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

by Frank T. Kryza

  In fact, Clapperton did not go to Yauri. It is hard to understand what kept him back, and he does not reveal his reasons in his notes. He had been eager enough (the previous year), to make a special trip from Sokoto to see the sultan of Yauri, but Bello warned that the journey was too dangerous and had prevented it. Now here he was, within hours’ paddling distance of Yauri, and he says only that he could not spare the time. This is baffling, especially since he noted in his journal that although everybody treated him with great kindness, on the subject of Mungo Park all were evasive. Yet Clapperton himself failed to visit the one man who could, presumably, have told him exactly what happened on that fatal day twenty-two years before.

  Even more astonishing, according to Bello, the sultan of Yauri had Park’s journals and papers, for which, one would have thought, Clapperton would have been prepared to lose a month, let alone a day or two. There must have been something about the proposed trip that raised Clapperton’s concern, a concern he did not put in writing and that remains unknown to this day. It is possible, of course, that he was simply unwilling to allow anything to divert him from besting Laing to Timbuktu.

  In any event, Mungo Park had set a terrible precedent that was to haunt subsequent explorers. Driven to the edge of sanity, Park had massacred many Africans, forgetting that he, not they, was the trespasser. It was an indelible first impression that his successors would fail to erase in the decades ahead.

  After inspecting the place where the Jolibar came to grief, Clapperton noted shrewdly that even if the canoe had not struck a rock or been attacked, it could not have survived the terrific rapids of the river. Lander, too, inspected Bussa Falls, capturing wonderfully the atmosphere of the place:

  It was nearly sunset when I got into the canoe in which I was ferried across the stream to Bussa. The evening was calm, clear, and beautiful; the fireflies had already begun to shine and buzzed the air. The hollow roar of crocodiles was heard from the borders of the current, and the declining sun tinged the surface of the water with a rich hue of crimson. The sound of sweet-toned instruments and the hum of human voices mingling in concert and wafted from the city I was approaching produced a soothing and delightful effect; and as the little canoe was propelled slowly through the lazy stream, the music seemed like a symphony of angel voices floating from the sky.

  This is a departure from the stark, utilitarian prose typical of Lander and Clapperton. It is all the more impressive when one takes into account that even men of the officer class, like Clapperton, were little more than barely literate.*

  The next day, April 10, at a place called Komie (Komi), where the Kainji Dam now stands, the two white men crossed the Niger at what was called King’s Ferry and saw the last of Borgu territory. Both were reluctant to leave. Clapperton had been told that the Borgu had the worst reputation of any of the African tribes. “They have not lived up to that reputation,” he wrote. “I have travelled and hunted with them and been at their mercy for weeks.” Lander called them “strictly honourable, good-natured and cheerful; always benevolent and ready to sacrifice personal comfort for their white visitors.”

  As they traveled, Clapperton heard from all interlocutors that the Niger River flowed south into the sea, but his instructions were to head north and find Sultan Bello in Sokoto, and he personally very much wanted to renew his friendship with the great African king. The main road to Sokoto was via Kano, which they reached on July 20, 1826. They had taken more than three months to travel three hundred miles, averaging under three miles a day, slogging through stifling jungles and boulder-strewn plains.

  At Kano, Clapperton learned that war had erupted between the Sokoto caliphate and the kingdom of Bornu. A famine had devastated Bornu, and the sheikh (the familiar El Kanemi, who had been so impressed by Hillman’s martial inventions) had sent fine horses to Kano as an oblique way of calling attention, through ambassadors who accompanied the horses, to their predicament. Instead of helping, the governor of Kano (the foul-tempered Hajji Hat Salah, who, the year before, had slandered Clapperton in a luncheon toast) ordered the Bornu ambassadors bound hand and foot and publicly butchered alive in a market square.

  Other cities to which El Kanemi had sent horses returned them with bundles of spears—a way of saying that if the sheikh wanted grain, he would have to come and fight for it. Outraged, Mohammed El Kanemi assembled an army and marched on the caliphate. War had raged ever since.

  Having come this far, Clapperton now had to decide whether to move forward despite hostilities that greatly increased the risks he faced. It was a decision that would take him five weeks to make. In those long days and nights, while mulling over his prospects, he must have asked himself what had become of Laing. Clapperton likely thought often of his rival, wondering if he might find him in the next valley, across the next bend in the hills, ensconced in a hut in the village just ahead in the wilderness.

  In fact, the entrepid Scot was very far away, and in terrible trouble.

  *If this seems opaque, it is because pre-Victorians had to resort to complex wordplay to indulge in off-color humor in print. Far from referring to Grieg, Ibsen, or to the legend of Peer Gynt (whose Mountain King had only one wife), allusions that might have been the English reader’s first inference in 1825, the joke is “a true mountin’ king,” i.e., they were traveling on a flat savanna, well beyond mountains, so “mountain” could only be understood as “mounting” (his many wives). How tedious to explain

  *Lander was likely thinking of Haydn’s Symphony no. 45, the Farewell (much influenced by Mozart), where the final violinist sits alone on the stage as his counterparts, one by one, take their leave of him on the platform to return to their families. There is no “Mozart’s Farewell.”

  *A healthy, well-fed, well-watered camel can safely carry up to 350 pounds over long distances. Zuma likely weighed at least that much.

  *The old town of Bussa, and Bussa Falls, is now underwater as a result of the construction of the Kainji Dam in the late 1960s.

  †“Jolibar” is one of dozens of West African names for the Niger River.

  *As late as 1850, less than 5 percent of British sailors were literate, a figure that would rise dramatically as cheap printed books soon became widely available.

  Chapter Fifteen

  TREACHERY IN THE TANEZROUFT

  AFTER A MONTH AT IN SALAH, Alexander Gordon Laing wanted to get moving again. Yet Sheikh Babani showed a reluctance to leave the desert oasis. The Arab leader was strangely irritable. He argued with Laing about money, protesting that he had not been paid. Further, Babani claimed that the caravan’s camels needed rest and their loads redistributed. When Laing pressed him, the sheikh “burst into tears indicating,” Warrington wrote later, “that his heart failed him in what he was about to do.”

  The other members of Laing’s party were also in no hurry to leave this place of plenty, which, had they seen it on their first day out of Tripoli, would have seemed overpoweringly drab. After weeks in the desert, In Salah appeared to everyone as a corner of heaven. But they knew they had to leave, and so they drank the crystal-pure water from local wells, savoring it, as Laing continued to bicker with the head of his caravan.

  Hatita was not much help; he was going no farther. Laing sent the Tuareg guide back to Tripoli with the mail on December 8, for he would have been useless in the Hoggar country, where the Hoggar Tuareg would certainly have recognized him as an Ajjer and killed him on sight. Hatita’s departure left Laing despondent, telling Warrington,

  I despatch Hateeta tomorrow, and shall leave the remainder of this sheet till then. I like Hateeta much. I never met a better man in any country, and certainly never a more disinterested man. Use him according to his deserts my dear Consul, and you will use him well.

  Laing tried to generate enthusiasm for setting off among the merchants, some of whom had been waiting ten months to go south, but this effort, too, failed. These experienced desert travelers, no strangers to local conditions, told him that Tuareg bands were roa
ming abroad. These were dangerous, deadly men. No one was willing to risk crossing the desert until rumors of their presence had abated.

  The waiting was insupportable. On January 1, 1826, in a letter to his friend Sabine, Laing added a postscript asking for books: “When Denham’s work is published, I wish you would tell [John] Murray to send me a copy, as well as of Lyon, to Sierra Leone [where he expected to end his journey]—the Travels of Edrisi, a copy of Ptolemy and Herodotus also, if he can possibly procure them.”* The boredom and delays gave him time to worry about his wife, a pastime that was “driving him to distraction.” In a letter to Warrington before Christmas he wrote:

  Shou’d you have now in your possession, or hereafter receive any letters addressed to me in the interior, pray return them to the Colonial Office, whence I have desired that they may be forwarded to Sierra Leone, to which place I must request of you for the future to address to me. Continue writing to me regularly, and giving me every kind of information which you think will be interesting to me. You know there are many subjects to which I am indifferent, therefore do not accuse me of dictating, when I say that I shall be happy if you enlarge most upon matters relating to my Dear Emma, and the mission upon which I am employed. In both of these subjects we are I believe equally and reciprocally interested. Do not I pray you, omit to apprise me exactly of the state of health of my Dearest Emma, whose image ever occupies my thoughts, is ever before my eyes. I feel in its full force the truly peculiar and delicate situation in which I have left her, and the bare idea is oftentimes nearly sufficient to drive me to distraction: My only consolation arises from the consciousness that it was necessary to the happiness of us both. If it pleases God to spare us for each other, (and that it will so please Him I have implicit faith) I shall devote the remainder of my life to atone for the unhappiness I have occasioned her, in my future endeavours to render her as happy as it is possible for me to do….

  On the day after his arrival at In Salah (December 3, 1825), Laing had apprised the Colonial Office of his intention to resume his journey no later than December 10—just long enough to rest the camels. The days rolled by; Christmas passed; New Year’s Day came. For Laing, racing against Clapperton to reach Timbuktu and the Niger, waiting any longer became out of the question. At last, he decided to set out alone across the dreaded Tanezrouft, the heart of the desert, a land known as “the place of thirst.” It covered 70,000 square miles of barren rock and sand, the deadliest leg of the journey south. Laing’s ignorance concerning the route and his inflated self-confidence blinded him to the risk he was about to take. He wrote that he was “determined upon setting out solus in four days more, come what will, come what may.”

  And then, a strange thing happened: the traders, seeing that a lone Christian who did not know the way showed less fear than they, were shamed into joining him. “The merchants having become acquainted with our determination plucked up courage,” Laing wrote.

  On January 9, thirty-eight days after he had arrived, the caravan of forty-five men and one hundred camels left In Salah to cross the mournful kingdom of sand. They headed for the Hoggar, the great mountain nucleus of the central Sahara. For two interminable weeks, they waded through loose, granular sand, the camels nearly knee deep in the shifting particles, dark sandstone ridges flanking the track their only guideposts. This was the desert of the European imagination—high sandhills down whose slopes the camels plunged in a wavering zigzag, kept upright only by the camel boys tugging their tails; high sandhills that loomed over the exhausted travelers like ranges of mountains.

  An Arab merchant on horseback in Africa. These intrepid entrepreneurs were the lords, and often the scourges, of those black-populated regions whose commerce they dominated.

  The Sahara daily became more dangerous, and yet Laing’s fascination with it bordered on mesmerization. Fully seduced by its bleak beauty, he was elated. He wrote Bandinel, apparently not recognizing just how serious the matter was, of the peril he was now in for having been mistaken for Mungo Park:

  An extremely ridiculous report has gone abroad here that I am no less a personage than the late Mungo Park, the Christian who made war upon the people inhabiting the banks of the Niger, who killed several, and wounded many of the Tuaric, and although at the first blush its statement, you may feel inclined to treat it with the same levity which I did, and smile at the absurdity which cou’d for a moment favor the belief of such a report, yet when I inform you that there is a Tuaric in this place [a village south of In Salah] who received a Musket shot in his cheek in a rencontre with Park’s Vessel, and who is ready to take his oath that I am the person who commanded it, and when you consider that the great discrepancy in point of time (I being only 31 years of age, and the expedition of Park having taken place 21 years ago) is a matter of no moment among people who do not trouble themselves with investigation, you will regret it as much as I do now, absurd & ridiculous as it may at first appear, for I cannot view without some apprehension the difficulties in which it may involve me in my attempts at research hereafter on the great artery of this unexplored continent. How imprudent, how unthinking; I may even say, how selfish was it in Park to attempt making discovery in this land, at the expense of the blood of its inhabitants, and to the exclusion of all after communication: how unjustified was such conduct! What answer am I to make to the question which will be often put to me? What right had your countrymen to fire upon and kill our people?

  Laing understood much that had eluded his fellow Scot, and he was determined not to replicate Mungo Park’s errors.

  From time to time, little vortices of sand imitated the spume of the ocean, and it occurred to Laing that the challenge of the desert was not unlike that of the sea. The familiar perils were all there—bad weather, loss of bearings, exhaustion of supplies, even going down with all hands. A caravan engulfed in sand might not descend as far as a ship sinking to the bottom of the ocean, but the effect was oddly similar, and the odds of rescue distinctly less. The Sahara was twice the size of the Mediterranean, and emptier. Its vastness was inconceivable: 3,500 miles separated Cap Blanc on the Atlantic from Port Sudan on the Red Sea—3,500 miles as the crow flies; to walk that distance was to double it.

  In two weeks the caravan reached the Hoggar country, an endless rubbled plain the size of Texas with boulders the size of tall buildings. On this waterless, bone-hard plateau, the sun’s rays beat the ground as upon an anvil. Except for the unwonted acacia and a malignant species of crow that tormented the camels and stole precious supplies, no living thing inhabited this land—except the Tuareg. Laing thought it the most desolate region in the world. He described it as “a Desart of sand as flat as a bowling green and as destitute of verdure as Melville Island [in the Arctic Circle] in the depth of winter.” The merchants were still so frightened, he wrote, that “during four days that we were in a constant state of alarm, expecting every moment to fall in with the much dreaded [Tuareg], every acacia tree in the distance being magnified or rather metamorphosed by the apprehensive Merchants into troops of Armed Foes.” Though the caravan was isolated and at greatest danger, to Laing the fears of his comrades seemed exaggerated. “Receiving daily advices from Tuat [In Salah] of the perilous state of the road,” he wrote, “my situation was not the most enviable, exposed as I was to the [hostile censure] of the whole kaffila, for subjecting them and their property to such hazard, when by a little patience in waiting at [In Salah], till the road became good [i.e., safe] they might all have gone in safety.”

  Though explorers and geographers could not know this at the time (and would not for many decades, until satellite photos revealed the fact), the sand desert forms only one-seventh of the whole brooding wasteland of the Sahara. The rest is made up of plains of pebbles and rock like the Tanezrouft. Movement along these iron-hard surfaces was torturous in the merciless heat. Huge outcrops of rock alternated with mountain ranges extending hundreds of miles and rising thousands of feet, denuded of vegetation. Changes of temperature were violent
. At sundown, the thermometer fell thirty degrees in ten minutes, a drop accompanied by explosive salvos as pebbles cracked in the sudden loss of heat. The prevailing winds, the khamsin* and simoom, rose in terrific gusts. Over the centuries, these winds had flattened mountains. At night, their searing, chafing eddies dried out canyons and withered life.

  Laing could not hinder the sand. A tin plate left on the ground was covered in seconds with a thin gritty film. Sand filled the ears and nose, reddened eyes, and infiltrated clothing. Sand clogged every crack and crevice. There was sand in the tea glasses, sand in the food, sand in the scientific equipment, a dispiriting grit on one’s tongue, a malevolent sting in the eye….

  Whenever the wind picked up, visibility lessened. One might see thirty feet. Caravanners hunched against whatever shelter they could find, waiting. Some put their heads on their knees, barely breathing. Camels snorted and gnarred.

  After wind, water was the ruler of the Sahara, and its incidence in the Tanezrouft was as yet unexplored. There were few oases, each boasting settled life of a sort, usually in a village behind white mud walls. In the water holes, there were catfish. In some inhabited lands (like In Salah), rain had been unknown for as long as eighteen years running, but rain was no stranger to the desert. Sometimes it came down in blinding, icy torrents. Then the wadis became cascades; mammoth pools formed in valley bottoms while overnight millions of white and yellow blooms appeared in the desolation. Tamarisks, an evergreen shrub with roots as deep as eighteen feet, and the pasture grass called ashab, so loved by camels, would gain new life.