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Also, the gunboats themselves were custom for the Nile.

Kitchener would have hesitated to venture even so far unless he had complete command of the river. The fact that he enjoyed this advantage was due, above all, to his fleet of gunboats. These lumbering, armour-plated Leviathans, slow in movement, inelegant in lines, still carried an amoury capable of demolishing any Arab fort which they might encounter along the banks of the Nile. Kitchener started with four of them, antiquated by the standards of what was to come, but still quite formidable enough to have maintained Gordon indefinitely in Khartoum if he had had the good luck to include them in his armoury. [But Gordon had been murdered in 1885. -- VR] Then came a new and yet more fearsome model, designed especially for the campaign, crated in a myriad of containers and carried laboriously by train, camel and steamer up the Nile to the assembly point. One hundred and forty feet long and 24 feet wide, these boats could steam at twelve miles an hour and draw only 39 inches of water. Each carried a twelve-pounder quick-firing gun, two six-pounders, a howitzer, four Maxim guns and, what was to prove as useful as anything, a battery of searchlights. They provided the most formidable concentration of firepower in the Sudan.

Fat-fingered in from Ziegler's book. Typos mine, British-isms his.