A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  Barth asked them to put aside personal animosities for the sake of the mission, no doubt remembering the many times he had done so with Richardson. Otherwise the mission, which should be their highest priority, would be damaged. Vogel and Macguire agreed, but Church was unbending. He declared his intention to go home with Barth.

  In Travels and Discoveries, Barth blurred all this with a couple of vague remarks. He wrote that Vogel had jumped into the mission with enthusiasm, “giving up all pretensions to the comforts of life” for the sake of science and knowledge. “He unfortunately committed the mistake,” continued Barth, of expecting the same dedication from the sappers, whose “ideas were less elevated.” These partial truths, intended to protect the public’s perception of both sides, didn’t stop Church from making damaging accusations later on.

  NOT EVERY SURPRISE in Kukawa was unpleasant. Part of the box plundered in Zinder was recovered, including a packet of letters for Barth. Some were three years old, but he read them with great pleasure. And after being deprived of fresh books for years, he luxuriated in Vogel’s small library. He also grew fond of his energetic young countryman, Vogel, and relished the chance to converse again with a well-trained scientist.

  After Vogel and Macguire left on January 20, 1855, for Adamawa and Bauchi, Barth felt “rather desolate and lonely.” His spirits were further lowered by an attack of rheumatism that crippled him for more than a week. Yet he never stopped pestering Umar to send him homeward. He told the sheikh he couldn’t delay any longer, “my health having suffered considerably from my five years’ stay in these countries.” To emphasize his point, on February 20 he rode a few miles outside of Kukawa and pitched his tent. “I felt extremely happy in having at length left behind me a town of which I had become excessively tired.”

  But he couldn’t get away that easily. Umar wanted Barth to move back to Kukawa until they resolved all the issues of theft. Barth suspected that if he returned he would get stuck for another month or two. “Knowing from experience that with these people time is of no value,” he wrote, “and finding my health rapidly declining, I had come to the resolution of not waiting any longer.” Umar yielded to his determination and sent him five camels, inferior ones, but they nevertheless gave Barth “a slight hope of proceeding on my journey.” He bought two more camels and hired a guide.

  But on February 28, Umar sent musketeers to bring him back to town. The reason wasn’t clear, but a large caravan was approaching and Barth suspected that the sheikh hoped it carried supplies for the mission and hence new gifts for himself. “I thought it prudent, heartrending though it was,” wrote Barth, “to resign myself in obedience to the tyrannical will of these people.”

  The caravan brought nothing for Barth or the mission except a letter from Lord Clarendon that was twenty months old. Barth tried to make good use of this intermission by studying Kanuri and the history of Bornu, and he attempted to improve his health with daily rides. But his journal referred constantly to his physical and mental exhaustion. “All that now remained for me under the present circumstances,” he wrote, “was to resign myself in patience, although the delay pressed upon me with indescribable heaviness, and I had scarcely energy enough to endeavor to employ my time usefully.” “Altogether my usual energy was gone,” he noted, “and my health totally undermined, and the sole object which occupied my thoughts was to convey my feeble body in safety home.” Even his usual delight in African company waned; he complained that he hadn’t had a happy day in Bornu since Vogel left.

  Worries about money also drained his vitality. Two of his camels died during this delay. “Everlasting anxiety about the necessities of daily life eats into [a traveler’s] energy,” wrote Gustav Nachtigal, “which in any case suffers from the climate, from disease and from intellectual isolation, and this naturally impairs his scientific work.”

  Around this time, Consul Herman got exciting news from Murzuk. He forwarded it to Lord Clarendon in a letter dated March 13. “I have the honor to report to your Lordship,” he wrote, “that the rumour of Dr. Barth’s death has most happily proved unfounded.” Gagliuffi had received a letter in Italian from Barth, written from Kano in mid-November 1854. Barth said he intended to go to Kukawa and then straight home. Clarendon got this dispatch three weeks later. He immediately informed Chevalier Bunsen and the Royal Geographical Society.

  The news came too late to prevent another mix-up. A caravan from the north arrived in Kukawa on March 23, 1855. It brought 1,000 dollars for the mission. But at the time, the Foreign Office still thought Barth was dead, so the packet was addressed to Vogel as the head of the mission, and there was some doubt about transferring it to Barth. “All this mismanagement,” he wrote, “in consequence of the false news of my death, greatly enhanced the unpleasant nature of my situation; for, instead of leaving the country under honorable circumstances, I was considered as almost disgraced by those who had sent me out, the command having been taken from me and given to another. There is no doubt that such an opinion delayed my departure considerably, for otherwise the sheikh would have exerted himself in quite a different manner to see me off.”

  Barth eventually did collect the 1,000 dollars, some of which funded his journey home. Umar also repaid the 400 dollars stolen from Zinder, which Barth used to pay debts, including the salary of el Gatroni.

  By mid-April the crushing heat, with daytime temperatures above 110 degrees, was further damaging Barth’s health. Sheikh Umar grew alarmed. If Barth died in Bornu, relations with Britain might be strained. Umar gave the explorer a camel and hinted that he could leave soon. Barth’s hopes revived. He bought another camel and made preparations.

  On May 4 he left Kukawa again to camp nearby. He returned to town on May 9 to say goodbye to Umar, who had arranged for him to accompany a caravan of Tebu and Daza merchants for the first part of the journey. As a final request, Umar asked Barth to send him a small cannon. (The sheikh died in 1880.)

  After one false start and another five-day delay, which almost unhinged Barth, the journey began in earnest. On May 19 they crossed the river separating Bornu from Kanem. “I deemed it one of the happiest moments of my life,” wrote Barth; “… I turned my back with great satisfaction upon these countries where I had spent full five years in incessant toil and exertion.”

  One obstacle did remain: he had to cross the Sahara in the heat of summer. More immediately he had to deal with the monkeys. He was bringing three of them back (species unspecified), tethered to the baggage atop the camels. On the first day’s march they kept untying the baggage ropes, and their incessant screeching spooked the camels into stampeding, which plunged the hairy little jockeys into worse hysterics, which further panicked the camels. Things got broken, including a musket. Barth got the monkeys off the camels’ backs and shooed them away.

  The caravan was skirting the northwestern edge of Lake Chad. Lakeside villagers sold them smelly dried fish for the long desert crossing. On May 30 they struck north into the dunes. “I here enjoyed again the wide expanse of the open desert,” wrote Barth, “which, notwithstanding its monotony, has something very grand about it, and is well adapted to impress the human mind with the consciousness of its own littleness, although at the present season, it presented itself in its most awful character, owing to the intense heat which prevailed.”

  The suffering began. The best way to survive the crossing was by forced march, with short breaks during the most scalding hours. Even in the shade, when they could find any, the temperature was 110 degrees. Humans and animals plodded in a stupor of heat and exhaustion. Sand-winds sometimes intensified the wretchedness and desolation. They wrapped veils around their heads and mouths to block the sand, and tightened their girdles to avert hunger. It was worst for the heavily burdened camels, and for the slaves of the Tebu and the Daza, who staggered under their loads. During one of the night marches, four camels collapsed and died. Slaves deranged by misery tried to hide and get left behind, though that meant certain death. The travelers ofte
n had to dig sand out of the wells. Sometimes the water was as sweet as grace, sometimes fetid with dead birds or other filth, too foul to drink. But they always drank.

  It took them a month to cover 450 miles to the salt-trading oasis of Bilma, a soothing respite of palm trees and grasses. A few days later Barth’s small group separated from the rest of the caravan. The next phase of the journey was the most difficult, across a rocky desert plateau. It was also the most dangerous, infested with bandits. Barth bought as much fodder-grass as he could find, using “dollars, cloves, and the remnant of dried fish which I still had left … as my only safety with my small band of people consisted in the greatest speed.”

  Barth surely knew Denham’s description of what lay ahead of them:

  The fatigue and difficulty of a journey to Bornou are not to be compared with a return to Fezzan: the nine days from Izhya to Tegerhy, without either forage or wood, is distressing beyond description, to both camels and men, at the end of such a journey as this. The camels, already worn out by the heavy sand-hills, have the stony desert to pass; the sharp points bruise their feet, and they totter, and fall under their heavy loads: the people, too, suffer severely from the scanty portion of provisions, mostly dates, that can be brought on by these tired animals,—and altogether it is nine days of great distress and difficulty. There is something about El Wahr surpassing dreariness itself: the rocks are dark sandstone, of the most gloomy and barren appearance; the wind whistles through the narrow fissures, which disdain to afford nourishment even to a single blade of wild grass; and as the traveller creeps under the lowering crags, to take shelter for the night, stumbling at each step over the skeleton of some starved human being, and searching for level spots on the hard rock, on which to lay his wearied body, he may fancy himself wandering in the wilds of desolation and despair.

  They made another series of forced marches. At wells they drank quickly and moved on to avoid human predators. Though they were heading north, temperatures remained 110 degrees or higher. They reached a well called Mesheru, notorious for being surrounded by the bones of slaves whose march to the northern markets had ended there. “The water of this well,” wrote Barth, “which is five fathoms in depth, is generally considered of good quality, notwithstanding the remnant of human bones which are constantly driven into it by the gale; but at present it was rather dirty.” In the next sentence he noted the remarkable landscape and commented, “It would form a good study for a painter experienced in water colors, although it would be impossible to express the features in a pencil sketch.”

  The juxtaposition is jarring: pastel artwork and water made gritty by human bones, its depth measured precisely. The horrors elaborated by Denham barely seemed to touch Barth. He was insulated by thoughts of home. When this segment ended after seventeen days, at an oasis called Tejerri, he wrote to Frederick Warrington, who was coming from Tripoli to meet him, that he had arrived here on July 5 “after a most agreeable undisturbed journey of 48 days”—another of his dumbfounding statements, especially since he added that he could barely use his arms and legs because of rheumatism. He asked Warrington to arrange a warm bath for him in Murzuk. He also asked him to bring “a bottle of tolerable wine,” and ended, “I hope to get plenty of interesting news from you, and if it please God, a few letters.” He must have been almost out of his mind with happiness now that every step was bringing him closer to home.

  They came to the village of el Gatroni, who had a joyous reunion with his family after years of separation. Barth gave him the promised bonus of 50 dollars and wished he could double it for his invaluable dependability. El Gatroni treated Barth to a meal of fowls, with a special treat of grapes for dessert.

  On July 13, just south of Murzuk, Barth reached the tent of Frederick Warrington, who had escorted the three Europeans out of Tripoli when the mission began. “I could not but feel deeply affected when, after so long an absence, I again found myself in friendly hands, and within reach of European comforts.”

  But those comforts dangled like a carrot at the end of a stick. “All dangers and difficulties might be supposed to have ceased,” wrote Barth. “But such was not the case.” The tribes between him and Tripoli were in revolt against Ottoman rule. The Turks and Britain were allied, so the region was dangerous for Barth. But at this point nothing could stop him for long, and he moved on after a delay of six days.

  He also learned from Warrington about another troubling development. During his absence, the once-close relationship between Britain and Prussia had been wedged apart by the Crimean War. When Russia moved to expand southward into territories controlled by the Ottoman Empire, Britain, France, Prussia, and Austria attempted to mediate. Russia rejected the terms they suggested and invaded the Caucasus and the Danubian Principalities. By late March 1854, when Barth was on the verge of escaping Timbuktu, Britain, France, and Austria had declared war on Russia. Prussia, however, remained neutral, despite the efforts of Prince Albert and Chevalier Bunsen, who always urged close ties between Britain and Prussia. When Prussia refused to support Britain, Bunsen resigned as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, a post he had held for thirteen years. From Britain’s perspective, Prussia’s snub resembled enmity.

  The rift wasn’t sudden. The close relationship between Britain and Germany had long coexisted with an undercurrent of suspicion and resentment about Germany’s influence on British affairs. The alliance and the resentment both started in 1714, when George I, the first Hanoverian king of England, arrived from Germany. Georges II through V all married German princesses. Queen Victoria’s mother was a German princess, her governess a German baroness. Victoria married a German prince, Albert. One of the royal couple’s closest counselors, Christian Friedrich, was a German baron. In some British circles Germany was viewed as a parasite. When Victoria married Albert, some street wit wrote, “He comes to take for ‘for better or for worse’/ England’s fat Queen and England’s fatter purse.”

  Barth felt the repercussions of all this in Africa and would soon feel them in England. He had been sending his scientific dispatches to Bunsen, who forwarded them to Humboldt, Ritter, and other German scholars, as well as to the Foreign Office. He saw nothing amiss in this practice since his contract specified that he was not in British government service, but was an independent scientist-for-hire, at least until he assumed the directorship of the mission. But after the rift over the Crimea, some people in Britain, especially within the Royal Geographical Society, began grumbling that despite Barth’s British paycheck, his first loyalty was Prussia.

  In his letter to Clarendon from Murzuk, Barth addressed the issue. He wrote that he had just learned of “the most lamentable division and coolness which had succeeded to the harmony once existing between Her British Majesty’s government and the King of Prussia. I have only to mention, that the correspondence formerly passing through the hands of the Chevalier Bunsen was far from being a correspondence with Prussia, but with my friends in England, principally Members of the Royal Geographical Society, sufficient care being not taken at the Foreign Office of private correspondence.”

  AFTER A COUPLE of tense encounters with the rebels, who said they would have cut his throat if Britain had openly opposed their revolt, Barth neared Tripoli. Four days from it, a messenger from the vice-consul, Richard Reade, met him with a bottle of wine.

  On August 28, 1855, after five years and five months in the African interior, he rode into Tripoli. He inhaled the perfumes of the city’s renowned gardens. “Yet infinitely greater was the effect produced upon me by the wide expanse of the sea,” he wrote. “I felt so grateful to Providence for having again reached in safety the border of this Mediterranean basin, the cradle of European civilization, which from an early period had formed the object of my earnest longings and most serious course of studies.” He had an urge to gallop to the beach, leap from his horse, and kneel in a prayer of thanks. But such dramatic gestures were beyond him. Instead he rode quietly through the town’s dazzling white walls to hi
s quarters.

  He was taking the young servants freed by Overweg, Abbega and Dorugu, with him to Europe. Over the next few days he delighted them with new clothes—trousers of blue wool, tailored jackets of red wool with metal buttons and gold stripes, red wool caps with blue silk tassels.

  Barth was impatient to leave Africa. They stayed in Tripoli only four days before taking a steamer to Malta and then to Marseilles, where they boarded a train for the English Channel. Dorugu and Abbega were amazed by all of it—the peculiar utensils called forks, the big houses “without even the least amount of sand,” the way people pressed coins into their hands simply because they were black, the swift chuffing carriage that Barth called “Victoria’s horse,” the women with faces white as chalk and wasplike waists above puffy skirts. And then one morning, remembered Dorugu, “I don’t know who it was who told me the name of the town—perhaps it was Abdul Karim [Barth] himself, I don’t remember—but the name of the town was London.”

  It was September 6, less than two weeks since they had left Tripoli. After settling into Long’s Hotel on Bond Street, Barth reported immediately to Lord Clarendon, who received him as a hero.

  He had completed his labors and now looked forward to the harvest: first the peaceful solitude of composition, then publication of his account, followed by some fame and a professorship. Perils and intrigues, he felt sure, were finally behind him.

  30

  Problems at Home

  THE LONDON PAPERS HAD REPORTED THE RUMOR OF BARTH’S death, but none of them noticed his return. It was a foretaste of the public’s response to him and his journey.