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

by Frank T. Kryza

  Of his Armies nothing more was heard: and I humbly beg your Lordship, in the name of the Regiment, that he may be removed from it—and that we may not be subject to the mortification of his calling us Brother Officers.

  No officer’s career could survive such a letter, and Laing’s did not. What could have incited such venom? As Laing had left West Africa months before General Turner arrived there, someone unknown is likely to have provoked this harangue—someone who resented Laing’s relationship with Sir Charles or Major Chisholm. Laing was good at maintaining relations with superiors who could help him, but he was less adept at cultivating friendly relations with those peers who (correctly) viewed him as a rival.

  General Turner, from other accounts, was an amiable man, well liked by his troops. Presumably, he was fair-minded and would not have signed an attack so vitriolic had he not thought it fully justified. Irritation at Laing’s repeated end runs probably had much to do with it, predisposing him to lend an ear to criticisms of an ambitious and slightly insubordinate officer.

  Laing, to be sure, also had that trait that armies seldom abide: he was not (and never would be) a team player.

  Yet Laing still had admirers in West Africa, including Captain Edward Sabine of the Royal Artillery, another young officer with a brilliant career ahead of him. Already a respected scientist and an authority on the Arctic, Sabine was pursuing “scientific investigations” along the tropical coast. Later, he would become president of the Royal Society. It was Sabine who would edit Laing’s only book and loyally see it published while its author was wandering in the Sahara in search of Timbuktu.

  In the years ahead, Sabine would become one of Laing’s main correspondents. Had there been any substance to General Turner’s commination, it is unlikely that someone of Sabine’s character would have maintained his friendship, or that Laing would have been chosen by Colonel Chisholm to report to Lord Bathurst on the troubled Gold Coast. Though we may never know the details, the circumstances suggest that Laing got caught up in a power play in Sierra Leone, running afoul of a rival who held General Turner’s ear.

  In the end, Laing had the full confidence of the one person who mattered: Henry Bathurst, one of the dozen most powerful men in the kingdom. Though Laing would never again fight in battle as an army officer (though he kept his commission, rank, and pay at Bathurst’s insistence), his true vocation as an explorer could now begin.

  As his evolving status became clear, and notwithstanding the protracted contretemps with General Turner, Laing continued to cultivate the people in London who could smooth his way. He realized how important it would be to make an ally of Henry Goulbourn, Lord Bathurst’s undersecretary. Goulbourn was regarded by critics in Whitehall as a man of pedestrian talents. But he was also a man of phenomenal energy, and therefore the ideal subordinate for Lord Bathurst. Of Bathurst, it was said politely that while he did not shirk his responsibilities, he “was not one to do himself what he could depend upon others to do for him.” So it was helpful in cultivating Bathurst’s support to have Goulbourn’s goodwill.

  As well as holding Bathurst’s confidence, Goulbourn had an independent source of personal power: he was a close friend of Robert Peel, the rising young star of the Tory Party and a future prime minister. Goulbourn, at this stage in his career, was happy to work in Bathurst’s shadow, and it was clear that he was far more involved in the day-to-day details of colonial rule than his nominal boss. “In-letters” for Bathurst’s review from all parts of the empire had Goulbourn’s concise analyses on their turned-up corners. Other letters had details of the proposed reply to be made or were marked “put-by” for later consideration. Goulbourn kept all these files in his own desk, advised Bathurst on what required his attention, and directed the clerks in the Colonial Office. Bathurst himself preferred to take the long view, spending weeks at a time at his ancestral seat, Cirencester Park, though there is no doubt that in some matters, as in the Laing expedition to Timbuktu, he focused personally on, and directed, the details.

  HENRY BATHURST CAME from an ancient line of intelligent and wealthy aristocrats who made government service their avocation. Unlike some of his fellow peers, who took after the playboy George IV, Bathurst was hardworking, well read, virtuous, modest, and committed to the principle of noblesse oblige: that great privilege demanded responsibility and service. He was the third earl, born in 1762, the elder son of a prominent Tory. The younger Bathurst soon developed a distinguished résumé of his own. He was elected to Parliament for Cirencester, Gloucestershire, from 1783 until he succeeded to the earldom in 1794.

  In 1812 he become secretary of state for war and the colonies (a cabinet post he invented) under the Earl of Liverpool, who was prime minister. In this post, Bathurst became spellbound by Africa, and a staunch enemy of the slave trade. He was made a Knight Companion of the Garter in 1817, thus cementing his personal relationship with the prince regent and future king.* That year, too, Bathurst was tapped to inform the Prince of Wales of the death of his only legitimate child, Princess Caroline. The news Bathurst bore to the palace was doubly tragic, for Caroline had died only hours after giving birth to a stillborn son. Few men in England had a closer personal relationship with her eccentric sovereign in 1825, for whom he served as an intellectual and moral foil. No man in George IV’s court resembled the king less in temperament and character than Bathurst, or was trusted by the king more, perhaps just for that reason. Laing could not have picked a more powerful patron.

  Laing’s powerful mentor and protector, Henry, 3rd Earl Bathurst, Baron of Battlesden, Baron of Apsley, Knight Companion of the Garter, and confidant of both George III and George ÎV. A protégé of William Pitt, he was a lord of the Admiralty and a Treasury lord from 1783 to 1791. It was Bathurst who founded the Colonial Office, where he pursued antislavery policies with a grim moral determination as secretary of state for colonies. He became the principal architect of England’s Africa policy, launching the scramble for those vast colonial territories Britain eventually came to control.

  Given his abiding interest in African exploration, Lord Bathurst was a proponent of finding Timbuktu and tracing the definitive course of the Niger, though he had developed unusual ideas about how to undertake the mission. He revived the old idea that explorers should penetrate from north to south rather than try the typical ingress from the West African coast, where so many had succumbed to disease. To come in from the north, you had to cross the Sahara. Crossing the desert involved traveling much greater distances than taking the coastal route.*

  The shortest way to Timbuktu, he knew, was the caravan road south from Marrakech, about 1,000 miles in a straight line, twice that given the winding nature of the track (these were rough estimates, since nobody knew exactly where Timbuktu was). Farther east, it was known that another road ran through Touggourt, Wargla, and Tuat. Bathurst saw great logic in departing still farther east, from Tripoli, as Laing had now been ordered to do.

  As the northern terminus of the easiest road to the Sudan, Tripoli had, since Roman times, been the main gateway to the interior from the north, and the main maritime outlet for the produce of the south. There was an old road running southwest through Ghadames and Djanet. Traversing the Sahara diagonally, it was not much used, and this was one of the reasons Sheikh Babani had selected it when he was organizing his slaving caravan in the summer of 1825—he was concerned about bandits and thought the road less traveled might provide better cover for himself, for his merchandise and servants, and for his protégé, the Englishman. The total distance involved was enormous—probably some 3,000 miles across some of the most demanding terrain in the world, six times the distance then thought to separate Timbuktu from the Atlantic.

  IN THE MORNING of that first day out of Tripoli, the desert seemed lit by some sad dawning of the end of the world. The sand was painted a ruddy ocher, the color of bister and mummies, tinting the desert a half dozen shades of yellow and brown, peppered with squalls of dust. The caravan began moving south, where
the great range of the Atlas ran to sand and the mighty desert met the sea. Wild nomadic tribes controlled these unbounded wastes, but Laing trusted Babani, and the caravan was a large one.

  At the outset of such a journey, when camels were healthy and properly watered and fed, their heads tended to strain forward and low to reduce the pull of the ropes on their nose rings. To Laing, they looked like large angry geese as they padded quietly along. Soon they were exhausted, their heads held high on curving necks, trying to resist the awful weight of their bodies even when their nostrils were nearly pulled out, the pain of the one seeming much greater than the other. As the day grew long, Laing learned to belabor his camel from behind with his riding stick, further inciting the beast forward.

  Laing quickly perceived that there seemed to be nothing but pain in the desert, for human beings and animals alike. Life was pain, Babani told him. Only in death was there relief. Yet there was such a light in the sky, and in the distance such an extraordinary clearness, that death seemed very far away, a tribute to the insidious charm of this land of sand and silence. Laing felt his resolution firm, unwavering, unyielding.

  He was a traveler now, he believed, on the high road to fortune. There was romance enough in adventure, in danger. Other rewards—money and fame—would come later. As he left on his historic journey, Laing believed that much in his past and all of his recent efforts destined him for precisely this adventure and the success that would surely cap it.

  Night fell quickly in the Tripolitanian desert. The sky overhead became rusty; the setting sun dimmed. As the light failed, the sky passed from copper to bronze but remained metallic as the sun’s embers were overtaken by the moon’s milky shimmer. In the distance, desert mountains edged their sharp outlines with a stroke of burnt sienna. A chill wind blew; the ember tint faded. All things in the ghostly light took on a translucent, weightless quality as the moon rose and became more silvery in the increasing chilliness of night. In the desert, the night was kind when it was not too cold.

  Distant horizons subsided. The moon washed the land with a clean, soft light. And then there was nothing but the sand and the moon, those strange men of imposing gravity lying nearby in the camp, instantly asleep and snoring loudly, and the deep blue-black of the vault above, a transparent emptiness studded by diamonds.

  *A burnous, or burnus, from the Arabic, is a hooded cloak made of wool or a mixture of wool and camel hair.

  †A thick, strong, coarse outer garment, often made of camel hair. Probably from the Arabic, barak, a gown.

  ‡The date of Laing’s birth is often given as 1793, but in an autobiographical note he says it was 1794.

  *Before the germ theory of disease emerged decades later, Europeans thought that fevers in West Africa were caused by nocturnal “miasmic vapors” and “exhalations” from swamps. Sailors believed they were safe from these if they stayed aboard ship, even if anchored only hundreds of yards from shore. (They were right, because mosquitoes cannot easily cross open ocean.)

  *Founded in 1348, the Order of the Garter is England’s highest order of chivalry. It is composed today, as it has been for centuries, of the sovereign, the Prince of Wales, and a few other select members of the queen’s immediate family, plus twenty-four elected Knights Companion who are replaced only upon death (or disgrace—over the centuries thirty-six have been beheaded, six of them by Henry VIII alone, and many others have been expelled for displeasing their sovereign). For Bathurst to have received this accolade meant that he had been officially welcomed into the innermost circle of palace life and that thereafter he would have access to the prince regent (later George IV) whenever he needed it. On the political side, he had already established himself as a force in both Houses of Parliament. In his lifetime, he served successively in the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

  *Timbuktu was thought at the time to lie about 500 miles inland, traveling due east from the Atlantic. It is actually almost 900 miles from the ocean, as the crow flies, 1,500 miles on foot.

  Chapter Six

  THE TRIPOLI ROUTE

  MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS had passed since the fateful dinner at St. Albans Tavern that gave birth to the African Association, but the time had not yet come for Alexander Gordon Laing to move toward the strange rose light of the Sahara.

  By 1820 none of the big questions raised by Sir Joseph Banks had been answered. The origin and outlet of the great river Niger, whether it evaporated in a salt lake somewhere in the desert or flowed as a tributary of the Nile; the location of the various African kingdoms; and most of all, the size and importance of Timbuktu—all these remained profound mysteries.

  The members of the association, reposing in cozy armchairs in London, now recognized, along with their collaborators in government, what had been obvious to travelers for a thousand years: Islamic fanaticism, disease, hostile tribes, territorial coffles,* parched deserts, unnavigable rivers, and the sheer distances involved made the penetration of the interior of Africa hugely difficult.

  The British decided to try a new approach, one that might co-opt Arab foes and defeat disease in one stroke: to send explorers in from the northern fringes of the continent, along the clean, dry Mediterranean coast. Traveling south, the explorers would traverse the vast Sahara into black Africa, possibly succeeding even in enlisting Muslim merchants as guides, in return for a reward.

  Four factors made Tripoli attractive as the point of departure. First, the dynamic English consul there, Colonel Hanmer Warrington, pushed the cause of exploration with all his disorganized but considerable energy. Second, the bashaw, Yusuf Karamanli, upon whom Warrington exerted influence, agreed to help explorers traveling through his kingdom and would (for a fee) provide protection. Third, the dry desert climate had advantages over the humid West African littoral, where unnamed diseases debilitated explorers before they could even begin their travels. And finally, the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Tripoli itself, with its odd mixture of refinement and corruption and its melting pot of a population, appealed to the English sensibility.

  Commander William Henry Smyth, a twenty-eight-year-old hero of the Napoleonic Wars, planted the seed for the new British strategy. In the spring of 1816 a letter from Smyth strongly recommending Tripoli as “an open gate into the interior of Africa” landed on the desk of Sir Charles Penrose at the British Admiralty. Admiral Penrose had dispatched Smyth to Tripoli to retrieve broken columns and twenty cases of statues (probably from the Roman temple at Leptis Magna) which Yusuf Karamanli had graciously donated to the Duke of York. The warm relations between the bashaw and Warrington impressed Smyth, and he developed an exaggerated idea of the bashaw’s influence in the interior of Africa. His letter asserted that “by striking due South of Tripoli, a traveller will reach Bornu [a vast plain in what is now northeastern Nigeria, sloping toward Lake Chad] before he is out of Yusuf’s influence; and wherever his Power reaches, the protecting virtues of the British Flag are well known. In fact, looking to the unavoidable causes of death along the malarious banks of the Rivers of the Western coast, I think this ought to be the chosen route, because [it is] practicable into the very Heart of the most benighted quarter of the globe.”

  Smyth’s* letter could not have been more timely. Admiral Penrose passed it on to Sir John Barrow, who agreed wholeheartedly with Smyth’s analysis and forwarded it with his recommendation to Lord Bathurst. After the disasters on the west coast, the Colonial Office, which was now the department responsible for government missions to Africa, quickly saw the advantages of the northern route. In 1818, the first government-sponsored mission to the river Niger via Tripoli set out. All important British missions to Africa would use this route until 1829.

  Tripoli was already prosperous, a Mediterranean center of commerce, one of the few ports in North Africa where European merchants traded. European seafaring powers posted consuls there, and their ships lay at anchor in its superb natural harbor, a bay fringed with date palms, waiting to transport goods and slaves from the African interior
. Tripoli was an open city: the bashaw permitted any profitable activity as long as he received his share of the swag. Corsairs freely used the harbor to divide the spoils in the ships they had captured.

  Though the British strategy may have seemed novel in London, it was hardly a new one. Tripoli had been a gateway to the African interior since pre-Christian Garamantes tribesmen sold precious stones to the Carthaginians. The way through the Fezzan to Murzuk and on to Bornu—the shortest, safest, and oldest of the caravan routes—had been trod by Roman, and later by Arab, invaders.

  Whoever ruled Tripoli tried to keep the caravan routes open, but all soon learned that desert nomads could not be brought under control more than a few score miles from the city walls. As a repercussion of their raids, running caravans south was a hazardous business best undertaken by large convoys of armed men. The city itself had had many masters, including the sultan of Morocco, the bey of Tunis, Ferdinand the Catholic of Spain, and the Knights of St. John (of Malta)—and now, a strange man called Yusuf Bashaw Karamanli.

  IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, Tripoli was invaded by the Turks. They governed, backed by a garrison of Janissaries. A Janissary was a soldier in an elite corps of Turkish troops drawn exclusively from abducted Christian boys trained to fight and brought up as Muslims. The Janissaries in Tripoli intermarried with Arab and Berber women, and their sons were called Cologhis. The Cologhis, inevitably, grew more powerful until a fateful day in 1711 when one of them, Ahmad Karamanli, invited the officers of the Turkish garrison to a sumptuous banquet—and promptly slaughtered all of them as they ate. Calling himself the “bashaw” or “pasha” and continuing to give fealty to the Sublime Porte, he founded a Tripolitanian dynasty that would rule for the next 125 years.

  At the time English explorers began using Tripoli as a point of departure for black Africa, Yusuf Karamanli (Ahmad’s great-grandson) held Tripoli’s throne. To become bashaw, Yusuf, the youngest of three brothers, had murdered his oldest brother, deposed his father, and exiled his remaining brother. He ruled Tripoli from 1795 to 1835, extending his authority southward with bloody wars against nomadic tribes.