by Steve Kemper
The famous geographer’s recommendation was good enough for Richardson. Bunsen asked Ritter to sound out Barth. On October 5, 1849, exactly one year after Richardson sent his proposal to Palmerston, Ritter called Barth to his office and asked if he would be interested in accompanying a British expedition to Africa. To a man with no prospects and many recent setbacks, the offer was a godsend. The invitation came with one stipulation: Barth must contribute £200 to cover his own expenses. He was sure his father would fund him once again.
But as Barth’s acceptance was making its way to England, his father nixed the plan. Johann’s objections weren’t financial‚ but parental and professional. He pointed to the appalling death rate among African explorers. He had almost lost his son to Saharan bandits once, and he forbade Heinrich to give the continent another whack at him. Further, he worried that another long absence from Germany might jeopardize his son’s goal of landing a professorship. Crushed but obedient, Barth told Ritter he had to back out.
Ritter quickly enlisted another promising German scholar, a geologist and astronomer named Adolf Overweg. Though born just a year after Barth, Overweg seemed much younger because of his boyish enthusiasm and his lack of travel experience. Overweg eagerly agreed to go.
But Palmerston refused to let Barth withdraw. If the great von Humboldt and Ritter considered him the best man for the job, then Britain would have him, regardless of a father’s fears. Palmerston sent word through Chevalier Bunsen that Britain considered Barth under verbal contract.
Barth, delighted, probably appealed to his father’s strict sense of honor. Johann relented, on one condition: the Prussian government must promise to give Heinrich a professorship at a good salary upon his return. Von Humboldt used his influence at court to secure this future commitment, which turned out to be as trustworthy as most political promises. Next, Bunsen convinced Palmerston that the expedition should retain Overweg as well, since his skills complemented Barth’s. Further, he persuaded the Foreign Office to repay Barth’s and Overweg’s £200 contributions during the course of the expedition, and to reimburse them for the expense of traveling to and from Tripoli. In return, the Germans would send periodic scientific dispatches, and upon their homecoming they would submit a scientific report to the Foreign Office. Bunsen emphasized that Barth and Overweg would be independent scientists, not agents of Her Majesty’s Government. This independence would cause Barth much trouble, both during and after the journey.
Now that he was back on board, Barth began laying down conditions. He scolded Bunsen for asking the British government to pay him £200, since he could not accept any money from a foreign government that might restrict his independent pursuit of scientific truth. Bunsen, amused by Barth’s touchy rectitude, wrote to a correspondent that he had no intention of informing Palmerston of Barth’s stance, since the foreign secretary “might think Dr. Barth was mad, for refusing what probably he might get, in the shape of money, which in this country always is considered a good thing, of which you cannot have too much.” Bunsen eventually persuaded Barth to curb his foolish virtue and accept the fee against unforeseen expenses in Africa. The Geographical Society of Berlin, founded by von Humboldt and Ritter, also contributed £150 toward the Germans’ expenses.
Barth wrote a long letter to Richardson under the heading “Reflections on the projected exploring expedition into the interior of Africa.” It prickled with his strong opinions. First, he insisted that they must be in Tripoli by mid-December 1849 and leave no later than early January 1850 with the last caravan heading for Bornu and Lake Chad; otherwise they wouldn’t get through the Sahara before the hot season began and wouldn’t reach Bornu before the start of the region’s unhealthy hot and rainy summer. Second, once the Germans had explored Lake Chad, Barth wanted to be released from his obligations to the British government so that he could proceed eastward, as Ritter and von Humboldt had urged, to search for connections between Lake Chad and the Nile, as well as the sources of the Nile. Above all‚ Barth insisted that the expedition’s chief goal must be changed from commercial relations to exploration and science.
Whether Richardson was offended or amused by this cheeky letter isn’t clear, but he recognized its borderline insubordination. He wrote to a correspondent that he had replied to Barth that the mission’s main purpose was to open North and Central Africa for trade and commerce, “and that on no account could I deviate from the necessities of this course of my mission for any merely scientific object, however important it might be for science, and that it was necessary that he and Dr. Overweg absolutely must submit to this.”
“Merely scientific” must have struck Barth as sacrilegious, and submission was against his nature. A gulf separated their perspectives.
Richardson, Barth, and Overweg met for the first time on November 30, 1849‚ in London. They signed a contract with the Foreign Office that specified roles, money matters, and a long list of terms. Richardson, the director, would decide the expedition’s route and pace. The main mission was commercial. Richardson was authorized to make treaties with African potentates. If the group decided to split up for any reason, the medical chest would be divided into thirds. After reaching Lake Chad, if Barth and Overweg wanted to continue eastward, Richardson was authorized to draw money on the Crown for their expenses.
Palmerston also wrote a letter of final instructions to Richardson:
The countries you are about to visit are as yet so little known to the Nations of Europe, that every information of every kind respecting them which you may be able to collect will be interesting and useful; but besides those Political and Scientific subjects of investigation to which your attention will of course be directed, it is the wish of H. M. Government that you should especially endeavour to ascertain by what means the commercial intercourse between Great Britain and Africa might be extended and developed; what are the Districts and what the lines of communication in that country which offer the greatest facilities for commerce; what are the European commodities which are most sought after by the natives; and what are the main articles of African produce which could best be obtained in payment for the productions of Europe.
Palmerston also directed Richardson “to act with entire unreserve and in the most cordial union with the Prussian gentlemen with whom you are to be associated; and you will of course give all due attention to their wishes and suggestions with regard to the course of your common proceeding.” He noted that the Foreign Office had fronted Richardson £394.19 thus far, and added, “You will however be careful to keep your expenditure within the narrowest limits consistent with an efficient attainment of the objects of your expedition.”
Richardson responded to Palmerston on December 5. “Our enthusiastic German friends,” he wrote, “unable, it would appear, to restrain their ardour to get into Africa, left me yesterday morning before I could receive your Lordship’s instruction. They will wait for me at Tunis.”
Indeed they would, and at Tripoli, Murzuk, Ghat, and other places along the route. The expedition hadn’t really begun, and Barth was already impatient with Richardson’s tendency to dawdle. But the great point was that the mission was underway toward the unknown.
BARTH AND OVERWEG sailed from Marseilles on December 12, reached Algeria the following day, and were in Tunis by the 15th. They waited in vain for Richardson until the 30th, then left overland for Tripoli, the expedition’s staging point, arriving on January 18. They expected Richardson to be waiting there after taking a boat from Malta but found no sign of him or their supplies, and no word about either. The Germans had expected to depart immediately. “A great deal of patience was required,” noted Barth.
Richardson had reached Tunis the day after Barth and Overweg left. The British vice-consul there, Lewis Ferriere, thought Richardson would leave immediately to catch up with his colleagues, but instead he dallied in the city for several weeks. “The Germans and our Englishman do not appear to pull very well together,” wrote Ferriere in a confidential memo to the Fore
ign Office, “and there seems to me a degree of jealousy between them. It strikes me also that the Germans are the scientific men and Mr. Richardson the Bookmaker only… .”
Ferriere added that Richardson was already dissatisfied with a British sailor named William Croft who was traveling with him. The expedition needed a sailor to assemble and operate the boat that Richardson intended to haul across the Sahara to Lake Chad. The notion sounds harebrained, but one of the expedition’s goals was to explore and survey Lake Chad, which had never been done. The explorers hoped to determine whether the lake drained the Niger River system or was connected to the Nile’s. Based on Denham and Clapperton’s twenty-five-year-old account of Bornu, Richardson had concluded that the native vessels available at Lake Chad were unsuitable for this task. Hence the sailor and the boat. It’s unclear why Richardson was unhappy with Croft, except for the clue that he hoped to replace him with someone “steady.” It must have doubly exasperated Richardson that he had handpicked Croft, who also happened to be his nephew.
So as 1850 began, several points of friction were chafing the group. Surely things would get sorted out in Tripoli.
3
At the Edge of the Desert
THE MEDITERRANEAN SPLASHES ONE SIDE OF TRIPOLI, THE SAHARA rubs the other. The Phoenicians, with their keen eye for commercial real estate, founded the town in the seventh century B.C. It quickly became a trade hub. By 1850 it had absorbed twenty-five centuries of war, commerce, political intrigue, and forced occupation. Greeks were followed by Romans, Carthaginians, various Muslim regimes, Spaniards, the Christian Knights of St. John, and, most recently, the Ottoman Turks, who took control in the sixteenth century.
When Barth and Overweg arrived, the city’s population of about 15,000 was a stew of Berbers, Moors, Arabs, Jews, Turks, Maltese, Italians, and black Africans from various kingdoms and tribes in the south. Tripoli was a swinging door that connected the Mediterranean countries with the interior of Africa. Merchandise from Europe entered through the city’s busy port. Goods from Africa’s interior—ivory, gold, indigo, cotton cloth, animal skins, ostrich feathers, leather goods, kola nuts—left the city for Europe and the Ottoman countries. But the main export moving through Tripoli was slaves.
The amount of human flesh that passed through the slave markets of Barbary was a trickle compared to the torrent from Africa’s west coast. That torrent, directed at the New World, was industrial in scope and purpose, and favored strong young males. In the trans-Saharan trade, the majority of slaves were females—the younger and prettier, the higher the value. Most of them were bound for domestic duties in the houses and seraglios of Barbary, Egypt, Anatolia, and the Levant. Slave raiders in the Sudan often killed males because they were less docile on the slog to market and less profitable once there.
Some of the captured slaves were retained by the nobles of Islamic kingdoms in the south, but most were sold to Arab traders who took them north to the big markets on the Mediterranean. Many European travelers commented that slaves in Islamic lands were treated relatively well compared to slaves in the West. They had certain rights and privileges. For instance, though the Qur’an permitted masters to enjoy their female slaves sexually, children from such unions were born free and their mothers could not be sold. Once a female slave married, her master lost sexual privileges. The Qur’an encouraged masters to marry their slaves and free them, and forbade the separation of slave mothers from their children before age seven. Some slaves became wealthy landowners and high government officials with slaves of their own. In a few cases the children of royal slaves became kings.
Slaves bound for the markets of Barbary first had to survive the horror of being torn from their villages and marched in coffles across the desert to the sea. Crossing the Sahara on foot, even in the best circumstances, was brutal—choking sandstorms, extreme temperatures, awful thirst. But these conditions were infinitely more taxing for youths recently wrenched from their homes, fettered together, and terrified about their unknown fate. They were often whipped and deprived of sufficient food and water. Those who couldn’t keep up were abandoned. The caravan route between Bornu and Fezzan, in what is now southwestern Libya, was littered with their skeletons. Mortality rates are inexact but historians estimate at least 20 percent and often much higher. In 1849 the British vice-consul in Murzuk, an oasis town on the route between Bornu and Tripoli, reported to the Foreign Office that 1,600 slaves traveling from Bornu had died of thirst after attempting to survive by killing camels to drink their blood and the putrid water in their stomachs. Five months later the vice-consul sent a similar report: en route from Bornu, 795 of 1,770 slaves had perished of thirst.
Britain had established a consulate in Tripoli in 1780. A number of British expeditions launched from there. Captain G. F. Lyon, in his account of the illfated Ritchie mission of 1818–20, portrayed Tripoli to British readers as crowded with drunkards, prostitutes, slave-traders, and religious fanatics. He wrote that the cruel, whimsical pasha who ruled the city amputated the limbs of lawbreakers and festooned the city’s gates with hanging corpses. Lyon described frenzied scenes of marabouts (Muslim holy men) whirling crazily, biting their tongues, piercing their cheeks with nails, sniffing out the houses of foul Christians. Yet he also admired the exotic beauty of young Arab women, despite the tattoos on their chins and noses, and between their eyebrows: “Nothing, in fact, can exceed in prettiness an Arab girl.” And he luxuriated in the city’s hot baths, where attendants provided vigorous body rubs and languorous shampoos, followed by pipes, coffee, and incense to perfume beards.
Other visitors to Tripoli also noted the way fanaticism rubbed shoulders with dissipation. The German explorer and doctor Gustav Nachtigal, who began an expedition from Tripoli about twenty years after Barth, wrote that because of the city’s large number of “dissolute slave girls,” many residents had syphilis, yet Tripolitans deftly conflated religious belief and wantonness by turning the malady into a mark of distinction, referring to it as “the Great” or “the queen of diseases,” on the theory that even saints in Paradise had it.
Richardson found Tripoli disgusting. On his previous visit he had called it “the most miserable of all the towns I have seen in North Africa.” He curled his lip at “the squalor and filth of Tripoli, with its miserable beggars choking up all the thoroughfares.” For Richardson the filth included moral and political corruption, which in his view stemmed directly from the slave trade. His opinion of the Europeans in the city was not much higher: “… in truth, the greater part of the Europeans of Tripoli, and in all Barbary towns, are a degraded unenthusiastic race, wholly occupied with their petty quarrels and intrigues.”
He returned there on January 31, 1850, two weeks behind Barth and Overweg. The expedition’s supplies still hadn’t arrived. Richardson estimated that departure would be delayed at least another month. To Barth and Overweg, already impatient to leave, the idea of sitting around for that long sounded intolerable. They left immediately for a three-week exploration of Tripolitania.
Richardson stayed in the city and set about organizing the caravan. No easy matter, considering Tripoli’s crooked merchants and the demands of the bureaucracies, local and British. Add the heavy syrup of the enervating climate, and delays became inevitable. African travelers were often left stranded, as Richardson put it, “in ludicrous suspense between indignation and surprise.”
He gradually bought camels and hired camel drivers, servants, and guides. He procured several months of provisions, including rice and dry biscuit in ten large iron cases, which Tuareg bandits would later assume were filled with gold. He bargained for cooking dishes and waterskins. From the British arsenal in Malta he ordered “half a dozen muskets, half a dozen pairs of pistols, and half a dozen short swords; some powder and shot.” He bought lots of “articles of manufacture, as cheap watches, etc. for presents and barter.”
“All these preparations,” he wrote, “cost me prodigious anxiety, as I was obliged to study at the same time effi
ciency and economy.” Arranging these complicated logistics was new to Richardson, and, it turned out, beyond his fiscal and managerial abilities.
Richardson’s fretting and incompetence annoyed British officials in the city. The consul, G. W. Crowe, already disliked him from his earlier visit. At that time, Lord Palmerston had suggested appointing Richardson vice-consul at Ghadames, an oasis town about 350 miles southwest of Tripoli. But Crowe vehemently objected, citing the abolitionist’s tactlessness and impolitic fervor. Richardson had caused diplomatic problems for Crowe by loudly criticizing the Ottomans’ oppressive taxes, which led the Turks to request that Richardson be sent home.
Now Richardson was back in Tripoli, accompanied by his wife, living in Crowe’s house, at Crowe’s expense, and once again burrowing under Crowe’s skin. Crowe was astonished that Palmerston had entrusted Richardson with such a difficult mission. He was still seething a year after the expedition’s departure. “I cannot express to you how much I am disgusted by the ingratitude of Richardson,” he wrote in a letter to the Foreign Office’s undersecretary marked “Private.” “I fear his wretched mismanagement will lower the reputation hitherto enjoyed by the English nation in Central Africa.”
For instance, everyone knew that travelers in Africa must pay for their security by offering gifts to chiefs and rulers along the way. Mediocre gifts endangered their givers. But Richardson, complained Crowe, had not bought any “decent gifts, nothing that the chiefs [in the interior] can’t find in their local market. When Mr. Richardson arrived from England, he had not a penny left of the sum he had received from you—and yet he had not purchased a single article of British manufacture to take with him, except a secondhand brass-hilted sword about five feet long, apparently a stage property, such as are carried in Corporation processions before the Mayor.”
Richardson, by the way, was rather pleased with this sword, because it was so large and shiny, which he felt sure would please some desert chief.