A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  “A scientific nature like this one,” commented von Schubert, “is destined for bitter experiences.”

  BARTH BUCKLED DOWN to work on his doctoral dissertation. His esoteric subject was trade relations in ancient Corinth, a busy port like Hamburg. After receiving his degree in June 1844, he returned to the family home, with the understanding that he could spend the next six months working undisturbed for ten hours per day. His goal was a university appointment, which would require several years of postdoctoral research. Meanwhile he looked for work as a private tutor, without success. Probably just as well, since his introverted and sometimes abrasive manner wasn’t suited for young students.

  After six months at home, with no job prospects, Barth asked his father to fund a grand research trip. He wanted to travel the shores of the Mediterranean along the three continents that bordered it. A scholarly book about such a trip, he told his father, might help secure a university position. Johann, ever supportive, agreed to the plan.

  Barth threw himself into the preparation. In late January 1845 he left Hamburg for London, where he perfected his spoken and written Arabic through intensive tutoring. He also roamed the British Museum to study its collection of antiquities. He paid attention to practical matters as well, securing letters of protection from the British consulates on the Barbary coast. And he sought useful contacts, such as Chevalier Christian Charles Josias Bunsen, the shrewd, urbane Prussian ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, who would play a crucial role in Barth’s future.

  On August 7, 1845, he touched Africa for the first time at Tangiers. Next came Algeria, Malta, Tunisia, Tripoli, and Cyrenaica. He started across the northern desert to Egypt. One night as he lay in his tent, he was attacked by eight Bedouin bandits. He fought back with his sword but was shot in both legs and knocked unconscious. One slug passed through his right leg; the other lodged in his left thigh. The bandits evidently assumed that Barth’s fancy red chest held gold, and must have been irate to find a worthless machine inside—a new invention for recording images called a daguerreotype. Barth also lost most of his papers, sketches, and photographs—a lesson he never forgot. He was lucky to survive the attack, the first of many scrapes with rapacious desert nomads.

  After a brief convalescence he took a detour up the Nile to Wadi Halfa, then across the desert to the ruins of Berenice on the Red Sea, and finally back north to Cairo. He crossed the desert again to Gaza, where he learned Turkish and the Syrian-Arabic dialect before continuing through Palestine to Damascus. He returned to the sea at Beirut and went north through the ancient Phoenician cities along the Syrian coast. Then Cyprus, Rhodes, and the rock tombs of Lycia in Turkey. By September 1847 he was en route to Constantinople. From there he headed west through Smyrna, Mykonos, and Athens, and finally on toward home. He reached his parents’ house on December 27, 1847. He had been traveling for nearly three years and was almost twenty-seven.

  The trip changed him. He had been tested by the myriad difficulties of foreign travel through dozens of cultures, many of them Islamic. He had, as he later wrote, “familiarized myself with that state of human society where the camel is man’s daily companion, and the culture of the date-tree his chief occupation.” He had learned how to travel leanly and alone for long periods. He had coped with fever, illness, and an attack by murderous thieves. He had greatly deepened his knowledge of history and languages. The trip sharpened his ability to detect the connective tissues between countries, cultures, and eras, links that he would later find in Central Africa.

  The trip also intensified certain personality traits. Von Schubert met him for the first time six months after Barth’s return, when the young soldier came to ask for the hand of Barth’s beloved younger sister, Mathilde. “He had become the very model of the imperious, the closed-off, and the ascetic,” remembered von Schubert. “His behavior at that time was still very much under the influence of this trip: he was silent and withdrawn. Later we became close friends, but it took a long time before I was able to thaw the ice around his heart and experience the depths of his character. In his first letter to me, he wrote, ‘If you make my sister unhappy, I will shoot you dead,’ which was clear enough.”

  Immediately after his return, Barth renewed his search for an academic position, but two months later France’s revolution of 1848 triggered a wave of turbulence across Europe. In Germany, republicans agitated for reform and nationalists urged unification. (The German Confederation comprised thirty-nine independent German-speaking states.) Prussia took advantage of the chaos to invade Denmark’s German-speaking duchies, Schleswig and Holstein, next door to Hamburg.

  Colleagues urged Barth to jump into the ferment, but he declined. His long absence in Africa and the Middle East had left him aloof from national politics. Besides, history had taught him that patriotic fervor was often the enemy of truth and knowledge, his guiding values. A decade later when chauvinism in both Britain and Germany lashed him, he was shocked that honorable people could put narrow national interests above science and the pursuit of knowledge.

  He may have paid more attention to another piece of stunning news in 1848: a German missionary in East Africa named Johann Rebmann reported that he had visited the interior near the Equator and seen a mountain called Kilimanjaro, whose summit was covered with snow—news that a prominent British geographer named William Desborough Cooley, who later became important to Barth, mocked as absurd, since logic dictated that snow at the Equator was impossible.

  Barth also might have read in 1848 about the departure of two British naturalists, Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace, for the Amazon. It’s even possible that he noticed the publication that same year of Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 by a British abolitionist named James Richardson, who would soon change Barth’s life.

  What’s certain is that Barth avoided the brushfires of German politics and stayed focused on his professional and personal future. Full of self-confidence from his travels, he began writing an account of his Mediterranean journey. He also decided to get married. Neither venture ended well. Barth’s utter lack of social skills, particularly with women, and his unease in parlors doomed him as a suitor. One can only imagine his awkward facsimile of courtship, his attempts to charm his chosen damsel with scientific and historic data, his frequent lapses into moody impatience with small talk and perfumed niceties.

  She rejected him. “The experience was a great blow to Barth’s self-esteem,” wrote von Schubert. “His bitter fear of romantic relationships lasted for a long time after that, and even in later years he could not bring himself to enter into marriage.”

  Barth assuaged himself with his professional prospects, which looked brighter by early 1849. Through the efforts of Ritter and Böckh he was offered a part-time job for the spring semester as a lecturer in the university’s archeology department. Best of all, the first volume of his Wanderings Along the Shores of the Mediterranean was coming out in June.

  But again he reaped bitterness, first in the classroom. His lecture topic was soil composition, principally in Africa. This subject somehow failed to captivate his few students. His droning lecture style snuffed any possible sparks of interest. The students quickly stopped attending. Stunned by his failure to enthrall young minds by reciting scientific data, Barth canceled the class.

  His book fared marginally better. Reviewers praised his energy and stamina, as well as his wide-ranging and meticulous scholarship. But like the students, reviewers were bored by the book’s numbing welter of undifferentiated detail and its tedious pace. The general public yawned. The publisher dropped plans to print the second volume.

  In the space of a year, all of Barth’s glowing ambitions had turned to ash. He had failed as a teacher, a writer, and a wooer. Still, the trip around the Mediterranean had demonstrated his strengths, to himself and others. He also had discovered his twin passions—deep scholarship and rigorous travel—but hadn’t figured out how to combine them into a living. He began d
aydreaming about a long trip into Asia. He was twenty-eight.

  In early October 1849, Carl Ritter asked him a question that changed everything.

  2

  Invitation to Africa

  AFTER EIGHTEEN MONTHS OF SILENCE FROM THE BRITISH FOREIGN Office, James Richardson’s patience was running thin. He had been pushing the British government to fund an expedition into the Sudan but couldn’t get a response.

  (At the time, “the Sudan” referred to the vast area south of the Sahara and ten degrees or so north of the Equator, from the Atlantic coast to the mountains of Ethiopia, which encompasses most of today’s Senegal‚ Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, and Sudan, as well as northern Nigeria and northern Cameroon.)

  Born in 1809, Richardson had trained as an evangelical minister. His two great drives were to spread Christianity and to abolish slavery, “the most gigantic system of wickedness the world ever saw.” He put himself on the line for his principles, spending several years in northern Africa to gather information about the slave trade for Britain’s AntiSlavery Society. His time in Africa also gave him a more nuanced perspective on the continent and on Islam than was typical in Victorian Britain, where the public’s perceptions rarely went beyond harems, slavers, and naked dark skin. Richardson, by contrast, credited the strengths and benefits of Islam to Africans. He was also commendably blunt about how Britain’s love of money led it to overlook horrible policies and practices among its own merchants and allies abroad. Europe’s effect on Africa, he wrote, was “to plunge her into deeper misery and profounder degradation.”

  Like most proselytizers, he could be tactless and grating. In the introduction to his two-volume account of his fact-finding trip to northern Africa, Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 (1848), he comes across as peevish, thin-skinned, self-congratulatory, and holier-than-thou. He had the evangelist’s knack for being irritating even when he was right.

  Still, his commitment to abolition went beyond finger-pointing and grandstanding. He wanted to be on the front lines. His firsthand look at slavery had convinced him that prayers and protests in London wouldn’t reform slavers in Africa. The best way to do God’s work against this abomination was not religious missions that encouraged piety, but new consulates that encouraged trade. Open the gates of commerce between Africa and Europe, ran the argument, and Africans would give up the depraved traffic in flesh for an exchange of products with fewer moral and financial risks. Prosperity would make virtue possible, virtue would lead naturally to Christianity, and together this trinity would replace barbarism with civilization. Merchants on both continents would profit. Oppressed tribes would no longer suffer the depredations of slave-raiders. And since Africa was an unplucked market, Britain could extend its influence far into the future by getting there first, in particular before the French.

  The notion of using commerce as the flying wedge of Christianity and civilization was common by the mid nineteenth century. Richardson hoped it would convince the British government to fund an expedition. He knew that Lord Palmerston, the secretary of state for foreign affairs, opposed slavery but also disliked political entanglements in foreign lands. Yet Palmerston did believe wholeheartedly in the blessings of commerce. “It is the business of government,” Palmerston wrote in 1841, “to open and to secure the roads for the merchant.”

  But before the blessings of British commerce, Christianity, and civilization could rectify African barbarism, there was groundwork to do. First, prospective avenues of trade had to be discovered and mapped. True, Mungo Park had probed inland from the west coast before being killed somewhere on the Niger River in 1806. True, the Lander brothers had solved a major geographic question in 1830 by proving that the Niger didn’t flow east across the continent to the Nile, as many geographers had assumed, but turned sharply south at Gao and emptied into the Gulf of Guinea. In the early 1820s, Oudney, Clapperton, and Denham had traveled south through the Sahara to the kingdom of Bornu in Central Africa, on the west side of Lake Chad. But they hadn’t determined whether the lake was connected by navigable waters to the Niger’s river system in the west, or to the Nile’s system in the east, and their crude maps were untrustworthy.

  Most European expeditions had tried to penetrate Africa by traveling from the continent’s west coast through the Gambia, or south from the Barbary Coast. Europeans knew there were three ancient trade routes through the Sahara—Taghaza to Timbuktu in the western Sahara; Ghadames to Hausaland in the central Sahara; and Tripoli to Bornu in the east. But the Arab traders who profited from these routes didn’t want Europeans horning in on their business and impeded them whenever possible. Consequently, despite many European expeditions over several decades, maps of the interior were sketchy at best and often dead wrong. Distances were mere estimates, as were the locations of important cities such as Kano, Kukawa, and Timbuktu.

  But opening trade between Europe and Africa required far more than better maps. Most of the explorers who ventured into the interior on Britain’s behalf left their bones there. The continent was rife with hazards—hostile natives, strange diseases, harsh terrain and temperatures, frightening animals. Mungo Park and his entire party of three dozen were wiped out by sickness and violence on the Niger. John Ledyard died after reaching Cairo in 1788. Daniel Houghton vanished in the desert in 1791, en route to Timbuktu. Dysentery killed Friedrich Hornemann in the Sahara in 1799. Henry Nicholls perished in 1805 on the Guinea coast and never saw the interior. Dysentery killed Johann Burckhardt in 1817 before he could leave for the Fezzan, and felled Clapperton in 1827. Fever got Joseph Ritchie in 1819 and Oudney in 1824. Alexander Gordon Laing was shot, stabbed, and left for dead by desert pirates, but recovered and reached Timbuktu in 1826, only to be expelled and murdered not far from its precincts. Shortly after John Davidson left Morocco for Timbuktu in 1836, robbers slaughtered him. The list of fatalities goes on.

  European commerce couldn’t flourish in Africa if Europeans couldn’t survive there. The continent’s rulers and warlords had to be courted. Agreements that protected European traders had to be signed. The anarchy caused by bandits and freebooters along the trade routes had to be squelched. European merchants also needed to know which European products the Africans craved, and which African products might be profitably imported. Much needed to be done before commerce and Christianity had any chance of civilizing Africa by exploiting its resources.

  This had been Richardson’s appeal to Lord Palmerston at the Foreign Office eighteen months earlier, and he repeated it in a letter in September 1848. This time Palmerston responded. On September 30 he asked Richardson to submit a proposal with routes, a timetable, and an estimated budget.

  Richardson was ready. Five days later he sent back ten pages in his chicken-scratch handwriting with the heading, “Projected Journey of Discovery and Philanthropy to Central Africa via the Great Desert of Sahara.” Richardson noted that expeditions attempting to enter Africa through the Gambia, “the White Man’s Grave,” had been miserable failures, mostly because of the malevolent tropical climate. For Europeans, he wrote, the old north-south caravan routes through the desert were far healthier, aside from the problem of attacks by bandits. He proposed a route from Tripoli through the Fezzan to Murzuk, Ghat, and the Aïr Mountains, which had never been visited by Europeans. From there, south to Katsina and Hausaland, then east to the kingdom of Bornu before turning due north back to Tripoli.

  The expedition’s purposes, he continued, would be to persuade Africans to replace the slave trade with legitimate commerce, to sign trade agreements, and to collect information about the continent’s peoples and places: “and so promote the sciences and geography, language, ethnology, and general knowledge.”

  He estimated the trip would take one to two years and cost at most £500, including the expense of gifts “to conciliate the princes and personages” along the route. In a bow toward Palmerston’s reputation for frugality, he added that the mission’s success would not depe
nd on a lavish budget or presents, “but on the tact, prudence, and experience of the Traveller… . In the Desert, the poverty of the Traveller is oftentimes his greatest security.”

  Richardson also proposed establishing a British consulate in the northern Sahara at Ghat, a popular stopover for merchants traveling to and from Bornu and Timbuktu. Such a consulate would become “a centre of influence … from which could radiate the light of British Christian civilisation.” If the government would fund an expedition to Central Africa, he concluded, “We could, undoubtedly, by perseverance and pacific policy, materially benefit and morally enlighten the African tribes and peoples, raising up degraded Africans to the standard of civilised Europe—and so expect, in humility, the favour and blessings of Almighty God upon us as a nation and the world at large.”

  Palmerston finally answered in August 1849: Richardson could make the necessary arrangements and leave whenever he was ready.

  TO MEET HIS pledge to collect scientific information, Richardson needed a scientist. “When a man has no science in him,” he wrote apologetically in his book about the Sahara, “or no education in science, he can give you none.”

  Chevalier Bunsen, the Prussian ambassador, got wind of Richardson’s expedition. Always alert for ways to promote Germans and German interests, Bunsen offered to use his contacts among his country’s eminent scholars to find Richardson the best available German scientist—that is, the best in Europe. Richardson happily accepted the offer. Bunsen asked his friend Carl Ritter to recommend someone. After conferring with von Humboldt, Ritter replied, “The only person known to Professors Ritter and Baron Alexander von Humboldt on the Continent, who would unite the necessary qualities, experience, and scientific knowledge to undertake such an expedition as that proposed, the scientific and philological functions, is Dr. Barth.”