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

by Frank T. Kryza

  Park reckoned on reaching the Niger by the end of June. He didn’t get there until August 19, having lost three-quarters of his party. The long rains had come and fever and dysentery (shigella) proved even more lethal than the Muslim tribesmen who attacked the caravan. The ghastly journey left no time to bury the dead; the ailing fell behind only to be stripped and butchered by bandits who followed the expedition like hyenas. Park’s own health deteriorated; soon he had only ten men left. But when he saw the Niger again, “rolling its immense stream along the plain,” a strange ebullience overcame him. Against all common sense, he resolved to press forward.

  Park hired canoes to take the remnants of his shrinking caravan downriver as far as Segou, where the party arrived in September. He waited weeks while suspicious tribesmen squabbled about providing canoes. More members of the party died, including Park’s brother-in-law. By the time he secured two vessels, illness had whittled his escort down to the army lieutenant, three soldiers, and the guide Isaaco. Park was determined to go on. He sent Isaaco back to the coast with letters to his wife and to Banks, telling Banks he intended “to keep to the middle of the river and make the best use I can of winds and currents till I reach the termination of this mysterious stream.” To his wife: “I think it is not unlikely that I shall be in England before you receive this…. [T]he sails are now hoisting for our departure to the coast.” Dated November 20, 1805, that was the last anyone ever heard from Mungo Park.

  NO ONE KNOWS precisely what happened to Park, what fate he met, or how far he got before he met it, but years later, in 1810, the Mandingo guide Isaaco volunteered to return to Segou to find out, and the stories he heard generated clues. Apparently realizing that he had crossed into lands controlled by Muslim tribes and remembering their hostility from his previous expedition, Park expected trouble. He took fifteen muskets and plenty of ammunition aboard the two canoes, which were provisioned to take him safely beyond Muslim territory.

  Park and his men came under frequent attack from the shore and had to shoot their way downriver. According to Isaaco’s account, they managed to reach Timbuktu, but because of the hostility of its inhabitants, visiting the city was out of the question. Park pushed on. He managed to navigate 1,500 miles of the Niger’s total course of 2,600 miles and reach a point barely 600 miles from its outlet to the sea. Here, at a place called Bussa Falls (where the Kainji Dam in present-day Nigeria now stands), all were killed in an ambush.

  Questions persisted about Isaaco’s version of events, and it wasn’t until 1819 that the London Times finally acknowledged “the death of this intrepid traveller is now placed beyond any doubt.” However it occurred, Park’s death only fueled curiosity about the Niger’s true debouchment.

  Park sent his last reports from Segou convinced more than ever of the accuracy of his theory. He had learned that the eastward-flowing river would soon turn to the south (not yet aware that it would later turn again to the southwest, making a beeline for the Atlantic). In a letter to Banks, which Isaaco brought back, Park wrote, “I have hired a guide…. [H]e is one of the greatest travellers in this part of Africa: he says that the Niger, after it passes Kashna (presumably near Timbuktu), runs directly to the right hand, or to the south,” and in his last letters to his wife and Lord Camden he repeated his conviction that he would return to England via the West Indies from the Congo’s mouth.

  If Park did get as far as Issaco reported, he would have been forced to abandon his theory of the Niger as a tributary of the Congo. Having turned south after Timbuktu, the great river arced again soon after (at Gao) to the southwest and flowed in a direction even he must have realized could not take him to the Congo’s estuary. Yet if Park revised his theory of the Niger’s course, no testament to this has ever appeared.

  NEVER ONE TO PIN all his hopes on a lone explorer, Sir Joseph Banks recruited yet another intrepid young man, Friedrich Hornemann, the German son of a Lutheran pastor, to launch another expedition before Park returned from his first journey. Hornemann was a student at the University of Göttingen, where one of his professors was J. F. Blumenbach, an ethnologist working on a classification of human races based on skeletal features. Blumenbach was a friend of Banks (by this time, a large and eclectic group) and referred his student to Soho Square, citing his good mind and robust constitution. Hornemann was offered 200 pounds a year, and his mother was promised an annuity if the young man died (a first for the stingy armchair explorers), as he was her sole source of support.

  The route chosen for Hornemann was the previously unsuccessful one from Cairo across the Sahara. He left London for the Mediterranean and Alexandria just as Napoleon was moving the Grande Armée into Egypt in the summer of 1797. Arriving ahead of the French, he met a fellow German, Joseph Frendenburgh, who was living in Egypt as a converted Muslim. Hornemann hired him as an assistant and began learning Arabic. The pair was delayed by an outbreak of bubonic plague, and Hornemann’s funds were cut off when the French defeated the mameluks at the Battle of the Pyramids. Determined and resourceful, he made friends with scientists Napoleon brought to Egypt, and through them, he met Bonaparte himself. The general was impressed with the young man and provided him with a visa and the money to launch his trek, offering to forward his letters to London.

  In September 1798, Hornemann and Frendenburgh headed west in a caravan bound for the Fezzan. By now, Hornemann spoke fluent Arabic, calling himself “Yusuf,” but for all his preparation he was an unconvincing mock-Muslim. He was unmasked when he was observed making sketches of ancient ruins. Confronted, he read from the Koran so convincingly that he was accepted as a nasrani striving to learn the true faith. After passing through the oasis at Siwa, the caravan reached Murzuk (Murzuch). Hornemann remained there seven months, preparing extensive notes that eventually found their way back to Sir Joseph. In one package of documents, he attached a bizarre instruction that no one try to find him for at least three years after news of him ceased. Hornemann did not elaborate on this request.

  Frendenburgh died at Murzuk, which even then had a well-earned reputation as an unhealthy place (because of the hordes of mosquitoes infesting its oasis). Alone now and with no caravans heading south, Hornemann turned north to Tripoli, where he was taken in by none other than Simon Lucas, the resident British consul. From Tripoli he wrote to Banks, telling him, “[P]ray sir, do not look upon me as a European but as a real African and a Muslim.”

  He was back in Murzuk in the spring of 1800 and from there joined a caravan heading south—destined, he hoped, for the Niger and Timbuktu. He was never heard from again.

  Sir Joseph respected the wish he expressed in his earlier letter, and for three years no inquiries about him were made. The association published his journals, as relayed from Tripoli, and presented a leather-bound copy to Napoleon, while still at war, as a token of thanks for his help.

  Nearly twenty years later, other explorers tracking the same paths spoke with people who had accompanied Hornemann. He apparently reached the Niger and died there of dysentery. He had fully transformed himself into a Muslim and shown such compassion and caring for others that he was looked upon as a marabout (a holy man), still in his twenties.

  Hornemann’s faith in his disguise may have been less than total, thus explaining his entreaty that no inquiries about him be made for three years. A search for him, which would surely have included a physical description, might have compromised his disguise and served as his death warrant.

  BETWEEN 1809 AND 1817, the African Association placed its hopes on a Swiss, Jean Louis Burckhardt, who was again sent to cross the Sahara from Cairo to the Niger. Sir Joseph was now convinced that his men would be safe only if disguised as Muslims, and Burckhardt perfected his disguise by traveling for years in Syria. Burckhardt became the first European since the Crusaders to see Petra in Jordan. In Cairo, he learned that no caravan was soon departing for the interior, so he began a series of excursions that led him to discover the spectacular statues at Abu Simbel, to travel farther up the Nil
e in Sudan than any other European, and to make the pilgrimage to Mecca—each of them a remarkable accomplishment. In 1817, just as a caravan was at last assembled by Arab merchants bound for the interior, Burckhardt contracted dysentery and died at Cairo.

  The stalwart African Association took a collective deep breath, but soon sent out another explorer, Henry Nicholls. Having failed in assaults from the north (Tripoli), the east (Cairo), and the west (Gambia), the membership now proposed that an effort be made from the south. The site chosen from which to strike inland was a British trading post in the Gulf of Guinea. It was not known at the time that the Niger River emptied into the Gulf of Guinea (through the mysterious Oil Rivers delta), and so, in a cruel irony, the starting point of the expedition was in fact its destination. Nicholls sailed from Liverpool on November 1, 1804, bound for Calabar. Park was still alive at the time and planning his final, fatal descent of the Niger. In February 1805, Nicholls described his health and prospects as good. By April he was dead, probably the victim of malaria.

  Meanwhile, in England, a discernible transition was taking place in the temper of African exploration. The driving force of the African Association, Sir Joseph Banks, had become ill and was confined to a wheelchair, although he continued to work. Spurred by the wars in Europe and Britain’s rivalry with France, the Colonial Office and the Admiralty chose to take a larger role in Africa. The torch was passed from the private to the public sector, although the African Association continued to be involved until it was absorbed into the Royal Geographical Society in 1831.

  Though the Napoleonic Wars diverted resources from Africa, interest in the questions of Timbuktu and the Niger were so heightened by the drama and mystery of Mungo Park’s disappearance and the widely publicized adventures of Hornemann and Burckhardt that in 1815 an ambitious, two-pronged attack was launched. One expedition, under the sponsorship of the Colonial Office, set out to follow Park’s course down the Niger. A second, under the direction of the Admiralty, was to start at the Congo estuary and follow the river upstream. The hope was that the two expeditions would meet somewhere in the middle of the continent.

  In 1815, the Colonial Office sent Major John Peddie to head the first enterprise and further map the course of the Niger. He arrived in Senegal in November with the expectation of recruiting volunteers from the Royal Africa Corps, but promptly died of coastal fever. Peddie was replaced by Captain Thomas Campbell, but the struggle to move inland was hampered, oddly, by attacks of huge swarms of bees, and the expedition made little progress before turning back. Campbell died. He was replaced by Dr. William Gray and Dr. John Dochard, the military surgeons of the group. With a hundred men and two hundred pack animals, they turned inland. The journey was a nightmare, with most of the men dying, Gray captured (later released), and Dochard and seven men barely reaching the Niger before turning back.

  Sir John Barrow, secretary of the Admiralty from 1804 to 1845, and the man who insisted Dixon Denham give due credit to Clapperton and Oudney Barrow began his long public service career as private secretary to the British ambassador to China in the 1790s, later serving as private secretary to the governor of the Cape of Good Hope. He was a founder of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830, where he tirelessly promoted exploration of the Arctic. Point Barrow, Alaska; Cape Barrow; and Barrow Strait are all named for him

  While Burckhardt was traveling in northeastern Africa, another of Banks’s protégés, Sir John Barrow, was committing the British Admiralty to the second part of the exploration strategy, searching for the Niger and Timbuktu by moving in from the mouth of the river Congo—a venture soon turned into a race by the newly formed French Société Géographique, which in 1824 offered a 10,000-franc prize to the first man to reach Timbuktu and return to tell the tale.

  Barrow, in his capacity as secretary of the Admiralty, selected Captain James Kingston Tuckey to go up the Congo and ascertain whether the Congo and the Niger entered the ocean together (the truth was that their estuaries are nearly 900 miles apart). Tuckey’s team of fifty-four included a Norwegian botanist and a gardener from Kew. Their boats could not navigate the mouth of the Congo because of swift currents. Changing to smaller vessels, they made it to Yallala Falls and then overland for 200 miles until the weakened porters refused to go farther, at which point they turned back.

  When the group reached the coast, thirty-five of the men were dead. Captain Tuckey soon joined them, expiring on October 4, 1816, on the deck of his flagship, still at anchor in the Congo estuary. The expedition added little to the store of knowledge about Africa, despite its horrendous toll.

  The reaction in England to these disasters was not unlike the shock Americans would experience after the Challenger space shuttle tragedy 170 years later. With the very public failure of these efforts, at horrific cost in British lives and treasure, the government’s interest in Africa cooled. Trying to go in from the fever-ridden coast had proved to be a poor strategy. Government ministers in London were stunned that England’s best and brightest had been wiped out in both of the expeditions (65 percent of the British contingent of 117 men died in Africa, while many of the rest were terminally ill when they landed in England).

  Time would need to pass before any senior member of government would again be willing to see his name associated with a British assault on Africa.

  *A patent nonsense. Lake Victoria, exceeded in size only by North America’s Lake Superior, remained hidden from European eyes until 1858, when John Hanning Speke stumbled upon it. Lake Chad was also undiscovered.

  *The Congo’s outflow would late be calculated to be two million cubic feet per second. At 2,900 miles in length, it is the world’s sixth longest river.

  Chapter Five

  THE “AFRICAN TRAVELER”

  ON THE DAWN of that July morning in 1825 when he left Tripoli, Alexander Gordon Laing found himself taking part at last in the dream he believed would make him, as he began the fourth decade of his life, a man to be reckoned with in the wider world.

  When the camels were loaded and their head ropes attached, the caravan stood waiting in the moonlight. Then Laing heard the call of their leader, Sheikh Babani, “Nemchou Y’Allah!” (Depart, by the grace of God!). The camels began to move forward, and Laing felt his spine come alive with a surprising serpentine motion, gently swaying backward and forward. Six feet off the ground, Laing felt like a lord of creation. He was now part of a trans-Saharan caravan, part of the backbone of an enormous snakelike procession that moved sinuously, determinedly, and unstoppably through the sand beyond the oasis of Tripoli and across the Great Desert to the humid jungles of Central Africa.

  The setting moon loomed over the horizon as twilight passed into day. A night dew had cooled the morning and the caravan soon found its easy gait. A gaggle of children followed the camels for a mile or two, their white robes and black cloaks contrasting with the unearthly rose light of the desert. They called out to one another in their harsh, aspirate dialect and went off at a run, noiselessly, barefoot, with burnouses* flying, like bats fleeing the dawn.

  The shadows of date palms stretched across the track, dwarfing the great dun-colored camels and their loads, the trudging donkeys, goats, and sheep, the swarthy figures of men, some heavily covered in their gray or white baracans,† some half naked but confident of the power vested in their crooked knives, knobbed clubs, and those flintlocks whose silvered trimmings caught the glint of the rising sun. From a distance, the weapons scintillated like scattered fireflies.

  As he started across the desert, Laing’s past came to a sharp focus, as though his life thus far had been merely a rehearsal for the expedition now begun. There was a calm within him, an awe of this new world into which he was pentrating at last. It was a world where all seemed dignified, silent, undefined, infinite, and suffused with that mysterious rose light.

  ALEXANDER GORDON LAING was born on December 27, 1794,‡ in Edinburgh, the eldest son of William Laing, a popular schoolmaster who ran his own private school. Laing’s mo
ther was the daughter of William Gordon of Glasgow Academy. With an academic background on both sides of the family, he studied for a career in teaching. At thirteen, he was sent to Edinburgh College, where his tutors regarded him as “brilliant.”

  As the first son of a prominent local educator, Laing was accorded special treatment. “I lived under little restraint from my professors while attending the seminary,” he later wrote, “though I had some slight check upon my conduct from occasionally being under the eye of my father.” His family connections gave Laing status within the elite schools he attended, and the latitude to assume the role of “young gentleman.” Yet the sensitive boy must gradually have become conscious of the contrast between this role and his true social status, a cruel reality in the Great Britain of that era that would carry wider implications as he grew older. By fifteen, he had completed his education at Edinburgh University and was hired for a teaching post at Bruce’s Classical Academy. Six months later he returned home to become assistant to his father.

  “The reading of voyages and travels occupied all my leisure moments,” he recorded. “The History of Robinson Crusoe, in particular, inflamed my young imagination. I was impatient to encounter adventures like this—nay, I already felt an ambition to signalize myself by some important discovery springing up in my heart.”

  Travel books like those of Captain James Cook were the equivalent in those days of the science fiction of a later century. In rainy Edinburgh, Laing thought up long, complex possible journeys, drawing faint pencil marks on maps, planning timetables, budgets, and logistics. He entertained visions of distant beaches and jungles, of lines of blue-green breakers bursting into foam on deserted shores. He heard the wave music and tasted briny sea breezes.