One explorer, watching Yusuf Bashaw’s army returning after a campaign in the hinterlands, counted two thousand human heads on the tips of Cologhi spears. These grisly trophies belonged to rebellious Tuareg whose decapitated bodies were burned in the desert. But the nomads, tough and resilient, never permitted the bashaw’s power to extend much beyond Tripoli and its environs. While he did exercise some authority over the caravan routes, the bashaw’s assertion that he could guarantee the safety of any traveler bound for Bornu was a fantasy.
Hanmer Warrington, a fanatical patriot convinced of English superiority (he ended one report of a disagreement with a fellow consul with the words: “I am an Englishman, thank God! He is not!”), blustering and insufferable to all who crossed him, administered British affairs in Tripoli like a despot himself. Whitehall understood his shortcomings only too well, but these were, in a sense, the right shortcomings—to defend British interests in a city where pirates and slavers not only had legal protection but still accounted for a substantial fraction of the bashaw’s income, and where a thousand Maltese still numbered among the British subjects under the consul’s care. A more diplomatic consul could not have succeeded. Warrington was brutal, but he was also effective.
Yusuf Bashaw, who had secured his throne through years of bloodthirsty machinations, appreciated Warrington’s connivery. Warrington constantly tripped up the other consuls, using whatever skulduggery suited him. Far from earning a reprimand, he got high marks at the Castle, where the bashaw appreciated the achievements of a schemer as resourceful as himself. Warrington’s favor at court could also be attributed to his unabashed groveling. An English soldier who visited Tripoli in 1845 (when, admittedly, the consul was elderly, partially blind, and reaching the end of his career) described Warrington watching troops marching on the beach below the bashaw’s Castle:
“Tell Ali Bashaw [Yusuf’s son, who had succeeded him] I never saw such splendid maneuvering in all the course of my life!” Warrington informed the interpreter.
“Tell the bashaw that as long as he has such troops as these, he will be invincible!”
“Tell the bashaw I myself should not like to command English troops against these fine fellows!”
The English visitor smiled inwardly, he reported, for the Cologhi soldiers’ antics were comically inept.
In his earlier years, by whatever means, Warrington usually got his way. One morning in 1817 a corsair and its prize arrived in Tripoli harbor, the flag of the captured ship flying on the vessel’s forestay. The consul recognized “with horror and amazement” the Union Jack and ran to the bashaw for justice. Within the hour the prisoners were freed, the flag delivered to Warrington, and the pirate captain hung from his mast. (This in spite of appeals from the bashaw’s advisers to spare the pirate so that Tripoli’s reputation as a haven for criminals would not be tarnished.)
The bashaw realized that the age of piracy was ending. Under his reign, piratical practices had already been the cause of war in 1805 between Tripolitania and the United States.* In 1819, a combined Anglo-French squadron appeared off the shores of Tripoli. The bashaw and the other Barbary rulers were ordered to give up attacks on Mediterranean shipping or face grim consequences from the world’s two greatest navies. That was the death knell for the buccaneers who for nearly five hundred years had stalked the Mediterranean. It was also a huge financial blow to the bashaw. No longer could his treasury be supported by ransoms and the sale of stolen ships and booty. Though Yusuf Bashaw made halfhearted efforts to plunder the shipping of smaller nations, the threat of Anglo-French retaliation was great, even in protecting vessels that were neither English nor French. Those two powers, policemen of the Mediterranean, were themselves at peace. By 1825, the bashaw found that all sources of revenue from the old trade of piracy and Christian slavery had dried up.
With a large part of his revenues cut, the bashaw had to turn elsewhere for money. One source of income he thought he could exploit was the sale of black slaves. With this in mind, he started to organize slave caravans to strike deeper into Central Africa than Arabs had before. This strategy, ironically, coincided with the arrival of the first British explorers, who came in part to abolish the slave trade. The bashaw discovered that these travelers could themselves become additional sources of cash, though he failed to anticipate that it was the British who would be responsible for bringing slavery to an end.
APPROVAL FOR THE FIRST BRITISH EXPEDITION originating from Tripoli reached Warrington in February 1818. He replied enthusiastically in a letter to Barrow dated March 7: “The plan is fraught with innumerable advantages to Geographical Science, to the Commercial interests of the civilized world, and, ultimately, I hope, it may rescue millions of our fellow-creatures from an Abyss of Ignorance and Superstition.”
In October 1818, a frail and introverted twenty-seven-year-old surgeon named Joseph Ritchie arrived in Tripoli with a twenty-three-year-old naval officer, George Lyon, and a shipwright from the Malta dockyards, John Belford (who was there to build a boat should the trio ever reach the Niger). Ritchie, a Scotsman like Mungo Park, carried with him 2,000 pounds sterling and instructions from Lord Bathurst to “proceed under proper protection to Timbuktoo … and collect all possible Information as to the further Course of the Niger, and of the probability of your being able to trace the stream of that river with safety to its termination or to any given distance towards that point.”
The emphasis in London had shifted subtly from the days when Sir Joseph Banks and the African Association were in charge. The British still wanted to find the Niger River and the mysterious city at its northern bend, but increasingly the raison d’être for sending young men to these inhospitable regions was the possibility of commerce and the extirpation of the slave trade. The government had an agenda. Warrington, his jingoism ignited by the prospect of seeing the Union Jack hoisted deep in tropical Africa, promised the Colonial Office that “when Mr. Ritchie arrives everything shall be done for the best—the full extent of this Regency is within our grasp … though I should suppose overtures of a specific nature must be made, and accompanied by presents.” In the British consul, the bashaw had a man who, though for different reasons, thought much like himself.
The two senior members of the new expedition could not have been more different. Dr. Joseph Ritchie was a quiet, uncommunicative loner. George Lyon was a hardworking, extroverted young naval officer of considerable charm who made friends easily. Ritchie, unfortunately, was unsuited for African exploration, as soon became clear. He immediately fell ill and never recovered. Distracted and morose, he took no interest in Africa or its people, failed to record his observations, and probably caused the mission’s failure through a ridiculous oversight—he left Tripoli on a journey that might easily take over a year with only 300 Spanish dollars in his pocket, money he had borrowed from Lyon. He squandered the 2,000 pounds the Colonial Office had given him on a small warehouse of useless equipment, including a load of corkboard to preserve insects, two large chests of arsenic, brown paper for keeping plants, and six hundred pounds of lead (intended use: unknown).
What little is recorded of the Ritchie mission we owe to George Lyon, a fine writer who published his classic Travels in Northern Africa in 1821, just before Laing set off on his own journey. “He [Ritchie] relied too much on a singularly retentive memory,” Lyon graciously observed. For a time, the Ritchie party stayed in Warrington’s villa in the menshia outside Tripoli. Later they moved into the empty Portuguese consulate in town (Warrington was briefly acting consul for Portugal) and settled down to study the manner and customs of the Muslims. It may have been on the bad advice of the bashaw that they decided to disguise themselves as Moors. Lyon hired a fighi (a holy man, or religious scholar) to teach them Arabic. The trio went so far to have themselves circumcised (without anesthetics!) to pass close inspection as believers. Warrington, with the practical common sense that never left him where English travelers were concerned, regarded this strategy as ridiculous.
To complete the imposture, which probably deceived no one (news of their intended trip, by the time they left Tripoli, had spread far and wide), Ritchie assumed the name “Yusuf el Ritchie,” the dockyard worker Belford became “Ali,” and Lyon was “Said bin Abdulla.” They further announced that they would travel as mameluks (that is, as mercenary Muslim soldiers from Cairo), an additional folly.
As the weeks passed, they prepared their Arab disguises, shaving their heads, growing beards, and buying caftans, turbans, and Moroccan leather riding boots.* While Ritchie stayed indoors studying mathematics, Lyon attended clandestine meetings of the local marabouts to test his Arab costume and his facility with the language. He wrote of “marabouts in trances with nails through their faces and blood gushing from their bitten tongues whirling half-naked until they fell exhausted.”
On March 18, 1819, the bashaw received Ritchie and Lyon at an official audience with their consul, telling them they could head south with his ally, the newly appointed bey of Fezzan, Mohammed El Mukni, who was soon to leave Tripoli on a slave-raiding campaign. El Mukni, who had helped Hornemann years earlier, was collecting a force of armed Arabs to attack African villages. By accompanying the bey, Ritchie and Lyon would have protection for their journey and a guarantee of further help when they reached Murzuk. They bought twenty-two camels and some guerbas (waterskins) and left four days later as part of a caravan made up of two hundred men and as many camels.
In the company of Sheikh El Mukni and a strong guard of Tripoli soldiers, they made the journey across the sahel, the mountains of Gharian, the stony elevated surface of the Hamada el Homra, the great basalt hills of the Jebel es Sawda, the sand slopes of the Idehan Fezzan, and at last, the flat plain leading to Murzuk. Lyon found it difficult to adapt to his Moorish disguise. “As I sat in our tent writing a letter,” he said, “some Arabs came in and seemed to find much amusement in seeing me write from left to right; but when I told them my letter was addressed to a female, their astonishment knew no bounds; and they laughed heartily at the idea that a woman was capable of reading…. When I told them that Englishwomen were allowed to have money in their own power and that some of them had immense fortunes, they seemed hardly to credit me.”
The British could expect a certain amount of deference in the desert, oddly enough, because they had defeated Napoleon, the only European most Arabs had heard of. “Bono Barto, as the Arabs call him,” Lyon wrote, “is in great estimation amongst them, not on account of his military achievements, but because they have heard that he has 200,000 dollars an hour and he sits on a golden throne.”
On May 4, thirty-nine days after leaving Tripoli, the caravan reached the outskirts of Murzuk, capital of the Fezzan, a walled date-palm oasis of 2,500 inhabitants with seven guarded gates. According to custom, the party made a ceremonial entrance. Lyon describes the scene:
Having shaved, washed and adorned ourselves in the finest clothes which we had at hand, we started. Mukni, however, unwilling that his new Mamelukes should be less fine than his own people, sent for two splendid boxes, which he lent to Mr. Ritchie and myself, for this grand occasion, making us ride on the right and left of him …
In this manner, preceded by drummers, pipers, and dancers, they entered Murzuk, a town built on a flat plain around a central castle and surrounded by mud walls twenty feet high, crumbling with age. The houses, too, were built of mud, since it never rained—all compact single-story dwellings with courtyards, except for the bey’s palace in the middle of town, a labyrinth of turrets and connected rooms. One main street divided the town, and this wide-open space served as marketplace, storehouse, and mukef, or tethering place for slaves and animals. Tuareg regularly came to trade with the black population.
Beyond the city gates lay oases of date palms crowded around pools of brackish water. From these pools, at nightfall, arose clouds of voracious anopheles mosquitoes, vectors of malaria.* Murzuk had a deserved reputation for its unhealthy climate. In the town itself were pools of briny water fed by canals. Lyon correctly guessed that these “promote the advance of summer fevers and agues.” It was from such a fever that Hornemann’s German companion had died twenty years earlier.
The Englishmen were barely settled in the house provided for them by the bey when Lyon became ill with dysentery, confining him to bed for twenty-two days and, as he wrote, “reducing me to the last extremity.” He had no sooner begun to recover when “Mr. Ritchie fell ill, and was interned to his bed with an attack of bilious fever accompanied with delirium and great pain in his back and kidneys, for which he required constant cupping.† … When a little recovered, he got up for two days, but his disorder soon returned with redoubled and alarming violence. He rejected everything but water and, excepting for about three hours in the afternoon, remained either constantly asleep or in a delirious state.”
Nightmarish episodes filled the next six months as the lack of preparation that marked the expedition now began to exact its price. The three men went broke, reducing them to beggary. Ritchie, with maniacal stubbornness, would not let Lyon sell anything to raise cash, “lest it should lower us in the eyes of the natives.” When Lyon tried to sell supplies anyway, he learned that the bey, the once-friendly El Mukni, had forbidden the locals to trade. A young Muslim told Lyon privately: “Mukni hopes you may die so that he may secure to himself all your goods.” They could not borrow, for El Mukni, who had expected gifts, deserted them when he realized none would be forthcoming. They barely survived.
“For six weeks entire,” wrote Lyon, “we were without animal food, subsisting on a very scanty portion of corn and dates. Our horses were mere skeletons, added to which, Belford became totally deaf, and so emaciated as to be unable to walk.”
Dr. Ritchie became zombielike, possibly a symptom of his illness. He “almost constantly remained secluded in his own apartment, silent, unoccupied, and averse to any kind of society.”
El Mukni continued outwardly to pretend friendship. When Lyon again tried to borrow money, he apologized for not having any. In the end, he said he could let him have eight Spanish dollars, a pittance that would hardly supply the camp with food for a week. In July, El Mukni’s great slave-raiding party left for the south without them. As the months passed and Ritchie showed no sign of improvement, the simple rigors of day-to-day survival absorbed them. In September, Lyon took advantage of a caravan’s departure for Tripoli to send Warrington a plea for more funds, in the meantime selling one of their horses. Ritchie, though bedridden and weaker, continued to oppose giving up any of their property. “Mr. Ritchie being attacked again by illness,” Lyon wrote, “I much wished him to allow of my selling some of our powder to procure him a few comforts; but to this he would not consent.”
The cooler weather brought relief; Lyon was able to move around and make notes on the language and customs of the country. Food now became available, for El Mukni, who had returned, began to fear that reports of his penurious behavior would reach the ears of Yusuf Bashaw in Tripoli.
Lyon and John Belford were frequently down with fever, but Dr. Ritchie by now was slowly dying. He grew delirious, could eat no food, and sometimes drank vinegar and water. On November 17, he felt better and asked for a cup of coffee. He looked at himself in the mirror and told Lyon: “I was frightened at the blackness of my tongue, but now recollect I have been drinking coffee; had I observed that appearance without knowing the cause, I should have said I had bilious fever, and should bid you goodbye.”
By November 20, 1819, it was clear he was critically ill, and his two emaciated companions scrambled to keep him alive. Lyon wrote:
> On the 20th, we got a fowl, of which we made a little soup for him. The broth which Mr. Ritchie drank was the first nourishment he had taken for ten days, though we used all our endeavours to prevail on him to eat. He said he felt much revived by it, and turned round to go to sleep. I placed my bed at the entrance of the room and remained watching him. He seemed to breathe with difficulty; but as I had often observed this during his former maladies, I was not so much alarmed as I should otherwise have been. At about 9 o’clock, Belford, on looking at him, exclaimed in a loud voice, “He is dying!” I begged him to be more cautious, lest he should be overheard, and immediately examined Mr. Ritchie, who appeared to be still in a sound sleep; I therefore lay down on my bed and continued listening. At 10, I rose again, and found him lying in an easy posture and breathing more freely; five minutes, however, had scarcely elapsed before his respiration appeared entirely to cease; and on examination I found that he had actually expired, without a pang or groan, in the same position in which he had fallen asleep.
Ritchie died as he had lived—silent, withdrawn, uncommunicative.
Belford used his carpentry skills to make a coffin. That night, Lyon and Belford, who still posed as mameluks, secretly read the Church of England burial service over Ritchie’s body. The next morning, he was given a Muslim burial in the graveyard outside town, where the bey’s imam read the first chapter of the Koran over his grave. As the last spadefuls of sand were smoothed over, a messenger arrived from Warrington saying that the British government would allow disbursement of another thousand Spanish dollars.
Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa's City of Gold Page 10