The Stone That Wouldn’t Sink

Six men died trying to reach the strange vessel rolling in the Bay of Biscay. Its crew escaped, but the ancient Egyptian obelisk inside was abandoned. How did Cleopatra’s Needle survive the voyage that nearly destroyed it?

A gift nobody could move

On 14 October 1877, the steamship Olga was towing a remarkable object through a violent storm. Behind her rode an iron cylinder fitted with a cabin, a mast and a rudder. Inside, secured along almost the whole length of the vessel, lay an Egyptian obelisk. The craft had been built around its passenger. It existed to make one delivery.¹

The cylinder was called Cleopatra. Captain Henry Carter commanded it, with a small crew who had to steer and tend a vessel that could neither propel itself nor behave quite like an ordinary ship. The arrangement had carried them out of Alexandria, through the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic. Now the sea was threatening to roll their floating container over.¹

A rescue boat left the Olga. Six men went in it; none returned. Carter and the men aboard Cleopatra were eventually brought to safety, but the cylinder was cast off. The Olga reached England without the monument. The obelisk that Britain had spent decades discussing how to acquire appeared to have been lost before the country could erect it.¹

It had already survived considerably longer than the nation that was expecting it. Cut from Egyptian granite in the reign of Thutmose III, the stone had first stood at Heliopolis. Ramesses II later added his own inscriptions. It was eventually taken to Alexandria, where it formed one of a pair. Its companion now stands in New York.¹²

Cleopatra did not commission either stone. Both were ancient before she was born, and their familiar name obscures that much longer history. Nineteenth-century writers nevertheless found the association irresistible. A monument connected in the public imagination with Egypt’s most famous queen was more immediately marketable than an explanation of successive pharaohs and the relocation of temple furniture.²³

By the time British visitors took an interest, the future London obelisk was lying on its side, increasingly surrounded by sand and building activity. Its original religious setting had gone. It was an antiquity, an obstruction and a potential national trophy, depending on who was looking at it. That last interpretation would determine where it went next.¹²

British troops had wanted to bring it home after the fighting in Egypt in 1801. James King’s later account describes soldiers contributing money and moving the stone a short distance before the attempt stopped. Erasmus Wilson reproduced earlier travellers’ descriptions of its deteriorating surroundings. Neither writer imagined that remaining in Alexandria might itself be a legitimate future for the monument.²³

In 1819, Muhammad Ali, Egypt’s ruler, presented the fallen obelisk to Britain. Acceptance in principle was easier than collection. Governments could admire the gift without finding the money, the ship or the political enthusiasm to move it. The stone remained in Egypt while proposals came and went. Its very immobility became part of its reputation.¹⁴

The practical problem was formidable. Here was a long, tapered block of stone, damaged at its corners and lying beside a shore where an ordinary ship could not conveniently take it aboard. Moving it required more than sufficient lifting power. The engineers had to support it without breaking it, bring it to the water and keep it safe through a long sea passage.¹

Who would accept that risk? In January 1877, an agreement finally gave the question an answer. The engineer John Dixon would undertake the removal and erection. Erasmus Wilson would provide £10,000, payable when the obelisk stood beside the Thames. After more than half a century, Britain’s Egyptian gift had become a private engineering contract.¹³

Building a ship around a stone

Wilson was a distinguished physician with the money and antiquarian enthusiasm to turn a proposal into a project. General Sir James Alexander had pressed the cause of the neglected monument. Dixon offered a method. Wilson’s own account dates the signed agreement to 30 January 1877 and presents the undertaking as a practical conclusion reached after consultation, rather than an impulsive purchase.³

The terms mattered. Dixon was taking the risks of a difficult delivery for an agreed payment. A successful operation would reward his ingenuity, but extra expenditure would not automatically bring extra money. Henry Honychurch Gorringe, the American naval officer who later transported the companion obelisk to New York, described the London contract with admiration for its enterprise and sympathy for its eventual losses.¹

Dixon had alternatives. Gorringe records proposals involving an ordinary ship, a modified vessel and a hopper barge capable of receiving the stone through its bottom. Each addressed a different version of the same problem: how to move an exceptionally awkward object from an exposed shore into a seaworthy carrier. The solution chosen would avoid making the first transfer at all.¹

Instead of lifting the obelisk into a ship, Dixon would put a ship around the obelisk. Iron sections manufactured in England would be sent to Alexandria and assembled around the stone. The resulting cylinder could be rolled into the sea. Once afloat, it would be fitted for its journey and towed to Britain.¹

It was an elegant answer to the difficulty on land. It also imposed an unusual starting condition on everything that followed. A ship normally acquires its shape from the work it must do at sea. This vessel needed first to behave like a huge roller. Its circular cross-section made launching possible, but stability would depend on the position and security of the weight inside.¹

Dixon worked with Benjamin Baker, whom contemporary accounts credit with assistance on the design. The Thames Iron Works Company made the cylinder. Gorringe describes a vessel about 93 feet long and 15 feet in diameter, divided by watertight bulkheads. The obelisk rested on timber cushions intended to protect it from shocks and the small changes of shape a hull experiences in waves.¹

The stone was not simply loose cargo in an iron tube. Its supports and the internal partitions formed a carefully arranged structure. The heavy end faced forward, while the narrowing shaft extended towards the stern. Ballast would lower the combined centre of gravity. The designers were trying to give the cylinder enough resistance to overturning without producing an intolerably violent rolling motion.¹

An Illustrated London News report in March 1877 described the proposed accommodation, steering position and small sails. Its confidence was striking. The sails would help steady the craft; the steamer would provide the towing power. The report treated the available buoyancy as assurance against foundering and anticipated that rolling would be manageable. The ocean had not yet tested either expectation.⁵

There was an important distinction hidden inside that confidence. A vessel could possess enough buoyancy to support its cargo while becoming impossible to live or work aboard. It could also be divided into watertight compartments that offered little protection if their connecting doors were open. Those were separate weaknesses, and the Cleopatra would encounter both.¹

At Alexandria, Waynman Dixon supervised the work around the monument, while Carter took part in the preparations. Timbers and hydraulic jacks helped reposition the stone. Its smaller end was swung towards the alignment required for launching. Then the ground beneath the operation began to yield, and the engineers found something that would later give the voyage an altogether darker association.¹

The remains beneath the obelisk

Gorringe’s account describes a small vault exposed while the obelisk was being moved. It contained jars and human remains, including two skulls. The discovery occurred in a landscape already crowded with buried structures and fragments. Moving the monument was also disturbing the archaeological ground around it. The work could reveal objects even while making their original relationships harder to recover.¹

According to Gorringe, the skulls were subsequently taken aboard Cleopatra. He then reports that they were not seen after the Biscay gale and offers an explanation: perhaps members of the Maltese crew had thrown them overboard through superstition. The distinction is essential. He reports their presence, but he does not identify an eyewitness who saw them being thrown into the sea.¹

Were human remains really carried across the Mediterranean inside the obelisk’s transport vessel? That is what this contemporary history says. Were they discarded to appease some dangerous influence? The same author presents that as a supposition. It is a disturbing detail without needing the second statement to become more certain than its source allows.¹

The launch preparations were equally revealing in less supernatural ways. The shallow water contained large stone blocks. Divers cleared a path, and dynamite was used against substantial masonry farther out. Much of this obstruction belonged to the remains of earlier Alexandria. Getting one antiquity out required engineers to move or destroy parts of the ancient environment around it.¹

The cylinder also needed protection from stones hidden beneath the sand. Large timber rings were strapped around it near its ends, acting as wheels. Planking guided the movement towards the shore. Wire hawsers wound around the hull would turn it as winches pulled, while other lines checked its progress. This was a controlled roll, with considerable weight ready to move if control failed.¹

There was another complication. The off-centre load that would help stabilise the vessel at sea made its movement on land uneven. As the heavy portion passed over the top, it could encourage a sudden lurch. Iron rails were temporarily placed to counterbalance that effect. The launch and the voyage required different arrangements, even though they used the same hull.¹

On 28 August, the operation began before a large crowd. Gorringe describes an extraordinarily slow movement, interrupted by difficulties with the holding ground for the lighters carrying the winches. Their anchors dragged under the load. The hauling ropes were transferred to tugs, whose power kept the cylinder moving. By evening it had entered shallow water, but it was not properly afloat.¹

The following day brought more work and little satisfactory progress. Then came the discovery that explained why the new vessel refused to rise. Water had entered the cylinder. A concealed stone had punctured the hull, and the very design intended to preserve the obelisk had become a container filling around it. The trouble was greater than one damaged compartment.¹

The watertight doors had been left open. Gorringe quotes Dixon acknowledging the oversight in a later lecture. The men had provided bulkheads and doors, but had failed to ensure that the doors were closed. Once the hull was pierced, water could move through the interior. A safeguard existed on the drawing and in the ironwork, yet had not been made effective.¹

“We had provided bulkheads, we had provided water-tight doors through them.” Dixon’s recollection, quoted by Gorringe.¹

The obstruction was removed, the cylinder rolled to expose the damage, and a patch riveted over the hole. Pumping followed. On 7 September, the vessel finally rose and fell with the swell. The obelisk had survived its first immersion. Before Cleopatra had crossed a single stretch of open sea, she had already required a salvage operation of her own.¹

Into the Bay of Biscay

After the launch, Cleopatra was taken round to the harbour and prepared for the work she would actually perform. Bilge keels were added to moderate rolling. The cabin, bridge, mast and rudder were fitted. The temporary balancing arrangements used on shore were removed, and iron ballast was placed inside. The roller was becoming a vessel with a working crew.¹

Gorringe’s account says that this ballast was not properly secured. It is a specific criticism with consequences later in his narrative. It should not be confused with the open doors at the launch. Those had allowed flooding after a puncture. The ballast problem concerned weight that could move inside an otherwise floating hull and change the position in which it would settle.¹

Cleopatra left Alexandria behind Olga on 21 September. Carter commanded the cylinder and Captain Booth the towing steamship. The small craft had steering gear, but depended on the other vessel for forward movement. Whatever the ambitions attached to the stone, the immediate business was the unglamorous one of keeping two differently behaving hulls connected through changing seas.¹

The early voyage offered reasons for confidence. Stops were made at Algiers and Gibraltar. The craft had been designed for this very passage, and it was making it. The obelisk was no longer a proposal awaiting parliamentary interest or a relic half hidden in a yard. It was on its way to London, carried by a novel method that seemed to be working.¹

On 10 October, they rounded Cape St Vincent. The route now led north along the Atlantic side of the Iberian Peninsula towards the Bay of Biscay and the approaches to the Channel. Gorringe describes the weather at the cape favourably, followed by signs of deterioration. On the morning of 14 October, a heavy gale struck from the south-southwest.¹

The cylinder did not steer well even in easier conditions, according to his account. In the storm it yawed, its heading swinging away from the course it should have held. Seas struck the cabin with force enough to threaten it. The problem was becoming more dangerous than an uncomfortable passage: the exposed accommodation and the management of the hull were both at risk.¹

Carter decided that Cleopatra should face the wind and ride to a sea anchor before darkness. A signal went to Olga to cast off. Before the change could be completed, a heavy sea struck. The vessel lurched, the ballast shifted to the lower side and the cylinder went over on its beam ends. The internal arrangement that should have restored her position had changed.¹

The distinction between floating and surviving aboard was now brutally clear. The iron shell could remain at the surface while the men found themselves in a craft leaning dangerously over. They attempted to secure the ballast but could not recover control. Abandonment became the practical answer to a problem that could no longer be solved from inside the cylinder.¹

Even leaving was difficult. Gorringe describes Cleopatra’s own small lifeboat being lowered and smashed beneath the rudder arrangement. An escape route had disappeared almost as soon as it was tried. In a violent sea, with a damaged or unmanageable vessel moving beside another ship, a rescue needed both boats to approach closely enough for people to pass between them.¹

Could the obelisk still have been saved without putting more lives at risk? From the shore, after the event, the sequence can look like a succession of decisions waiting to be judged. Aboard Olga, the immediate concern was that men remained on Cleopatra. Booth called for volunteers. Six sailors answered, and their boat went into the storm.¹

Six men in an open boat

The men were William Askin, James Gardiner, Joseph Benbow, Michael Burns, William Donald and William Patan. Their names survive on the monument by the Thames. They had not sailed to recover treasure from a wreck, and they were not trying to escape from Cleopatra. They went out from the towing vessel to help the men aboard her.¹⁶

Accounts compress the purpose of that attempt differently. The memorial records an effort to succour the crew. Gorringe says Booth hoped the volunteers could help secure the displaced ballast. Both place the boat in the same emergency: Cleopatra was in trouble, and her crew needed help. Neither version supports treating the six deaths as a mysterious disappearance unrelated to the storm.¹⁶

The boat got away from Olga but was overwhelmed near the cylinder. All six men were lost. There is no need to invent their last conversation, a premonition or a struggle witnessed in detail. The surviving account is short. Its brevity is one reason the loss can be overshadowed by the far more elaborate story of the obelisk’s construction and recovery.¹

Carter and his crew were subsequently brought off. Gorringe describes a line thrown over Cleopatra, allowing a boat to be hauled alongside. The rescue that had already cost six lives ultimately succeeded in removing the men who were in immediate danger. Olga then cast off the cylinder and searched for the missing rescuers, without finding them.¹

The two vessels became separated. Cleopatra could not be located again, and Booth concluded that she had foundered. The Olga continued to Falmouth, arriving on 17 October in Gorringe’s chronology. The human survivors came home; the immense stone, its ingenious carrier and everything still inside were believed to have been left to the Atlantic.¹

That was an obvious place for a curse story to begin. An Egyptian monument had been removed from its resting place, human remains had reportedly been disturbed, and sailors had died. The elements could be assembled into a warning about interference with ancient Egypt. But the documented sequence already contained a direct cause of danger: a severe storm and a vessel whose ballast had shifted.¹

Gorringe was not content simply to admire the enterprise. He criticised the unsecured ballast and suggested that Booth might have recovered the cylinder had he stayed nearby. His account deserves attention because he understood moving obelisks at sea. It also deserves caution: expertise and hindsight do not make him an eyewitness to Booth’s decisions during the gale.¹

Was abandonment a failure? The answer depends on what was being saved. Continuing to hold a dangerous tow could expose the towing ship and everyone aboard it. Keeping men on an unmanageable cylinder could cost further lives. The fact that the cargo later survived does not establish that those facing the emergency knew it would, or could safely have remained with it.¹

Nor does the loss of the rescuers prove that the entire design was incapable of making the voyage. Cleopatra had already crossed the Mediterranean. Her hull would survive the Biscay storm. The catastrophe lay in the interaction of weather, handling, internal weight and human exposure. A single verdict about a brilliant invention or a doomed expedition leaves too much out.¹

On the Thames, the inscription preserves the central fact in language less elaborate than the stories that followed: the six men died attempting to help the crew during the storm of 14 October 1877. Their memorial is attached to the object they did not live to see erected. London received both an antiquity and a record of its cost.¹⁶

The abandoned vessel returns

Cleopatra had not sunk. Her loss from Olga’s view was not the same as her disappearance beneath the sea. Somewhere off the Iberian coast, the cylinder remained afloat without its crew. The obelisk was still inside the iron shell. The buoyancy that had proved insufficient to keep men safely aboard was enough to preserve the cargo after they had gone.¹

The steamship Fitzmaurice found the abandoned craft and towed it to the Spanish port of Ferrol. Gorringe places the discovery about seventy miles from that harbour. James King’s shorter account names Vigo instead. The difference is a useful warning: even nineteenth-century retellings close to the event did not preserve every geographical detail consistently.¹²

Ferrol is the harbour named in Gorringe’s detailed engineering history and in the Royal Museums Greenwich account. It is the location used here. The abandoned vessel had become a salvage problem, with another ship and crew entitled to claim payment for recovering it. The return of the stone did not put the project back where it had been before the gale.¹⁷

Gorringe gives a salvage claim of £5,000 and an award of £2,000, then acknowledges conflicting reports in a footnote. The general point is firmer than the exact accounting: recovering Cleopatra imposed additional expense, and the financial consequences were disputed. Dixon’s fixed-price agreement had left him exposed to costs beyond the original plan.¹

There was also a difference between rescuing the cylinder and completing its delivery. It still had to leave Spain, traverse the remainder of the Atlantic route and reach the Thames. The vessel had survived a storm severe enough to cause abandonment. Its continued existence was reassuring, but nobody could now mistake the operation for an uncomplicated tow.¹

A different tug, Anglia, carried out the final stage. The obelisk reached Gravesend on 21 January 1878, the date given by Royal Museums Greenwich. The passage had begun in September of the previous year. Britain’s present had finally reached British waters, after a voyage broken by a gale, six deaths, abandonment, recovery and the delay in Spain.⁷

Arrival did not mean erection. London still had to settle where the monument belonged and prepare a site that would support it. Gorringe describes a prolonged contest of suggested locations, including places near Westminster Abbey and the British Museum. The discussion was partly about how the monument would look among the capital’s existing buildings and memorials.¹

The proposed Westminster position brought another practical objection. It stood over the Metropolitan Railway. According to Gorringe, the railway company wanted continuing indemnity against the risk of the stone breaking through into its tunnel. An object that could cross seas inside an iron cylinder was still capable of causing difficulty when planners tried to give it a permanent address.¹

The chosen site beside the Thames simplified the last movement. Cleopatra could be brought close to where the obelisk would stand, avoiding another long overland journey. A substantial concrete foundation was prepared. The ancient shaft needed a dependable modern base, and the embankment needed protection from the concentrated weight it was about to receive.¹

The cylinder was grounded on a timber cradle. Its cabin was cut away and the hull dismantled around the stone. The ship built to make a single delivery was being taken apart to release it. Hydraulic jacks and traversing machinery brought the obelisk onto the embankment. The voyage was over, but the final act still required lifting an immense horizontal stone into the air.¹

A curse, or a chain of failures?

The engineering account gives an unusually clear route through the disaster. A hidden stone and open compartment doors explain the flooding at launch. A storm and shifting ballast explain the dangerous list at sea. A rescue boat overwhelmed beside the cylinder explains the loss of six men. None of those events requires an additional unseen force to make the sequence intelligible.¹

That does not mean every detail is settled. The catalogue of the London Archives’ Cleopatra’s Needle collection lists memoranda made aboard Olga, letters concerning abandonment, salvage cuttings and expenditure accounts. Those records could sharpen the reconstruction. The catalogue is a guide to surviving documents, not a substitute for examining them. This article has not treated the finding aid as an eyewitness account.⁸

The strongest alternative to a simple tale of bad weather is therefore an argument about preparation and responsibility. Were the rails sufficiently secured? Had the novel craft been adequately tested? Did the towing decisions make matters worse? Gorringe’s criticisms bring those questions into the historical record. Answering them fully would require weighing the crews’ own reports against his retrospective judgement.¹

A second interpretation concerns the larger enterprise. Its promoters described removal as the rescue of a neglected monument and the enrichment of London. Those aims made financial and engineering obstacles worth overcoming. They also placed the acquisition of the stone at the centre of the narrative, with Egyptian ground, buildings and labour appearing mainly as circumstances through which it had to pass.¹³

Wilson’s book is useful precisely because its language makes that outlook visible. He imagined the ancient monument among the institutions and religious landmarks of the British capital. Egypt’s past would acquire a new setting and new associations in London. His enthusiasm was sincere, but it was not a neutral description of what transporting the obelisk meant to everyone involved.³

The curse offers a more dramatic explanation: the removal itself provoked retaliation. Modern folklore accounts connect the deaths and misfortunes with the monument’s disturbed resting place. The reported skulls make an especially effective link between excavation and disaster. They are real features of a contemporary account, but the account’s conjecture about their disposal is not evidence of a supernatural cause.¹⁹

The Haunted Palace’s modern discussion is evidence that the curse story circulates, rather than proof that a curse operated in 1877. An ancient object, a fatal voyage and an unexpected survival make compelling material for folklore. They do not, by themselves, establish that the Egyptians placed a warning on this particular stone or that an unknown power acted on the ships.⁹

Could a curse ever explain why Cleopatra stayed afloat after her crew escaped? The same episode is presented as disaster when the focus is on the rescuers and extraordinary good fortune when the focus is on the cargo. A supernatural account can absorb both outcomes. It supplies atmosphere, but no clear way to distinguish its explanation from the consequences of a storm and a resilient hull.

There is a narrower mystery worth keeping. How did a vessel in such trouble survive after abandonment? The engineering answer is less reassuring than the survival first sounds. The shell retained enough buoyancy, while conditions had made it unsafe for its crew. People and cargo did not face identical risks. The obelisk could endure a position that living men could not.¹

The tragedy does not need to be reduced to a moral about superstition or progress. It involved ambitious engineering, mistakes acknowledged in the contemporary literature, dangerous weather and men trying to help other men. Those are substantial causes and motives. The uncertainty lies in their precise allocation, rather than in whether the six sailors truly died.¹⁶

What London kept

For the final erection, a massive timber framework rose around the horizontal obelisk. An iron jacket gripped the stone, with pivots arranged near its centre of gravity. Hydraulic jacks raised it in stages. The aim was to lift the whole assembly high enough for the stone to turn without its lower end striking the pedestal beneath it.¹

The position of that balance point had to be tested. The surviving shaft was irregular at its damaged base, and the jacket and securing straps added weight of their own. A calculation could guide the work, but the engineers checked it against the object itself. The operation required controlled movement, not simply the ability to pull harder.¹

On 12 September 1878, the obelisk was turned upright before crowds beside the river. Gorringe describes the movement taking about half an hour, followed by lowering onto the pedestal the next day. The date remembered as its erection marks the visible transformation: the stone that had lain in Alexandria and rolled through Biscay was standing in London.¹

The pedestal contained another collection of objects. Gorringe lists contemporary coins, a railway guide, newspapers, religious texts, a map of London, a portrait of Queen Victoria, children’s toys, hairpins and specimens associated with the engineering work. A hydraulic jack also appeared in the inventory. Beneath the Egyptian monument, the Victorians were leaving a small record of themselves.¹

The selection joined the ordinary and the official. A feeding bottle belonged to a different register of life from standards of measurement or a memorial describing the transport. Together, the objects would tell a future discoverer who had raised the stone here and what they thought worth preserving. The imported antiquity had become the cover for a new deposit.¹

The familiar bronze sphinxes were later additions, cast in 1881. They were not ancient companions carried out of Egypt with the obelisk, nor were they waiting beside it when it first stood on the embankment. The setting London recognises today accumulated around the stone after its arrival. Even the appearance of a permanent monument has a chronology.¹

Dixon’s own financial outcome was less triumphant. Gorringe describes insurance litigation and significant losses, while warning that the accounting was difficult to state precisely. The agreed £10,000 was not a reliable total for everything the project eventually cost. Nor did the monument’s successful erection erase the dangerous stages that had preceded it.¹

As of November 2026, Cleopatra’s Needle remains on Victoria Embankment. Its ancient inscriptions preserve the names and claims of Egyptian rulers. The modern inscriptions describe the British gift, its transport and the men who died during the passage. They belong to different periods, but they occupy the same monument, each attempting to establish what should be remembered.¹⁴⁶

For a visitor passing quickly, the obelisk can look like a settled piece of London: tall stone, sphinxes, river, traffic. The names at its base interrupt that view. This object did not simply arrive. People dismantled its surroundings, built a vessel around it, repaired a failed launch, crossed a sea, abandoned it and brought it back.¹

Was it cursed? The evidence gives no reason to make that the explanation. What survives is stranger in a more tangible way. Six rescuers were lost while an ancient stone remained afloat in an empty iron cylinder. The city eventually received the monument it wanted. The sailors commemorated beneath it never reached the destination for which they had sailed.¹⁶