Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa's City of Gold

by Frank T. Kryza

  FORTY-SEVEN YEARS OF AGE at the time of his first meeting with Laing, Hanmer Warrington was the son of a country parson, born in 1778 of an old Welsh family. He grew up in Denbighshire, a hilly country near Wrexham and the rivers Dee, Conway, and Clwyd in North Wales, where he earned a reputation as a horseman. He wanted to be a soldier. At sixteen, he joined the First Dragoon Guards by purchasing a cornetcy, the fifth and lowest grade of a commissioned officer in a cavalry troop, and the man who carried the colors. In 1802 he sold out with the rank of major. All of his military service, except for six months in Europe, was spent in Britain.

  On November 27, 1798, at Croydon, Surrey, he married Jane Eliza Pryce from the Isle of Wight, by whom he would sire eleven children. The couple’s first child, Jane Elizabeth, was born in Surrey in 1802. In 1812, after brief service in Spain during the Peninsular War, he was posted to Gibraltar as a minor official. He incurred gambling debts, but whatever court patronage he may have enjoyed, it did not extend to financial help. By 1813 he was the target of a lawsuit for collection of 500 pounds. A maneuver to return to London was rebuffed, but with official help he soon found a safe berth on the other side of the Mediterranean, installed as consul at Tripoli, a post he would hold for the next thirty-two years.

  His wife Jane was rumored to be the natural daughter of George IV. No impregnable evidence has ever been found of this, but Warrington did in later years seem to be under some mysterious protective umbrella, held over him (perhaps) by members of the royal family. This may account for his long tour at Tripoli, which was often punctuated by official missteps.

  Warrington made a good first impression at the bashaw’s court largely because of a spectacular windfall he produced for Yusuf Karamanli—a 40,000-pound loan from the Colonial Office. His influence grew with the British shelling of Algiers in 1816, a reprisal against the enslavement of Christians by the Barbary pirates. The bashaw observed that when the Royal Navy was introduced into any military equation in the south Mediterranean, the British emerged victorious. Yusuf Bashaw freed several hundred Christian slaves in his dungeons—mainly Danes, Italians, Spaniards, and Greeks—with alacrity, before English warships sailed into his harbor. From then on, the bashaw maintained a healthy respect for British sea power.

  By the time of Laing’s visit, money and the threat of force had helped Warrington become an éminence grise in the bashaw’s court, advising him on matters that had nothing to do with his official brief. Laing knew that with Warrington occupying the consulate, he would always be well received in Tripoli. In London, Warrington was considered a loose cannon, though a man useful to the Crown’s interests.

  The Warrington household was characterized, in a memoir by the wife of the Dutch consul, as “wild,” though stern and puritanical in some things. “There was no question of discipline, order, or rules,” she wrote. “Everyone did what he or she wanted, and, like the proverb, ‘every horseman wanted to be Captain.’ “

  THAT FIRST cool May night under Warrington’s roof, surrounded by a bevy of adoring women, it must have seemed to the well-read young officer that the whole Warrington clan had stepped out of the pages of Jane Austen. The second daughter, Emma, was a “delicate flowerlike girl with the clear pellucid skin of the consumptive,” he recorded. Laing fell instantly in love with her. The expression of her “haunting, shadowy eyes” made his heart “contract every time he looked at her.” In the ensuing weeks, on rides over the rolling sands of the sahel and the cool green lanes of the menshia, in long intimate talks in the English Garden, where peach, pomegranate, lemon, almond, and jasmine trees were planted among the ruined marbles of Roman and Greek goddesses Warrington had expropriated from Leptis Magna,* Emma Warrington fell passionately in love with the handsome young Scotsman, just as he had with her. In the tiny consular community, it was rumored they were inseparable.

  Warrington père was later to write to Earl Bathurst, head of the Colonial Office and his immediate chief back at Whitehall, that Laing was a “well set-up man, of fine physique, highly gifted in many ways. The girl herself is of a headstrong and tempestuous disposition, quite unable to withstand his ardent lovemaking. For one thing, she is younger than he, and is perhaps a little flattered by his attentions, for by reason of the pending mission to Timbuktu, he is already a public figure….”

  Mother and father watched the development of Emma and Laing’s sudden attachment with misgiving. Warrington sincerely liked Laing, but to approve his daughter’s hasty attachment to a man soon departing on a hazardous journey seemed to defy common sense. At the same time, and despite his fatherly concern, Warrington had reasons of his own for abetting the match.

  By the time Laing arrived in Tripoli, Warrington’s star had dimmed. Though he boasted to his new guest “of being able to do anything and everything in Tripoli,” this was no longer true. The bashaw now ruled by playing the consuls against one another. The new French consul, Joseph-Louis, Baron Rousseau, was a distinguished Arabist who could converse with the bashaw without an interpreter. (Warrington’s Arabic was appalling, though his Italian, a language the bashaw spoke fluently, was passable.) Warrington, lodged at his country villa, disliked the urbane, studious, constrained French colleague who rarely ventured outside the walls of Tripoli and who snubbed Warrington’s invitations to the English Garden. Rousseau thought Warrington drank too much and talked indiscreetly of private matters. He had said as much publicly, in the presence of other consuls.

  Further inflaming Warrington’s already splenetic emotions, the French consul’s son—a weedy, anemic, artistic young man named Timoléon—had had the effrontery to court Emma. To the British consul, who often fell asleep with a copy of Shakespeare on his chest and an emptied bottle of “dry sack” at his side, this set of circumstances must have seemed a twisted Tripolitanian version of Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, in an era when the battle of Waterloo was a recent memory, to see a Warrington daughter married to a Frenchman, even a rich one, was unthinkable; the very idea made him apoplectic. He was determined to be more successful than Lord Capulet had been in safeguarding his daughter.

  With hindsight, one wonders whether Warrington nudged Emma in Laing’s direction to foil Timoléon’s advances. If so, it was not a difficult plot to hoe. Laing had a self-professed “ardent nature.” While still in his teens, he had written that “passionately fond of the fair sex, I had always in my eye some Dulcinea, on whom I used to dote, make verses, and squander away money.” For her part, it appears that Emma regarded Timoléon as a neutered man, more of a helpmeet, cherished friend, and someone to talk to (in an environment where there were few, if any, eligible men). By contrast, from the day of their first dinner together, she perceived Laing as different—virile, brave, well traveled, already a person of some distinction in London and the greater world. She was swept off her feet. Warrington, blind to human emotions (other than his own), may well have overestimated Emma’s attachment to Timoléon.

  By the beginning of June, Laing was sending strong hints to friends back home of the direction his love life was taking: he asked his friend James Bandinel to buy him “a handsome little cabinet of mineralogical specimens, such a one as will suit a lady of taste and refinement. You must not form any conclusions from this extraordinary request. I am no more than interested, much interested, in the lady in question.”

  Though he had little else to do besides brush up on his Arabic, Laing’s days in Tripoli were not spent exclusively courting Emma. He also tried to charm the bashaw into permitting him to leave the city under official protection, for bandits were prowling just beyond the city gates. The bashaw could only wonder at the bizarre English penchant for Saharan exploration, though he was astute enough to make money from it. He tested the waters regularly, for with each new explorer he seemed to be able to raise the price of security.

  Of course, this had to be done diplomatically, for the bashaw’s patronage could never appear to be for sale. The transaction had to be effected in a roundabout way, as part of a Gordian rit
ual. In the weeks after Laing’s arrival, as he calculated with his advisers just how much cash he could extract, the bashaw kept making excuses for not granting an audience. Warrington wrote the Colonial Office that “sooner than suffer Major Laing to be detained for about four months, I should not hesitate to give His Highness a small sum to enable him to meet his expenses.”

  The bashaw would not think of accepting a trivial fee, Lord Bathurst replied, acknowledging “the folly of His Highness, who would not express his wants, and in consequence of those wants not being complied with, would detain Major Laing, thereby defeating the views of England.” Warrington wrote back that “at the moment the Bashaw was professing such disinterested conduct, a glance of his eye and the rubbing together of his thumb and finger gave strong indications that he expected something more substantial between them.”

  He told the bashaw’s chamberlain he could give him 500 pounds. The reply: “Tell the consul whatever he does, I shall be satisfied with,” a lukewarm response Warrington correctly understood to mean the bashaw thought the British could be more generous. The consul then promised 2,500 pounds to be paid in stages as Laing progressed south, achieving set benchmarks, plus another 5,500 pounds that might be paid later during the expedition, assuming additional goals were met. Significantly, Warrington did not report the larger number to London, rightly fearing Lord Bathurst’s probable opposition to committing so much money before Laing had taken the first step out of Tripoli.

  Warrington also gave Laing a letter of credit, signed by himself and Yusuf Bashaw Karamanli, “the Slave of Allah,” which authorized “the bearer Major Laing to draw on us for any money which he may require during his journey into the Interior of Africa.” The preliminary negotiations concluded, Laing was at last invited to the Castle.

  “It was not until the thirteenth day after my arrival that His Highness the Bashaw condescended to honour me with an audience,” Laing wrote.

  Various are the rumors which were in circulation with regard to the cause of the Bashaw’s coolness: one day it was said that His Highness never received anyone during Rhamadan, which at the time of my arrival was twenty days old; the next, it was rumored that His Highness had received a douceur [a gift or gratuity] from another Government [the French] to throw obstacles in the way of my accomplishing that object which they were desirous of effecting from another quarter; a third day the rebellion which had arisen in the Garian Mountains was assigned as the cause of the delay, and with every morning’s sun fresh conjectures were formed….

  The senior government administration of Tripoli was housed entirely in the bashaw’s “Castle.” This mélange of buildings, surrounded by high walls rising from bedrock and resting on Byzantine and Spanish foundations, formed a rough quadrilateral at the southeastern angle of the city walls. Its four bastions overlooked Tripoli harbor from the north, covered the entrance to the town from the south, and faced the city below to the west. Castle guns controlled both sea and land approaches, and if necessary could quell a revolt originating from within Tripoli itself. Over the centuries, the bashaw’s predecessors as masters of the Castle had shown that they trusted no one, a wise policy and one for which the strange physical structure of the buildings was perfectly suited.

  There were only two ways to get into the Castle, both through narrow gates in high walls. The first, facing the city, led across an easily defended ramp. This was regarded as the main entrance. The other, used mainly by the bashaw and his senior aides, gave direct access to boats at a jetty. In an emergency, this would permit the bashaw to escape by sea.

  Behind the unscalable walls lay an irregular maze of chambers, courtyards, covered passageways, stairs, armories, kitchens, stables, barracks, harems, and prisons. There was a small mosque for the bashaw’s personal use, a hidden strong room for his holdings of gold and jewels, and even a pharmacy and infirmary. Private apartments housed the bashaw, his harem of wives and concubines, his personal guards, the treasury and secretariat staff, his garrison of janissaries, along with platoons of servants to care for all of them. Far below floor level were dungeons housing never less than hundreds of slaves.

  The giant compound “had a dreary and disreputable air about it,” according to Laing. European visitors wrote of the feeling of being “suffocated by a miasma of wretchedness that the Castle passageways engendered, halls that gave some the feeling of leading to some dreadful abode for the entombment of the living.”

  Not all of this concern was the result of a heightened pre-Victorian sense of the dramatic, for no sane person entered the Castle of Tripoli without anxiety. One never knew in advance what might be the outcome of an interview with the bashaw. Though rare by 1825, it was not unheard of for summary executions (by beheading with a scimitar) to take place on the spot in the throne room, in the bashaw’s presence and at his command. As early as 1810, an American surgeon, Dr. Jonathan Cowdery, had treated the bashaw for volcanic fits of rage and a seizure condition, possibly epilepsy. The bashaw himself, in an explosion of anger, had once struck off the head of a Sicilian slave, drenching his silk clothes in a gusher of blood. He also made two recorded attempts to kill Peter Lyle, the Scotsman who served as his pirate/admiral-in-chief (later also his son-in-law).

  A view of an elaborately decorated corridor, this one bordering an atrium open to the sky, in the “Old Castle,” Bashaw Yusuf Karamanli’s huge fortress-like palace in Tripoli, from a photograph taken in the 1930s.

  Given this tension, an atmosphere of fear haunted the dark passages and courtyards of the Castle. The bashaw’s brand of government, born in the shadow of the Grand Serail in Constantinople, was one where fear was endemic, for treachery and distrust were part of the Turkish psychology of rulership. This imported atmosphere of duplicity festered nicely in Tripoli’s stifling climate. Suspicions thrived in the Castle. At night, though iron doors separating interior parts of the compound were bolted, massive entrance gates were locked and the keys handed ceremoniously to the bashaw, who slept with them under his pillow. He also kept the key to his treasury.

  As an official visitor accompanied by his consul and making a ceremonial call upon the bashaw in the official divan (privy council), Laing’s visit, like all consular visits, was choreographed days in advance. At the appointed hour, Laing headed toward the narrow causeway leading from the city into the maze of buildings. He was in full uniform, with the rank of major. Warrington wore his own spectacular consular dress, which he had designed himself: the plumed hat of a field marshal, the red and blue coat of an ambassador, the epaulets of an admiral, and the trousers, boots, and spurs of a cavalry officer. The two Englishmen and their retainers passed across the drawbridge over a dry moat and into a wide courtyard filled with soldiers, passing the stables of the bashaw’s famous gray horses. At the end of this yard, in his habitual chair, sat the striking figure of the Grand Kehya (chamberlain), an expatriate Russian renegade dressed in colored silks and a vast turban.

  The Grand Kehya rose, the guard presented arms, and the party marched slowly into a labyrinth of dark passages. Laing stumbled along these ill-kept, gloomy tunnels, their floors crumbling, their twists and turns blocked by shadowy figures of guards. The retinue passed through a series of solid doors lapped with iron plates, emerging at intervals into miniature courtyards open to the sky but barred with iron gratings and surrounded by galleries supported on carved arches bright with tiles. Eventually, the lilting sounds of the bashaw’s nubar, or band of timbrel, drum, and reeds, could be heard, and the party arrived in a large courtyard outside the throne room. Though the time of his appointment had been set, the exterior chamber was congested with palace officials, bedraggled Christian slaves, supplicants for justice, and criminals awaiting judgment. These persons circled and dodged like hyperactive children. From here, a small flight of steps led to the audience chamber itself, its doors guarded by two fearsomely large men armed with matchlocks and scimitars.

  Beyond the double doors, Laing occasionally glimpsed a scene of splendor. T
he walls of the outsized room were lined with bright Chinese tiles along which were ranged towering hampas (black slaves) armed to the teeth with blunderbusses, forming a background to the assembled members of the bashaw’s divan—religious dignitaries, and sheikhs, all in colorful clothes and uniforms who were standing at a safe distance from a raised dais at the far end of the room.

  In spite of falling revenues, Yusuf Karamanli indulged in rebuilding parts of his palace, and these contrasted with the comparative squalor of the Castle as a whole. Contingents of Italian workmen, both slaves and free, brought their skills in masonry, stucco carving, and colored marbles to the state apartments and the public rooms.

  The audience chamber often startled foreign visitors. An American consul reported that the bashaw received his guests with a pomp that far exceeded that of Algiers, which was wrongly considered the richest and most sophisticated of the regencies by Westerners. Bright carpets and cushions from Constantinople and gilt chairs from France were thrown about the room. Innumerable gilt-framed mirrors (some still bearing the labels of their manufacturer in Marseilles) reflected the deferential circle of the bashaw’s courtiers. On a throne of plush carpets and tasseled cushions sat the bashaw himself, a tiny plumlike figure on this huge stage, his personal guard surrounding him, a water pipe close at hand. He wore sumptuous silks of psychedelic coloring—refulgent blues, reds, pinks, violets, greens.