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

by Frank T. Kryza

  Warrington and the bashaw now addressed a protest to the American consul, Charles Coxe, for his intervention in granting protection to Hassuna, thereby allowing him to dodge Karamanli justice. Warrington wanted Coxe declared persona non grata, but wiser heads at the Castle prevailed. Consul Coxe said publicly only that he would not submit to the British consul’s “dictation.”*

  Further fueling the crisis, Mohammed D’Ghies was now also granted French asylum, since he had taken refuge with Rousseau. Mohammed’s allegiences, it now seemed, might have been to the French all along, and his letter to the bashaw’s son merely a ruse to throw the consular committee off the scent.

  The French consul, at this point, received the following note from Warrington:

  Sir,

  I shall not disgrace my pen by addressing such a Convicted Villain, and with Infamy will I brand your name to the extremity of this World. I will, however, Glory in giving you Satisfaction, and, please God, sending you before a Tribunal where Treachery and Falsehood will avail you Nought, and where you will answer for your Unparalleled Iniquity.

  As Rousseau instantly apprehended, this was nothing less than a challenge to a duel—Warrington was planning to publicly shoot him! The frazzled baron now grasped that he had only one option remaining if he valued his life. He stole away to the American consulate under cover of night, and the obliging Coxe smuggled him aboard an American merchant ship bound for France.

  He had not yet played his last card. Before Baron Rousseau left Tripoli, he cleverly obtained a statement from Mohammed D’Ghies that his most recent confession had been extracted at gunpoint, a statement he left with Coxe, who made it public. As soon as Rousseau sailed, Mohammed denied the truth of this document also, and reaffirmed his previous confession. (Mohammed, it seems, while not steadfast as a witness, was certainly smart enough to produce whatever answer his current interlocutor wanted to hear, and to leave even his few adherents confused.)

  The bashaw’s hypothesis of Laing’s murder had, weeks earlier, been forwarded to London by Warrington, where it prompted the British government to request that the Quai d’Orsay, seat of the French foreign ministry, undertake an investigation into the allegations against Baron Rousseau.

  For France, Rousseau’s exoneration became a matter of national honor. L’affaire Laing was now on the front page of every French newspaper. Jules, Prince de Polignac, the last French prime minister of the Restoration period, appointed a commission of inquiry chaired by one Baron Monnier, a distinguished Orientalist and diplomat. The Monnier Commission briskly concluded that the charges against Baron Rousseau lacked any foundation, and that it was improbable that Laing’s journals had ever passed into the hands of Hassuna D’Ghies. Baron Monnier personally pronounced Rousseau innocent of all the charges on December 31, 1829.

  Few in Europe accepted the verdict. On both sides of the Channel a consensus developed that Hassuna D’Ghies had stolen the Laing papers. In France, few doubted the culpability of D’Ghies; his long and disreputable history of gambling, womanizing, and defaulting on debts in Paris and Marseilles was well documented. Many Frenchmen were disposed to think him guilty of any crime attributed to him. There was also little confidence in Rousseau’s integrity. In England, inevitably, most people dissented from the findings of the French commission.

  The British Quarterly Review summed up most British and some French opinion when it wrote:

  Our conclusion, we must confess, is very different as regards both these persons [Hassuna and Rousseau]. So far from its being improbable, we think that it is morally certain that Hassuna D’Ghies, by fraud and perfidy, did obtain possession of Major Laing’s papers…. But, admitting Hassuna to be guilty, what object, it may be asked, could make Baron Rousseau so anxious about getting possession of Major Laing’s journals? The ambition of publishing the contents of the said papers in his own name. It seems he had already been dabbling in oriental literature, chiefly Arabic, and has been charged, with what truth we know not, of appropriating the labours of a young man in Syria, to himself.

  AN ENGLISH EDITION of Caillié’s two-volume work, Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo; and across the Great Desert, to Morocco, performed in the years 1824–1828, was published in London in 1830, the same year the original appeared in Paris. It was prefaced by an interchange between Edme-François Jomard, considered in France “the Very Incarnation of Geography,” and Sir John Barrow, acknowledged in England as the nation’s most eminent living geographer. They carried on a debate about Caillié and Laing, “beneath the graceful and pompous phrases of which a nasty under-current is evident.”

  The trouble, as far as the British were concerned, had little to do with geography or science. It was that Caillié was French, and that Laing, the Scot, had been robbed of his laurels. An English commentator wrote:

  A Frenchman, be it noted, not a German, or an Italian or a Dutchman, or a man of any other Christian nationality, but a Frenchman! The coincidence seemed so strange that he was at once denounced as an impostor. Thus many said he had been shipwrecked on the Barbary Coast and invented the whole yarn. Others, while admitting that he might have gone into the interior, denied his having been to Timbuktu. All attacked him for having disavowed Christ and travelled as a Musulman …

  Warrington was naturally wary of René Caillié. The French vice-consul in Tangier who had sheltered Caillié was a man named Delaporte. And were not Hassuna D’Ghies and Delaporte “old and sworn friends?” According to the grapevine in Tripoli, they were. The consul “considered himself justified in forming his suspicions … and those suspicions would not be removed until M. Rousseau delivered the papers and gave a clear, circumstantial account of the fraud.”

  Warrington’s views hardened. Laing had been murdered, he believed, and when the murder was reported, Rousseau—whose appetite for literary fame had been sharpened by information embodied in the letters Hassuna had expropriated during the course of Laing’s journey—made every effort to seize Laing’s other records. Warrington, in the end, seemed to believe that all of Tripoli was in on the conspiracy.

  Meanwhile, encouraged by the findings of the Monnier Commission, which he interpreted as a vindication, D’Ghies went to London, where he presented himself to the Colonial Office as the innocent victim of the malevolent British consul in Tripoli, whose evil influence over the bashaw forced him to flee his own country. He produced “A Statement to the Right Honourable Lord Goodrich,* Secretary of His Britannic Majesty for the Colonies Concerning the Expedition of the late Major Laing to Tumbuctoo and the affairs of Tripoli By the Shereef Mahommed Hassuna D’Ghies late Minister of the Pacha of Tripoli.” With its supporting documents, this formidable statement covered 227 pages in handwritten foolscap. It was a rambling indictment of Warrington, the bashaw, and the Quarterly Review. Hassuna accused Warrington of corruption and tyranny, a man “who had imagined the accusation about Major Laing in order to ruin Hassuna.”

  Hassuna, despite his anti-British sympathies, had a small coterie of friends in London. Backed by the more influential of these, he hoped to discredit Warrington and persuade the British government to use its influence to restore him to favor with the bashaw. Lord Goderich asked Major James Fraser to visit Tripoli to depose Warrington, who was expected to rebut Hassuna’s charges.

  Fraser, who had known Warrington for years, found that the consul had aged considerably. He now suffered from slight deafness, “always most apparent when his feelings are most excited.” He is “irregular in his habits of business,” said Fraser, “indiscreet in his communications, regardless of money to a degree that is painful to witness and cannot be justified by his circumstances, impetuous, even violent, where his feelings are excited or his duty concerned, yet provokingly indolent where they are not, and is on all occasions … incapable of small arrangements.”

  This was a polite way of saying that the consul was finally cracking up under the strain. But Fraser found it impossible “not to sympathize with the man so shamefully calu
mniated” and persuaded him to answer Hassuna’s accusations. The consul was so frazzled that he could not reply coherently. He merely appended notes in the margins of Hassuna’s diatribe.

  “False, false, false,” wrote Warrington.

  “The more I see of the affair of Laing’s papers,” Major Fraser reported to the Colonial Office, “the more I am convinced of the Bashaw’s having … to conceal his own participation in this black business, and the warmer is my feeling towards poor Mr. Warrington.” A month later, he said that he found no difficulty in believing that “some monstrous villainy had been committed or that Hassuna was implicated in it.”

  Warrington’s actions in Tripoli frequently caused his masters in Downing Street uneasy moments, and as the years passed, the consul’s blunders were the source of increasing official displeasure. There were many in London who privately wanted him sacked. One of these, who had befriended Hassuna D’Ghies and taken up his case in London, publicly called for Warrington to be removed from his post.

  Yet firing Warrington would have been difficult, even for Viscount Goderich, a seasoned politician who had already served as prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer. The consul, in so many ways the incarnation of John Bull, had many supporters, in government and in the press. He was viewed as a patriot, defending England. Under these circumstances, and with rumored friends in Buckingham Palace, no one in Whitehall was prepared to criticize Consul Warrington too loudly, much less recall him.

  After dragging on for another two years, the matter of Warrington’s behavior was summed up by Goderich:

  I am by no means prepared to say our Consul of Tripoli may not, from excess of zeal, for the service of the government, and from a very natural eagerness in the pursuit of those persons who have been the cause of his Son-In-Law’s death, and of the abstraction of his papers, have possibly adopted some erroneous conclusions and have occasionally acted with precipitation, although I must state, that after attentive perusal of the various papers which I have received from Mr. D’Ghies, I am wholly unable to discover what is the actual offence of which the Consul is asserted to be guilty….

  The quarrel between Britain, France, and Tripoli over Laing’s vanished papers marked the beginning of the end for the Regency of Tripolitania and of the Karamanli dynasty. Indeed, by then the bashaw was foundering in a sea of other troubles. The traffic in Christian slaves, rich prizes from piracy at sea, large annual subsidies drawn from maritime powers for the security of their commerce—all these had slowly and inexorably dried up. Without these sources of revenue, the bashaw, addicted to an extravagant lifestyle, was probably doomed even before the Laing scandal.

  Old, infirm, and growing daily more beset by controversies he could not truly fathom, he let control of his kingdom slip from his fingers. Already isolated in his palace, Yusuf Bashaw closeted himself with his harem, drinking brandy with three voracious and formidable concubines who squandered his money on jewels, alcohol, and their own numberless dependents. The country began to revert to the anarchy that had preceded Karamanli rule.

  Meanwhile, the French took matters in Tripoli into their own hands. In August 1830 a French squadron consisting of a battleship, two large frigates, two corvettes, a brig, and a schooner appeared off Tripoli’s Castle and threatened war if the bashaw refused to sign a treaty of peace. The squadron’s advent was a direct result of l’affaire Laing, for French prestige had been sullied.

  The treaty’s first article was unambiguous: “His Excellency the Bashaw, Dey of Tripoli,” it began, “will transmit to the Rear-Admiral commanding the French Squadron a letter signed by himself and addressed to H.M. the Emperor of France in which he will beg His Majesty to accept humble excuses in the circumstances which forced the [French] Consul General to quit his post.”

  In fact, the bashaw was told privately that he was expected to exonerate Baron Rousseau completely and absolutely. The Monnier report had cleared Rousseau of any crimes concerning Laing’s papers and now France demanded reparation. The admiral’s orders were not to negotiate, but to impose the following conditions:

  First. A public retraction of the accusations made by the bashaw against Rousseau, and a personal apology by either a son or nephew of the bashaw to Rousseau, on his return to Tripoli.

  Second. The immediate payment of the large sum of money owed, for a long period, by the bashaw to French creditors.

  Third. Complete abolition of piracy and the making of so-called Christian prisoners-of-war.

  Fourth. No increase under any pretext of the Bashaw’s navy.

  The bashaw was now “an elderly corpulent man,” according to a contemporary observer, “who seemed very uneasy … being … disordered by a bad boil or carbuncle. He was growing tired of playing one Great Power against Another. Moreover, the French had only recently taken Algiers, and the Squadron looked very large by daylight.”

  Faced with the stalwart naval force in his harbor, the bashaw saw no alternative but to accept the crippling and humiliating French conditions. On August 11, he signed a new treaty. France was to be paid 800,000 francs, part of which was to be set aside for restitution to French creditors. Tripoli was also to accord once more to France her previous place as “most favoured nation” in precedence, a question that for over a hundred years had agitated French and British consuls.*

  The fleet had barely cleared the horizon when an infuriated Warrington demanded an audience. He indignantly petitioned for the immediate retraction of Tripoli’s acquiesence to French demands. This, the bashaw glumly told him, was impossible. Warrington, without informing London, struck his flag a second time, again severing diplomatic relations. He retired to the English Garden to sulk.

  Yusuf Bashaw realized that he was now in deep trouble. He could not raise the large indemnity required by the French while his economy was in such a parlous state, not to mention the drain on his purse of perpetual tribal skirmishes in his hinterlands. News of the French capture and occupation of Algiers aroused fears of a Franco-Egyptian conspiracy to take over Tripolitania, especially if the British, his only ally, deserted him.

  Fortunately for the bashaw, Warrington received a scathing rebuke from London for striking his flag without official orders. In November 1830, he resumed diplomatic relations, grudgingly and with a sour face. He presented the bashaw with a bill for immediate payment of 200,000 francs owed to British creditors. Warrington saw no reason why French rather than British lenders should be paid first. Sadly, the old bashaw began to divest himself of the only assets remaining to him—his diamonds, his wives’ jewelry, his precious stable of horses. A clique of his ministers even tried to persuade him to levy an additional tax on Tripoli’s Jews, always the most vulnerable of the city’s three main constituencies because they were neither Muslim nor protected by foreign warships.*

  The row with the French was the last blow for the Karamanli dynasty, which had ruled Tripoli for 125 years. In 1835, Yusuf Karamanli was overthrown and Tripoli once again fell under direct Turkish rule. Stripped of his titles and his possessions, abandoned by his harem, the old man was repudiated by his own family and died in 1838, half starved and in rags, in a dank hovel a stone’s throw from his former palace.

  WITH THE PASSAGE OF YEARS, as other events attracted attention, the English public lost interest in Alexander Gordon Laing. But the British consul in Tripoli remembered. And he was grieved to realize that his son-in-law was forgotten.

  “Let John Bull not forget the situation of poor Laing,” he wrote years after Laing’s disappearance, “whose every vein was letting blood in the cause for the benefit of mankind, and in forwarding what had been entrusted to him by his countrymen. His poor, poor bones lay whitening on the burning sands of Central Africa and none so poor to do him reverence.”

  *Warrington took this decision without instructions from Whitehall, a singularly bold (though possibly career-ending) move.

  *Not to be confused with Dr. Thomas Dickson, the Scottish surgeon who accompanied Clapperton.
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br />   *He later realized he had been duped and apologized to Warrington. “I have been most perfectly deceived and treacherously imposed upon in the matter of Hassuna,” he wrote.

  *He meant Frederick John Robinson, Viscount Goderich, who succeeded Bathurst as secretary of state for war and the colonies in 1830. He later became First Earl of Ripon. His more famous son, also Lord Ripon, was viceroy of India and is remembered by Americans for resolving the “Alabama claims” arising out of the Civil War. Ripon Falls in Uganda is named for him.

  *In fact, then and now, almost every nation accords to any country with which it maintains diplomatic or consular relations “most favored nation” status, and the phrase carries little substance. The order of precedence of ambassadors and consuls is determined solely by the date of their arrival at post, not the chaleur (or froideur) of their relations with the host government. Warrington’s decades of service at Tripoli had made him dean of the consular corps (and therefore the highest-ranking consul) many years earlier. He would retain that rank until his recall in 1846.

  *Modern readers, inured to daily accounts of Muslim-Jewish violence in the Middle East, should remember that Jews made up something like a quarter to a third of Tripoli’s population during Yusuf Bashaw’s long reign. They were an indispensable presence in the political, economic, and social fabric of the city. Though always vulnerable because of their religion and occasionally persecuted, many of Yusuf Bashaw’s financial and political advisers were prominent Jews. The beleaguered ruler, usually so opaque to financial concerns, was far too astute politically to alienate his Jewish citizens at a time when he desperately needed good credit (which only they could provide—Muslim banks were nonexistent, and European banking had not then extended its reach beyond Malta). The idea of a special tax on Jews was a nonstarter and quickly fizzled. It was never implemented.