by Steve Kemper
Gagliuffi was an operator who knew the territory and all the main players. He somehow maintained good relations with everyone—a considerable skill in the volatile, ever-shifting politics of Central Africa. Certainly he was flawed. No one ever described him as incorruptible. No doubt he lined his pockets under the aegis of the British flag. But he also took his position seriously. He worked hard, and successfully, to advance British influence through diplomacy, which earned him the respect of Africans and colleagues in the Foreign Office.
His conduct toward the Richardson expedition was typical. He sent letters to all the regional desert chiefs, whom he knew, asking them to aid and protect the explorers. He arranged for a line of credit for them in Bornu through his friend the vizier. He offered Richardson much good advice about the peoples and territories ahead. Yet he also took a sharp markup on the goods Richardson purchased in Murzuk, and charged high interest on the credit Richardson drew there.
“Mr. Gagliuffi has been hospitable,” wrote Richardson in his journal. “Justice, however, compels me to say, that the British Consul sometimes remembered too vividly that he was also a merchant, and a Levantine merchant to boot. I am afraid he is not quite satisfied even with the profits he has already made out of the expedition.”
In several letters to the Foreign Office, Richardson accused Gagliuffi of profiteering and deceit. The FO, ever fastidious, began an investigation. It progressed glacially through the sporadic mails between London, Tripoli, and the Sudan. The accusations wounded Gagliuffi. He wrote the FO that he had hosted the explorers for weeks, without recompense, and had done all in his power to promote their safety. All this was true. He added that the expedition obviously was “badly managed, and in miserable condition,” with inadequate equipment—observations Barth would second. Richardson seemed to be blaming others, wrote Gagliuffi, for additional expenses that were his own fault.
From Tripoli, Consul Crowe also responded angrily to Richardson’s charges. “I am very unwilling to say anything, which may appear harsh, of a person engaged in a hazardous expedition, from which he may never return,” Crowe wrote to Palmerston. “But Mr. Richardson’s deep ingratitude merits with indulgence—he seems to have undertaken the direction of the mission, without any thought or care for the responsibilities attached to it, and now finding the difficulties of his position to be greater than he anticipated, and that there is not the slightest hope of affecting the principal object of his mission, he seems to attribute to other causes the natural consequences of his own incapacity and presumption.”
Richardson worried constantly about money and grumbled about the gougers surrounding him, complaints that had some merit. Yet he also mismanaged the expedition’s finances, and his gripes often sounded like whining self-justifications. He had told Palmerston that the expedition would cost no more than £500 and would last one year, maybe two. Then he spent nearly £400 before the expedition ever left Tripoli. In June 1850, two months into the journey, he wrote to Palmerston that he now believed the expedition would not return to Tripoli until spring of 1852 at the earliest, six months beyond his maximum estimate. Therefore he needed another £600 for provisions, presents, and other expenses. When Palmerston received this letter weeks later, he wrote at the bottom, “This may be allowed.”
But just three days after asking for an extra £600, Richardson wrote Palmerston again. The prices in Murzuk, he complained, were higher than expected. He had just given Gagliuffi a letter of credit drawn on the Foreign Office for £600—the amount supposed to last another two years. Obviously, he said, he would be needing more money. On this letter Palmerston wrote, “We must not grudge a small addition to the originally contemplated expense.”
To Barth, Richardson’s fiscal incompetence was as alarming as his plan to hire the Ghat Tuaregs. Both endangered the explorers and the mission. Barth also had money worries of his own. The three-months’ delay in Tripoli had been an unforeseen expense. Now it appeared that the expedition would continue much longer than expected. Because of these changed circumstances, he sent a letter from Murzuk asking Palmerston to grant him and Overweg another £100 pounds each. He also wrote to Chevalier Bunsen, urging him to press their case on Palmerston because of “the immense procrastination which our journey has undergone.”
While waiting in Murzuk, Barth studied the local languages, especially Berber, which gave him the “immense advantage” of being able to gather information directly from the camel drivers and the local people. From Gagliuffi he learned that the vizier of Bornu was a learned man who loved books. To create goodwill Barth suggested that the British government send to Bornu “some good Arab books, principally the Thousand and One Nights … together with some treatises on geography, astronomy, etc., as no present would become more to the scientific character of the Mission and as none—besides firearms and shot—would be more acceptable, there being a great interest for books in Bornu and only a very few ones being brought in to the country from Egypt.” The Foreign Office may have been surprised to hear that a black official in deep Africa would be interested in such scholarly books, but they were duly sent.
Barth also worked on his journal, and sent off dispatches and sketches about what he had seen and learned. But instead of sending them directly to the Foreign Office, as Richardson suggested, he sent them to Chevalier Bunsen with instructions to forward them to the FO. Bunsen also circulated them among Barth’s colleagues in Berlin. Based on his contract, Barth considered himself an independent scientist, not a government employee. He also naïvely regarded scientific information as a universal possession beyond national claims. For both these reasons he felt comfortable sending his reports through Bunsen and sharing them with German colleagues.
After receiving Barth’s packet of information and plea for money, Bunsen wrote to Palmerston about the £100 (which was granted). He also mentioned that von Humboldt, Ritter, and the Berlin Royal Academy were very pleased with the papers sent by Barth. Bunsen would send them along, he added, once the German scholars released them.
That nettled Palmerston. He had also gotten a letter from Richardson saying that there was some confusion about who should get the Germans’ reports first. In a note attached to this letter, Palmerston wrote tersely, “as they are all employed by the British Government they should address their communications to F. O. direct.” Because of slow communications, this misunderstanding festered. It later led to some ugliness with Britain’s Royal Geographical Society, which accused Barth of using British money to finance German science.
BY EARLY JUNE, after baking in Murzuk for a month, Barth and Overweg had had enough. The daytime temperatures were above 100 degrees in the shade, up to 130 in the sun. They told Richardson that they wanted to move toward Ghat. Richardson, ever cautious, asked them to wait for the Tuareg escort. They declined. The explorers agreed to reunite somewhere west. Barth and Overweg left on June 12.
The Ghat Tuaregs reached Murzuk on June 21. Barth was with them. He had met the party in the desert and decided it would be wise to be in Murzuk to monitor Richardson’s negotiations with these desert sharks. The Tuaregs included two sons of the sultan of Ghat, and an older minor sheikh named Hatita who had known Lyon, Oudney, and Clapperton in the 1820s. Richardson also knew the old man from his earlier trip to Ghat. Lyon described Hatita as “the only Tuarick I ever saw, who was not an impudent beggar, or who made presents without expecting a return.” This utterly contradicted the experience of every other European who met him. Hatita was a tireless wheedler. Around Europeans he spent much of his energy begging for presents and scheming how to shut out his fellow tribesmen.
Richardson began the grueling process of bargaining with Tuaregs who smell an easy mark. He was buying in a seller’s market. “Our escort is to cost us dear,” Richardson wrote afterward in his journal, “but it will ensure our safety.” He was right about the expense—200 Spanish dollars (about £40), a small fortune—but terribly wrong about buying safety, even if the Tuaregs had actually honored the a
greement.
As Richardson fretted in his journal about the dangers and expenses ahead, Barth felt reenergized by the prospect of movement. “[We] roused our spirits for the contemplation of novelties and the encountering of difficulties; for the latter could certainly not be wanting where the former were at hand.”
On June 25 the main caravan finally headed out of Murzuk. “The Greek doctor came to see us off,” wrote Richardson, “but we started in a little confusion, for Mr. Yusuf Moknee was drunk, as he was nearly all the time of our stay in Mourzuk.”
Gagliuffi, who didn’t yet know about Richardson’s accusatory letters to the Foreign Office, was worried about the expedition. A few days after it left, he wrote to Consul Crowe in Tripoli that he wished Richardson had hired people with real power to protect them. He was also uneasy about Richardson’s inadequate stock of goods for winning over rulers in the interior. “He thinks to travel far, and spend little,” wrote Gagliuffi, “and that is impossible in these countries: he is too confident in himself and listens to little advice. May God protect them!”
6
The Palace of the Demons
THE TUAREGS BROKE THEIR AGREEMENT FOR THE FIRST TIME WITHIN days of leaving Murzuk. Hatita mournfully informed Richardson that instead of taking the direct route to Aïr, as contracted, they needed to stop in Ghat for at least a month of preparations. It was an obvious ploy to milk the expedition at leisure. Richardson objected, sighed, acquiesced. Barth, incredulous, stepped in and told Hatita that the caravan would stay in Ghat no more than seven days. Hatita was already peeved at Barth for traveling ahead of the caravan, out of reach of his demands for presents. Richardson often griped about Hatita’s daily nagging (“I cannot fill this craving abyss to the brim”); Barth just shrugged him off.
They were traveling through a desert of stony rubble and dark sand. As they went west‚ the country grew more hot, arid, and desolate. Vegetation was so scarce that they carried forage for the camels. There were days without wells. They found fossilized starfish and plants. Occasionally they passed low stone walls forming a square or a circle—makeshift mosques where passing travelers could pray to Mecca. Temperatures in the shade rose above 100 degrees. Richardson felt the heat intensely and tried to make the Tuaregs travel at night, but they refused. In the late afternoons, for extra protection from the sun, he lay on the floor of his thin-ceilinged tent with his head shaded beneath his bed and table, which he piled with blankets.
At a place called Wadi Telisaghe, Barth discovered some remarkably skilled bas-reliefs cut into the blocks of sandstone that littered the valley. The most striking depicted two godlike figures with human torsos, one with the head of a long-horned bull, the other with the head of a bird, perhaps an ibis, which reminded Barth of Egyptian motifs. The figures carried bows and were fighting over a bullock standing between them. Other carvings also portrayed bullocks and ostriches. None showed camels. All demonstrated flair and expertise far beyond what Europeans, including Barth, expected to find in remote Saharan Africa. Barth’s classical sources didn’t mention anything like them, nor did the Arab historians who came later. The carvings suggested that skilled unknown cultures had existed in the desert even before the introduction of camels around the first century B.C. The historical implications electrified Barth. The carvings showed him how much still awaited discovery in the heart of Africa.
ON JULY 13 they traveled through a pass lined with huge boulders. Some of the boulders rocked on pivots in the hot gusty wind, others were neatly cleaved as if by a divine sword. Ahead, the crenellated peak of Mount Idinen towered out of the plain. Its massive walls and turrets looked hand-hewn. Desert winds had sculpted the mountain’s massive jumbled rocks into strange ribs and battlements that resembled a ruined castle or a blasted cathedral. Nature had painted it all in striking colors—cream, black, purple, russet, lavender. The effect was eerie.
The Tuaregs had been talking about the mountain all day. They said that jinns—spirits—from all over the desert gathered there to confer and pray. Caverns in the mountain were filled with the jinns’ treasure—gold, silver, jewels. No Tuareg would dare set foot there. They called it the Palace of the Demons.
The caravan traveled toward the mountain until seven o’clock, then camped. A strong wind kicked up, preventing men and animals from sleeping. When they started again at sunrise, the wind was still blowing hard and hot. They walked straight toward the looming mountain all day before making camp.
Barth wanted to climb it. This blasphemous idea alarmed Hatita and the other Tuaregs. It also distressed Richardson. He had passed by the mountain on his previous journey, and had tried to disprove the Tuaregs’ superstitions by climbing partway up it alone. He got lost and spent a terrifying night, afraid he was going to die.
Despite these warnings—in fact, partly because of them—Barth was determined to explore Idinen for inscriptions or carvings by ancient worshipers. He owed it to science. Hatita angrily refused to find him a guide. Yusuf Moknee told Barth that the mountain was farther than it appeared and advised taking a camel. Barth brushed them both off. Early the next morning he and Overweg set off on foot, carrying a few dates, some dry biscuit, and one small waterskin.
Overweg reappeared in camp at five that afternoon, thirsty and exhausted. He had given up within a few hours. Sharp black rocks made walking difficult, and a deep ravine greatly lengthened the approach to the mountain. Overweg thought it was foolish to continue, but Barth refused to turn back.
As the sun went down with no sign of their colleague, Overweg and Richardson became alarmed. They built big signal fires and hung a lantern in the tallest nearby tree. Overweg and several Tuaregs went out to look for Barth. They returned at midnight, having seen no sign of him.
At daybreak two search parties mounted up and left camp. They returned at noon. Overweg’s party found nothing. The other came across footprints to the north, but lost them in the stony sand. Now fully alarmed, Richardson offered a reward of 50 Spanish dollars for finding Barth, which inspired most of the Tuaregs to saddle their camels and join the search.
It was the height of the Saharan summer. Barth had no water. Such conditions, the Tuaregs told Richardson, usually killed people within twelve hours. Barth had been gone for more than twenty-four. The Tuaregs expected to find a corpse. “I confess, that as the afternoon wore on,” Richardson confided to his journal, “I had given up nearly all hope, and continued the search merely as a matter of duty.”
The sun was setting when a servant ran into camp shouting. A Tuareg had tracked Barth’s footprints and found him eight miles away. He was alive but unable to move. Blood oozed from his cracked mouth, the residue of an attempt to drink his own blood. His throat was so dry and swollen that at first he couldn’t swallow the water he desperately needed. The Tuareg rescuer bathed and sprinkled Barth’s head as the explorer hoarsely whispered over and over, “El hamdu lillahi,” a Qur’anic verse recited by Muslims many times per day: Praise be to Allah. He had been gone for twenty-eight hours. The Tuaregs were astonished at his survival. They were equally surprised by his toughness and quick recovery. Though he could hardly speak or eat for the next three days, on the day after his rescue he mounted his camel and rode with the caravan for seven hours.
Barth felt grateful, sorry, embarrassed. His impetuous curiosity had nearly killed him and crippled the expedition. He had let down his colleagues and caused them tremendous anxiety as well as expense. He had been headstrong, ill prepared, and overconfident both in his judgments and in his physical strength. He had disregarded good advice and flouted the thin line between life and death in Africa. He had almost thrown away his ambitions and dreams, had almost let down science just as the expedition was on the verge of territories never explored by Europeans. To bring his discoveries home, he must survive. He would not forget the hard lessons taught at the Palace of the Demons.
7
To Aïr
ON JULY 18 THEY REACHED THE SMALL CARAVAN TOWN OF GHAT, A huddle of 250 hous
es. For nearly 1,000 miles to the south, the territory was unknown to Europeans. Barth felt sure discoveries awaited there.
But first they had to escape the conniving spongers of Ghat. Hatita, an expert on the species and an exemplar of it, advised the Europeans to keep their doors shut and to answer all knocks with “Babo!”—“No one’s here!” The one exception to this rule, of course, was Hatita, whose begging remained shameless and insatiable.
The Europeans further infuriated the town’s spongers by refusing to pause there for weeks so they could be cadged into penury. In retaliation, their Tuareg escort reneged on their pledge to accompany the expedition to Aïr, brushing aside the mere detail that they had already been paid to do so. In fact, they demanded additional money for protecting the freed slaves who had accompanied the expedition to Ghat, a fee they had already collected once. For their finale, they insisted on a bonus.
This was the atmosphere in which Richardson attempted to negotiate a commercial treaty between Her Majesty’s Government and the chiefs of Ghat. These worthies quickly grasped that such an agreement could benefit them. They were poised to sign when Richardson pulled out another document requiring them to end the slave trade. Richardson’s tactlessness stunned Barth. The chiefs broke off negotiations.
“It is a serious undertaking,” noted Barth, “to enter into direct negotiation with these [Tuareg] chiefs, the absolute masters of several of the most important routes to Central Africa. It required great skill, entire confidence, and no inconsiderable amount of means, of which we were extremely deficient.” That last clause referred not just to their merchandise but to Richardson.
A caravan of Tuaregs from the Kel Owi clan, whose territory extended into Aïr, happened to be in Ghat. The expedition hired them as their new escorts through the mountains of Aïr and on to Zinder, a Hausa city in central Sudan. The fee was relatively low—about £15—but turned out to be merely a down payment.
