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

by Frank T. Kryza

  Regrettably, Lyon was unable to lay a hand on these funds, which were in Ritchie’s name, and since Warrington had never been informed by Ritchie how moneys received for the expedition were to be forwarded, there was no means anyway of collecting the fresh cash (which lay untouched at Malta). Warrington had offered Ritchie a letter of credit for use in Murzuk when he arrived in Tripoli, but the secretive doctor told the consul bluntly that he had made his own arrangements. Whatever these were, he took them to his grave.

  Lyon now assumed charge. Penniless and sick with malaria, he was determined not to return to Tripoli without some information on the wholly unknown country to the south of Murzuk. He managed, by selling Ritchie’s horse and other personal effects, to pay off the expedition’s debts and buy enough supplies for a journey lasting a few weeks. Fever struck again before he and Belford could get going, and for ten days both lay in bed, tended with devotion by one little Arab girl. Then, armed with a teskera, or official pass from El Mukni, they set out on horseback accompanied by a diminutive camel boy who knew the route.

  “We more resembled two men going to the grave than fit persons to travel over strange countries,” wrote Lyon.

  Weakened, they reached Tegheri, a town about 100 miles south of Murzuk. Here they saw members of the fierce Tebu tribe, parties of whom occasionally descended from the Tibesti Mountains to plunder passing caravans. These tall and handsome people, veiled like the Tuareg and wary of strangers, were black Africans, not Berbers, the northernmost part of a larger group of Tebu people whose territory extended to what we know today as northern Chad, Niger, and Sudan.

  The Tebu captivated Lyon, who summoned all his dazzling social skills to overcome their chilly reserve. He became so friendly with some that they let him make portraits of them and compile a rough vocabulary of their language. He drew their dark African features, their tightly combed hair; the men wearing a cloth about the face, the women unveiled. These were tough, solitary mountain people. They had to be, for they were pitted against the Tuareg, the ferocious “blue men”* who were the dominant nomads of the central and western Sahara.

  Though the Tuareg and the Tebu nominally espoused Islam, they were fiercely independent and deviated from accepted Muslim norms when it suited them. (A Tebu man might ask a prospective bride, “Whom do you love more, me or Allah?” a question even the nondevout would consider blasphemous.)

  At Tegheri, Belford became too sick to continue. The party turned back. Freed from Ritchie’s standoffishness, Lyon won friends in Murzuk, and the journey to Tripoli was lightened by gifts. Among his new benefactors was a high-ranking Tuareg, Hatita ag Khuden, from the Ghat region of the southern Sahara, who was later to become a supporter of Laing. Lyon promised this man an English sword.

  Black slaves being driven across the Sahara by their Arab captors for sale in Tripoli, in a koffila like that encountered by George Lyon on his return to the coast.

  On February 9, 1820, Lyon and Belford, joining company with a slaving caravan, set out on the journey back to Tripoli. Day after day, as Lyon rode with the caravan, he watched twelve hundred slaves, most of them women and children, shepherded painfully across the hilly wastes. Mounted overseers battered this mass of wretched humanity with whips and sticks; sick slaves were thrown by the road and left to die. Nauseated by the spectacle, Lyon took notes:

  These poor, oppressed beings were, many of them, so exhausted as to be scarcely able to walk; their legs and feet were much swelled and by their enormous size formed a striking contrast with their emaciated bodies. They were all borne down with loads of firewood; and even poor little children, worn to skeletons by fatigue and hardship, were obliged to bear their burthen, while many of their inhuman masters rode on camels, with the dreaded whip suspended from their wrists….

  On Friday, March 24, after more than a year of travel, the caravan had its first glimpse of the Mediterranean. That day, Lyon and Belford met Warrington and his family riding out from Tajura. The explorers’ appearance was so changed by disease and starvation that Warrington at first did not recognize them. The consul and a newly arrived naval surgeon, Dr. John Dickson, took the weary travelers back to the consulate’s sick bay.

  Exhausted by his own hardships, Lyon was haunted by memories of the brutalized slaves. He went to the slave market to say good-bye to them. Recognizing him, they greeted him with smiles, some with tears. He later wrote:

  Notwithstanding my happiness at once more rejoining my English friends, I really felt no small regret at taking leave of our poor fellow travellers, many of whom, I knew, were destined to proceed to Tunis and Turkey. Their good humoured gaiety and songs had lightened to me many hours of pain and fatigue, and their gratitude for any little benefits I had it in my power to confer, quite warmed my heart towards them.

  Lyon paid a last visit to the bashaw, who delighted in his mastery of Arabic and proficiency in the Fezzanese dialect.

  On May 14, 1820, Lyon and Belford sailed for England, their work in Africa completed. Sadly, in exchange for the life of its leader, the Ritchie mission produced little accurate information. The most important claim Lyon made, based on stories collected from traders in Murzuk, proved to be wrong: that the Niger “runs into a lake called the Tsaad…. [T]hus far are we able to trace the Niger, and all other accounts are merely conjectural. All agree, however, that by one route or another, these waters join the great Nile of Egypt.”

  Lyon duly reported to London that the Niger flowed into Lake Chad and from there to the Nile, as some geographers in England had predicted. Besides this misinformation, Lyon brought back to England the only tangible product of the expedition: a mehari camel, which he presented as a gift to George IV,* who exiled it to the stables at Windsor Castle after it spat on him.

  Lyon’s account of his journey between Tripoli and Murzuk was pored over with enthusiasm at the Colonial Office and at the Admiralty, the more so as it was in harmony with all the geographical speculations (mostly wrong) then popular at Whitehall. Although he had gotten no farther south than Tegheri, Lyon encountered no insuperable difficulties. It seemed that Consul Warrington’s statement about the prestige of the bashaw running far into the Sahara might be true.

  Now that Lyon had convinced Downing Street that the Niger ran into Lake Chad, the new destination for exploration charted by the British became the old African kingdom of Bornu, south of the lake. No one promoted this new route to the interior with greater ardor than Hanmer Warrington. With characteristic bombast, he wrote the Colonial Office that it was as easy to get from Tripoli to Bornu (a region so far south that it is now part of Nigeria) as “from London to Edinburgh, and I should not hesitate to go myself, knowing as I do there is neither danger nor difficulty attending it.”

  Needless to say, at no time in the third of a century he lived in Tripoli did Warrington ever travel more than a few miles outside the city, and then only for a picnic lunch accompanied by an army of servants.

  While Lyon was on his way home, Sir John Barrow of the Admiralty underwrote the financial support needed for another expedition. Lyon, in making his report, had expressed the hope that he would be allowed to lead it, which would establish a base camp for future exploration along the Niger on its supposed eastern course.

  Barrow would have done well to stick with Lyon, a man who will be remembered among the half dozen most competent English explorers. Unfortunately, the secretary of the Admiralty had already picked another man for the job by the time Lyon reached London.

  *A caravan, usually a slave caravan, from the Arabic qafila.

  *Smyth went on to a long and distinguished career, becoming, successively, an admiral, a fellow of the Royal Society, a founder of the Royal Geographical Society, and president of the Royal Astronomical Society. His charts of the Mediterranean were so accurate they were used well into the twentieth century. He died in 1865.

  *Thus adding a memorable line to the U.S. Marine Corps hymn.

  *So-called Turkish boots, which have an upturned toe.<
br />
  *The association between swampy or marshy areas and disease had long been recognized, but the roles of the mosquito and of the malarial parasites of the genus Plasmodium were not identified until the beginning of the twentieth century.

  †An archaic medical technique employed for drawing blood to the surface of the body by application of a glass vessel from which air had been evacuated by heat, forming a partial vacuum.

  *So called because the blue dye used in their veils and clothing frequently transferred more or less permanently to the skin.

  *The prince regent succeeded his father on January 29, 1820, though he had already been ruling as de facto king since 1811.

  Chapter Seven

  HUGH CLAPPERTON

  SIR JOHN BARROW selected Dr. Walter Oudney, a Lowland Scot and a physician like Mungo Park, to lead the next foray into the African interior. Oudney, thirty-one, practiced medicine in Edinburgh, having served as a naval surgeon earlier in his career. An undersized man with a pale, solemn face, he seemed to some at the Admiralty better suited to the sick wards of Scotland than the jungles of Africa.

  When Consul Warrington’s offer to go on the expedition himself was seen as the hyperbole that it was, Dr. Oudney recruited his friend and neighbor Hugh Clapperton, thirty-three, the tenth son of a Dumfrieshire doctor (who would go on to sire another seventeen offspring after Hugh), to go with him. “My friend Lieutenant Clapperton is a gentleman of excellent disposition, strong constitution, and temperate habits,” wrote Oudney to London, “who is exceedingly desirous of accompanying the expedition. He wishes no salary [emphasis added].” Clapperton was an adventurer, if a low-key one. Barrow wrote to Goulbourn, Bathurst’s aide, that Clapperton was “possessed of resources of superior kind.” By the time he joined Oudney, he had already sailed around the world. In 1822 the mission to the interior via the “Tripoli route,” as it soon came to be known, was duly organized.

  Captain Hugh Clapperton of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, in full dress blues.

  Hugh Clapperton, who was soon destined to become Alexander Gordon Laing’s rival, had first gone to sea as a thirteen-year-old cabin boy on a merchant schooner plying between the Baltic States and North America. He showed an independence of mind early—by refusing to shine the captain’s shoes. At seventeen, he was press-ganged (kidnapped) into the Royal Navy, reaching the rank of lieutenant—a remarkable achievement in an era when officers were drawn from the upper classes. He sailed the Mediterranean and the South China Sea after an initial voyage that took him to South Africa and South America. He participated in the capture of Réunion from the French and spent two years patrolling the East Indies. At the battle of Mauritius in 1814, he was first in the breach and personally hauled down the French flag.

  He saw service in the Canadian Great Lakes, fighting in the War of 1812 against the United States before gaining his commission and the command of a schooner in 1815. At a blockhouse on Lake Huron, he lost half a thumb carrying an exhausted youngster across the frozen lake while escaping the attack of an American schooner. Said to have become engaged to a Huron princess, in 1817 he was demobilized on half pay and returned to Scotland, a victim of the peace. With his experiences in far-off places, robust constitution, and proven military courage, Clapperton made a welcome addition to the mission. Moreover, he looked the part: he was six feet tall in an age of shorter men, with a high brow, piercing eyes, and fine symmetrical features.

  The plan was that this pair, Scotsmen and friends, would form the mission to Bornu. But, through outside influence, another member was added, Lieutenant Dixon Denham, an instructor at the military college at Sandhurst. He met Captain Lyon socially just after the latter’s return to London and seemed bent on joining the new expedition.

  Denham, thirty-five, was “an adventurer with the temperament of a man which drove him always to look beyond the next hill,” according to a friend. Though he had never served in Africa (or undertaken exploration of any kind), he was said to be a brave soldier. At the battle of Toulouse against Napoleon, he had carried his wounded commander out of the line of fire.

  Denham was also the officer-gentleman, equally poised at a diplomatic reception as on the battlefield. He told friends he had been drawn to African travel on an impulse, much as he “might have swum the Thames in winter on a bet.” He had patrons in high circles, including the Duke of Wellington, with whom he corresponded regularly, and this may have been a factor in securing his appointment. Buoyant and indomitable, he had been placed at half pay in 1818 and was bored—and like Clapperton, unemployed and available. “He was the kind of man who must have adventure, or he rots,” a friend recorded.

  Notwithstanding his intelligence and courage, his good record in the Peninsular War, and his skill as a writer and artist, Dixon Denham was also a snob, domineering, insecure, jealous, and burdened with a devious streak of real meanness. He assumed from the outset, because of his superior social connections, that he was the mission’s leader. He wrote to Barrow that his instructions should place him “independent of the Governor of Malta and the consul at Tripoli, except as concerns my interviews with the Bashaw.” Whether as a result of Denham’s aggressive personality or because of the actions of some shadowy backer in high places, plans for the expedition were revised. Oudney was to accompany the mission to Bornu, where, like Ritchie at Murzuk, he was to set up a vice-consulate and study prospects for trade. Denham, meanwhile, accompanied by Clapperton, was to carry out the main work: exploration of the Niger to its mouth.

  Though he could not have known it at the time, Barrow had succeeded in recruiting a team that would prove even more dysfunctional than the one headed by Ritchie. If the Ritchie expedition was an example of a man defeating himself through a bizarre inability to cope with practical problems, the Denham-Clapperton-Oudney mission became a melodrama of personality conflict. Denham, under stress, was puritanical and a martinet, while Clapperton was inflexible and swore a lot—and poor Oudney was overwhelmed by them both. The enmity that built up between Denham and his two coexplorers overshadowed the whole voyage, which turned into a study of the deterioration of civilized values under the strain of traveling in the wilderness, a nonfiction Heart of Darkness.

  Oudney and Clapperton, who may have had some qualms about the new organization but had no idea of what they were really in for, left England in September 1821. Denham wasn’t ready to leave and stayed behind. On October 20, Oudney and Clapperton landed in Tripoli aboard a Sicilian fishing boat. Warrington welcomed them warmly, as he did all visitors from his homeland. It was still not clear from Colonial Office instructions who was leader of the party, and Oudney wisely induced Warrington to set out in writing the fact that he, Oudney, was in general charge. This document contained the phrase “You are charged by His Majesty’s Government to conduct this interesting and important mission into the interior of Africa.”

  At Tripoli, John Tyrwhitt, the apple-cheeked son of a friend of Warrington’s in Malta, joined the two travelers. Tyrwhitt was the black sheep of his family. He had joined the navy too young and led a dissipated life. His father wrote bitterly to Warrington that his son had been “wild,” hiding for a time in Italy, where he had a torrid love affair. “I wish him to have the least possible pocket money as he has a great propensity for extravagance, women, and alcohol,” his father wrote, hoping that his friend the British consul would “pack him off to the most remote part of Africa.” Warrington complied, selecting Tyrwhitt to replace the deceased Ritchie as his vice-consul at Murzuk.

  Contemplating this trio round his dinner table, Warrington enthusiastically wrote the colonial secretary: “I never saw men better calculated for the undertaking.” It was another of his blowhard exaggerations; of his three guests at dinner that evening, only one would survive more than a year.

  Denham arrived in Tripoli on November 19 aboard the schooner Express carrying a copy of his own instructions from the Colonial Office. After stating that Oudney was to remain at Bornu, where he was nominated “His M
ajesty’s Vice-Consul to the Sultan of Bornu,” the instructions directed Denham and Clapperton to “explore the Country to the Southward and Eastward of Bornu, principally with a view of tracing the course of the Niger and ascertaining its Embouchure.”

  Oudney was aggrieved that, instead of exploring, he would be tied up in Bornu doing paperwork. Further complicating matters, although Clapperton was to travel with Denham as his subordinate, it was to be “without any reference to his Relative Rank in His Majesty’s Service,” suggesting in some sense that they were equals. Finally, Oudney was to make all arrangements, hold all funds, and be responsible for obtaining the permission of the sultan of Bornu for the journeys in his territory. Thus a clear leader for the expedition was not designated, the wellspring of endless acrimony in the weeks ahead.

  Denham had already vexed Oudney by setting out in writing an “Order of March” for the travelers, presumably based on rules then used in the British army. It contained such irrelevancies for African travelers as guard duties, ration issues, the posting of sentries, and punishments for dereliction of duty. He handed out copies. Oudney rejected the document as an insult, which, in the circumstances, it probably was; Clapperton simply ignored it.

  Denham revealed his true opinion of his fellow travelers in a letter he sent to his brother Charles, then in London, on April 11:

  In the choice of my companions, I do not think His Majesty’s government have shewn their usual Sagacity; we are not well classed, and I have scarcely a fair chance. They are both Scotchmen and friends, and as one of them is under my orders, and the Consul Dr. Oudney, and myself, independent of each other, no small jealousy exists on their part, and to push me off the stage altogether would be exactly what they wish. [Of Clapperton he wrote,] [S]o vulgar, conceited and quarrelsome a person I scarcely ever met with, [and of Oudney he said,] [T]his son of war or rather of bluster completely rules, therefore any proposition from me is generally negatived by a Majority.