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

by Frank T. Kryza

  The British delegation was eventually shepherded into the throne room by the Grand Kehya, where Laing spent more than an hour with the bashaw and his court exchanging formalities and pleasantries and discussing the proposed expedition. This was succeeded by a grand meal in a neighboring hall, where the bashaw demonstrated his fondness for food and alcohol, as well as his considerable skill as a negotiator.

  Laing later wrote Lord Bathurst: “His Highness informed me in the most unequivocal language that the door was shut to me unless I opened it with money, that without some pecuniary douceur he would continue to detain me in Tripoli for months upon the most frivolous pretences.” When he received this message, Bathurst was furious at the mission’s mounting cost and delay. He sent Warrington a chastening letter urging him to prod Tripoli’s ruler more vigorously.

  Consul Warrington, skilled at mediating precisely these kinds of troubles, quickly arranged that Laing should leave Tripoli with a Ghadames (Ghadamis) merchant named Sheikh Babani. It was always wise to pay someone in a caravan, preferably a substantial merchant, to see that one came to no mischief at the hands of fellow travelers. Sheikh Babani would play this role. They would head southwest through Ghadames and In Salah (Insalah) to Timbuktu, where Babani claimed to have good connections. Laing now had to wait only until Sheikh Babani was ready to leave. In the meantime, as often happened in Tripoli, tactical problems with the bashaw were speedily sorted out, roadblocks that had appeared as insurmountable as boulders now melted away like a morning fog. Tripoli’s ruler was satisfied at last with the sums he had extorted from England.

  And in the midst of all these official goings-on, Laing proposed to Emma. Though Warrington may have supported the match in private, in his role as protective father he overtly tried to prevent it. He pointed out that Laing should at least inform his parents. Laing replied that by the time a reply came from Edinburgh, he would be halfway to Timbuktu. Warrington asked how Laing proposed to support his wife on army pay. Laing replied that once he had reached Timbuktu, his fortune would be assured (an assertion the consul surely could not doubt). Warrington asked what would happen if he failed to reach the city. Laing’s reply is telling of the role history held for him: “It is my destiny,” he said, “to do so.” The lovers were insistent on marriage and in the end the bemused parents relented.

  On July 14, 1825, Alexander Gordon Laing married Emma Warrington amid the blossoms and perfumes of the English Garden. He was like a serviceman about to go overseas who marries a girl he has just met and may never see again, but with Warrington looking over his shoulder and in control of the villa, Laing (so far as we know) was not allowed to consummate the marriage. The consul made a point of telling Lord Bathurst so. His odd blend of Oriental intrigue and Victorian hypocrisy fairly oozes from the letter he sent to Earl Bathurst on the day of the wedding.

  Tripoli, 14th July 1825

  My Lord,

  I have the honor to Inform your Lordship that Major Laing was this morning married to my Second Daughter.

  Although I am aware that Major Laing is a very gentlemanly, honorable and good man still I must allow a more wild, enthusiastic and romantic attachment never before existed and consequently every remonstrance, every argument, & every feeling of disapprobation was resorted to by me to prevent even an engagement under the existing circumstance the disadvantages so evidently appearing to attach to my daughter.

  After a voluminous correspondence, I found my wishes, exertions, entreaties, and displeasure, quite futile & of no avail, & under all circumstances, both for the public good, as well as their mutual happiness, I was obliged to consent to perform the ceremony, under the most sacred, & most solemn obligation that they are not to cohabit till the marriage is duly performed by a clergyman of the established Church of England, and as my honor is so much involved, that I shall take due care they never be one Second from under the observation of myself or Mrs. Warrington.

  Now my Lord I do not conceive a father can possibly be placed in a more delicate situation, as long as doubts may arise as to the power and legality invested in me as His Majesty’s Consul General to unite two of His Majesty’s Subjects, as Man and Wife, & till that doubt is completely removed I will take good care my daughter remains as pure & chaste as snow.

  I have the honor to submit to your Lordship’s consideration the Certificate I gave of the ceremony having been performed by me, in my official capacity, and as it is a question of great importance I wish to know whether a marriage so performed is equally binding as if duly solemnized by a clergyman of the established Church of England.

  At various times under various circumstances, various marriages have taken place at Algiers and Tunis, but I am not satisfied as to their legality. May I therefore beg and pray your Lordship’s opinion on this most important & interesting question.

  Hanmer Warrington

  To the Right Honble

  The Earl Bathurst K. G.

  His Majesty’s Secretary of State

  Colonial Department

  The wedding certificate was witnessed by Warrington, his wife and other daughters, and the consuls of the United States and Spain. A handwritten note on the letter, added in London, reads, “copy sent to the King.” No doubt it was sent to amuse him. George IV was not one to take marriage—his own or anyone else’s—very seriously.

  This letter shows Warrington at his most duplicitous, and it was likely written more for Laing’s benefit than for Lord Bathurst’s. The wily consul fails to mention that over the years he had performed scores of marriages in Tripoli, all of them perfectly legal. (He was, in fact, the chief British magistrate in Tripoli, where he held autarchic powers—he routinely sentenced British subjects from Malta to stiff prison terms in a jail he wholly controlled, and could, theoretically, have hanged any of them. Performing marriages was among the least of his prerogatives.) The truth is that he wanted to preserve Emma’s chastity, to ensure her future prospects should Laing perish, which must have appeared to him an alarming and very real contingency.

  The groom consoled his bride by promising to be back in four or five months, certainly in time to celebrate Christmas.

  ON JULY 17 Laing paid a farewell visit to the bashaw, who advised him that on the route he was taking “you must open the doors with a silver key,” and gave him an escort of 150 horsemen out of Tripoli.

  In the predawn half-light of the following day, veiled by a cold, silvery mist, the Englishman and his entourage met Sheikh Babani and his followers outside the walls of the white city. Babani was ready. Laing went up to the sheikh and embraced him. Could he trust this man? The old merchant laid the palms of his hands on Laing’s head, as nomad fathers do when they greet their sons, and pronounced the words of welcome:

  “Salam alaikum.” (Peace be with you.)

  “Alaikum wa salam,” responded Laing. (Peace to you too.)

  “Yak, la bas.” (No evil to you.)

  “La bas.” (No evil.)

  “La bas, Hamdullah.” (No evil, thanks be to God.)

  And so it went for several minutes: the stylized exchange of ritual courtesies and veiled allusions that were (and still are) the formal and traditional openings of conversation among Saharan nomads, each line echoed by the other like the chorus of a beloved old song. Laing soon lost the drift, but Babani was impressed. This was no ordinary nasrani.*

  As he departed with Sheikh Babani’s caravan on the road to Ghadames, Laing must have felt a mixture of disappointment and exhilaration—disappointment at leaving behind his virgin bride and exhilaration at starting on a route that had not been visited by Europeans since Roman times. To reach Timbuktu, the golden city of the Sudan, he would have to cross two thousand miles of the harshest desert in Africa, territories where the bashaw’s jurisdiction did not extend. Conditions could be unimaginably harsh in these lands, where human life was held more cheaply than a good pair of boots. Lawless Tuareg† bands made their living off the plunder of caravans.

  Laing imagined he would be in
Timbuktu in weeks, months at most, though deep in his heart he must have known that if his mission were that easy, it would likely already have been accomplished.

  Others, certainly, including Dr. Mungo Park, had tried before and failed.

  *A ruin sixty miles south of Tripoli, the site of some of the world’s finest Roman architecture.

  *That is, a Nazarene: a man from Nazareth, Christ’s village, a term that loosely meant “Christian” or “white man” but was less offensive than the abusive name usually reserved for non-Muslims: kafir (infidel).

  †“Tuareg” is a word derived from the Arabic phrase “the abandoned of God,” because many of these Bedouin people did not embrace Islam as fervently as other peoples conquered during the Arab invasion. In modern usage, “Tuareg” refers both to the plural and singular, though in some nineteenth- and twentieth-century English texts readers will find the singular of “Tuareg” shown as “Targui.”

  Chapter Four

  WHITE MAN’S GRAVE

  IN 1797, when Mungo Park returned from his first expedition, Timbuktu still beckoned and the puzzle of the Niger’s course and the location of its mouth remained unsolved. No one knew this better than Dr. Park himself. As soon as he was back in Britain, he began making plans for a second mission. This would have to wait nearly six years, for Park married and began raising a family.

  Considering the meager wages the African Association paid its explorers (Park received ten shillings a day), his new domestic responsibilities meant settling down and earning a living, which his training as a physician allowed him to do.

  While practicing medicine in Scotland, Park had plenty of time to sort out what he had learned and develop his own theory of the Niger, especially concerning the location of its mouth. Three mutually exclusive hypotheses about the river’s outlet prevailed. The oldest and most venerated supposed, as a geographer of the period wrote, “that the Niger has an inland termination somewhere in the eastern part of Africa … and that it is partly discharged into inland lakes, which have no communication with the sea, and partly spread over a wide extent of level country, and lost in sands or evaporated by the heat of the sun.”

  Detractors claimed that “to account for such a phenomenon, a great inland sea, bearing some resemblance to the Caspian or the Aral, appears to be necessary. But besides that the existence of so vast a body of water without any outlet into the ocean, is in itself an improbable circumstance … such a sea, if it really existed, could hardly have remained a secret to the ancients, and entirely unknown at the present day.”*

  Another argument asserted that the Niger flowed into the Nile. Most geographers of the period tended to dismiss this idea as popular conjecture rather than as an opinion deduced from reasoning, “since nothing appears to be alleged in its support, except the mere circumstance of the course of the river being in the direction of the Nile.”

  The third hypothesis held that the Niger, after reaching Wangara (Ouangara, in present-day Mali), “takes a direction towards the south, and being joined by other rivers from that part of Africa, makes a great turn from thence towards the southwest, and pursues its course till it approaches … the gulf of Guinea, when it divides and discharges itself by different channels into the Atlantic; after having formed a great Delta.”

  This turned out to be a remarkably accurate description of the river’s course and termination, though at the time the reasoning supporting it seemed “hazardous and uncertain.” Geographical objections to it arose, resulting in the widely held view, as one geographer of the period put it, that “the data on which it is grounded are all of them wholly gratuitous.”

  Park came to adopt and champion a fourth conjecture. This held that the Niger took the turn to the south after Wangara or Timbuktu, as previously proposed, but persisted in that direction rather than turning southwest, and flowed into the estuary of the Congo. The two rivers, in this novel construction, converged.

  This idea was put forward by George Maxwell, another Scotsman fascinated by Africa who made his living trading on the Congo River. For years he had championed the river’s importance, pointing out little-known facts about the Congo’s powerful currents and flow. The river’s discharge* pushed fresh water out to sea so forcefully and in such quantities that ships approaching its mouth encountered it before they sighted land—the lowered buoyancy caused ships to sink a foot or two, alarming the crew. Deducing its immense size from that, Maxwell accurately ranked the Congo as second only to the Amazon in its freshwater outflow, and argued that it offered a natural way for the exploration of and trade with the African interior. But only after the question of the Niger’s geography became a lively subject of inquiry—in the wake of Park’s first expedition—did Maxwell succeed in getting the right people in London to pay attention.

  Park, according to one of his biographers, “adopted Mr. Maxwell’s sentiments relative to the termination of the Niger in their utmost extent, and persevered in that opinion to the end of his life.” Though well aware of the geographical objections that could be raised against this theory, he found solutions to overcome each.

  If the Niger was a tributary of the Congo, the combined length of the two rivers would be well over 4,000 miles (thus making it the world’s longest). To this, Park answered, why not? After all, the Amazon was then accepted to be more than 3,500 miles long. Of the objection that the river would have to flow through a great mountain chain through the middle of the continent, he dismissed this on the ground no real evidence supported the existence of such mountains. To get around the difficulty that changes in the Niger’s elevation did not correspond to those of the Congo and its placid flow, Park supposed that the Niger passed through a series of seventeen or eighteen lakes, buffering its discharge. He wrote Earl Camden, then the British colonial secretary, “[T]he quantity of water discharged into the Atlantic by the Congo cannot be accounted for on any other known principle but that it is the termination of the Niger.”

  By 1802 Park had tired of his sedentary family life as a country doctor in Peebles, Scotland, and was suffering from wanderlust. Married life was boring, and ambition was a stronger pull than a growing practice, a wife, and three children. He told his friend the novelist Sir Walter Scott that he would “rather brave Africa and all its horrors than wear out his life in long and toilsome rides over the hills of Scotland.” He wrote to Banks about the lack of satisfaction he found as a country doctor and of his wish for a more exciting career. Banks replied that he would be happy to recommend him, but that the British government was now taking an interest in African exploration, slowing down the process of outfitting new expeditions. In due course, Park was called to London and offered command of a military unit to explore that part of the Niger beyond where he had gone before, and to determine where it emptied—whether into Saharan sands in an inland sea, or the ocean.

  The debonair and handsome Scottish physician Mungo Park, as he appeared in the frontispiece of his hook, published in England after his first expedition, making him an overnight celebrity. By then, Park had lost his good looks, appearing to friends to have aged thirty years, in part because tropical disease and stress had caused all of his hair to fall out

  In 1804, Park, Banks, and Lord Camden proposed a second Niger expedition, this one on a larger scale. The British government had already sent a consul to Senegambia, saw huge potential in African colonization, and was easily persuaded to provide Park with whatever military support he needed to negotiate trade treaties and discover the Niger’s course. England and France had begun their competition for African colonies.

  Though persuaded of the truth of Maxwell’s hypotheses, Park chose not to follow the trader’s plan of exploration up the Congo estuary. More familiar with the route he had taken on his first expedition, he wanted to start once more from the Gambia, strike overland to the Niger, and then sail down the river to its mouth.

  If the river did terminate in a great lake in Wangara, he would return across the desert to the coast at the Bight
of Benin. But, convinced that he would wind up in the Congo’s estuary, he planned to sail from there to the West Indies. If his theory proved right, he told Camden, the expedition, “though attended with extreme danger, promises to be productive of the utmost advantages to Great Britain. Considered in a commercial point of view, it is second only to the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, and in a geographical point of view is certainly the greatest discovery that remains to be made in the world.” (Most geographers of the time would have disagreed: they considered the origin of the Nile an even greater mystery, though less important commercially.)

  A number of Britons regarded Park’s thinking as fallacious and tried to discourage him from embarking on another dangerous journey. Banks, however, backed him with complete confidence.

  I am aware that Mr. Park’s expedition is one of the most hazardous a man can undertake, but I cannot agree with those who think it is too hazardous to be attempted; it is by similar hazards of human life alone that we can hope to penetrate the obscurity of the internal face of Africa; we are wholly ignorant of the country between the Niger and the Congo and can explore it only by incurring the most frightful hazards.

  Park set off at the end of January 1805 aboard the troopship HMS Crescent and arrived at Goree at the mouth of the Gambia two months later. He brought with him five navy carpenters, convicts in Portsmouth who received pardons in exchange for volunteering to build boats to navigate the river. In Goree, he recruited thirty-two soldiers and two sailors from the Royal Africa Corps garrison, also convicts; service in Africa was their punishment. They joined the party with the promise of double pay and discharge from the corps upon completion of the expedition. Park, commissioned a brevet captain, also had an army lieutenant, his brother-in-law, and a friend from Scotland. Though granted authority to hire up to twenty African porters, Park discovered that “no inducement could prevail on a single Negro to accompany me,” so his party consisted wholly of white men. They sailed up the Gambia aboard the Crescent to the town of Kayee, where he hired an English-speaking Mandingo guide named Isaaco. In April, he struck out overland toward the Niger.