Height: 26cm (10in)
Semi-spherical cast iron cannonball fragment mounted on a decorative tripod base of weighted silvered brass on a circular base. The fragment mounted with silvered liner, the rim decorated with foliate border and inscribed ‘Piece of shell picked up at Alexandria + After the bombardment. July 12th 1883’.
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In 1882 bankrupt Egypt was under the dual control of Britain and France when a nationalist Egyptian army officer, Urabi Pasha, led a rebellion against the Khedive to rid the country of European influence. After the murder of some 60 Europeans, the British and French intervened to protect the Suez Canal and other interests. Between 11 and 13 July 1882 a naval squadron under Sir Beauchamp Seymour bombarded the city and destroyed the Forts of Alexandria with Palliser shells and other modern ordnance. The present cannonball relic is more likely to be Egyptian rather than British and belonging of Colonel Urabi’s obsolete coastal guns. In a dispatch written on board the flagship Invincible, Sir Beauchamp Seymour mentions the presence of smoothbore guns that could have used such ammunition: viz - ‘Major Tulloch, Welsh Regiment, attached to my staff, and Mr. Hardy, midshipman, in charge of the boat, who got on shore through the surf, and destroyed, with charges of gun-cotton, two 10-inch muzzle-loading rifled guns, and spiked six smooth-bore guns in the right hand water battery at Mex, and re-embarked without a casualty beyond the loss of one of their boats on the rocks.’