While all this was going on, von Haven was taking his ease in the next village. There he made the last entry in his diary:
“It is easy to see what an adverse effect it has had on our expedition that our artist lay sick in Suez; not only because this meant the absence of our other two members, but also because his own work was missed. A number of quite good prospects have escaped us. The above-mentioned inscriptions and Mount el-Mokateb have also suffered somewhat from this. They are not drawn with the accuratesse Herr Baurenfeind is capable of. Nevertheless, Herr L. Niebuhr provided a good substitute, despite the fact that drawing is neither his department nor his calling. He has done much better than I could have done—partly because of my ignorance of the art of drawing, and also partly because of the above-mentioned obstacles—in copying the inscriptions, particularly the hieroglyphics. It is only fair that he should himself have the honour of his copies, and that he himself should dispatch them in his own time, without my anticipating him with borrowed copies.”
Self-justification is thus persuasively joined to justice (of a sort) for Niebuhr. And thus ends the one document composed in Danish to have been preserved from the expedition to Arabia Felix.
In the afternoon of 25th September, 1762, whilst Forsskål was walking about as usual among the traders on the quayside in Suez, he caught sight to his great relief of the little caravan making its way towards the town after having crossed the gulf a little farther to the north. Soon afterwards the expedition was once again complete and gathered in the inn in Suez. Morale was high; Baurenfeind was well again; and Niebuhr’s appearance meant that Forsskål could at last put an end to his boredom. They had even brought their distinguished friend, von Haven, safe back from the desert. But as for the results of his trip, all that could be said was that there was still no news from Mount Sinai.
Niebuhr’s transcription of the hieroglyphs at Diebel el-Mokateb
5
During the days that followed, von Haven wrote up his diary from the Sinai expedition and sent it via von Gähler home to Bernstorff; Niebuhr, however, who like Forsskål feared that the Danes would disloyally exploit his work, kept his diary to himself and contented himself with sending home a provisional report.
Thus Bernstorff learned nothing of the details of Niebuhr’s work on the Sinai peninsula. On the other hand, as he read von Haven’s pointless remarks, he was seized with disappointment which, as he read on, changed to sheer fury. Was this all to emerge from the mission that had been one of the main items of this expensive expedition? Was this ludicrous account, where all the more important questions were left unresolved and replaced by disquisitions on food problems and debilities and a bad foot—was this the kind of thing to win honour and respect for the Danish king among the scholars of Europe, all waiting for this very report with the greatest excitement?
On 21st June, 1763, the Danish Minister gave vent to his anger in a letter to von Gähler. Now everything was wrong with the expedition; each of the members was severely criticised in turn; Forsskål had only submitted his diary up to 6th April, 1761; Niebuhr had sent no diary home at all; and Kramer had distinguished himself from all the others by sending nothing whatever, not even a letter, since his departure from Copenhagen two and a half years earlier! But this was not all. Eventually they arrived in Suez and, after an expensive journey and all sorts of intrigues, finally got within reach of one of the main objectives of the expedition. Whereupon the artist fell ill, only to recover the very moment the others, to whom he was indispensable, had left town. The doctor was compelled to remain behind with the sick man, and Forsskål, without the least excuse, refused to accompany the others to Sinai. As for these two, “one of them now sends us a kind of diary in mediocre form, and instead of reporting all the interesting and unusual things we had a right to expect of him, he keeps talking about all sort of trivial circumstances of absolutely no interest at all.” Bernstorff comments on the absurdity of von Haven’s neglecting to furnish himself with a letter of introduction after visiting the archbishop in Cairo; he dismisses his researches at Djebel el-Mokateb as superfluous and finds it quite ludicrous that he should turn back home before establishing whether or not he had been at Mount Sinai: “I must admit that all this is utterly deplorable. This is no way to carry out the orders of the king. This is no way to fulfil the expectations everybody has of our scholars’ abilities. It is not for this that all the scholars of Europe have their eyes fixed upon them.”
Von Gähler hastened to express his agreement with his wrathful superior: “As for the trip in the desert, I must admit that when I forwarded to Your Excellency what Herr von Haven had written, I was tempted for a moment to add some remarks about the poor use—or so it seemed to me—to which he and his colleagues had put their trip. But as I had already once before been compelled to report a number of rather distressing matters, I felt the most tactful thing this time would be to postpone my reflections.”
Meanwhile Bernstorff was not content to pour out his wrath to his subordinate in Constantinople. The schoolmaster in him, never very far below the surface of the Minister, now rose up and gave each single one of the members of the expedition a reprimand and a warning that in future they must comply with the royal instructions. Von Haven got the worst of it. The letter to him was written not by a schoolmaster but by a statesman, for whom it was an easy matter to express the most malicious things in the most exquisitely phrased courtesies.
By way of introduction, Bernstorff reminded von Haven of the fact that the expedition had been organised in honour of His Majesty the King and added that, to the extent that it was successful, it would incontrovertibly make the names of its members famous throughout the learned world. “Never at any time will you have a more favourable opportunity for earning the approval and goodwill of your king than this. Here you can furnish him with evidence of the tireless energy and industry with which you seek to attain those objectives. His Majesty has determined for your mission. If this opportunity is thrown away, it will probably never occur again.”
After this lightly veiled threat of the King’s displeasure, Bernstorff dealt directly with the fatal diary. He reported that he had had it translated into German to be sent to Michaelis, who was waiting for it with the greatest impatience. Bernstorff hoped that it would satisfy the eminent scholar, adding with grim irony that it had at least been carefully translated. After this he continued: “When I myself read it, I felt sure that this could only be an extract from a more proper and much fuller diary of yours. I assumed that in the short time left before your departure, you perhaps had not attempted to complete a fair copy in extenso, and that you had therefore contented yourself with sending me a provisional account, which was more particularly concerned with the physical events of the journey and the difficulties you encountered. As I continue to hold this belief, I shall flatter myself with the conviction that your genuine and more extensive diary will also contain many more interesting and more precise details, which of course we all justly expect from your exceptional ability and learning, just as I also am inclined to believe that this proper diary will go more deeply into those problems which are your prime responsibility in your capacity of philologist, which was in fact the only reason why the king condescended to permit you to travel through Egypt and into the desert. Finally, I am convinced that I can look forward to receiving this proper diary as soon as you have a little more time at your disposal. I prefer to hold to this conviction, because if, despite all expectations, it should happen to be otherwise, I shall not be able to guarantee you either the further good-will of the king or the applause of a public whose expectations have risen to such a peak that it would be completely impossible to satisfy them with any feeble achievements or any mediocre contributions to knowledge. The interest which I cherish for all things concerning you, my dear sir, makes it painful for me to contemplate this.”
Bernstorff ended his letter by protesting at von Haven’s negligence at Djebel el-Mokateb, at Mount Sinai, and at the monast
ery of Saint Catherine—negligence which in the Minister’s opinion was so grave that the whole thing would have to be repeated on the expedition’s return journey. This was in his view the only possible way to save the honour of the expedition regarding this part of its task.
However, all Bernstorff’s trouble was in vain. His sugared threats never reached their addressee. His letter to von Haven was dated 21st June, 1763. Some months following its dispatch, he received an alarming message from Arabia Felix. It had been drafted by Forsskål, but it was also signed by Niebuhr, Kramer and Baurenfeind, and was dated Mocha, 9th June, 1763—almost fourteen days before Bernstorff’s own letter. Forsskål, as usual, went straight to the point: the Danish philologist, Friedrich Christian von Haven, had died suddenly.
[1] An ell was equivalent to about 2 modern English feet.
part two
A THOUSAND AND ONE DAYS
5. Spring in Tehama
One calm summer’s day, 5th October, 1762, the six men of the Danish expedition were once again standing in a rowing-boat and being ferried out into the sun. The oars creaked in the rowlocks; not a breath of air stirred in the sheer heat that lay over the glassy water. Behind them lay Suez, where the sharp shadows and the white surfaces of the houses formed a slowly changing pattern of relationships as the boat moved farther out. Before them lay four large ships; they saw only one side of them, the side lying in the shade; but the light was so intense that the tips of the masts and the rigging seemed to be glowing points, and sparks of light were struck and extinguished in the water fore and aft of the ships. These were the ships which in three days’ time were to make the voyage south down the gulf, then sail obliquely across the Red Sea to Djidda, which served as the port of Mecca.
The six men stood in the rowing-boat, surrounded by the chests containing their baggage and equipment. More than eighteen months had passed since that cold winter morning when they were rowed out in similar fashion to the man-o’-war in the Copenhagen roads. From their outward appearance it was difficult to believe they were the same people. The sun had scorched and tanned their faces; Forsskål and Niebuhr wore full beards, and in their long Oriental garments, which they had now been wearing for more than a year, the six of them looked more like a group of traders than anything else, making their way south from Cairo. Nor was there much inward similarity to the men who had left the Tollbooth in Copenhagen. In contrast to the gloomy silence that hung over the rowing-boat on that earlier occasion, they were probably chatting to each other about wind and weather; they had long since grown accustomed to their strange surroundings, and even their own individual peculiarities had long since become commonplace in the group. The sense of impending drama evident in the air at the time of their departure seemed—after reaching a crisis in von Haven’s buying the arsenic, in Forsskål’s angry letters, and Niebuhr’s threats—to have subsided. They could not be bothered to waste any more of their energies on it; the hot climate had had a soporific effect; their sarcasm and abuse had become trivial and repetitive, while on the other hand their small talk about ordinary commonplace things gave them repeated pleasure. After von Haven’s humiliating appeals in Suez and his subsequent fiasco on the Sinai peninsula, nobody could take him seriously, let alone fear for anything he might do. They realised quite clearly that he would be so occupied in future with spicing his own dishes properly that there would be no time for poisoning others.
After sampling the boredom of Suez for several weeks, the irritable Forsskål had also become milder in temper. Von Haven even wrote about him quite civilly in a letter from this period. On all sides there were signs of a change of mood. The changing pattern among the six men followed the law of psychology that seems to apply to all such expeditions: the enforced company of the others first produces a state of tension that gets out of hand and becomes unreasonable and sometimes ridiculous, and only later settles down into an attitude which seems to transcend personal enmity yet nevertheless has nothing whatever to do with friendship. When men live under the dictatorship of a common destiny it may be that they cannot stand one another, but neither can they dispense with one another. This does not make them good friends; but it seems to provide most people, temporarily at any rate, with a good character.
All in all, the expedition had gone off reasonably well until now. They were still at full strength, and none of them had fallen victim either to plague or to thieves. Baurenfeind’s illness had caused them some anxiety, but he had got over the crisis and now seemed as well as ever. Even the scholarly results they had achieved provided the basis for a certain amount of optimism. Admittedly, the trip to Djebel el-Mokateb was no great success; but Niebuhr had collected on his maps information that was to be of great value in future explorations of the region. Their stay in Egypt had produced results that exceeded all their expectations. In addition to dispatching several hundred botanical specimens, Forsskål had also sent home his completed monographs, two botanical and one zoological. Niebuhr had filled almost a thousand pages in his diary with astronomical and meteorological observations, with maps and town plans, with descriptions of native habits and customs; and in Baurenfeind’s chests there were also innumerable drawings of plants and other natural objects, of clothing and machines, of implements and instruments, of ruins and landscapes. Despite all this activity, however, the great silent question behind the expedition still remained unanswered. Only once had it been specifically formulated, and that was by Peter Forsskål the day they left Copenhagen. But we shall soon see evidence of how every member of the expedition had it constantly in his thoughts. After von Haven had been subdued and the internal drama among them had subsided, this question took its place as the main theme of the expedition, as its motive force. Why Arabia Felix?
The preliminaries were over and the conflicts past. This was one of the reasons for the good humour prevailing among the six men in the rowing-boat that calm summer’s day, 5th October, 1762. The other reason is a little more difficult to define, but it is present none the less. They were going to find out very soon what it was really about. If everything went according to plan, the four ships out there would take them in a few days’ time considerably nearer the answer to the question.
At all events they could look forward to several days’ holiday on board. This last week had been trying. Only four days after the return of von Haven and Niebuhr from the Sinai peninsula the great caravan arrived at Suez with pilgrims on their way to Mecca. Like a swarm of outsize grasshoppers they settled on the little harbour town and overnight made it more densely populated than Cairo itself. Men, women and children were there in confusion; the poor with their bundles and beggars’ crutches, the rich with their servants and heavily armed mercenaries to protect them during the journey; and great numbers of traders, neither rich nor poor, who had learned to use this chance of getting themselves and their goods in safety to Mecca while doing a little business en route. Wherever rich and poor meet you will soon find a trader, so that the rich may become richer and the poor poorer. Suez was a welter of buying and selling; goats, clothes and women changed owners; silver coins blinked in the sun; six thousand incoming camels packed the streets and alleys; mountains of boxes and packages were pushed up and down on the quayside, where screaming donkey drivers swished their whips upwards against the animals’ genitals; the trading and the gaming went faster and faster, and everybody was busy.
In the middle of this hectic bustle Forsskål had had to step in. In time he had become well-known among the people in the harbour quarter, and he managed to reserve the topmost cabin in the biggest of the four ships now preparing to sail with all this turmoil to Djidda. The departure was planned for 8th October; but already, three days earlier, the Danish expedition arranged to be rowed out to their ship; they wanted to be aboard before the other passengers arrived, and to establish themselves as inconspicuously as possible in their reserved cabin. European travellers were not favourably regarded by Mohammedan pilgrims; so the group was glad that Forsskål had secure
d them a cabin a little apart from the others. “In my case particularly,” wrote Niebuhr, “it was very convenient to be able to make my astronomical observations almost unobserved. Admittedly we were sailing south; but for most of the time we were also headed sufficiently east for me to see the sun in the meridian quite easily on my watch outside the cabin; and when we anchored, the stern of the ship always lay to the south because of the prevailing northerly wind.” The result of Niebuhr’s secret observations was the first chart of the Red Sea.
Three days after the expedition went on board the four ships set sail for the south over the glittering water, loaded to the deckline with goods and passengers. Von Haven estimated the number of people on board their own ship alone as 500-600; and Forsskål calculated the crew as numbering not less than seventy-two men, the majority of whom had their wives and children with them on the journey. The best cabins were occupied by rich Turks on their way to Mecca with their entire harem; the women were accommodated immediately under the expedition’s cabin, rather as the slave girls had been on board the ship from Constantinople—and, as we shall soon see, with the same picturesque consequences. The fore and after decks were packed with traders who had so arranged their chests and sacks as to leave a little space in the middle where they themselves could talk and sleep, smoke their pipes, cook rice, or do a little trading. Finally, each of the four ships had up to three or four smaller vessels in tow. In most of these were horses, goats and sheep; when the animals were to be fed, a sack of straw was thrown overboard and allowed to drift astern to the boat in tow, where the herdsman fished it up with a boathook. With one of the other boats in tow there was a lively traffic of a different kind. It was filled with prostitutes, the so-called Hadsjs of Mecca, who worked hard during their pilgrimage to the Holy City to earn their keep.
Arabia Felix Page 19
