But it was Laing’s romantic soul that provided the most significant early threat to the expedition. In Ghadames he received a packet of letters from his new bride, including a pallid portrait of her that had been commissioned in Tripoli. His sweetheart’s consumptive appearance put Laing into a paroxysm. The following morning he wrote to Warrington, threatening to abandon his mission altogether as Emma was evidently pining for him:
My Emma is ill, is melancholy, is unhappy—her sunken eye, her pale cheek, and colourless lip haunt my imagination, and adieu to resolution—Was I within a day’s march of Tombuctoo, & to hear My Emma was ill—I wou’d turn about, and retrace my steps to Tripoli—What is Tombuctoo? What the Niger? what, the world to me? without my Emma?
By six p.m., though, he had recovered and was writing again, asking to be excused his “agitation of the morning.” The following day he was pledging once again to perform his duty “like a Trojan.”
After staying six weeks at Ghadames, Shaykh Babani’s caravan left for the southwest, reaching In Salah, in the district of Tuat, on December 2. Here, far beyond the reach of the Tripolitanian authorities, Babani was changing: he was now “needy and avaricious in the extreme,” wrote Laing. On January 9 they set out again. The caravan was jumpy. Every distant bush was taken for a mob of Tuareg marauders, and at one point Laing was mistaken for Mungo Park, but he paid little heed to the danger that implied. In the great arid plain of the Tanezrouft, which was “as flat as a bowling green, and as destitute of verdure as Melville Island [in the Arctic Circle] in the depth of winter,” a group of heavily armed Ahaggar Tuareg on fast camels joined them, riding side by side with the caravan. A few days later, after what Laing described as an act of “base treachery” by Babani, the Tuareg silently surrounded his tent at three a.m. and fell on him. The translator tried to run away but was caught and killed, as was one of the African sailors. The other was wounded in the leg, while Jack le Bore managed to escape. Laing, meanwhile, was shot and stabbed twenty-four times and left for dead.
Somehow, the gravely injured explorer managed to climb onto a camel that morning. He was carried a further four hundred miles to the territory of the powerful shaykh of the Kunta Arabs, Sidi Muhammad, where on May 10, 1826, he wrote to his father-in-law with his mangled left hand, detailing his appalling injuries. Even as Laing was convalescing, Sidi Muhammad’s desert camp was overwhelmed with a catastrophe of its own. On July 1, Laing wrote again to Warrington with news, this time datelining his letter “Azoad”:
With a mind sadly depressed with sickness, sorrow, and disappointment, I lift an unwilling pen to acquaint you that I am no further on my Journey than when I last addressed you.
A sickness, “something similar to yellow fever,” had swept through the camp and killed half the population, including Babani, Sidi Muhammad himself, and Jack le Bore. Laing had caught the fever too, but had recovered, and he was now the only one of his original party left alive. He was still suffering from “dreadful pains” in his head, arising from the severity of his wounds. Nevertheless, driven by a sense of destiny that bordered on madness, he determined to push on.
He was now only a few days’ ride from Timbuktu, but the timing of his arrival in the region could hardly have been worse: the city was falling under the control of the Muslim ruler of the Fulani empire of Masina, Ahmad Lobbo. Lobbo had recently been warned by the sultan of the powerful Sokoto caliphate not to let Europeans visit the Sudan on account of the abuses and corruptions they had committed in Egypt and elsewhere, and now he wrote to the governor of Timbuktu, telling him ominously to “take from [Laing] all hope of returning to our dominions.” The new Kunta shaykh, Sidi Muhammad’s eldest son, al-Mukhtar al-Saghir, repeatedly warned the explorer not to continue, but Laing insisted. Shaykh al-Mukhtar did what he could: he provided an escort to Timbuktu and wrote to the town’s governor, asking him to protect Laing.
Laing reached the city on August 13, 1826, a little over a year after leaving Tripoli, and five weeks later wrote his only letter from Timbuktu, to Warrington. He was not, strictly speaking, the first European ever to reach Timbuktu—Leo Africanus, after all, had been born in Europe and lived in Italy, and European mercenaries and renegades fought with the Moroccan army that invaded in 1591—but he was the first explorer to get there and send an account home, brief and cryptic though it was. If the city was a letdown, Laing was not going to say so now. It is likely that he spent weeks in Timbuktu filling his journals with observations he one day hoped to publish, but he didn’t want to share these with the British government just yet, and suddenly there was no time: a party of Fulani was expected and he had been urged to leave immediately. He couldn’t entirely disappoint his reader, however, so he stated simply that “the great Capital of central Africa” had “completely met [his] expectations” in every respect except size, and promised to write more fully from Segu, though the road ahead was “a vile one,” and he knew his perils were not at an end.
Laing left Timbuktu around three p.m. the following day, September 22, accompanied by a freed slave, Bungola, and an Arab boy. He set out north into the desert, toward Arawan, on a roundabout route designed to avoid Lobbo’s men. Then, like so many before, he disappeared.
• • •
THE SAHARA KEPT FEW SECRETS. Despite its immense size and small population, rumors traveled fast. Caravans picked up the gossip of every settlement they passed through, from the great markets to the smallest oases, and carried it with them to their destinations. It was always a surprise to students of the Sahara, the historian E. W. Bovill noted, that “in this tremendous desert everyone seemed to know what everyone else was doing.” In the early nineteenth century, few pieces of information moved more quickly than news of an intruding European.
The first echoes of Laing’s troubles reached Warrington in Tripoli in March 1826: there had been a treacherous attack on his party and the explorer had been badly injured. After that, the desert grapevine fell silent. As both consul and the explorer’s father-in-law, Warrington was in a compromised position made worse by his daughter’s distress and his own knowledge of the intrigue in the Tripolitanian court. Laing had traveled with the protection of the powerful pasha of Tripoli, Yusuf Karamanli, and now Warrington put Karamanli under great pressure to deliver news of Laing. In the spring of 1827, the pasha gave Warrington a copy of a report sent from Shaykh al-Mukhtar himself.
The leaders of Timbuktu had been embarrassed by their desire to look after their guest and the demands of their new sovereign, Ahmad Lobbo, the shaykh explained:
In order to reconcile the two interests, they permitted him to remain at Timbuctoo about a month . . . until he met with the enemy of God and his prophet, Hamed Ben Abayd Ben Rachal El Barbuchy, who persuaded him that he was able to conduct him to Arawan, from thence in order to embark at Sansandyng, and thence to continue his road to the great ocean.
The “enemy of God” was a shaykh of the Barabish (Bérabiche) Arabs who also went by the name Ahmadu Labeida. He and Laing left Timbuktu together, but halfway along the route the guide ordered his servants to seize Laing and kill him. Afterward they searched his baggage, whereupon “every thing of a useless nature, [such] as papers, letters, and books, were torn and thrown to the wind, for fear they should contain some magic, and the articles of value were retained.” This, said Shaykh al-Mukhtar, was the faithful history of the circumstances of Laing’s death.
Warrington forwarded the reports to the War and Colonial Office, without fully believing them. Some months later the British diplomat was aggrieved to hear of a letter sent on April 5 to the French newspaper L’étoile, which stated as fact that Laing was dead. There was no name attached to the letter, but it was datelined Sukkara-Ley-Tripoli, which happened to be the residence of the French consul, Baron Jean-Baptiste Rousseau. Warrington disapproved of the French in general and Rousseau in particular, and now he found a target for his wrath and grief. How could Rousseau know what Warrington did not? H
e conjured an elaborate plot among the French, Pasha Karamanli, and the pasha’s foreign minister, a debt-ridden Francophile named Hassuna D’Ghies. This man, Warrington believed, had been in cahoots with the treacherous Babani all along, and may even have sponsored Laing’s eventual killer. As Warrington sent back reports hinting at this conspiracy, a Royal Navy frigate was diverted to Tripoli to persuade the pasha to cooperate further with the consul’s investigations. That day, April 22, 1828, the pasha admitted for the first time that Laing was dead. In August, Bungola arrived in Tripoli, where he confirmed that the Barabish shaykh had “killed [the explorer,] being assisted by his black servants by many cuts of sword when asleep.” There was now no doubt about Laing’s fate.
The affair had a catastrophic effect on the already ailing Emma, who remarried and moved to Italy, but died the following year, at the age of twenty-eight, just four years after watching her beau ride out for Timbuktu. Her desperate father, meanwhile, fixated on the explorer’s journals, refusing to believe Shaykh al-Mukhtar’s assertion that they had been destroyed. There was no doubt that they would contain vital information about the interior that would make his son-in-law’s name and, equally important, prop up any future claim Britain might make on the rich African interior. His suspicions once again turned on D’Ghies and the French consul.
Rousseau in the meantime inadvertently fed his rival’s paranoia by declaring he had discovered the existence of a history of Timbuktu, which he hoped would soon be in his possession. The baron’s letters announcing his findings were published in the Société de Géographie’s Bulletin in 1827 and are almost certainly the first mentions in European literature of the Tarikh al-sudan, although he didn’t know it was called that. Often misattributed to Ahmad Baba, the Tarikh al-sudan, or “Chronicle of the Sudan,” was written in the 1600s by another Timbuktu scholar, Abd al-Rahman ibn Abd Allah al-Sadi. Once found, it would become the essential text for historians of the region.
In his first letter, Rousseau mused that the capital of the Sudan, “Tin-Buktou,” had always escaped the most persevering investigations. “Everyone speaks of it, and no one has yet seen it.” He hoped that, driven by the Société de Géographie’s “noble and generous competition,” there would come a traveler “who is happy to lift . . . the mysterious veil which will undress her to the eyes of European scholarship.” In the meantime, the French consul continued, he had managed to collect a few pieces of information on the subject:
It seems there exists a detailed history of this town, which is written by a certain Sidi-Ahmed-Baba, a native of Arawan, a township of the [Kunta] country, a history which only puts its founding at 1116 AD. This is how, in this work, the circumstances which surrounded the foundation of Tin-Buktou are told:
“A woman from the Tuareg tribe, named Buktou, settled on the edge of the Nile of the Negroes, in a cabin sheltered by a bushy tree; she possessed some ewes, and liked to exercise her hospitality on the travelers of her nation who passed that way. Her humble house was not slow in becoming a sacred sanctuary, and a place of rest and of delight for the surrounding tribes, who called it Tin-Buktou, that is to say the property of Buktou (Tin being in their idiom a possessive pronoun for the third person). Next these tribes came from all sides to gather and made a vast camp, which was later transformed into a vast and populous city.” This is, according to Sidi-Ahmed-Baba, the etymology of the name and the origin of the foundation of Tin-Buktou, of which, after all, the fame is perhaps only a chimera, which will vanish once we are able to surmount the many obstacles that prevent access.
More letters from Rousseau, dated March 3 and June 12, 1828, were published in the Societé de Geographie’s Bulletin the following year. This time he or the Bulletin’s editors confused Ahmad Baba’s name with that of the folk hero Ali Baba: “I hope to be soon in possession of the history of Timbuktu by Sidi Ali Baba of Arawan, which I am awaiting from Touat,” Rousseau wrote.
For Warrington, this was further evidence of French dirty tricks. How could Rousseau be in a position to get hold of the “Ali Baba” history of Timbuktu when no Frenchman had reached the city? Was this the volume to which Laing had alluded in his sole letter from that place, in which he had written that he had been “amply rewarded” in his searches of the town’s records? There was a simple explanation for the missing papers: the French had stolen them. The more he pursued this line of investigation, the more witnesses came forward to give him the answer he desired. Bungola told him D’Ghies had taken personal possession of Laing’s papers, while an ex-employee of Rousseau’s said he had seen D’Ghies handing over documents to the French consul in exchange for money. D’Ghies must have found the fruits of Laing’s journey, Warrington surmised, and sold them to the French to help pay his debts.
As Warrington squared up to Rousseau over the missing Laing papers, news was about to break of a second European who had reached Timbuktu. The development was doubly bad for Warrington, since the explorer was French.
• • •
RENÉ CAILLIÉ was in many ways Laing’s antithesis. He was modest, the son of a convict, orphaned at eleven, a neglected child with a dreamy, even melancholic character. One of his few pieces of early luck was the appearance in his life of a teacher who encouraged him to read adventure stories. Like Laing’s, Caillié’s imagination was inflamed by Robinson Crusoe, but nothing in the literature excited him as much as the map of Africa. As a child, he had scanned the continent’s mammalian shape, from rounded rump to rhinoceros horn, and pored over its fantastical annotations. What undiscovered cities lay in those gaps? What unseen creatures? What unknown civilizations? His passion for geography grew into an obsession. He would make his name, he decided, with some important discovery on this little-explored continent. He cut himself off from his friends, renounced sports and other amusements, and devoted his spare time to books and maps. At sixteen—the same tender age as the nineteenth century—he left home with sixty francs, bound for Africa.
The first decade of Caillié’s exploring career was an education in what could go wrong for European adventurers. The vessel on which he worked his passage south, the Loire, sailed from France in company with the frigate Medusa, a ship whose name lives in infamy. The Medusa was wrecked on the notorious shoals of Arguin, an island on the west coast close to Cape Blanco, whereupon her captain and officers took to the boats, consigning 147 lower ranks to a makeshift raft, which they cut adrift. Only fifteen people survived the scenes of drunken fighting, starvation, and cannibalism that broke out on board, which were immortalized by Théodore Géricault in his painting The Raft of the Medusa, a metaphor for the corruption of the French elite.
Caillié would soon find equally significant disasters were unfolding on land. Among these was a large British expedition to the interior and Timbuktu under Major John Peddie, which set out from a swampy malarial region at the mouth of the Nunez River. Peddie died of fever before he had even left the coast, and his expedition penetrated just three hundred miles inland before it was forced to return with half its officers dead. Undeterred, the British tried again, this time starting from the Gambia, but the expedition was so expertly milked by the king of Bondu that its commander, Major William Gray, soon had to send to the coast for more gifts. Caillié joined the resupply caravan, which carried too much baggage and too little water into the desert. The young man’s eyes became hollow with dehydration, and he watched other men grow so desperate they drank their own urine. Later, he caught a fever, and was lucky to make it back to France alive. There he heard that these failed British military expeditions had cost the extraordinary sum of £750,000, worth about $3.4 million at the time.
Still, Caillié persevered. In 1824 he returned to Africa with his own idea for an assault on the interior. Unlike the failures he had witnessed, his mission would be low-cost and low-key. He would disguise himself as a poor Egyptian Arab who had been kidnapped by French troops as a child and was now heading home to Alexandria. He spent three years
preparing for this role, studying Arabic and the Islamic texts, perfecting his cover story, learning how to dress, pray, and eat like a Muslim. Neither the French nor the British would sponsor his solo mission, but the Société de Géographie prize would be reward enough. He would give the money to his sister, who was living in poverty in France.
“Dead or alive,” he swore to himself, “it shall be mine.”
Caillié left the coast of Guinea on April 19, 1827, in Arab costume, carrying a Kuran and the essential umbrella. He climbed through the malarial swamps into the Guinea highlands, and struggled over mountain passes and ravines and torrents swollen by tropical storms. He took shade from the sun under spreading bombax trees and ate tamarind fruit to ward off the fever that always threatened to overtake him. In the uplands of Futa Jallon he crossed the Niger—even here, close to its source, it was two hundred yards wide—and at Kankan he survived an attempt by his guide to unmask him as a Christian. His feet broke out in bleeding sores and an attack of scurvy stripped the roof of his mouth to bare bone, but he recovered. He carried on. In March 1828 he reached Jenne, on the Bani River, where he found a boat that would take him north to the Niger, and then 250 miles farther to Kabara, the port of Timbuktu. On April 19, 1828, a year to the day after setting out, he was at last close to his objective.
At one p.m. that day, he was hiding in the bottom of the boat when the crew called down to tell him they were approaching Kabara, and he hurried out on deck. At first he could see nothing but marshland covered with aquatic birds; then the little port town that served Timbuktu appeared, perched above the floodline on a small hill. The water in the river was too low for the boat to get close, so he climbed into a canoe, which was dragged through the shallows by slaves.
The Storied City Page 9
