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

by Frank T. Kryza

  Ledyard set off in 1786, after Jefferson obtained the necessary letters of transit. From Sweden, he tried to cross the frozen Gulf of Bothnia on foot, but the ice gave way. He reached St. Petersburg in precarious shape. The Portuguese ambassador to Russia saved him, loaning him twenty pounds. He traveled six thousand miles to Yakutsk in Siberia, but bad weather prevented him from crossing the straits. Russian soldiers seized him, putting him on a sled for the Polish border. If he ever returned to Russia, he was warned, he would be hanged.

  Two years later, he knocked on the door of Sir Joseph’s library in Soho Square, in rags, penniless, but ready to set out again on another daring emprise. Banks told him, “knowing his temper, that he could recommend him for an adventure almost as perilous as the one from which he had just returned.” Banks promptly proposed Ledyard to the selection committee, whose members felt that his inability to speak Arabic was offset by his “adventurous nature.” They spoke of him as a man who “from his youth had felt an invincible desire to make himself acquainted with the unknown, or imperfectly discovered regions of the globe.”

  Sir Joseph sent Ledyard to Henry Beaufoy, a plutocrat wine merchant and leader of the Society for the Abolition of Slaves. Beaufoy noted “the manliness of Ledyard’s person, the breadth of his chest, the openness of his countenance and the inquietude of his eye.” Beaufoy unrolled a map of Africa and drew a line from Cairo eastward, explaining the route he thought Ledyard should take. He asked the American when he would be ready to leave.

  “Tomorrow morning,” he said.

  Beaufoy, surprised by this zeal, said he did not think he could write up his instructions so soon.

  As it happens, Beaufoy’s directives were ridiculous, revealing just how little England knew about the lands the association proposed to explore. From Cairo, Ledyard was to proceed to Mecca, where no Christian could hope to pass unnoticed, “and from thence (unless insuperable difficulties shall occur) he shall cross the Red Sea, and taking the route of Nubia shall traverse the Continent of Africa as nearly as possible in the direction of the Niger.”

  Ledyard left England on June 30, 1788, and arrived in Cairo on August 19. He found lodgings in a convent maintained by the Order of Recollects, advising his sponsors that Cairo in August sweltered, but that he had “seen it hotter in Philadelphia.” Biding his time, Ledyard prepared for his inland journey and toured the Egyptian capital. He visited the slave market and met a minister of the bey. His eagerness to depart accelerated when he found that Christians in Cairo were insulted and badgered in the streets, especially when they tried to make converts to Christianity (as he regularly did).

  Ledyard sent his impressions to Beaufoy in a series of letters, but suddenly they stopped. Weeks later, the British consul in Cairo wrote to say that Ledyard had died.

  A bilious complaint [Beaufoy wrote in the proceedings], the consequence of vexatious delays in the promised departure of the caravan, had induced him to try the effect of too powerful a dose of the acid of vitriol, and the sudden uneasiness and burning pain which followed the uncautious draught, compelled him to seek the relief of the strongest Tartar emetic. A continued discharge of blood discovered the danger of his situation…. [H]e was decently interred in the neighborhood of such of the English as had ended their days in the capital of Egypt.

  In plain English, Ledyard had inadvertently poisoned himself with a fatal dose of sulfuric acid.

  Banks and Beaufoy did not long mourn him, for they had already hedged their bets. While Ledyard tackled the crossing of Africa from east to west, the African Association recruited a second explorer who would cross it from north to south. This was Simon Lucas, whom Beaufoy probably knew as the son of a fellow wine merchant. Lucas, sent to Cadiz as a young man to learn the sherry trade, was captured by pirates and sold as a slave to the Moroccan bey. Released three years later, he was appointed British vice-consul to the court of the man who held him captive.

  Lucas returned to London sixteen years later, where he was appointed Oriental interpreter at the Court of St. James. There he met members of the African Association, many of whom had strong ties to the royal family. On June 13, 1788, only four days after the African Association had been formed, Banks paid a call on Lord Sydney, who had held cabinet rank and was intensely interested in British exploration and colonization.* Banks wanted Sydney’s help in getting Lucas released from duties at court to take part in an expedition to Africa. Sydney put the matter to George III, who agreed to grant Lucas leave.

  An undated note in Beaufoy’s handwriting says, “Mr. Lucas, Oriental interpreter, whose salary is 60 pounds per annum, offers to proceed, by way of Gibraltar and Tripoli to Fezzan,† provided his salary is continued during his absence.” He seemed a choice recruit: not only did he speak Arabic, but at court he had become friendly with the Tripolitanian ambassador.

  The association financed the Lucas and Ledyard expeditions with 453 pounds sterling. Each explorer received an advance of 100 pounds, with the possibility of drawing further sums en route. To forestall requests for money, the selection committee made a virtue of its stinginess, “persuaded that in such an undertaking poverty is a better protection than wealth.” A poor man offered less of a temptation to thieves. The tiny commissions appear not to have deterred Ledyard or Lucas, for it was not the pursuit of money that drew either man to the African wilds.

  Simon Lucas left England in August 1788, reaching Tripoli in mid-October. While Ledyard lay dying in Cairo, Lucas was looking for an escort to take him across the Libyan Desert, just as Alexander Gordon Laing would do nearly forty years later. When he told the bashaw (in those days, Ali Karamanli, Yusuf’s father) that he wanted to visit the Fezzan, the ruler remarked that no Christian had ever attempted such a trip and that Lucas would probably die if he tried. Lucas said his only interest lay in collecting plants and Roman antiquities. The bashaw told him, as he and his son would tell other explorers taking the Tripoli route, that, personally, he would be glad to help, but the moment was not auspicious because unnamed tribes in the south continued to defy his authority. Lucas, looking elsewhere for help, found two sheikhs from the Fezzan who offered to escort him. He left Tripoli with them in February 1789. He wore Turkish dress and let his hair grow so that, as he wrote to his sponsors, he looked “like a London Jew in deep mourning.”

  Carrying presents for the ruler of Fezzan (including brandy, which was that Muslim’s favorite drink), Lucas traveled east along the coast of Libya to the seaside city of Misurata. As he was about to turn inland, the local governor warned him that warring tribes would bar his way. With the prudence of the civil servant he had become, Lucas decided to wait until the tribes had calmed down. The two Fezzan sheikhs grew impatient and left him, but not before he had extracted new geographical information about southern Libya. Left on his own, Lucas decided to return to England.

  On June 30, 1789, he wrote to Banks that he had arrived penniless in Marseilles and drawn some cash at a local bank. He apologized for not pursuing his assigned route, but noted that his journey had produced valuable information and that he had brought back a collection of rare seeds. Privately, Lucas felt that destiny held better things for him. In 1798, named consul to Tripoli, he prospered for eight years before dying at post (to be succeeded not long after by Hanmer Warrington).

  The members of the African Association were powerful men used to getting their way. The failure of the first two missions and the death of their first explorer acted as a spur, not a deterrent, to future missions. In fact, while their “African travelers” were in the field, the membership met with two North African visitors to London who claimed to have been to Timbuktu. They suggested that the Niger would be most easily reached from the river Gambia.

  In all their talk of Africa, the Niger and Timbuktu captured the members’ greatest interest. Timbuktu, more than anything else, embodied the unattainable. As Beaufoy wrote, its discovery, and that of the Niger, was “made doubly interesting by the consideration of its having engaged the at
tention, and baffled the researchers of the most inquisitive and most powerful nations of antiquity.”

  Recognizing now the difficulty of passing through northern deserts controlled by Muslims, Banks and Beaufoy decided to send the next expedition inward from the West African coast. The association’s next traveler, an Irish major, Daniel Houghton, had served off the coast of Senegal, and was sent to the mouth of the Gambia. His instructions were to push up that river as far as possible and learn whatever he could about “the rise, the course, and the termination of the Niger, as well as of the various nations that inhabit its borders.”

  He began well enough and reached the rapids known as Barra Kunda Falls, the farthest navigable point on the Gambia, where he was assured by his guides that he could walk the “Timbouctoo Road” with just a stick in his hand. Experience proved otherwise. Houghton followed his instructions as best he could, but from the outset he had aroused suspicion among native traders, who robbed and killed him. Before they succeeded, Houghton penetrated farther into the African interior than any other European. Years later it transpired that he died in 1791 at a village named Simbing (in present-day Mali), about 160 miles north of the Niger and 500 miles short of Timbuktu. He had been lured into the Sahara, robbed, and left to die.

  In the dispatches Houghton sent to London during his journey, carried back to the coast by pairs of tribesmen who specialized in carrying messages across the wilderness for Arab merchants, he correctly surmised that the Niger rose in the mountains south of the Gambia and that it likely flowed from west to east.

  Sir Joseph next sent out Mungo Park, a young Scottish physician who had sailed in 1791 as ship’s surgeon on an East India Company vessel bound for Sumatra. Park dazzled the membership of the association, Banks finding him “a young man of no mean talents … sufficiently instructed in the use of Hadley’s quadrant to make the necessary observations; geographer enough to trace his path through the wilderness, and not unacquainted with natural history.”

  In May 1795, Park sailed aboard the brig Endeavour, bound for the Gambia for a cargo of ivory, and reached Jilifree on the river’s northern bank thirty days later. From there he struck inland, following Houghton’s route.

  Dr. Park’s mission lasted more than two and a half years, and his adventures and accomplishments rank among the greatest ever in the annals of African exploration. As in the case of Houghton, tribesmen constantly harassed him, demanding tolls for the right to pass through their lands. In the Moorish kingdom of Ludamar, where, he learned, Houghton had been robbed, he wrote that the tribesmen “hissed, shouted, and abused me, they even spit in my face, with a view to irritating me, and afford them a pretext for seizing my luggage. But finding such insults had not the desired effect, they had recourse in the final and decisive argument, that I was a Christian, and that my property was lawful plunder.”

  A band of Muslim horsemen took him prisoner and brought him to the camp of a local chieftain who ordered his right hand cut off, his eyes plucked out, and his life ended. Park escaped only because, at that moment, an enemy tribe attacked the camp. He pressed on, ridden with fever, bereft of supplies, tormented by thirst and sandstorms. He came out of Muslim territory and entered the country of the Bambara, who proved friendly. He followed a group from a place called Kaarta heading east toward the town of Segou. “As we approached the town,” Park later wrote,

  I was fortunate to overtake the Kaartans … and we rode together through some marshy ground, where, as I was looking round anxiously for the river, one of them called out, “Geo affili” (see the water); and looking forward, I saw with infinite pleasure the great object of my mission, the long-sought and majestic Niger, glittering to the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing slowly to the eastward. I hastened to the brink, and, having drank of the water, lifted up my fervent thanks in prayer to the Great Ruler of all things for having thus crowned my endeavors with success.

  The date was June 20, 1796, and Park had become the first European on record to lay eyes on the river Niger, and to record that it flowed inland, to the east. He vowed to follow it to Timbuktu and on to its mouth. He did not succeed. His situation swiftly deteriorated as he moved back into Muslim lands. In the unbearable heat, his horse collapsed, the tropical rains began, and on August 25 a gang of thieves jumped him, stripping him naked.

  “I was now convinced,” he later wrote with characteristic understatement, “that the obstacles to my further progress were insurmountable.” Upon reaching Silla on the Niger, still some four hundred miles from Timbuktu, he turned back, struggling for a year to find the Atlantic. In June 1797, he reached the mouth of the Gambia and boarded an American slaving vessel which carried him as far as Antigua, where he caught a mail packet home. He landed at Falmouth just before Christmas 1797, and went straight to London.

  News of Park’s accomplishments thrilled the African Association (and indeed all of England). He was the first white man to penetrate the forbidding interior of Africa for the sole purpose of finding out what lay there, and to come back alive. He invented a new and glorious calling, creating an adventurous species of hero: the lone, brave African explorer: the African traveler. This beau ideal soon captured the imagination, fed the fantasies, and filled the literature of Europe.

  English society lionized Mungo Park. The book he wrote, Travels into the Interior Districts of Africa, became an instant best-seller. His success was of great help to the African Association, whose membership soared to more than one hundred and came to include former prime ministers, the fabulously wealthy bankers Coutts and Hoare, the beer brewer Whitbread, the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood, and the leader of the antislavery campaign William Wilberforce. James Rennell, a noted geographer and former surveyor-general of Bengal, provided illustrations and maps for Park’s book.

  Banks, with Park’s triumph to point to, now launched a campaign to involve the British government (and money) in African exploration. When the rivalry between Britain and Napoleonic France spilled over into Africa, exploration took on a new, political dimension. While the African Association’s explorers pushed up the Gambia, French traders moved up the Senegal.

  In 1799, after the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, Banks urged his government to seize control of the Niger and its trade before the French did. It was prescient advice.

  *The equivalent in today’s currency of about $1,350. The first-year budget was thus just over $12,000, though Banks and others would soon augment it—with a certain stinginess—from their considerable private wealth.

  *Sydney, Australia, was named for him.

  †Fezzan was a large desert kingdom roughly south of present-day Libya. Its southern border was many hundreds of miles from the river Niger.

  Chapter Three

  A WEDDING IN THE ENGLISH GARDEN

  THOUGH THE BRITISH CONSULATE near the center of town had served as the residence of English envoys to Tripoli since 1788, Hanmer Warrington rarely spent the night en ville. The building was in a state of poor repair, its structure and trappings seeming to him unrepresentative both of Great Britain and of his own personal prestige. Warrington much preferred the spacious comforts, solitude, and wine cellar of his well-guarded country home. One of his first official purchases had been a stout six-oared boat to row him from the menshia to town and back.

  On the evening of Laing’s arrival, after giving him a brief tour and allowing the younger man to take in the sights, sounds, and smells of Tripoli, he carried him off in his boat to the English Garden two miles outside the city walls.

  There, he introduced Laing to his wife; to Louisa, his flighty and flirtatious youngest daughter; to Emma, the middle daughter, thin and of medium height; to Jane, the oldest, a big, strong, strapping girl; to George, the boy who would later plead to accompany Laing on his desert journey; and to Frederick, the son who acted as his father’s interpreter and was soon to help Laing with his mastery of Arabic.

  The “English Garden,” Hanmer Warrington’s country home outsi
de Tripoli.

  The Warrington brood at the time of Laing’s arrival consisted of the consul and his wife, seven sons, and the three daughters (a fourth daughter had died in 1815), but the whole family was rarely in one place and not all were present to welcome the visitor from London.

  Warrington promised his guest a steak dinner. Rare was the European in Tripoli who served steak to his guests, since most local “beef” was butchered from camels that had collapsed, usually from disease, in the sewage-strewn streets. Even boiled vegetables presented a risk to the unacclimated. As for the steak dinner, somehow the resourceful consul had managed to obtain the real thing—aged cuts of beef brought that day from the hold of the Gannet, packed in salt and tarragon leaves in Malta.

  In the meantime, Laing was escorted to his rooms. At the consul’s residence one could at least have a good wash. In the bathroom adjoining his bedroom, Laing squeezed into a galvanized sheet-metal tub and sloshed himself down with hot water, his first soak in the week since leaving Malta. Another luxury awaited him on the porch outside: a tray bearing a choice of whiskey and beer. Laing took the Scotch, which he drank neat.

  On this, their first evening together, Laing tried to get to know his corpulent host, the smiling bon vivant who was to be his sponsor, superior, and collaborator. Hanmer Warrington was an enigma, if clearly a man under some pressure. There was, Laing knew, among the European consuls in Tripoli a constant vying for influence, particularly between the British and the French. Could that explain the British consul’s constant boasting? In Warrington’s own estimation, with his arrival eleven years earlier, in 1814, England’s fortunes had risen, for the bashaw found in him a character as strong as his own. It was sometimes said in consular circles that it was Warrington, not Yusuf Bashaw Karamanli, who sat on Tripoli’s throne. The consul did nothing to gainsay this view.