A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  On September 22, Palmerston wrote in a memo, “I think that Mr. Richardson’s death ought not to make any difference as to the providing funds for the expedition.” The Germans, he continued, had been persuaded to go to Africa by the British government and should not be left unsupported. Two days later he told his undersecretary, Henry Unwin Addington, to instruct the explorers to prolong the expedition, with Barth in charge. Palmerston authorized them to use their best judgment about the expedition’s direction from Lake Chad—whether east toward the Nile, southeast toward Mombassa, or “a westerly course in the direction of Timbuktoo.” Addington dispatched this letter to Tripoli on October 7.

  At almost the same moment, Richardson’s widow was departing Tripoli with her husband’s effects. She had received the £60 pension requested by Richardson before he left for the interior. (In March 1852, Mrs. Richardson would ask the Foreign Office’s permission to publish her husband’s journals, because she needed the money. Crowe, the British consul in Tripoli, who intensely disliked Richardson and thought he had bungled the expedition, opined that since Richardson had been traveling at the expense of the FO, all his papers belonged outright to the government. But he supposed he wouldn’t object to publication as long as the FO vetted the proofs and deleted anything “which might be inconvenient.” Richardson’s account appeared in two volumes in 1853.)

  IN LATE DECEMBER 1851, politics rearranged the Foreign Office. Palmerston had repeatedly exasperated Queen Victoria by his habit of sending communiqués to British ambassadors and foreign governments without seeking her opinion, much less her approval. Despite her rebukes, he didn’t change his practice. When Louis Napoléon staged a coup d’état in France on December 2, Palmerston supported it, though he knew the queen did not, and he compounded the offense by officially endorsing France’s new government. It was too much. On December 26 the queen demanded his resignation. He was replaced temporarily by Earl Granville. Lord Malmesbury took the position at the end of February 1852.

  Five days after Palmerston’s ouster, Chevalier Bunsen, the vigilant Prussian ambassador who had placed Barth with the expedition, wrote to Granville to protect the interests of the mission now in Prussian hands. Bunsen evidently was operating on old information from Barth. He told Granville that the two Germans expected to leave Bornu in May, and intended to travel east to the Nile or Zanzibar, as Ritter and von Humboldt had envisioned.

  All of this was incorrect. Bunsen also pressed the government on several financial matters. He asked the Foreign Office to reimburse Barth for paying off Richardson’s debts, to increase the payment due each man in Bornu from £200 to £500, and to increase the sum due at the end of the journey from £200 to £300. Next to each of these requests in Bunsen’s letter was written, in red ink, “Done.” The problem was how to get the funds to Bornu.

  (Bunsen also solicited financial aid for Barth from his countrymen. King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia gave £150. Several private individuals joined Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s German husband, to contribute £60. The Königsberg Society for Natural Sciences donated £300, but since Bunsen was certain that Barth would follow his German mentors’ wishes and go east, the chevalier sent the money to Mombassa. Barth never got it.)

  Bunsen also noted that the explorers were constantly asked for “real English goods,” especially cutlery, but Richardson had furnished the mission with nothing but cheap merchandise from Tripoli. Granville authorized Bunsen to spend £65 on English manufactures and submit the receipts for reimbursement. The chevalier bought 6 dozen scissors, 23 pounds of steel cutlery, 5 dozen small looking-glasses with brass covers, 2 gross of silver rings, some copper finger rings, 2 silver watches, 2 pocket compasses, 4 thermometers, 8 dozen army razors and 3 dozen “fine razors,” several music boxes, 4 pairs of pocket pistols, a pair of double-barreled pistols, 5,000 needles, and some colored handkerchiefs. The receipts were duly filed by FO clerks.

  The goods were shipped from London on January 19, 1852, and reached Tripoli on March 6. Two weeks later they left with a caravan heading to Murzuk, where Gagliuffi would forward them to Kukawa. But the consul regretted to inform the FO that the region between Murzuk and Kukawa was “in a state of so much excitement and agitation, that it is feared no caravan will venture to leave Mourzouk for many months to come, either for Soudan or Bornou.” He added the disturbing news that all the money and merchandise sent long ago for the mission also remained stalled in Murzuk. Around this time, Barth left for Bagirmi, unaware of any of this.

  In early June 1852 the new consul in Tripoli, Major G. F. Herman, informed Lord Malmesbury on the consulate’s distinctive pale blue paper that £400 was en route to Gagliuffi for Barth and Overweg. He had instructed Gagliuffi to use another £300 to settle Richardson’s debt with the merchant Sfaksi, Gagliuffi’s partner. Herman hoped the money would reach Murzuk in time to leave with a small caravan then forming for Bornu. If not, he wrote, “the transmission of the money across the desert will I fear be attended with infinite difficulty—great risk and considerable delay.” He assumed the expedition was in severe straits, and so had ordered Gagliuffi to “embrace every means of execution in his power, not actually bordering on culpable rashness.”

  In late June 1852, Gagliuffi wrote that he would do his best to send the money, but warned that a fresh war had broken out between the Tuaregs and the Tebus in the territory between Murzuk and Bornu. Caravans were not risking the trip. He added that for people who didn’t know Central Africa “it is impossible for them to comprehend the difficulty one has in sending money into the Interior, as whoever has the charge of it runs a great risk of being murdered, unless accompanied by a strong caravan.” He warned that the money probably wouldn’t get to Kukawa before the explorers left there after the rains in August.

  It would be wise, he continued, to reward Sheikh Umar and Haj Beshir for their treatment of the explorers. For the sheikh he suggested a saber, a cuirass, an iron carriage, some revolvers, and a steel helmet with a plume. For the vizier, a saber, some revolvers, a watch, and a large telescope. (This request crept through the Foreign Office’s bureaucracy. Ten months later, boxes containing Gagliuffi’s suggestions, minus the carriage, left England for Bornu.)

  A month-and-a-half into his stint as consul, Herman was distraught about the expedition’s precarious state and appalled by its former director. In late July 1852 he wrote a letter to Malmesbury in which someone, probably Undersecretary Addington, who handled correspondence, felt compelled to draw a thick black censor mark through several intemperate adjectives. Herman put the blame squarely on Richardson for the financial severities being suffered by Barth and Overweg and the usurious loans they had been forced to take. “All this might have been avoided,” wrote Herman, “had but a modicum of the foresight which ought always to preside over the organization and conduct of such expeditions been observed.” In his view Richardson’s “culpable negligence” verged on the “incomprehensible.”

  This drew a rebuke from Malmesbury via Addington: blaming Richardson was beside the point; focus instead on helping Barth and Overweg accomplish their mission.

  IN LATE JUNE, Gagliuffi informed Herman that the earlier batch of money, goods, and correspondence—which included about £300 in currency and £450 of merchandise, plus Palmerston’s letter of October 7, 1851, directing Barth to continue the expedition—had left Murzuk on April 6 with a caravan bound for Kukawa. After a journey of about 1,000 miles the caravan reached Kukawa on June 24, 1852. Overweg took delivery. It was the expedition’s first communication from Tripoli since July 1851. The next day Overweg forwarded the correspondence to Barth in Bagirmi.

  Barth opened Palmerston’s directive on July 6, “one of the most lucky days of my life; for, having been more than a year without any means whatever, and struggling with my fate in the endeavor to do as much as possible before I returned home, I suddenly found myself authorized to carry out the objects of this expedition on a more extensive scale, and found sufficient means placed at my d
isposal for attaining that object.” The letter had been inching its way to him for nine months.

  BARTH OFTEN COMPLAINED bitterly about the expedition’s lack of means and his consequent sufferings. He sometimes felt that the British government had turned its back on him, and he sometimes ascribed this neglect to anti-German attitudes. Considering the immense lag between Barth’s requests and his receipt of a response, he understandably misinterpreted lack of communication as lack of interest.

  But the Foreign Office correspondence tells a different story. The FO did everything in its power to support the mission. It invariably approved requests for more funding, and worked strenuously, though often unsuccessfully, to ease the mission’s travails. After receiving Barth’s desperate letters about Richardson’s death and the mission’s straits, the FO sent £1,400 in currency and goods, and Malmesbury authorized Consul Herman to draw an additional £500 if necessary. (“But Lord Malmesbury trusts [in the draft letter, Malmesbury crossed out Addington’s softer “hopes”] that there will be no occasion for this further outlay.”) All this was on top of Richardson’s blown budget. But wars, thieves, and distance isolated Barth and repeatedly separated him from the funding he urgently needed.

  The Foreign Office correspondence also makes clear that British officials admired Barth’s energy, tenacity, and scientific productivity. They often refer to his courage and enterprise. Yet the appreciative nouns are frequently modified by the adjective “Prussian” or “German,” clearly a qualifier as well as a descriptor. Barth, with his tetchy pride, sensed this. Friction was inevitable.

  20

  Resurrection and Death

  BARTH SPENT THE MORNING OF JULY 6 EXULTING OVER HIS TROVE OF correspondence, especially the letter from Palmerston that made him the expedition’s leader and assured him of funding. He also received many letters from colleagues in Europe praising his splendid scientific contributions thus far. The letters revitalized him and opened new prospects of future discoveries. One small detail marred his happiness: “For the present, however, I was still in Bagirmi.”

  The bundle of dispatches fueled the Bagirmis’ suspicions about Barth. Spy? Scout? Assassin? His position wasn’t helped by a high-handed letter from Barth’s patron, Sheikh Umar, to the sultan. The same day the bundle arrived, a delegation of agitated officials visited Barth. He thought they were about to put him back in irons. Instead they asked for his journal. Certainly, he said. But first he read aloud from it, translating English and German passages about the geography and ethnography of their country. The delegation, delighted, contributed additional information, but took the journal anyway. The sultan gathered all of Massenya’s learned men to inspect this runic volume. None of them could read it. Barth’s blind friend, Faki Sambo, assured them it was purely scientific. Stumped but still suspicious, they gave it back.

  Since returning, the sultan had avoided Barth, worried that the stranger might poison or hex him. On July 8 he risked an audience, summoning the infidel to the palace. Barth entered a courtyard where courtiers lolled. A doorway covered by a reed mat led to an interior chamber. No one presented himself as the sultan, so Barth loudly asked whether ‘Abd el Kader was present. A voice from behind the mat answered yes.

  Palmerston had empowered Barth to make commercial treaties with foreign governments on Britain’s behalf, a role he took seriously. Speaking in Arabic translated into Bagirmi by Faki Sambo, Barth began the diplomatic spiel he would use throughout Central Africa. It expressed a prelapsarian moment in European-African relations, or at least in Barth’s conception of them, since he believed everything he said. He told Bagirmi’s invisible sultan that Britain wanted to be friends with all the earth’s princes and to trade with them, though never in slaves. He added:

  … all who were acquainted with us knew very well that we were excellent people, trustworthy, and full of religious feelings, who had no other aim but the welfare of mankind, universal intercourse, and peaceable interchange of goods. I protested that we did not take notes of the countries which we visited with any bad purpose, but merely in order to be well acquainted with their government, manners, and customs, and to be fully aware what articles we might buy from, and what articles we might sell to them.

  Barth then presented his modest gifts, including one showstopper, a repeater watch from Nuremberg. Then he asked permission to leave the country immediately, since he had been a prisoner for four months and had business in Kukawa.

  The sultan remained silent and hidden, as he would in later visits. As soon as Barth returned to his quarters, two officials showed up to ask, on the sultan’s behalf, if Barth happened to have a cannon with him. Well, no. In that case they wondered whether he would make one. Disappointed again, they left. The next day the sultan offered Barth a pretty female slave. “Although sensible of my solitary situation,” he replied, “I could not accept such a thing.” He again asked permission to leave. The sultan answered that his guest couldn’t possibly depart without gifts, which would require some thought.

  Days again turned into weeks. Barth, burning to get back to Kukawa and begin his future, remained mired in Bagirmi. His friend Bu-Bakr urged patience—“the most momentous words for any traveler in these regions,” fumed Barth.

  Not that he was idle. He worked on his historical and ethnological accounts of Bagirmi and Wadai, which would cover forty-two densely written pages. He compiled vocabularies of twenty-four regional dialects, which ran to forty-six pages. He worked on a detailed map of Central Africa. It’s astonishing that he found the energy to do all this despite sickness and the psychological stress of indefinite detention.

  He also began replies to his recent correspondents. One of them was William Desborough Cooley, the British historian and geographer. His book of 1841, The Negroland of the Arabs Examined and Explained; or, An Inquiry into the Early History and Geography of Central Africa, attempted to re-create the history and geography of the western Sudan through rigorous engagement with old travelers’ accounts and Arabic sources such as Al-Idrisi and Al-Bakri. Cooley sifted these sources for verifiable facts and cross-checked them against modern European travel accounts. Comparing all these sources, he believed, would yield a strong facsimile of truth about Central Africa’s past as well as the location of historical places and landmarks.

  He was able to demonstrate that the half-legendary empires of Mali, Ghana, and Songhai had been real, and he roughly positioned them geographically for the first time. From old and new sources he extracted a detailed, complex history of black Africa that contradicted hazy European assumptions about the continent’s savagery. Cooley also avoided most of the era’s racial and cultural biases. He reminded readers that bloody executions by African leaders weren’t so different from English laws that burned women at the stake for counterfeiting money or that hanged hundreds of people for minor crimes such as pilfering.

  Cooley’s book was immediately influential among Europe’s Africanists, but met its greatest resistance in Britain. Barth admired it so much that he carried it to Africa and often consulted it. On April 1851, a few days after he first arrived in Kukawa, he wrote Cooley an introductory letter that began, “Sir, It is from a warm love of science that I quite a stranger to you take the liberty of addressing you the following lines.” He expressed his esteem for The Negroland of the Arabs, “sincere as it is without the least prejudice and going on with a firm step from point to point”—a perspective and method like Barth’s own. Rereading the book in Africa, he told Cooley, increased his appreciation. He thought Cooley would like to know that on-the-ground observations were confirming the accuracy of the old Arab historians and many of Cooley’s speculations. “I am able to put truth in the place of conjectures,” wrote Barth, “and to give life to vague accounts of former times.”

  Cooley’s response, written in January 1852, reached Bagirmi with the packet of letters in July. His tiny handwriting in pale ink contrasted strongly with Barth’s bold dark penmanship. The letter was a peculiar mixture of praise
, advice, querulousness, bruised egotism, and condescension. Cooley regretted not meeting Barth in London and welcomed Barth’s compliments about his book, “as it has been received here with discouraging coldness,” despite “the revolution effected by me in the comparative Geography of Africa.”

  He swatted away several of Barth’s suggested corrections to his speculations. Barth was right, but Cooley’s reaction was typical of him. He ridiculed any new information by explorers that contradicted his armchair conjectures. For instance, he mocked all the eyewitness reports of snow on Mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro because they clashed with his theory about possible temperatures at the equator. This habit eventually undermined his influence and earned him the nickname “the stormy petrel.”

  Cooley praised Barth for sending back “a larger amount of valuable information, then [sic] has been as yet appended to the narrative of any African traveller, Burckhardt alone perhaps excepted; and doubtless you now possess much the loss of which would be deplorable.”

  Which brought him to his key point: advice about where Barth should go next. He understood that Barth intended to try for Africa’s east coast. “Now my dear sir,” wrote Cooley, “only reflect on the checks given to the progress of geographical discovery by the obstinate hankering after intractable problems, such as those connected with the Poles, the Mountains of the Moon, Timbuctoo, and etc. etc., which had led to nothing but waste of energy and disappointment.” Traveling east from Bornu, he continued, would be another waste. Barth would be leaving Islamic Africa and entering regions with fierce tribes unacquainted with white men and uninterested in establishing commercial relations with them. The languages would be drastically different, so he would be unable to command and control his servants. He would certainly be plundered and probably killed.