Gunboats on the Nile

If you're planning on doing the Sudan period, then you will need gunboats and river steamers at some point. This leads you to an intersection where you can either buy them commercially or build them yourself. For 15mm there really aren't a lot of choices other than the Merrimack/Old Glory gunboat, Peter Pig, or the one by ERM. These will run you anywhere from $40-75 with the Peter Pig one at the high end.

Since I would rather spend the money on figs, I decided to build the boats from scratch. Now here comes the second hurdle; there's little to no information on the Nile gunboats. Sure, there's the scene with the Melik in the Four Feathers and one of the converted steamers in the Khartoum film, but that's about it. The Courier's Sudan series from the early 80's had some good illustrations and those, along with some from the book War on the Nile and the Khartoum Osprey campaign book, gave me some ideas.

In several books it is mentioned that there were around 30 steamers and gunboats operating on the Nile during the 1884-85 campaign, but I only have information on about five of them. I decided to build several gunboats and some steamers for our 15mm big battles. I cannot stress this enough, but build the boats as you think they would appear and since there's little to no pictures available, no one can call you on it!

I imagined that a majority of the boats would be dirty, heavily used steamers used for trade on the Nile. I then figured that several would have been modified with sandbags, some boiler plate armor, and whatever artillery or machine guns were available.