A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  The supplies finally arrived in mid-March—guns, medicines, several tents, “desert spectacles,” the boat, and other important equipment such as scientific instruments. These included sextants, compasses, telescopes, chronometers, azimuths, a barometer, two dozen thermometers of various types, a psychrometer for measuring humidity, and chains for measuring distance.

  The medicine chest contained:

  Sulphate of quinine (for fever) 1 ounce

  Compound of chalk powder with opium (for dysentery) 1 pound

  Powdered ipecacuanha (an emetic) 8 ounces

  Dr. Dover’s powder (a mixture of ipecacuanha,opium, saltpeter, tartar, and licorice, used to induce sweating and head off colds and fevers) 8 ounces

  Calomel (a laxative) 8 ounces

  Lunar caustic (a disinfectant) 8 ounces

  Powdered opium (a sedative, also for dysentery) 1 ounce

  Sulphate of zinc (a powerful emetic, also taken for dysentery and night sweats) 1 ½ ounces

  Tartar emetic 1 ½ ounces

  Tincture of catechu (for dysentery) 24 ounces

  Aromatic spirit of ammonia 2 pints

  Liquor cinchonae pallidae (for fever) 5 ounces

  Basilicon ointment (a mixture of hog lard, resin, and wax, for ulcers and burns) 4 pounds

  Blistering paste (also called “Spanish fly,” made from crushed “blister beetles” and used to raise blisters for relief of fever and other ailments) 2 pounds

  Lint (dressing) 2 pounds

  Diachylon plaster (a sticky mixture of oil and lead monoxide, for closing wounds) 1 tin

  The chest also held two iron spatulas, two lancets, two glass measures, scales and weights, and a Wedgwood mortar and pestle.

  A British doctor in Tripoli named Edward Dickson examined the chest and judged it inadequate for a long journey to the interior. At Dickson’s suggestion, Richardson added another ounce of sulphate of quinine and 21 ounces of powdered Peruvian bark, both for fever. (Quinine was known to reduce fever, though the reasons, like the causes of fever, weren’t understood. At that time the drug was taken after the onset of illness, not preventively.) Richardson also followed Dickson’s advice about adding more laxatives—six pint bottles of castor oil and five pounds of Epsom salts.

  This list makes two things clear: Richardson’s main medical worries were fever, dysentery, and better health through purgatives; and second, since these scanty amounts of medicine were supposed to last three people and their servants for up to two years, and also to cover the inevitable requests for medicines from Africans along the way, he didn’t worry nearly enough.

  Barth was immediately dismayed at some of the equipment and its condition. The minimum and maximum thermometers arrived “so deranged” (phrasing that underlines Barth’s foreign relationship with English) that they couldn’t be repaired. The expedition’s sole barometer, entrusted to Overweg, somehow got broken before the caravan ever left Tripoli. To Barth such carelessness was nearly unforgivable in a scientist; now they would have to boil water to determine elevations, a less precise method. “For the use of future travelers,” Barth wrote, “I always wore not only my azimuth, but even my chronometer in my belt, and found this an excellent precaution against accidents of any kind.”

  He also judged the tents supplied by the British as “quite unfit for the country whither we were going”—too high, too lightweight, and lacking top ropes to keep them anchored in desert winds. Barth bought his own tent in Tripoli, heavily lined to keep out the sun, low-ceilinged, with top ropes. When traveling, he wrapped his pack, guns, and the planks for his bed and writing desk inside this tent. He also carried a double-barreled gun and a revolver, though unlike Overweg, who was an enthusiastic hunter and an excellent shot, Barth was neither.

  His small travel library included two well-worn books taken on earlier journeys: the Qur’an and Herodotus. In the second book he later wrote, “This Herodotus was my steadfast companion on both my great journeys, round the Mediterranean in 1845–47, when he joined up with me in Alexandria, and in 1848–55 through Central Africa. Thus he is immortally dear to me, despite being so soiled.”

  The stories in Herodotus sometimes mirrored what Barth saw in Africa: factional conflicts between cities and small kingdoms, raids to capture women and slaves, power-mad rulers, love of ceremony and rich tribute, fierce punishments and superstitious beliefs, distinctions drawn with absolute certainty between the civilized and the barbaric.

  Barth also took a large supply of notebooks. Paper was scarce in Africa. On the inner front cover of the first notebook, he wrote, in Arabic, “ ‘Abd el Karim Barth el Inglisi.” ‘Abd el Karim, “Servant of the Merciful,” was the name Barth used throughout his journey. As the notebook’s epigraph‚ he wrote:

  Knowledge is power.

  Because science is

  the confidante in the wilderness,

  the companion in a foreign land,

  the storyteller in solitude,

  the guide in joy and sorrow,

  the weapon against the enemy,

  and the ornament for friends.

  This poetic tribute to science is striking for several reasons, starting with its source. Aside from the first sentence, the passage comes from an obscure hadith attributed to the Islamic scholar Al-Suyuti (c. 1445–1505 A. D.), an Egyptian who wrote roughly five hundred works in Arabic on law, theology, and science. Barth elsewhere describes Al-Suyuti as “that living encyclopedia and keystone … of Mohammedan learning.” That Barth knew this work speaks to his deep scholarship. He surely nodded at what came before and after the passage in the epigraph: Al-Suyuti declares that Muhammed championed science and urged believers to pursue knowledge “even to China.” The Prophet also said, according to Al-Suyuti, “On the day of resurrection, the ink of scholars will be equal to the blood of martyrs.” Science, said Muhammed, is “the light tower of the Path to Paradise.” And scientists, he added, are touched by the wings of angels. Such sentiments spoke to Barth’s most deeply held convictions. He must have been delighted to find them expressed by an early African Islamic scholar.

  Richardson packed Bibles in Hebrew and Greek. He also took Comus, Milton’s tale about black magic, virtue besieged by temptation, tribulations in a strange land, and eventual escape and homecoming—a parable that probably spoke to Richardson’s anxieties about the journey.

  With the supplies finally at hand, Barth wondered why the mission was lingering in Tripoli. To nudge Richardson along, the Germans left the city on March 24 and camped nine miles to the south. Richardson was delayed partly by the logistics of transporting the boat, a wherry with long oars and poles. It arrived in two pieces instead of the expected four, which posed difficulties for loading. Richardson eventually cut it up. The boat alone required eight camels.

  The other delay was personal. Unlike Barth and Overweg, Richardson had a wife, who was with him in Tripoli. In the days before he left, he wrote a letter asking Palmerston to approve a payment of £60 to her if he didn’t return—a modest price for his life. “Hope and the spirit of adventure sustained my courage,” he wrote on March 30, the day he finally left the city, “but it is always sad to part with those we love, even at the call of duty. However, I at length mustered strength to bid adieu to my wife—the almost silent adieu of affection. How many things that were thought were left unsaid on either side!”

  4

  First Steps

  RICHARDSON REACHED THE GERMANS’ CAMP ON MARCH 31. ON April 2, 1850, the expedition finally set off into the desert. Most caravans left Barbary in September or October to make the crossing during the desert winter. This one would reach the heart of the Sahara at the height of summer.

  In addition to the four Europeans (including the sailor Croft), the expedition included an assortment of helpers and hangers-on, whose number ebbed and swelled as the caravan progressed. Richardson’s dragoman (fixer and interpreter), Yusuf Moknee, dark and handsome, was the son of a wealthy former governor of Fezzan, and hence arrogantly self-impo
rtant even though he had long since drunk away his father’s estate. Richardson hired him because he couldn’t find anyone better in Tripoli. As bodyguards, Richardson hired two quarrelsome Arab janissaries. Several servants and camel drivers rounded out the payroll.

  Like all caravans, this one attracted tagalongs: a marabout from Fezzan, a couple of Arabs “going with camels to somewhere,” and about a dozen free blacks hoping for protection while traveling through the violent territories separating them from their homes in Sudan and Bornu. They carried a folded document in their turbans or neck pouches that proved their emancipation.

  The caravan also attracted two lunatics. One, a Neapolitan in rags, insisted that he was Richardson’s servant. He trailed the Englishman around Tripoli for weeks and finally into the desert. At the camp Richardson popped this delusion by giving him two loaves of bread, a Tunisian coin, and a polite bow, followed by a firm order to go home. The other madman, wrote Richardson, was a Muslim with “an unpleasant habit of threatening to cut everybody’s throat.” He lugged around a bunch of old metal, including a large knife, which he often pulled from beneath his robe and flourished while ranting about slit throats. He was eventually disarmed and forced back toward Tripoli.

  The caravan set off with sixty-two camels. Barth and Overweg accounted for ten of them, including the two they were riding. About half the camels carried luggage, supplies, equipment, trade goods, and guns. The trade goods and guns were as essential to the expedition as the camels. The 1,300 miles between the Mediterranean and the Sahel—the semiarid lands south of the Sahara where Muslim Africa met pagan black Africa—were seething with raiders, freebooters, war parties, and thieves. Muslim slavers prowled the Sahel and kept the black tribes boiling with fear and anger. Old rivalries between kingdoms, tribes, and ethnic groups flared up constantly. Travelers crossed these turbulent lands at their own peril.

  And yet the desert was also alive, as it had been for centuries, with an extensive web of long-distance commerce, from salt caravans of several thousand camels to smaller groups of traveling merchants who offered everything from indigo and cotton cloth to foodstuffs and swords. Travelers tried to protect themselves by banding together to discourage pirates, and by buying safe passage with tributes paid to every local chief whose territory they entered. Though the countryside was ostensibly governed by several large kingdoms, the force of law came in a distant second to force of arms.

  For Christians these dangers increased exponentially. Many Muslims considered Christians evil infidels. Black tribes associated them with the lighter-skinned slavers who killed and stole their people. Consequently hundreds of Europeans had died attempting to trace the Niger River or reach the fabled city of Timbuktu. If the natives didn’t kill these explorers, something else usually did—thirst, starvation, disease, poisonous snakes, or large carnivores.

  Little was known about these lands, especially when approached from the north through the Sahara. No accurate maps existed. Distances were unknown, as were the precise locations of major towns in the interior such as Timbuktu and Kano. The region was thought to be relatively flat, but in fact was rumpled with mountain ranges. Some of Central Africa’s great kingdoms—Bornu, Kanem, Sokoto—were little more than rumors in Europe, and little or nothing was known about their rulers, populations, cultures, products, politics, or trade relations.

  Richardson expected the mission to be gone for two years at most, if things went according to plan. The expedition’s goal was the kingdom of Bornu on Lake Chad, where present-day Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon meet. Twenty-five years earlier, Oudney, Clapperton, and Denham had proven that Europeans could reach it. They had taken the ancient route that ran directly south from Tripoli. But now the depredations of Tuareg bandits and Arab raiders had almost shut down that corridor, and caravans weren’t risking the trip.

  The current expedition had different plans. The first stage of a journey between Tripoli and Bornu ended at Murzuk, 500 miles to the south. Two tracks connected Tripoli to Murzuk. Most travelers, including the Oudney expedition, took the easterly one because it was easier and better-watered. The westerly track, developed by the Romans in the first century A.D., cut ten days from the journey but was rarely used because it crossed the arid plateau called the Hammada, a harsh landscape of scorched rubble. No modern European had traversed it. To Barth this scientifically unexplored route that also saved time must have seemed ideal.

  From Murzuk the shortest route to Bornu plunged directly south through the Sahara by way of Bilma for about 1,000 miles. But Richardson planned to take a detour west for 250 miles to Ghat, then go southwest for another 400 miles to the mountains of Aïr, a Tuareg stronghold never conquered by Romans, Arabs, or Turks. No European had ever seen it.

  THE FIRST TWO WEEKS of travel passed pleasantly. These northerly regions of the Sahara were relatively moderate. Contrary to the stereotypical image, the Great Desert is not a barren tract of rolling dunes. Rock and gravel are as common as sand. The topography varies tremendously: stony plains and plateaus, steep ravines, wide channels carved by ancient watercourses (wadis), shallow basins left by ancient lakes, isolated mountains and jagged massifs. Trees and bushes manage to grow; a camel can often find something to munch. Wells stipple the arid emptiness, if you know where to find them. And of course people have lived throughout the Sahara for centuries in oases and nomadic camps, farming or raising livestock. The Tuareg call the Sahara “Tinariwen”—“the deserts”—because it is many deserts, not one.

  The caravan moved in the straggling Arab style, the camels widely separated, grazing as they ambled. The richer the vegetation, the slower the caravan’s progress. Barth preferred the Tuareg method of tying the camels one behind the other, to keep them moving. Stymied by the leisurely pace, he channeled his frustration into data, repeatedly and laboriously measuring the mileage with a watch and a chain. Result: the caravan’s rate was 2 to 2½ miles per hour.

  He soon began leaving camp early in the morning to spend the day exploring on his own, rejoining the caravan in the evening. He found much to see, sketch, climb, measure. His journal entries are clotted with precise details about every geographic feature along the route, every ruin (Roman, Arabic, Turkish), every form of vegetation and crop (corn, figs, dates, olives, almonds, pomegranates). He describes every village and its people, often accompanied by pertinent scholarly references.

  His observations about a small oasis 100 miles south of Tripoli are typical: “Mizda, most probably identical with the eastern ‘Musti kome’ of Ptolemy, appears to have been an ancient settlement of the indigenous inhabitants of North Africa, the Berbers, and more particularly of a family or tribe of them called ‘Kuntarar’… .” He details Mizda’s geophysical characteristics and soil composition (gypsum). He notes the depths of its wells and its use of oxen to draw water, plus the number of oxen in the village (three). He sketches the oasis and remarks that it is actually two distinct villages with two chiefs, one who stays in tents some distance away and another who lives inside the village’s crumbling walls. He describes the architecture and counts the number of trees in Mizda’s palm grove (about 200), which is also dotted with onions. He notices an unusual abundance of lizards and chameleons, and measures the oasis’s circumference (2,260 paces). The people suffer from eye problems, he wrote, and the barley is ripening.

  Barth noticed everything and recorded it all scrupulously, almost compulsively. His notetaking reflected his faith in the power of scientific observation to discover and crack open the secrets of nature. To Barth the parallels between scientific and geographic exploration were clear. Both were journeys into the unknown. His mentor, Alexander von Humboldt, had spent five years exploring South America and returned with 60,000 botanical samples and zoological specimens. Von Humboldt’s multivolume narrative extolled the excitement of scientific exploration and was a trumpet call to younger scientists.

  Barth surely knew John Herschel’s influential A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Phil
osophy (1831), which confidently proclaimed that once one adopted a scientific outlook, “Everything in nature became interesting and significant, nothing was beneath notice. The most ‘trifling natural objects,’ such as a soap bubble, an apple or a pebble, could reveal a scientific law (respectively, the laws of aerostatics, gravitation or geology)… . To the natural philosopher there is no natural object unimportant or trifling… . A mind that has once imbibed a taste for scientific enquiry has within itself an inexhaustible source of pure and exciting contemplations… . Where the uninformed and unenquiring eye perceives neither novelty nor beauty, he walks in the midst of wonders.”

  Mundane details were not minutiae, but grains of gold that could accumulate into a treasure. Barth considered it his scientific duty to observe and record everything, and then to find correlations between cultures and eras, between a place’s geography and its history, between environment and ethnography. He did this partly for science, partly to aid future travelers, and partly because he couldn’t help himself.

  Most earlier travelers to Africa were soldiers or adventurers, and if they survived, they wrote books more personal than scientific. (Richard Burton, the other great explorer-scholar of Africa, would soon combine the two.) Barth’s model was not Mungo Park or Dixon Denham, though he admired those brave men and their books, but von Humboldt.

  Barth was a new breed, an explorer who was also a trained linguist, scientist, and historian. Personal anecdotes could be charming, he believed, but were an unnecessary distraction from the high calling of scientific research. He drew this contrast clearly in his preface to Travels and Discoveries, noting that Richardson’s journals were “full of minute incidents of traveling life, so very instructive to the general reader. But, from my point of view, I had to look very differently at the objects which presented themselves; and Mr. Richardson, if he had lived to work out his memoranda himself, would not have failed to give to his journal a more lasting interest.” Barth’s goal was posterity, not popularity, yet it wounded him when the public granted his wish.