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

by Frank T. Kryza

  As a young man in grimy Edinburgh, Laing’s vivid imagination enabled him to construct an altogether different future for himself than the one his parents intended. He was glad to feel the cold rain beating upon his face and took a childish pleasure in ducking his head suddenly to watch the jet of water spouting from his hat brim. Sailors returning from distant ports looked so healthy, these Italian dockhands, Jewish tailors, nondescript young men from all over the world who had been privileged to see the sun directly overhead at the equator. To leave gray, murky Scotland and become one of their number—would that not be a glorious thing?

  Laing was in a hurry. His youth, constrained by social and geographical blinders, seemed to stretch out before him with no end. Scotland was walled in, the least likely place where an ambitious young man could profitably spend these important years. Indeed, Scotland in those days was a grim place. Like so many young Scots before him, Laing sought to find some way to get out of the country as quickly as possible.

  The small number of Englishmen who journeyed to “North Britain,” as Scotland was sometimes called, from a spirit of adventure or on business, braved the trip with a brand of courage other travelers might bring to an expedition up the river Congo. The bleak landscape was bare, destitute of trees, a countryside of heather and morass and barren hills; its agriculture was sparse—dirty patches of crops surrounded by brush and swamps. The inhabitants of some counties appeared barely human, troglodytes with bunioned feet and coarse, hairy legs, poor creatures who spoke incomprehensible dialects, dressed in rags, living in hovels, feeding themselves on grains so poor that in England they would be reserved for livestock. When night fell, the voyager was likely to find himself in a town of dirty thatched huts. If he was lucky, he might find a shack that passed for an inn, only to get a verminous bed he could not sleep in and food he could not eat. His disgust after such a trip would be total. One English visitor of the period, returning south, summed up his impressions: “I passed at last to English ground and hope to God that I may never go to such a country [Scotland] again.”

  This was not the place to captivate someone of Laing’s far-reaching worldly interests. After he’d returned to Edinburgh to help his father, it took him a year to flee his natal city. Dissatisfied with the staid life of a schoolteacher, Laing was roiled by an internal tumult as he tried to find a more substantial role for himself without aggrieving his parents. A poor, well-educated man is an unlovely thing. Laing had only unsatisfactory choices available to him.

  Alexander Gordon Laing joined the army at seventeen in Scotland, enlisting with the Prince of Wales Edinburgh Volunteers. In 1811 his parents reluctantly agreed to let him leave the country. He sailed for Barbados, where his mother’s brother, General Gabriel Gordon, was serving. His uncle got him an ensign’s commission in the York Light Infantry, a West Indian regiment he joined at Antigua. Two years later he exchanged into the 2nd West India Regiment at the same rank and sailed for Jamaica. He was attached in Jamaica to the British consul’s office and served as a staff aide to senior officers of the regiment.

  Jamaica was an agreeable place. The largest and the most famous of the colonies that made up the British Antilles, it was a land of stately lawns and magnificent houses. On the flat, well-tended greensward of Government House, peacocks, white and blue, spread resplendent tail feathers as they circled the colossal flagstaff displaying a Union Jack the size of a bedsheet. Officers lived in thick-walled stone houses where polished tables in paneled dining rooms gleamed with old silver and cut glass—elegant rooms that spoke of a stylish and extravagant colonial prosperity. Planters’ dinners were served up nightly by armies of servants: a Creole soup, roast chicken with local vegetables, boiled yam, fried plantains, sweet potatoes, tarts and cakes, all washed down with the vin du pays, so called, of the country (a well-aged mellow yellow rum).

  The West Indies were among Great Britain’s first colonial possessions, and for two centuries they had been the most prosperous, though that was changing as the slave and sugar economies shrank. Still, the Antilles showed Laing the good things life could offer a man willing to muster some ambition and put himself forward. His superiors lived well, and Laing had every expectation that his own lot in life would rise as he followed their path. In the meantime, there were sunlit skies to enjoy, green spears of the young sugarcane, yellow sands, and the ocean, turquoise and green, in this land of warmth and perfume.

  Looking down from Hardware Gap at Kingston through an avenue of hills glittering in the plain, Laing had put Scotland behind him. He moved easily in his role as military attaché in these colonial and diplomatic circles, receiving guests at official functions on behalf of the consul and the military commandant with the perfect gentility and aplomb they required. He was good-looking and well liked; he had the air (if not the pedigree) of a gentleman. He may have briefly considered a diplomatic career, though he knew he lacked the social credentials and the right ancestors, and that these factors would likely bar access to the highest levels of the Foreign Office.

  While Laing was ensconced in this new world, another side of his personality emerged. Beneath the smiling and complaisant exterior, Laing sometimes displayed a mocking contempt for rank and social hierarchies. In modern terms, he had an “attitude,” a barely concealed surliness that would sometimes poke through his cultivated reserve. Now and then he would whisper in a friend’s ear some sarcastic remark on social conventions. There was a sharp pleasure in it that he could not resist, a complex blending of outward respect for society with ridicule of its vanities. Laing knew the rules of the game and wanted to play, but he was a man apart and could not resist laughing, when it suited him, at the foibles of rule-bound, rank-conscious British society.

  In time, the easy life at Kingston and Montego Bay took its toll. Laing developed a “tiresome liver complaint” which led to his transfer as an invalid first to Honduras and from there back home to Scotland, where he recuperated for eighteen months at half pay. By then he had earned the respect of his senior officers—he had “friends at court,” so to speak, in London and in the Antilles who made sure he was not forgotten. At the end of 1819 he was promoted to lieutenant and sent to rejoin his regiment, which was then serving in West Africa. Laing was thrilled, for West Africa was a place where an ambitious British officer could truly make his mark, an opportunity not possible in the country-club atmosphere of the Caribbean.

  Africa was a rougher place. In Sierra Leone, as in all the other European settlements along the western coast, the activities of the expatriate whites—whether traders, officials, or army officers—were restricted to villages easily accessible from the ocean, if not to the narrow confines of the trading beaches where they could escape to their ships or forts at night to avoid the pestilential diseases that were thought to come with the setting sun.*

  This isolation by the sea was only partly due to health concerns and the difficulty of travel through tropical rain forests. It was also the result of the slave trade, the middlemen of which had seen to it that their European customers were denied access to the hinterlands, the source of their own supply of new slaves. Though officially abolished, the “traffick” continued.

  As Laing was to learn, the indigenous peoples of West Africa were loath to let white men know too much about the geography and riches of their interior lands for all sorts of commercial and political reasons. Arab traders, too, had a vested commercial interest in keeping Europeans out. They helped sow distrust by relating stories of the British colonization of India, tales not lost on local African kings.

  By 1821, fifteen years after the abolition of the slave trade in British colonies, it had become clear in London that there was much to be gained commercially, and also sometimes politically, by creating links with some of the powerful tribes of the interior instead of conducting all business through intermediaries on the coast. At the end of that year, Sir Charles MacCarthy, the British governor of Sierra Leone, decided to send a mission into the hinterland to Gambia and the
Mandingo country “to ascertain the state of the country, the disposition of the inhabitants to trade and industry; and to know their sentiments and conduct as to the abolition of the Slave Trade.”

  Lieutenant Laing, who had shown great eagerness to explore the interior, was chosen to lead that party. He had been vying for a mission for months, and he told his friends since arriving in Africa that he wanted to find Timbuktu and the Niger’s termination. “I have had for many years a strong desire to penetrate into the interior of Africa,” he wrote, “and that desire has been greatly increased by my arrival on the Coast.”

  This expedition and two others that followed took Laing 200 miles inland through unexplored country to Falaba, the capital of the powerful Soolima tribe, and to the source of the Rokelle River. He ended the year a seasoned traveler, demonstrating that he had all the qualities the English sought in an explorer: he was brave, resolute, observant, and showed diplomatic talent in dealing with the chiefs of the interior tribes, whose confidence he won. These adventures also gave Laing his first opportunity to show his skill as a writer. Travels in the Timanee, Kooranko, and Soolima Countries in Western Africa was published in 1825 by the distinguished publisher John Murray in London, the first of a shelf of travel books Laing hoped to write. He reported in this account that at Falaba he had come within three days’ journey (about sixty miles) of the source of the Niger, at Mount Soma. To his lasting regret, he had been unable to visit it.

  Regarding a river of such importance as the Niger, which is looked upon in the Negro world as the largest river in the universe, [he wrote] there are naturally to be found … many extraordinary traditions; it is said, that although not more than half a yard in diameter at its source, if anyone was to attempt to leap over it, he would fall into the spring, and be instantly swallowed up, but that a person may step over it quietly, without apprehension or danger.

  The following year (1823), Laing, who had been promoted to command a company in the Royal Africa Corps, was ordered to the Gold Coast, where war had erupted between the British and the Ashanti. Exploration was temporarily set aside. In the ensuing twelve months, Laing saw constant action and was frequent witness to the horrors of ferocious jungle warfare. According to his officers, he lived up fully to the high standards expected. They remembered him especially for having volunteered to rescue a sergeant captured by the Ashanti and held prisoner at Kunmassi. His offer was rejected because it was considered too dangerous; the sergeant was later killed.

  The Ashanti overwhelmed a British force led by MacCarthy in early 1824. The governor was captured and slain. Soon after, Laing was chosen by MacCarthy’s successor, Colonel James Chisholm, to go back to England to report personally to the secretary of state for war and the colonies, Earl Bathurst, on the turn for the worse that events on the Gold Coast had taken.

  This was an important assignment and a rare opportunity for Laing to bask in the limelight, for Bathurst was the real creator of the Colonial Office (which he ruled from 1812 to 1827). Short of discussing the catastrophic Ashanti victory with the king or the prime minister, Chisholm could not have sent him to anyone in London with more influence on the application of British power in Africa. Laing also knew that it was within Bathurst’s brief to assign him anywhere in Africa, on any mission Bathurst chose. Laing was determined not to let this important contact pass without personal benefit.

  In the event, he put on a good show for the boss, who was impressed by his command of the facts, the acuity of his intellect, his courage, and his poise. He did not know it, but Laing’s active military career was over. Though always an ambitious man, in West Africa he was well liked, almost loved, by most of his fellow officers. His behavior in the next months would reveal a darker, self-serving side.

  Back in London, he felt his services in West Africa had entitled him to the rank of major, but he realized that this promotion was now less likely because MacCarthy (his patron) had died. So, without clearing it first with his commanding officer, he petitioned the commander-in-chief of the Royal Africa Corps (no less than the Duke of York, a member of the royal family) for promotion. If his appeal could not be granted, he wrote, he hoped anyway to be given the “Rank of Major in Africa only.”

  At first this request was refused, but some months later, after a vacation in Scotland, he succeeded in getting the coveted promotion (though, as proposed, it was “effective in Africa only”). Lord Bathurst had probably intervened, granting him also a few months’ leave to write his book.

  In the meantime, on July 1, Major General Charles Turner succeeded the fallen MacCarthy as colonel-in-chief of the Royal Africa Corps and as governor of Sierra Leone. Turner, who had never served in Africa and was still in London, learned about Laing’s petition for promotion only after it had been granted. It is likely that he never met Laing and had formed no assessment of him, but it cannot have made a good impression that this young captain appealed directly to a royal duke over his commanding officer. The incident likely became the subject of barracks gossip. Probably the first indication Laing received of the rising resentment in his outfit was the following note from the general’s aide-de-camp:

  No. 7 Penton Square

  3rd November, 1824

  Sir,

  I am directed by Major General Turner to acknowledge the receipt of your Letter addressed to Lieutenant Glover, extra Aide de Camp, wherein you state that His Royal Highness the Commander in Chief has been pleased to grant you leave of Absence during the period of your prosecuting some scientific researches in the Interior of Africa.

  The Major General desires that you will furnish him with your Authority for this communication as he is wholly unacquainted with the circumstances set forth by you and as they are of a Nature which under existing circumstances he could not have expected or approved of.

  I have the honour to be

  Sir

  Your most obedient humble servant,

  Wm. Ross,

  Capt. R. A. Corps & Aide de Camp.

  Around the same time, news of the death of another of Laing’s supporters reached London: Colonel Chisholm, who had entrusted Laing with the consequential and delicate task of personally briefing Lord Bathurst. Chisholm was still field commander in the Gold Coast when he died. To the ambitious Laing, despite the ominous tone of the letter from Captain Ross, Chisholm’s death seemed to suggest the possibility of another shot at promotion. He wrote an appeal to his new friend, Earl Bathurst, asking him to intervene with General Turner in support both of a promotion and of orders to conduct an expedition in West Africa to explore the river Niger.

  To this letter, which is dated January 12, 1825, he added a brief résumé of his qualifications as an “African traveler.” It is an interesting self-assessment by the thirty-one-year-old Laing:

  In the year 1822 Memorialist [i.e., Laing] performed a Journey of Seven Months into the interior of Africa at the request of the late Sir Charles MacCarthy; established friendly relations with many powerful inland Chiefs, and greatly increased the Gold and Ivory trade of Sierra Leone— For this service Memorialist received a letter of thanks and a piece of plate from the Merchants of the Colony.

  On the 2nd December 1822, Memorialist commanded the advance guard of the British army at Donquah and with it alone, defeated a large body of Ashantees and Fantees—

  After the above affair, Memorialist succeeded partly by negotiation, partly by determined military movement in making allies of the Fantees, among whom he remained for four months, organising them into a force, with which alone, he overthrew and expelled from their country, a large Ashantee Army which invaded it in August 1823.

  After the unfortunate defeat of Sir Charles MacCarthy Memorialist collected the scattered Fantees, and successfully opposed the Ashantees as long as his health permitted him to keep the field; preventing them from crossing the Boosoompra, and isolating them from the towns of the waterside—

  A. Gordon Laing

  Capt. R.A.C. Corps

  And Major in Africa


  A comparison of what Laing wrote about his part in the Ashanti campaign with a report made by the brigade major of the British force shows that Laing’s is a fair, concise, and restrained record of his performance. An anonymous critic in Africa caviled that Laing had sustained “considerable loss on his side.” But he clearly had MacCarthy’s and Chisholm’s support and goodwill. Their letters in 1821 and 1822 reflect this, indicating that young Captain Laing was a gallant and thoroughly competent officer in the field.

  Nonetheless, when a copy of Laing’s package of documents to Lord Bathurst reached General Turner, now installed at his headquarters in West Africa, he attacked Laing with a ferocity that must have astonished Bathurst, to whom his dispatch, dated April 9, 1825, was addressed. This is what General Turner wrote, effectively ending Laing’s career as a field officer:

  I would not fulfil my duty either to your Lordship or to the service, were I not to characterize as unwise, unofficerlike, and unmanly, the conduct of Captain Gordon Laing in this Country. In place of attending to the health and discipline of his Company, his time was occupied in editing a contemptible Newspaper (which I now possess) the columns of which are filled with the most fulsome panegyrics upon himself in prose and rhyme, in magnifying into Armies, a few Wild Negroes in the Woods, deceiving Sir Charles both as to their numbers and quality, also in inflaming the Chiefs of the Ashantees, by foul abuse against the English—Such were his Newspaper proceedings—His military exploits were worse than his poetry, for appalled at the storm he mainly helped to raise, he abandoned and left to their fate, those whom he had brought within its influence.