir Samuel Baker had begun two years earlier—that of opening up the vast regions of the equatorial Nile, and the lakes which recent exploration had discovered. In these distant and unhealthy regions he remained for three years, overcoming by extraordinary energy and resolution all difficulties of nature, hostile man and climate. A chain of posts was established along the Nile; steamers were brought from Egypt in sections, put together above the last rapid, and the navigation of Lake Albert Nyanza successfully accomplished. Underlying all this labour there was in Gordon's mind a purpose beyond gain or exploration. It was the abolition of the slave-trade which heretofore had been the one great object of Soudanese commerce. Discovering that his efforts to suppress this trade must remain unsuccessful unless his power extended to the vast plain countries lying west of the Nile basin—Kordofan and Dar-Für—Gordon returned to Egypt and England in 1876.
Going out again in January 1877, he was appointed by the Khedive sole governor of the entire Soudan, with unlimited powers over a region that stretched from the second cataract of the Nile to the Great Lakes, and from the Red Sea to the head-waters of the streams that fall into Lake Tchad. During the next three years he traversed in all directions this vast territory. Now he was settling a frontier dispute with the Abyssinian feudatories in the east; now swooping down with scanty escorts upon some slave raider or rebellious chieftain in western Dar-Für. For months together he seemed to live on the back of his camel. Neither the numbers of his enemies nor the fiercest sun of terrible deserts could check his energy. His presence, multiplied by incessant toil into twenty times the reality, awed the wild tribes into obedience, and for the first time in its history the Soudan seemed to feel that law and justice were united with government. Early in 1880 all this ceased. Gordon resigned his command. A great change was coming in Lower Egypt, and it was evident that under the new system which was being inaugurated at Cairo there could be no place for such a master. A short visit to India, continued on to the old scene of his first famous enterprise in China, filled up the greater portion of 1880; but the close of the year found Gordon in Ireland intent upon relieving the almost chronic unhappiness of that island. Struck with the terrible scenes of poverty which he witnessed in the south and west of the island, he propounded a scheme of land-law improvement, which, although then met with ridicule or silence, has since been largely made the basis of legislation; but these views did not tend to make their holder acceptable in the eyes of authority, and, to escape the necessity of accepting some insignificant routine appointment at home, Gordon volunteered to take another officer's duty in the Mauritius, where for another year he remained unnoticed and unthought of.
From Mauritius Gordon proceeded to the Cape in colonial employment, and finally returned to England in the close of 1882. Almost the whole of the following year was spent by him in Palestine in unbroken quiet and reflection. Early in 1884 he was asked by the British government to proceed once more to the Soudan, where the events which had taken place in Egypt since he quitted it four years before had given rise to a long catalogue of catastrophe. The Moslem populations had risen in revolt, defeating the armies of Egypt and isolating her garrisons. To remove these garrisons from the Soudan was the primary object of Gordon's mission; that accomplished, he was to proclaim the separation of the country from Egyptian rule. But all this was changed by the hard logic of facts. A month after Gordon reached Khartoum that place was invested by the troops of the Mahdi, the leader of the Soudan revolt. Then began what may truly be called the supremely heroic period of Gordon's life. The world seemed to recognise that a great man was in the throes of a great peril. In an age when merit is rarely found unobtrusive, and when genius is apt to exhibit its light on the house-top, Gordon, whose whole life had been one endeavour to depreciate his own merit and to deny himself the glory of his actions, became at once the centre of perhaps the widest attention given in our time to one man. After the siege of Khartoum had lasted five months a relief expedition was organised in England. In September the advance up the Nile began. Early in November the troops entered the Soudan at the Second Cataract, the greater portion of the expedition moving in boats built in England for the passage of the upper cataracts, many of which had never been navigated by any craft. After two months of very arduous labour the advance, crossing the desert from Korti, and finding at the latter place some of Gordon's steamers, arrived in the end of January 1885 in the neighbourhood of Khartoum. It was too late. The place had been taken by the Mahdi two days earlier. Gordon had fallen. One thing, however, was gained by the toil and blood of this expedition. It was the journal kept by Gordon during the latter half of the siege. From this journal he stands before us—as in no other way could he have been revealed to us—a wonderful instance of courage, faith, resolution, and humility; a man from whose life and death we gather that, amid all the change of science and system, the mould in which the true hero is cast remains the same.
See Andrew Wilson's Ever Victorious Army (1868); Birkbeck Hill's Gordon in Central Africa (1881); Gordon's own Reflections in Palestine (1884), Last Journals (1885), and Letters to his Sister (1888); and the Lives of him by Hake (The Story of Chinese Gordon, 2 vols. 1884-85), Arch. Forbes (1884), by his brother, Sir Henry Gordon (1886), Sir W. F. Butler (1889), D. Boulger (1896), and the books on the Egyptian Soudan by Ohrwalder (trans. 1892) and Slatin Pasha (trans. 1896).