A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  “I confess,” wrote Cooley, “that your present design of rushing on blindfold in the hope of groping your way for 2000 miles through barbarous nations appears to me quite desperate and likely only to end in your destruction.” He begged Barth to consider “the fearful and notorious sacrifice of life that has hitherto attended African Expeditions,” and “to retract your rash promises and to embrace safe counsels. The world applauds success much more than self sacrifice. It will avail you nothing to make discoveries if you do not live to tell them. Where the interests of science are concerned, it is evident that discretion is the better part of valour.”

  Barth replied to this well-meaning but patronizing letter on July 24 from Bagirmi. He began respectfully, one scholar to another, describing his historical accounts of Wadai and Bagirmi, his collection of vocabularies, and the subdivisions of Fulani tribes. Then this: “As for my further proceedings, Sir, I pray you, at least not to take me for a child. It has never been my intention nor will it ever be to rush on blindfold into any situation whatever.” He added, not quite truthfully, that he had never planned to go east and had always left open other possibilities, depending on circumstances. And circumstances now compelled him “to turn my face Westwards, in order to finish my researches in that quarter.”

  COOLEY WAS NOT the only deskbound scholar who presumed to dictate Barth’s path, though he was in the minority about which path to take. Nearly all the recent letters from Europe, wrote Barth, assumed that he and Overweg “should be able, without any great exertion, and in a short space of time, to cross the whole of the unknown region of equatorial Africa, and reach the southeastern coast.” He admitted that he had once hoped to make that journey, but after more than two years in Central Africa he now believed that it would take years more of expensive hardship. Neither his health nor his means were up to it.

  So he was relieved when Palmerston held out the possibility of Timbuktu—certainly distant and difficult to reach, but not unthinkable, despite Cooley’s opinion. “To this plan, therefore, I turned my full attention,” he wrote, “and in my imagination dwelt with delight upon the thought of succeeding in the field of the glorious career of Mungo Park.” Park’s account had been his sole literary companion in Bagirmi, and perhaps helped tilt him toward Timbuktu.

  DESPITE THE RAIN KING’S powers, the violent downpours began. As he moldered in Massenya, Barth knew that the many rivers separating him from Kukawa were swelling and would soon be impassable. His sense of urgency intensified. The sultan, however, remained silent.

  Barth grasped at any scrap of hope. On August 1 slaves began to hoe the soil in his courtyard to plant okra. Barth took this as a sign that he would soon be free, since otherwise his camel, which stayed in the courtyard, would destroy the okra seed.

  He got another sign on August 6 when the sultan sent him fifty shirts. And, the messengers added, permission to leave soon. Barth kept one of the finer shirts, of light silk and cotton. He gave thirty as gifts to his servants, his host, and friends such as Faki Sambo, Bu-Bakr, and Haj Ahmed, who was still waiting for eunuchs and freedom. Barth saved seven of the best shirts to send to England as examples of Bagirmi manufactures.

  But still he couldn’t quite leave. His escort to Kukawa was a servant of Sheikh Umar’s head eunuch, and this man needed a few more days to close a deal for five slaves that he and his master would sell in Kukawa.

  On the morning of August 10, Barth was awakened by his host’s servant and told he could pack his camel and go. Barth didn’t believe him and rolled back over. His host entered and confirmed the news. After three-and-a-half months of confinement in Massenya, the moment had really arrived. “My heart bounded with delight,” wrote Barth, “when, gaining the western gate, I entered the open country, and once more found myself at liberty.”

  THE RETURN JOURNEY to Kukawa was sodden. The rain rarely let up. They swam flooding rivers and streams separated by bogs and marshes. “I led rather an amphibious life,” wrote Barth.

  Released from immobility, he didn’t want to stop moving. His exhausted servants did everything possible to delay him, desperate to rest and dry out, but he was relentless: early starts, long days, rain be damned. He stayed wet and developed rheumatism, which troubled him for the rest of his life.

  Barth made it to Kukawa in just ten days, his servants dragging behind. Overweg learned he was approaching and galloped out to meet him. They hadn’t seen each other for five-and-a-half months, and their reunion was joyful. Barth thought Overweg looked weak and exhausted, but that small cloud quickly passed as they talked excitedly about the projects ahead. Barth settled into his old rooms and reacquainted himself with such luxuries as coffee with sugar.

  He spent the next day writing letters. From Dr. Dickson in Tripoli he requested more purgatives and emetics, since he and Overweg would be in the interior for the foreseeable future. He sent a long letter to Lord Malmesbury at the Foreign Office to report that he was back in Kukawa, “in perfect health and in the very best spirits.” He assured him that the mission was going well scientifically. He had established that the river system of Adamawa was unconnected to Lake Chad. He had brought back a full account of Bagirmi and Wadai. Overweg had been exploring the lake.

  Financially, he continued, things remained dicey, a theme he expanded in a letter that day to Consul Herman in Tripoli. A caravan had arrived with 1,000 dollars and 750 dollars’ worth of merchandise—helpful, but not nearly enough. The expedition’s debts came to more than 3,000 dollars, mostly because of the horrible terms accepted by Richardson from the merchant Sfaksi.

  On this same day, Gagliuffi also sent a letter to Consul Herman, informing him that he had consigned 450 dollars and a box of fine English tableware to a Tebu merchant who was going to Kukawa. No one had wanted to transport money because of the danger, but Gagliuffi persuaded the merchant by buying “half a camel” from him to carry the box and then sweetening the offer with another £10. But Gagliuffi added that neither he nor the merchant could be held responsible “for what may occur on the road between this and Bornou.”

  (Instead of going straight to Kukawa, the merchant went to his hometown of Bilma and settled in for a weeks-long wedding celebration. He sent the caravan ahead to Kukawa, without the money or the tableware. By the time he got to Kukawa, Barth was gone. The vizier sent the money and tableware on to Barth in Zinder, but missed him by a few days. From there, the cash and cutlery disappeared.)

  Barth also attended to pressing matters in Kukawa. Three days after returning, he met with Sheikh Umar. The sheikh wanted Barth to ask the British government to establish a consulate in Kukawa. He also wanted Barth to fill the post, a sign of his trust in the explorer. Barth agreed to push for a consulate, but he himself had other plans—to extend his scientific explorations west and perhaps reach Timbuktu.

  The sheikh was pleased—not because Barth would be furthering science but because he wouldn’t be going east to Wadai and signing a commercial treaty with Bornu’s enemy. This response strengthened Barth’s suspicion that the vizier probably had schemed to trip him up in Bagirmi.

  BARTH AND OVERWEG talked often about the future. Overweg still looked drained and seemed unable to recover his strength. They decided a change of air might help. On August 29, Overweg left to explore a seasonal river that fed Lake Chad. He returned on September 13 but had pushed himself so hard during the excursion that he was exhausted and didn’t eat that evening.

  Fevers arrived with the rains. September was the unhealthiest month in Kukawa. To escape town the Germans took long rides every day. On September 20 they went north. Overweg, an avid hunter, “was so imprudent as to enter deep water in pursuit of some waterfowl,” wrote Barth, “and to remain in his wet clothes all the day.” (Barth had been guilty of the same thing on his return trip from Bagirmi.) That night Overweg was too spent to eat. The next morning he couldn’t get up. Barth earnestly advised him to take a sudorific, but “he was so obstinate as not to take any medicine at all.” His illness worse
ned throughout the day.

  The next day, September 22, “his speech became quite inarticulate and almost unintelligible.” This symptom alarmed even Overweg. To recover, he urged Barth to take him to the house of their friend Fugo Ali in Maduwari, eight miles southeast of Kukawa on the lake. Fugo Ali had been Overweg’s navigator on Lake Chad. The explorers started for the village the next day, but Overweg was so weak that the short trip took two days. Barth left him with Fugo Ali and returned to Kukawa to finish some dispatches.

  That evening one of Overweg’s servants rushed back with the news that Overweg was worsening.

  I mounted immediately, and found my friend in a most distressing condition, lying outside in the courtyard, as he had obstinately refused to sleep in the hut. He was bedewed with a cold perspiration… . He did not recognize me, and would not allow me or any one else to cover him. Being seized with a terrible fit of delirium, and muttering unintelligible words, in which all the events of his life seemed to be confused, he jumped up repeatedly in a raging fit of madness, and rushed against the trees and into the fire, while four men were scarcely able to hold him.

  Toward morning he finally collapsed onto his bed and grew quiet. Barth asked if wanted anything. Overweg urgently indicated that he had something to tell him. He struggled to speak but couldn’t make himself intelligible. “Hoping that he might have passed the crisis,” wrote Barth, “I thought I might return to the town.” And he did. His conduct was astounding. Was Barth clueless? Heartless? Frightened? Resentful of Overweg’s neglect of his health? No explanation can excuse his conduct at this crisis, when Overweg clearly needed care and solace.

  Early the next morning, September 26, Overweg’s servant woke Barth in Kukawa. Overweg had not spoken since Barth’s departure and his condition was alarming. Barth again rode toward Maduwari. He was met by Fugo Ali’s brother, in tears.

  “Is the foreigner dead?” asked Barth.

  “Yes.”

  Barth spurred his horse into a gallop.

  At Maduwari, according to an account left by Overweg’s servant, Barth wept over his companion’s body, a detail omitted from the explorer’s own account. When he emerged from the hut, he told Overweg’s distraught teenaged servants, Dorugu and Abbega—slaves whom Overweg had freed—not to worry, he would take care of them. The villagers, who knew Overweg well from his long stays there, began lamenting him.

  Barth and Fugo Ali washed Overweg’s body and wrapped it in a white cloth. They dug a grave in the shade of a hajilij tree. No one spoke. Barth put some of Overweg’s personal effects into the hole. They covered the body with boughs, then dry grass, then dirt. To protect the grave from hyenas and scavengers, they finished with branches of thorn.

  “Thus died my sole friend and companion,” wrote Barth, “in the thirtieth year of his age, and in the prime of his youth. It was not reserved for him to finish his travels, and to return home in safety; but he met a most honorable death as a martyr to science.”

  OVERWEG IS THE least knowable of the expedition’s three Europeans. The glimpses of him in the accounts of Richardson and Barth are brief, and he left no publishable journals. He was clearly energetic and amiable—easier to like, Barth admitted, than his European companions. Barth enjoyed his company and his skills, but was sometimes exasperated by his boyish carelessness and naïveté. In the days leading up to his death, Barth’s concern for him is clear, but so is his irritation. The behavior that contributed to Overweg’s death—repeatedly exhausting himself despite his weakness, plunging into the lake after waterfowl and staying in wet clothing, refusing medicine—suggests a young man who considered himself indestructible. Barth called him imprudent and obstinate.

  These flaws were magnified for Barth by what he saw as Overweg’s irresponsibility toward their mission and toward science. Earlier in the journey, Barth recorded that Overweg “laughed at me when, during moments of leisure, I finished the notes which I had briefly written down during the march.” In contrast, Barth approvingly noted that Richardson took pains with his journal. As a scientist, Overweg was as tireless and enthusiastic as Barth, but far less meticulous and conscientious. Barth’s candid epitaph for Overweg appears in Travels and Discoveries hundreds of pages before the actual death scene:

  … it is greatly to be regretted that my unfortunate companion, who seemed never fully aware that his life was at stake, did not take into consideration the circumstance that he himself might not be destined to return home, in order to elaborate his researches. If all the information which he occasionally collected were joined to mine, those countries would be far better known than they are now; but, instead of employing his leisure hours in transcribing his memoranda in a form intelligible to others, he left them all on small scraps of paper, negligently written with lead-pencil, which, after the lapse of some time, would become unintelligible even to himself. It is a pity that so much talent as my companion possessed was not allied with practical habits, and concentrated upon those subjects which he professed to study.

  It took tremendous discipline for an explorer to keep a detailed journal despite hunger, thirst, sickness, danger, fatigue, and the myriad problems and mundane tasks that besieged a traveler in remote places. To neglect one’s notes must have been a constant temptation. Overweg habitually succumbed to it.

  After Overweg’s death Barth tried to salvage his companion’s memoranda but could decipher nothing but a few names, like a maddening story made of scribbles and occasional characters. Except for some measurements of latitude and a few astronomical observations, Overweg’s two-and-a-half years of research perished with him in Maduwari. He remains the figure who urgently wanted to tell us something, but waited too long.

  THAT EVENING BARTH returned to their house in Kukawa. During his absence in Bagirmi, Overweg had found a layer of gypsum in the courtyard and used it to cheer up their quarters with whitewash—typical of both his boyish good spirits and his squandering of time. To Barth the place now seemed “desolate and melancholy in the extreme.”

  They had intended to make another surveying excursion on Lake Chad, and Barth had hoped to make another attempt at exploring Kanem. But “any longer stay in this place had now become so intolerable to me,” wrote Barth, “that I determined to set out as soon as possible on my journey toward the Niger—to new countries and new people.”

  21

  Westward

  TWO DAYS AFTER OVERWEG’S DEATH, BARTH RESUMED A LETTER HE had started earlier to Cooley:

  Circumstances have changed… . Yesterday at noon I laid my sole companion and fellow traveler in the grave and am now lonely and companionless in these regions where nobody does understand my doing, the Director of my own expedition—but nevertheless I am in good health and best spirits—as far as circumstances allow and shall not give up the least point—I am not a man who is afraid of death in such a cause, but I shall be the more prudent and circumspective, and it will please God I trust to give me success, and after that safe return home redeemed by the sacrifice of two lives out of three.

  He also worked on official correspondence. He informed Consul Herman about Overweg’s death, the new plan to go west, and the need to be resupplied down the road. He asked again for a letter in Arabic that introduced him as a representative of the British government, not merely an expeditionary. He advised Herman to “look sharp” to keep Gagliuffi’s private interests and partnership with the merchant Sfaksi from harming the mission.

  He also urged Herman to lobby for a British consulate in Kukawa. The sheikh had promised to give the consul a spacious house, “with three milk cows ready for him, if they do not die in the meanwhile.” Sheikh Umar, added Barth, was sending several cases of gifts to the queen, accompanied by an envoy instructed to visit the marvels of England and report back to the sheikh. Barth asked Herman to arrange free passage for this envoy and “to instruct that fellow a little how he has to behave in England.” Barth also enclosed Overweg’s papers in a separate envelop to be delivered to Chevalier Bunsen, a
dding “you will be so kind not to open the packet.” This instruction would be held against him.

  Next Barth wrote a long letter to the Lord Secretary in the Foreign Office about all these matters. He emphasized the wisdom of sending a consul to Kukawa to cement relations with Bornu. The sheikh was sending an envoy and the vizier hoped to send his son to England soon. Barth hoped that the government would take advantage of this open door. (Britain would not send a representative to Bornu until after 1900.)

  This letter, dated October 10, 1852, reached the Foreign Office in London on February 19, 1853. The news about the envoy’s approach excited a lot of correspondence between Tripoli and London about how to deal with this person, house him, translate for him, transport him to England. For decades the British government had been trying to establish relations in the Sudan. Now that Barth was thrusting the opportunity upon them, they were unsure how to react.

  Barth informed the Foreign Office that he hoped to reach the Niger River at the village of Say. Beyond that everything was “extremely uncertain.” He doubted he could make it to Timbuktu, but hoped he would be able to map the unknown course of the Niger between that city and Say. He asked the government to send a cache of money, merchandise, and new instruments, especially thermometers, to Zinder, 400 miles west. Beyond there he would be hard to reach.

  His departure was delayed when a Tuareg horde invaded the lands between Kukawa and Zinder. Two months after Overweg’s death, things had simmered down enough to go. Sheikh Umar and Haj Beshir wished him well and added a parting gift of two fine camels.

  ON THE MORNING of November 25, 1852, Barth passed through Kukawa’s western gate. The day felt momentous. Bornu had been his base for nearly twenty months. Ahead lay unknown regions and dangers. The lands between Bornu and Timbuktu were boiling with wars and brigands. He was uncertain whether supplies would reach him before he lost touch with Tripoli. He was alone, the sole representative of the British government in Central Africa. If he managed to reach Timbuktu, 1,200 miles away, he didn’t know whether the sheikh there would welcome him or kill him. The last undisguised European to enter the legendary city, Major Gordon Laing, had been murdered. (René Caillié, a Frenchman, had later visited briefly, but in disguise.)