Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa's City of Gold

by Frank T. Kryza

  Rumors about Warrington abounded in London. Most alleged that the consul—a beefy, pear-shaped man—was no more than a bibulous Falstaff who had been released from debtors’ prison in Gibraltar and exiled to his isolated post on the frontier of the Sahara only because he was the husband of an illegitimate daughter of George IV. Even so, the men in London who disliked Warrington (and these were legion) could not deny that in his eleven years at post he had become the most influential of the officials posted to the Barbary States,* and that no one was more enthusiastic about England’s colonization of Africa. His welcome of Laing that spring day would prove as sincere as it was effusive. The two had corresponded for months about Laing’s expedition, and now at last, to Warrington’s delight, the man was before him in the flesh, and the great voyage across the Sahara was about to begin.

  As Laing and his host walked landward through the old city, the late afternoon revealed a perfect sky, unclouded blue, typical weather for May, Tripoli’s most forgiving month. With the lowering sun the town had taken on a surreal whiteness, a brightness that was central to Tripoli’s year-round loveliness. The light gave the gaps between the narrow buildings a gleaming, pulsing quality. Desert sand polished clean, and the buildings that made up Tripoli’s low skyline, other than the biscuit color of the bashaw’s Castle, which rose above the rest, were all a bold white. Undimmed by fog or haze, Tripoli’s intense light reflected starkly on the city’s smooth surfaces. The crumbling city walls were made of reddish wind-scarred sandstone. The mosque, the bashaw’s harems, and the courtyards were aflame with bougainvillea. Cascading fountains blossomed everywhere.

  Tripoli in 1825 was a much more important city than it is today. The flags of eight European countries and the United States snapped above their consulates overlooking the harbor. Tripoli was a place to gather intelligence, a place where information was as valuable as the tangible goods of trade; it was the commercial and diplomatic entrepôt of north-central Africa.

  The city was bordered on the north by the Mediterranean Sea and on the south by the Jafara, or alluvial plain, from which rose the encircling Western Mountains. The mountains gave way in turn to the arid Hamada el Homra (the Red Plateau) and the Great Desert. A fertile coastal belt was magnificently cultivated with olives, the avenues separating them lined with fragrant eucalyptus trees.

  About a mile from the southern gate and across the foreshore lay an oasis of palm trees, gardens, and villages, known as the menshia.* Within this oasis, which was the garden of Tripoli, lay a labyrinth of sandy lanes running between hedges of Indian fig and wells where oxen drew water to irrigate the plots of green peppers and alfalfa. This was the summer retreat of the Tripolitanian aristocracy, nestled in a forest of palm, fig, pomegranate, jasmine, and olive trees, where also were hidden the villages, country houses, the stables, mosques, and gardens of the bashaw and his large family.

  Consul Warrington had acquired six acres of land in the menshia soon after his posting. He built a five-bedroom house there, and a garden that became famous. This estate, known as the “English Garden,” was set in an unspoiled stretch of the country painted with palms, dark green bushes, square white houses, and gleaming cream-colored sand—not the high dunes of the inner desert, but soft, snowlike sheets that covered everything but the houses, vegetation, and, usually, the road.

  Laing’s first recorded impressions of Tripoli are revealing for their attention to detail, their insight, and their naÏveté. He was both attracted and repulsed. He likened the city, on close inspection, to a prostitute:

  The Town of Tripoli, having for a background a beautiful mixture of the majestic Date, the broad leafed Fig, the wide spreading Mulberry and Olive trees, is rather pleasantly situated on a flat promontory close to the water’s edge; from eastward it is beheld to the best advantage, appearing from thence both gay and strongly fortified, numerous flags waving in the pliant air, with the tall spires of the various Mosques contributing materially to the former, and the lofty piles of embrasured walls to the latter effect; on landing, however, this favorable delusion is soon dispelled and Tripoli, like a Painted Beauty, loses all attraction on close inspection—gaiety vanishes and is lost to the eye as it travels amid the narrow, irregular dirty streets or lanes, and every impression of strength disappears, on an inspection of the ill-constructed, misshapen, dilapidating walls.

  The Castle of the bashaw, an irregular Jail-looking pile, is intended (at least it would so appear) by its total detachment from the fortifications of the town, as a stronghold or place of defense

  against enemies, either foreign or civil, who might possess themselves of the latter; but this also is delusion, for a determined foe, with pieces of artillery, battering rams, or even crow bars, might soon and with little difficulty effect an entrance, the walls though lofty, being constructed of small unhewn stones heaped irregularly one upon another, and held together by the presence of a copious incrustation of mortar. Tripoli with all its outward show, with all its pop gun parade, might be taken with greater ease than a well-stocked Mandingo town.

  And yet, even to the seemingly jaded Laing, entering Tripoli’s old city was to experience an odd sensation, something akin to that of a bucket dropping down a well—darkness, narrowness, coolness, surprise. The lanes were constricted. The British consulate, Laing’s destination, was only a hundred yards inland, occupying a rectangular block of land adjacent to one of the most ancient Roman landmarks of the town, but negotiating narrow streets as dark as tunnels seemed to take forever.

  The alley Shar’a Hara al-Kabira* cut at right angles from the quay directly into the most ancient quarter. Shar’a Hara al-Kabira was one of Tripoli’s principal thoroughfares. It meandered along a dozen flat city blocks that Warrington, Laing, and their retinue now followed on foot, despite offers of conveyance from a half dozen mule-drawn arabiya, or gharries.

  Laing caught sight of the Union Jack atop a flagpole fronting an imposing stone building. Here, Shar’a Hara al-Kabira wound upward between closely packed rows of dusty structures: warehouses, government offices, and stone residences occupied mainly by Tripoli’s wealthier families. These homes stood two or three stories high. Their windows were barred and shuttered, and their arched doors—made of a rocklike black timber—were secured with ham-sized iron padlocks. From the upper end of the cramped street rose the diminutive sun-bleached minaret of one of Tripoli’s minor mosques.

  The narrow, twisting lane was packed with humanity, the crowd’s density as arresting as its color. Lurching Berbers wore brown and orange cloaks. White-robed Arabs perched on bobbing Muscat donkeys smaller than Great Danes. Strings of heavily laden camels, driven by beanpole Africans in brilliantly hued wraparound sarongs, regularly interrupted the journey’s progress. Women’s clothing seemed to shimmer in the shadows. Black girls were swathed in flowing envelopes of Manchester cotton with gaily printed patterns: caged lions, pineapples, horses, palm trees, monkeys on poles …

  Women who glided by in grim black chadors, covering their bodies from head to toe, suggested mysterious errands, tiny gold studs flashing from nostrils, ankles, and necks. Bald heads of both sexes, shaved for cleanliness and coolness, reflected the glare of a fading sun. The stench of fresh excrement rose from open drains. Beggars with corkscrew limbs and skull-like faces thrust their dirt-caked bowls from hidden crevices.

  The torpid energy of the town suggested Asia more than Africa. Enclosed by city walls, Tripoli resembled a nest of ants set in the desolate emptiness of surrounding wastelands. Tripoli reeked of the past, and yet the city had also begun to show the ravages of the disruptive ways of Europeans. It brought together sophistication and savagery, vitality and languor, comfort and peril, loveliness and squalor—a blend that held all the heady pong of romance.

  Shar’a Hara al-Kabira crested a bluff forty feet above the quay. Laing made his way with Warrington to the customs house, where he would pass through the wringer of a tax bureaucracy that had taken root in the farther reaches of the Sublime Po
rte eons before the British thought they had invented it. The air was stifling; Laing was awash in perspiration. The customs clerk sat behind a lectern with a forty-five-degree slope that allowed his sweat to cascade to the ground without smearing the ink on the forms he prepared in quadruplicate. Notwithstanding Warrington’s goading, the pair was delayed for half an hour.

  Leaving the customs house, Laing walked to the consulate, a former palace built by the ruling Karamanli dynasty and presented to the British government in 1744. It was a large building of two stories standing in the narrow lane behind the Gurgi Mosque in Shar’a al-Kurwash.* Bakers at open-air ovens wielded wooden shovels, depositing crisp yellow loaves beside the white dough molds awaiting their turn. The baker worked below ground level so that the street itself became his countertop. The cry “Barlik! Barlik!” warned passersby of the emerging loaves.

  The undersized doorway to the consulate was deceptive. Inside, an ample courtyard led to a staircase, and a graceful loggia looked out on the open space. Uniformed lackeys flanked the flight of steps to the door, and a bodyguard hovered near, for this was the distressed foreigner’s sanctuary in Barbary.

  Entering the consulate from the street, Laing passed through double doors into an arched passageway lined with stone benches where visitors waited. This passage in turn opened into the large central courtyard. Here, around a fountain and basin and small plots of earth from which grew orange trees, jasmine, and verbena, stood the dark rooms in which the consular servants lived. Here also resided the janissary dragomans, supplied for protection, translations, and spying by the bashaw. A kitchen, deep storerooms, and the consular prison surrounded a flight of broad steps that led to the more airy rooms above, built Turkish fashion to face inward.

  On the first floor, the galleries overlooked a central court. The rooms within had smaller windows, protected by heavily waxed, dark wooden grilles and iron bars. These looked out on the narrow street below. From the gallery a narrow flight of stairs led to storerooms and a wide balustraded roof where, between rows of colored aromatic peppers spread to dry and hillocks of grain airing beneath the sky, the consular staff could walk and sit in the cool of the evening.

  From this roof in the last hour of the day, Laing had a view of the harbor, the bashaw’s Castle, the Marine Gate that led to the jetty (also entrance to the Jewish quarter, which at nightfall was shut off from the Muslim precincts of the city), the arch of the great Roman general and emperor Lucius Septimius Severus, and the whole steaming heap of resignation and decay that was Tripoli at twilight.

  And yet, there was something else. Beneath the low throbbing pulse of whispered gossip and behind the flicker of candles lit in tiny ogive windows, there was, for Englishmen especially, the promise of excitement and secrets revealed, an enticing whiff of the gutter and the slum, of cheap drinks and tawny, doe-eyed women, of pleasures not easily found in England.

  Tripoli was a crucible of raw emotions (as all uncompromising places are), a home to physical sensations that could scarcely be made real to anyone, like Laing, who was virgin to them. But they were there, he could sense it. It was hinted in those whispers and flickers of light in the darkness. Whatever you wanted, it could be had in Tripoli—for a price. History, in the Tripolitanian phrase, was a continuity of sorrows and of ecstasies. Tripoli’s history was deep and penetrated to the human bone, to the core of feeling.

  The calm at twilight was an illusion, for it concealed a brash hunger, a carnality that woke with the setting sun.

  *Horse tails, a relic of the nomadic origin of the Ottoman Turks, were a mark of seniority. The sultan carried four, his senior governors three, the rest of the Barbary pashas only two.

  *That is, the four North African states of Tripolitania, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. From the sixteenth century on, the first three were semiautonomous provinces of the Turkish Empire, while Morocco was independent.

  *Probably from the Arabic for “garden.”

  *“The Big Street.”

  *“The Street of the Baker”

  Chapter Two

  THE AFRICAN ASSOCIATION

  THE BEGINNING of the age of African exploration can be dated to the day—June 9, 1788, a Monday—and almost to the hour. That evening, nine titled Londoners led by Sir Joseph Banks, the great naturalist and friend of Captain James Cook, met for dinner in an upstairs private room at St. Albans Tavern off Pall Mall.

  They were members of the Saturday’s Club, one of the small elitist eating clubs in the London of that epoch. This social coterie met weekly so that friends with common interests could gather informally to enjoy an excellent roast (along with a fine old port) and discuss the big ideas of the day. The Saturday’s Club had a membership of twelve, of whom three were absent that night. The members were all wealthy, from the highest ranks of the British establishment, and wonderfully representative of the enlightened spirit of their times.

  Sir Joseph Banks, who would emerge as their leader, was president of the Royal Society (which he ruled with an iron fist for forty-two years) as well as secretary of the Society of Dilettanti. A product of Harrow and Eton, the inheritor of a large fortune, and an accomplished botanist, he had accompanied Cook’s first expedition around the world in the Endeavour, which he equipped with his own funds. Henry Beaufoy, M.P., a Quaker, became an abolitionist, as did the Earl of Galloway. The Bishop of Llandaff was both an abolitionist and a scientist, holding the chair of chemistry at Cambridge. Sir John Sinclair pioneered the science of statistics and later became governor-general of India. Lord Rawdon, another fellow of the Royal Society, drove American rebels from Bunker Hill outside Boston. He would later become governor of Bengal; he purchased the island of Singapore. Other members had equal claim to power, wealth, or fame; the caliber of membership in the Saturday’s Club was high.

  Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society and a founder of the African Association, as he appeared about 1800, in his late fifties.

  The conversation that Monday turned to what Banks felt was the great failing of the Age of Enlightenment. At a time when Captain Cook and others had proved that men could sail around the world, Britons knew less about the interior of Africa than the geographers of ancient Greece and Rome. Before they retired for the evening, Banks and his friends founded the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior of Africa, an organization devoted to gathering scientific facts, though not averse to making money, through trade and conquest in Africa. Each member pledged five gold guineas* a year to the effort, and members of the committee were enjoined not to divulge any information, except to other members, that they might glean from persons sent on missions of discovery. They identified the river Niger and the legendary cities it supported, notably Timbuktu, as their first priority. No European had ever set eyes on the river.

  The members resolved:

  That, as no species of information is more ardently desired, or more generally useful, than that which improves the science of Geography; and as the vast Continent of Africa, notwithstanding the efforts of the ancients, and the wishes of the moderns, is still in a great measure unexplored, the members of this club do form themselves into an Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Inland Parts of that Quarter of the World.

  Though the prospect of profitable commerce with the unknown continent was certainly a motivating factor (it was probably no accident that the St. Albans worthies set their sights on Africa so soon after England lost her vast American territories, only five years before, in 1783), the group had more noble motives as well: the abolition of the slave trade and a sincere desire for knowledge.

  The “African Association,” as it soon became known, met at Banks’s comfortable mansion at 32 Soho Square. Thanks to Banks’s position as president of the Royal Society, celebrity traveler, scientific adviser to governments, friend of George III, and what one admirer called “the father of research and friend of the adventurous traveller,” his library at Soho Square was open to all. Soon the African Association was ente
rtaining visitors from overseas who had an interest in African exploration. In modern parlance, Banks was a wonderful networker.

  The members discovered that little of practical value could be gleaned from documents; reconnaissance on the ground was essential. They did not waste any time. The first explorer selected was an American, John Ledyard, a thirty-seven-year-old native of Groton, Connecticut. Within a month of the dinner at St. Albans Tavern, he was on his way.

  The son of a sailor, Ledyard had attended Dartmouth College in 1772. He left school to live among the Iroquois of the Six Nations near the Canadian border, whom he hoped to convert to Christianity. In 1773, he persuaded Captain Richard Deshon to take him on as a sailor bound for the Barbary Coast. At Gibraltar, he enlisted in (and quickly deserted) the British navy. He served in the British army, and later as a marine. He later reported for duty with Captain Cook, with whom he visited the Canary Islands, Cape Verde Island, the Cape of Good Hope, Tasmania, New Zealand, Tahiti, and what was later to become California and Oregon. He was a member of Cook’s last expedition and saw Cook killed in Hawaii. In 1783 he published A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific.

  Ledyard next tried to establish a fur-exporting business, which failed. With the help of Thomas Jefferson, then United States minister to France, he planned a voyage across Russia, through Siberia, to Alaska, and across North America to Virginia. Jefferson admired the young New Englander, as he noted in his autobiography:

  In 1786, while at Paris, I became acquainted with John Ledyard, of Connecticut, a man of genius, of some science, and of fearless courage and enterprise. He had accompanied Captain Cook … had distinguished himself by an unrivalled intrepidity…. Ledyard had come to Paris in the hope of forming a company to engage in the fur trade of the Western coast of America. He was disappointed in this, and, being out of business, and of a roaming, restless character, I suggested to him the enterprise of exploring the western part of our continent, by passing through St. Petersburg to Kamchatka, and procuring a passage thence in some of the Russian vessels to Nootka Sound, whence he might make his way across the continent to the United States; and I undertook to have the permission of the Empress of Russia solicited.