The Sahara

by Eamonn Gearon

  While his own travels did not take him deep into the Sahara, he delighted in spending time with those explorers who came to see him during his 32-year tenure in Tripoli. He later became father-in-law to one of the more famous of these explorers when, in July 1825, his daughter Emma married Alexander Gordon Laing. Laing and Miss Warrington were married in a civil ceremony because there was no vicar available and Warrington insisted that the marriage remain unconsummated until an ordained priest could bless the couple.

  Two days later, Laing set off for Timbuktu. He was lucky to survive one Tuareg attack en route, during which a number of his party were killed and Laing was left with 24 sword wounds to his skull and arms, resulting in the loss of one hand and an ear lobe. Laing eventually reached the famed city after an arduous journey via Ghadames and In Saleh, becoming the first European in modern times to do so. Resting in Timbuktu for about five weeks, Laing was, according to native reports, killed a few days after setting off on his homeward journey.

  In spite of the Ottomans retaking direct control of the city in 1835, Warrington survived the change in political circumstances with elan, continuing to press for greater British representation in the Sahara. By persistence and force of his enormous, if flawed, personality, he convinced the Ottomans and the Foreign Office to accede to his demands, and the British established vice-consulates in Murzuq and Ghadames. As a result, Britain enjoyed unparalleled influence on trade and communications along the central Sahara routes. The vice-consul appointed to Ghadames was Charles Hanmer Dickson, grandson of the now late Consul Warrington, who died in retirement in Greece.

  Dickson’s duties included observing and reporting on trans-Saharan trade, promoting British trade interests and thwarting French ones. With French influence growing in neighbouring Algeria, there was a real fear of armed clashes between the British and French, who were exploring the area with increasing frequency from their own desert outposts. Dickson’s first letter to the British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston after his arrival at Ghadames suggests he had much to learn when he wrote: “Yesterday the British flag was hoisted on my residence amid repeated volleys of Musquetry (sic) ... The establishment of the first Christian in this city, which may well be recorded as an interesting event in its annals, has given universal satisfaction.”

  After the European nineteenth-century division of the Sahara the new powers were able to impose as much diplomatic representation as they chose, in many cases for the first time. In some cases these were “advisers” to the ruling potentate, in others the facade of cooperation was wholly absent. Whether before or after the gelding of local authorities, the Europeans rarely viewed the North Africans as political equals, frequently resentful if they had to negotiate with local notables at all.

  With thoughts of life in the Sahara furthest from his mind, the American sea captain James Riley had the misfortune of experiencing it and slavery first-hand after his ship ran aground off the west coast of the Sahara. In the best tradition of lengthy Victorian titles, Riley’s book was published as Sufferings in Africa: Captain Riley’s Narrative. An authentic narrative of the loss of the American brig Commerce, Wrecked on the Western Coast of Africa, in the month of August, 1815. With an account of the sufferings of her surviving officers and crew, who were enslaved by the wandering Arabs on the great African Desart (sic), or Zahahrah (sic): and observations historical, geographical, etc. made during the travels of the author while a slave to the Arab, and in the Empire of Morocco.

  Riley’s tale had an enormous impact upon publication, because even though slavery would be familiar to an early nineteenth-century readership, his text turned this state of affairs upside down, with white men enslaved by black masters. The crew’s ordeal at the hands of their Saharawi captors, and those to whom they were sold, was indeed awful. Even so, the mistreatment doled out to Riley and his crew was probably not much worse than that endured by any number of the nearly four million slaves resident in America at the same time.

  The crew of the Commerce started their captivity with a forced march through the deserts of the western Sahara and Mauritania, undergoing such indignities as being forced to drink their own and camels’ urine if they wanted to drink at all. As Riley relates, “We were placed on our camel soon after daylight, having nothing to eat, and drinking a little camel’s water, which we preferred to our own: its taste... though bitter was not salt.” While it was then commonplace for foreign captives to be ransomed off, such transactions tended to take place at Mogador (modern Essaouira) in Morocco, or on the coast at St. Louis, 1200 miles south, in Senegal. Unfortunately for the Commerce, it ran aground at Cape Boujadour, midway between these trading posts.

  Riley’s book is also notable as the first American bestseller. Encouraged to write his memoirs by President Monroe, the publisher of Sufferings and its sequel said it was “read by more than a million now living in these United States. Probably no book that was ever published, in either this or any other country, obtained so extensive a circulation in so short a period, as did that Narrative, and probably none ever published, made so striking and permanent an impression upon the minds of those that read it.” The book also has an important place in American history because among its one million readers was Abraham Lincoln upon whom it had such an impression that, along with the Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress, it was the book he said that most influenced his life and thinking on slavery.

  In many cases, Americans and Europeans who became the prisoners of local tribesmen were lucky to receive the services of British consul William Willshire. Willshire, a Londoner, lived and worked in Mogador with his wife and children from 1814 to 1844, during which time he saved hundreds of foreign seamen and others from slavery. So instrumental was he in securing Riley’s release that the grateful captain, on returning to America, founded a town in Ohio and named it Willshire.

  In spite of having amassed a personal fortune through his business interests in Mogador, Willshire lost everything during a French attack, during the course of which Arabs from the interior looted the city. After the attack Willshire left the city, dying seven years later in Adrianople (today Edirne, Turkey) in a state of penury. Having fought to secure an annual pension of £100 from the Foreign Office in London, for his thirty years of loyal service in Africa and five in Adrianople, he was eventually granted his pension by Palmerston’s government on 18 August 1851. Sadly he had died on the fourth.

  Sometimes diplomats were also soldiers. Such was the case with William Eaton, the US consul at Tunis under President John Adams, an army officer and adventurer, and the first American to cross Egypt’s Western Desert. A graduate of Dartmouth College, Eaton was selected for the trans-Saharan mission because so few Americans had any knowledge of North Africa. The purpose of his mission was twofold: to make contact with and reinstate Hamet Karamanli as pasha of Tripolitania, and to free Captain William Bainbridge and the 300 crew of the USS Philadelphia , prisoners in Tripoli because the US had stopped paying tribute to the Barbary states. (Yusef Karamanli, Hamet’s younger brother, had responded to this refusal by declaring war on the Americans.)

  Eaton himself was partly responsible for the change in US government policy, writing to Secretary of State, James Madison, “The more you give, the more the Turks will ask for.” Appointed Navy Agent to the Barbary states, Eaton sailed to Alexandria and found Karamanli. Having promoted himself to the rank of general, Eaton outlined his plans to Karamanli, who warmly welcomed the American plot to return him to his throne. Leading a mixed force of 300 Arab cavalry, 70 Christian mercenaries, two sailors, eight Marines and 1000 camels, Eaton marched nearly 600 miles across the desert. Having failed to secure adequate funds or supplies for the march, the party almost starved to death during the two month journey to Derna. The ensuing Battle of Derna was the first engagement involving American forces on foreign soil, providing part of the opening line of the US Marines’ Hymn, “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.
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  The contingent of Marines were led into battle by Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, whose bravery so inspired Hamet Karamanli that he presented O’Bannon with his personal sword, since when a Mameluke-style sword has been traditional for Marine Corps officers’ ceremonial uniform. Unfortunately for Hamet, however, news arrived that a treaty had been made recognizing his brother the usurper. Signed by Tobias Lear V, newly created American consul-general in North African and former personal secretary to George Washington, the treaty forced Hamet, Eaton and the other non-Arabs to sail away, having fought and won a battle for no reason.

  Ninety-three years after Eaton’s trek, Major Amedee-Francois Lamy of the French Army was at the head of another military column crossing the Sahara. In 1898-99 he led a French force south through French Algeria to Lake Chad. En route his force occupied the principal oases, including Tuat, Tamanrasset, Air and Zinder, which they were keen to ensure remained in French hands.

  The success of the mission not only allowed the French to travel at will in the desert, but in conquering Chad Lamy connected all of France’s West Africa territories. Meeting with two other French missions - coming from Congo and Niger respectively - at Kousseri in modern Cameroon, Lamy led a force of1200 infantry and cavalry in a long-anticipated clash against the Sudanese rebel leader Rabih as-Zubayr and his forces. Having formed his own empire in the Chad Basin, as-Zubayr was the main obstacle to French domination of the region.

  During the course of the battle both Lamy and as-Zubayr were killed, but when as-Zubayr’s forces were routed, the French victory meant the creation of a single French Saharan super-state, the capital of which was named Fort-Lamy in honour of the French man of the hour. In 1970 the Chadian government issued a 1000-franc gold coin to mark the tenth anniversary of independence, of which one side bore the legend “Commandant Lamy 1900” and an image of the French soldier. Three years later Fort Lamy was renamed N’Djamena, eliminating one more name from the Sahara’s short-lived, European imperial past.

  Professionals

  The work conducted by non-military professionals such as archaeologists is by its nature painstakingly slow, with few discoveries having any impact on the public consciousness. The single most impressive discovery in the past century is without doubt the tomb of Tutankhamen. Discovered by Howard Carter in the Valley of the Kings in 1922, the unearthing of the virtually undisturbed tomb of a Pharaoh was of peerless importance, containing as it did an incredible array of royal property including a large quantity of gold-work and precious jewellery. Carter spent numerous digging seasons living in a small house on the Theban Necropolis on the edge of the Sahara, from where he directed the digging, convinced he was going to make a significant find. By 1922 Lord Carnarvon, Carter’s financial backer, had lost faith in the project and declared that digging season would be the last he would fund.

  Howard Carter opens Tutankhamen’s tomb

  The discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb more than repaid Carnarvon’s investment and made Carter, with the help of the British journalist H. V Morton (later author of the popular In Search of series of travel books), the most famous archaeologist of all time. The fact that the tomb contained so many riches was what captivated the public. For gasp-inducing wonder, a pottery shard, however important, can never hope to compete with a golden death mask.

  Of all the accounts left behind by foreigners who worked in the Sahara, one of the most pleasing is A Cure for Serpents by the Count Alberto Denti di Pirajno (1886-1968). When he first arrived Dr. Pirajno was responsible for a small group of Italian troops under the command of the Duke of Aosta. Nearly twenty years later, and after time in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somaliland, Pirajno was a count and the last Italian governor of Tripoli. As such, he handed control of the city over to British forces when they arrived in 1943.

  A more sympathetic colonial administrator than many of his peers, Pirajno’s medical training also made him a careful observer of the people and places he visited, recognizing and appreciating the differences between the people he encountered. Writing about Ghadames, for example, Pirajno notes that it “is a strange country, and I learnt many things in the shade of its palm trees. The Ghadames speak Arabic with Arabs, Tamahak with the Tuaregs and Hausa with their servants, but among themselves they use a Berber dialect which no one speaks outside the walls of the city... Enclosed within their oasis and isolated in the vast desert, the Ghadames nevertheless maintain contacts all over the world; they combine the flabbiness of sedentary people with the broad vision of the nomads.”

  When not tending the human sick, Pirajno turned his attention to sick animals which he was just as happy to treat. Here he describes a sick lion:

  People who have never had a young lion with a fractured femur in the house will be unable to imagine how unsettling it can be. In the first place, someone had to take care of the beast... I sounded Jemberie and when, appealing to his religious sense, I mentioned that Neghesti was also one of God’s creatures, he agreed, but observed gravely that God had placed lions in the forest and not in men’s houses.

  Another man who did not start his career as a government official was Hanns Vischer, who became a member of the British Colonial Administrative Service after starting out as a missionary. Originally Swiss, Vischer became a British citizen and gave up the missionary life to work among the Hausa of northern Nigeria. Although the majority of his career was spent working in the education sector in Nigeria, for which services he was knighted, he also produced an account of a 1906 journey, Across the Sahara from Tripoli to Bornu.

  On a significant journey, crossing the desert along a former slave route, Vischer’s caravan of forty men and women and forty camels suffered a frequently waterless journey through British, French and Ottoman territory, gathering much original knowledge along the way. Vischer had hoped to do the reverse journey the next year but was denied permission by his superior in Nigeria. Major Sir Hanns Vischer retired from colonial service in 1939, spending the war working for the British Underground Propaganda Committee until his death in 1945.

  Missionaries

  The arrival in the Islamic Sahara of individuals preaching the Christian gospel was often seen as a threat not only to the quiet life of those living unremarkably in remote oases, but also to the authority, and possible stability, of the state. Where one foreign preacher was allowed to wander, others might follow, and men of the Good Book were sometimes the forerunners of men of the gun. Suspicion thus fell on Christian missionaries, who were viewed as theologically unsound and harbingers of conquest, perhaps reporting back on a town’s defences or the disposition of its inhabitants.

  Few nineteenth-century missionaries were in the direct employ of their national governments but the majority of them unquestionably arrived with a strong belief that European imperial rule was in the best temporal and spiritual interests of the natives. Yet Islam was, and is, so dominant that any success on the part of European missionaries in finding converts among the denizens of the Sahara probably enjoyed no more than single figures.

  The most famous foreign missionary to live in the Sahara was Charles Eugene de Foucauld (1858-1916). As a young man, the Strasbourg-born, aristocratic Foucauld was fond of those things most young men appreciate, including women and wine. General Laperinne, known in French history as the conqueror of the Sahara, and military cadet with Foucauld at the Ecole Speciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr, used to say that when they trained together, “The only thing Foucauld liked about the mass was the wine.” Laperinne’s fame was such that during French rule Tamanrasset was called Fort Laperinne, becoming Tamanrasset only after Algerian independence. Although somewhat dissolute, Foucauld did well as an army officer, attracting some fame in France for his travels through southern Morocco, disguised as one Rabbi Joseph Aleman, gathering topographical and other intelligence for French military cartographers, for which exploits the Societe Geographique of Paris awarded him their Gold Medal.

 
; Whatever else in his background or upbringing might have influenced his development, it was Foucauld’s travels in the Sahara that were the catalyst for his transformation in adulthood. Leaving the army, he toyed with the idea of converting to Islam before becoming a Trappist monk, to the surprise of everyone who knew him. Twelve years later, after living and studying in Palestine, whose deserts he found too heavily populated for his extreme ascetic tastes, he asked to be sent back to the Sahara. Foucauld moved to one of the Sahara’s most remote spots, Assekrem, which means “the end of the world” in Tamasheq, the Tuareg language. In the Ahaggar Mountains, thirty miles from the famed if hardly accessible Tamanrasset, the site provided Foucauld with the solitude for which he yearned.

  Like St. Anthony 1600 years earlier, the desert’s loneliness was precisely what appealed to Foucauld. As one diary entry noted, “I find this desert life profoundly, deeply sweet. It is so pleasant and healthy to set oneself down in solitude, face to face with eternal things; one feels oneself penetrated by the truth.” Yet in spite of choosing the life of a hermit, Foucauld also frequently bemoaned his isolation and enjoyed the company of his compatriots on the rare occasions they visited.

  De Foucauld, the hermit of Assekrem

  Over time the Tuareg accepted Foucauld’s presence, allowing him to live among them for the next fifteen years. In terms of his mission to convert them, Foucauld must be considered a failure. As he wrote in a letter, those he converted consisted of “an old black woman at Beni Abbes. I also baptised a small baby who was in danger of dying, who had the joy of leaving this earth almost immediately for heaven. Lastly, I baptised a 13- year-old boy, but it was not I who converted him. He was brought to me by a French sergeant who had taught him his catechism and prepared him to receive the sacraments. You see, my dear brother, I am really a useless servant.