Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff

Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff is a 2007 travel memoir by American author Rosemary Mahoney. The book recounts Mahoney’s attempt to row solo up the Nile River, in the face of many challenges, from the tough climate to the sexism of Egyptian boatmen, who cannot believe or accept that Mahoney wishes to row, much less do so alone. An experienced travel writer, Mahoney’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Award.

Mahoney recounts the genesis of her madcap dream to row the Nile. As a tourist in Egypt, she took a barge along the river from Aswan (a typical tourist activity) and fell in love with the landscape of the Nile. Returning to Egypt to fulfill her dream, she immediately encounters challenges. First, the climate is not conducive to rowing: "When I removed my hat, the sun had made the top of my head sting... it was like having a freshly baked nail driven into one's skull."

The bigger obstacle, however, is cultural: Egypt’s Islamic culture severely circumscribes what women are allowed to do (and, indeed, what behavior on the part of women men are allowed to condone). She initially finds that none of the (exclusively male) salesmen along the river will sell her a boat as a solo woman.



Mahoney recruits her friend Madeleine Stein, a teacher at Cairo University who speaks fluent Arabic. Together the two women devise an elaborate story: Mahoney convinces a boat-owner that her husband is asleep in a nearby hotel room. She wants to surprise him, when he wakes, with the gift of a rowboat.

The story works, but immediately Mahoney encounters her next hurdle. She needs a felucca (riverboat) to tow her out onto the river, but she cannot find a felucca captain who will agree to do it.

Finally, she befriends a Nubian man, Amr, who offers her the use of his rickety rowboat, but insists that he and Madeleine must follow him in his felucca for her safety. Although Amr, as a Nubian, has experienced prejudice in Egyptian society himself, he is still amazed by the women’s conduct: “Nubian woman would not be doing nothing. Nothing. They should only be staying home and minding the house.”



Mahoney rows some of the distance with Amr, before she and Madeleine manage to buy a skiff. Mahoney proceeds alone, finally having the experience she imagined.

As she proceeds, Mahoney has many encounters with Egyptians (mostly men). She learns that, as a Western woman, she belongs to a category all her own, neither truly female nor male: “Not Nubian, not Muslim, not Egyptian – these facts conspired to disqualify me entirely from the female category. What mattered for a Muslim woman could never really matter for me. In Egypt, a western woman would never truly be a woman, nor did she quite approach the status of a man; instead, her identity was more like that of a pleasant or irrelevant animal like, say, a peahen or a manatee.”

Because of this status, Mahoney finds that men are eager to discuss sexual matters with her in a way they never would with Egyptian women. She meets a male prostitute who tells her that all white women are prostitutes. He is outraged when Mahoney suggests that white women want to have sex with him, and as the one who is paid, he is the prostitute.



Finally, in frustration at being constantly accosted by Egyptian men (hailing her “You look like an Argentine; you look like an English, a cat, a bird”), Mahoney decides to disguise herself as a man. She dons loose white clothing and makes a turban from her shirt, and she continues undisturbed to the end of her journey: the point where rowing further is dangerous.

Throughout her travelogue, Mahoney quotes from the accounts of previous travelers on the Nile, including Winston Churchill, Napoleon Bonaparte, and William Golding. She focuses particularly on two Edwardian-era travelers: the novelist Gustave Flaubert and the pioneering nurse Florence Nightingale. Mahoney delights in the paraphernalia of Edwardian travel: elaborate dinners, lashings of alcohol, suitcases full of books and palatial riverside hotels. She notes the writers’ colonial attitudes and reflects on what has changed and what hasn’t.

Exploring themes of cultural difference, sexism, and determination in the face of adversity, Down the Nile was a National Book Award Critics’ Circle Best Book of 2007, and reviewers hailed the book as “travel writing at its most enjoyable” (Publishers’ Weekly).