To depart, they needed the bashaw’s permission. By now, Yusuf Karamanli realized that easy money could be made by “guaranteeing” the safety of English explorers, though he knew this pledge had no value south of Murzuk. Receiving Oudney and Warrington, he offered to provide an escort of a thousand armed men to Bornu and back in exchange for 5,000 pounds sterling. Warrington forwarded this proposal to the Colonial Office.
Apart from the expense, reliance on the bashaw also meant the usual inestimable delays. There were more visits to the bashaw. The Colonial Office approved Warrington’s request for funds, but the consul handed over only a part of the sum, in the hope that the bashaw would use it to collect a party of soldiers to escort the mission to Bornu. Weeks passed with renewed but empty promises, and it became obvious that Yusuf Bashaw had no intention of recruiting escorts for the Englishmen.
The bashaw said he was awaiting the annual visit of the bey of Fezzan, with whom, on his return, the explorers might go free of charge. But the new bey, El Ahmar, never showed up. Feeling that they were wasting their time in Tripoli while their funds were drying up, the explorers decided to take the risk of traveling to Murzuk without escort. Besides, as Oudney pointed out, an armed escort could be a mixed blessing, since it might create the impression of a mission of conquest. And undisciplined troops were as likely to invent trouble as prevent it.
The meetings with the bashaw concluded, Oudney and Clapperton gathered their belongings and prepared to set out. They would go ahead of Denham, who had undisclosed private business to attend to in Tripoli. Traveling as Christians in their own clothes, and bearing a teskera from the bashaw, they took a new addition to the team: William Hillman, a shipwright from Malta. Hillman was hired by Denham to construct the boat in which to navigate the Niger, and to serve as his personal servant.
The rest of the party, which totaled the unlucky thirteen, was made up of oddly assorted characters. There was a native of St. Vincent in the West Indies, Adolphus Sympkins. Nobody could cope with a name like that and he was known simply as “Columbus” from his having been a merchant seaman and, if his own accounts could be believed, having visited most of the countries of the globe. He was “a shifty gentleman” but useful in that he spoke Arabic fluently, as well as three European languages. Then there was Jacob, a Gibraltar Jew, who appears at odd moments in all three of the journals that were kept of the voyage, but with no explanation of what he was doing. Presumably he just wanted to go to Bornu. Three bearers and four camel men completed the party. Equipment, even by the modest standards of the day, was meager, but Oudney had a good supply of trinkets to hand out as gifts to the potentates they expected to meet. Denham would follow the main party later.
A PALE, rinsed dawn broke along the seawall and a breeze brought the smell of tar and the sticky dampness of salt as the party set out from Tripoli on February 23, 1822, heading due south nine hundred miles through the great sand sea. The first part of the journey, to the Fezzan, was pleasant, even beautiful. Day after day, the sun shone out of a cloudless sky; night after night, moon and stars brooded over the scented darkness of the fertile desert. There were valleys of bright green, tangled masses of fruits and flowers, and by day the mountains were dazzling with the clear sunshine of North Africa. The restlessness and irritability of Tripoli faded in the timelessness of the desert.
Yet even the journey to Murzuk, not considered more than a preliminary to the actual march, turned out to be a test of endurance. The real desert began at Sockna (Suknah), halfway between Murzuk and Tripoli. Oudney’s party got a rude initiation; travel in the Sahara, especially for a European, could be difficult. The distances were vast, the terrain brutal, and the weather pitiless. Heat was the major enemy in a land where 100 degrees Fahrenheit was considered a cool winter’s day. In summer, temperatures of 150 degrees and above were not unknown, especially as one got farther from the coast. In such remorseless heat, living things became not so much paralyzed as comatose. Caravans halted, the Arabs covered themselves with burnouses on the burning sands like so many dancing pebbles of water on the well-greased surface of a frying pan.
The dry air and sandy soil of the Sahara quickly lost its heat after sunset; in the hottest regions of the planet, night cold was a significant danger. The mercury plunged visibly within the space of minutes. It sometimes fell below freezing at night, but a frost at dawn quickly gave way to temperatures hovering well above 100 degrees by ten o’clock.
To the discomfort caused by extremes of temperature was added, this trip, the ordeal of a sandstorm—called a “hurricane” by the Tripolitanian Arabs. A lurid yellow light on the horizon and a sound like dull thunder announced its coming. The dry air crackled with electricity; touching the canvas of the tents gave a nasty shock. The heart of the storm itself descended on the Englishmen with impetuous violence. Some of these tempests had engulfed and smothered whole caravans. Men were lost in a cloud of driving sand particles, helpless against the lash of tens of millions of flying grains of razor-sharp silica. The sun was obscured and a feeling of claustrophobia, the crushing weight of immense and unpredictable forces, burdened the caravan. Tents pitched to give protection whirled away on the flaying winds. The noise was overwhelming, the curses of men and the anguished bellowing of animals piercing through the roar of the storm.
The “Tripoli Route” taken by Denham, Oudney, and Clapperton to discover Lake Chad, West Africa’s great inland sea, and the Bornu Empire, thus validating Lord Bathurst’s contention that it was safer ’though it involved traveling much greater distances) to penetrate the heart of Mack Africa by coming in from the southern Mediterranean across the Sahara.
The next morning, the air was still, the sun rose and the violence was only a memory, but the camp was in disarray. Everyone in the caravan was put to searching and digging in the sand for lost objects. After an hour they simply moved on.
At Murzuk, friendly cries of “Inglesi! Inglesi!” greeted them, the people of the town crowding around the white visitors, kissing their hands, laughing and showing affection and geniality foreign to Tripoli. The women of the town inspected the explorers “with rather more curiosity than modesty.” Good nature was the prevailing mood. The new bey of Fezzan, El Ahmar, successor to the one who had refused to help Ritchie, was a colorful and unpredictable character who called himself by the nom de guerre Mustafa the Red. He was a renegade who had earned the bashaw’s support by marrying one of his daughters. Mustafa the Red, the bashaw had promised, would escort them to Bornu with a thousand troops. When the explorers arrived in Murzuk, the bey told them he was indeed about to leave—but for Tripoli, not Bornu. He needed to gather an armed force for the slaving expedition south. This was bad news, for Lyon had stressed the dangers to health of an extended stay in Murzuk, with its noxious pools of stagnant water.
Denham left Tripoli on March 5, 1822, soon joining his colleagues at Wadi Mimum on March 8. Denham, who had a greater fear of illness than the others, didn’t like the squalor of Murzuk, and proposed that he should immediately return to Tripoli alone to see if could pressure the bashaw to provide the needed escort. He also hoped to extract more funds from Warrington. The need for the bashaw’s help became more urgent when the bey announced that the Englishmen were forbidden to leave the Fezzan during his absence. To make sure they complied, he withdrew all means of traveling, including camels.
Oudney and Clapperton supported Denham’s idea of returning to Tripoli. They may even have encouraged him, hoping that his fear of illness and his generally nasty disposition would dispose him never to come back. “His absence,” wrote Clapperton to his mentor Sir John Barrow, “will be no loss to the Mission, and a saving to his country, for Major Denham could not read his sextant, knew not a star in the heavens, and could not take the altitude of the sun.” By June 13, 1822, Dixon Denham was back with Warrington in Tripoli.
AFTER DENHAM’S DEPARTURE, Oudney and Clapperton took cursory trips to explore the desert, mainly to the west. These jaunts were dangerous, for
the country around Ghat, 240 miles west of Murzuk, was the territory of the ferocious Ajjer Tuareg, through whose lands no passport of the bashaw carried prerogative. A bit of luck helped smooth the way for them. Lyon, in his last days in Murzuk, had been befriended by the Ajjer Tuareg Hatita ag Khuden, and had promised this man an English sword.
“Hateeta, a Tuarick of the tribe of Benghrasata of Ghaat,” Lyon had written of his departure from Murzuk in 1820, “came to take leave of me. He now pressed me very much to promise him, that on my return to Africa, I would pass through his country, of which he is chief, and take him with me to the Negro Land, adding, that if I would bring him a sword like the one I wore, he should be perfectly content. He is the only Tuarick I ever saw who was not an impudent beggar, or who made presents without expecting a return.”
Lyon had not forgotten his promise and had purchased a good Sheffield sword in London and given the weapon to Denham. Just before leaving for Tripoli, with the ragged desert molded into satin dunes by the soft spring rains, Denham had observed a tall man veiled like a Tuareg watching the mud hovel in which the British party was housed. Though he stood at some distance, Denham could see that the stranger had “large, brilliant eyes” and that he was watching him intently. Denham called out to him and discovered that he was none other than Hatita. Denham gave him the promised sword.
“It would be difficult to describe his delight,” Denham wrote. “It was shortly reported all over the whole town that Hateeta had received a present from Said (Lyon’s travelling name), worth one hundred Dollars.”
It was Hatita’s role as dalil (guide and protector) that made it possible for Oudney and Clapperton to travel safely outside Murzuk. During the next three months, the Bornu mission pretty much incorporated Hatita into its company as a full-fledged member of the expedition, at least while the explorers were in and around Murzuk and in Ghat. Beyond arranging for the hire of camels, he was determined to make his patrons a social success among the locals, and he seemed to enjoy teaching them the etiquette of the desert—a thorny jungle of human impulses even in the best of times.
“Our friend Hateeta was anxious we should shine,” wrote Oudney, “and read a number of lectures to Clapperton.” To have come across a Tuareg so ready, even eager, to help and advise on social behavior was a delightful experience in a land where strange manners usually excited ridicule, or worse. The engaging Hatita endeared himself to Clapperton, as he would to all English explorers. Dr. Oudney showed his gratitude by treating him for malaria, which was endemic.
This was new territory, not seen by a European in modern times. The wells amid the chaotic rocks of the desert were choked with sand that took hours to dig out. The track took them through monotonous regions where the hours and days became apparent chiefly through the variations in the wonderful light, converting it into an antilandscape. The desert floor practically disappeared and the explorers were conscious only of light and color, of pinkish yellow spreading over the lower half of their field of vision and pale blue flooding the upper—both all-enveloping and blindingly brilliant. Between the two, no clear division existed, just a perpetual watery image shivering the horizon like a shattered windowpane. Then the light would change again, reflecting distant rocks in the mirages, causing them to appear twice their real height and dangerously top-heavy, like gigantic bowling pins. At twilight, the horizon would reemerge. Clapperton and Oudney would come down to earth again, watching the sand sea change its nighttime shades from yellow to ocher to purple to gray.
On June 16, they visited the Roman mausoleum of Garama, the ancient capital of the Garamantes, which loomed abruptly over the desert like a medieval castle. They saw dunes 400 feet high. On July 8 they discovered in the heart of the mountains a forgotten community able to survive on next to nothing, a band of forlorn humans in a permanent settlement by the shores of a salt lake, Bahir Mandia. They lived on tiny shrimplike creatures (the Tuareg called them “worm-eaters”), catching them with closely woven nets.
They visited the headquarters of the Ajjer Tuareg at the oasis of Ghat. The friendly welcome of the notoriously dangerous Tuareg seemed further proof they did not need a military escort.
In the meantime, Denham in Tripoli found the bashaw as obdurate as Murzuk’s bey. He insisted that the mission not leave Murzuk without Mustafa the Red and his men. The bey himself had still not reached the coast, and once he got there, would need at least six months to gather the required troops for his slaving expedition. Warrington had already paid the bashaw 2,000 of the promised 5,000 pounds. To ensure that he collected the rest, the bashaw was intent on maintaining the conditions of the original deal. This meant that no move could be made from Murzuk for months, perhaps a year.
Mondra Lake, also known as Bahir Mandia, the tiny saltwater body Oudney and Clapperton discovered shimmering like a blue jewel ringed by date palms in the pristine desert west of Murzuk. Denham would never forgive his coexplorers for making this side-trip without him
This news outraged Denham, convincing him that Warrington was incompetent and that he needed help from officials back home. He decided to consult Lord Bathurst personally, ostensibly to report on the deteriorating situation to the Colonial Office, but also, as a letter to his brother shows, to get his own military rank raised to lieutenant colonel and to obtain a new commission clearly appointing him commander-in-chief. He found a French ship soon to weigh anchor for Marseilles, and in this vessel, in spite of Warrington’s protests, he sailed, commenting to one of the bashaw’s lieutenants that his government would have something to say when they heard of the casual treatment (which he termed “duplicity”) meted out to an official British expedition.
It was a move Dixon Denham would live to regret.
Chapter Eight
THE JOURNEY TO BORNU
YUSUF KARAMANLI did not like news of his ill treatment of Englishmen finding its way to London. He now concocted an alternative plan to satisfy the impatient British. A wealthy Fezzanese merchant, Abu Bakr Bhu Khallum (a man invariably referred to by Warrington in his letters by the Gilbert and Sullivanesque “Buckaloom”), with an escort of three hundred men, was about to return to the Fezzan and from there proceed to Bornu. He was leaving Tripoli, and agreed for a fee (to be shared with the bashaw) to escort the Englishmen beyond Murzuk.
Warrington, who was more than ready to pay the required sum, wrote to Denham, then in quarantine at Marseilles, hoping to forestall him:
This morning the Bashaw has offered to send Buckaloom, with One hundred Horse and One hundred Infantry to convey the travellers to Bornou etc., provided we give Him ten thousand Dollars. The escort to leave Tripoli in fifteen days after the payment of the money, and Mourzouk in two months from the same date. It is a most material and certainly most important point gained…. Therefore, the moment you receive this, I suppose you will return from Marseilles immediately, and with your usual activity and zeal, will join them at Mourzouk.
Denham got no farther than Marseilles, where he was overtaken by no fewer than three letters from Yusuf Bashaw addressed to him at Leghorn, Malta, and Marseilles, as well as Warrington’s letter. He realized the consul had outfoxed him, and that he must return to Tripoli at once. He was still so angry he fired off a furious letter to Bathurst. He wrote of Oudney:
Never was a man so ill qualified for such a duty [as leading the mission]. Except by water, I think, he has never travelled 80 miles from Edinbro’. Still everything would he arrange and on we went, blundering in misery, although at a considerable expense. Not one word of any language could he speak except his own, yet he did undauntedly harangue those around him who bowed, walked off, and of course cheated him.
He should have slept on this letter before launching it in the next packet boat for England, for if he had hoped to denigrate Oudney and Clapperton in the eyes of Lord Bathurst, and so to command the expedition with a promotion, he failed utterly. Robert Wilmot was tapped to send back a reprimand expressing Lord Bathurst’s tart surprise
th
at you should have felt yourself warranted in leaving Tripoli at a time when you could most usefully have assisted H.M.’s Consul General in completing the final arrangements for your departure into the interior of Africa; nor can his Lordship understand the grounds upon which you seem to have imagined that your presence in this country would have advanced the interests confided to your charge…. [As to Denham’s unpleasant remarks about his companions,] Lord Bathurst has felt considerable regret at the general tone of your observations; and, although his Lordship will be willing to make some allowance for the feeling of irritation which prompted you to leave Tripoli, and for the haste in which your letter was written, yet he feels himself called upon to caution you most earnestly in future not to allow yourself to yield to angry feelings and impressions which, if not restrained, must have the effect of disturbing the harmony of your party and of extinguishing the mutual disposition to amicable cooperation, without which the wishes and expectations of H.M.’s Government must be frustrated.
This rebuke was waiting for him when he landed at Tripoli. Meanwhile, news of his bid to go to England reached his companions back in Murzuk. Both Oudney and Clapperton (and even Hillman, the carpenter) were dumbfounded.
What [inquired Oudney in reply to Warrington’s news] has taken Major Denham to England? He has not written a word on the subject to [us].… I do not know how he can exculpate himself, or look us in the face, for leaving the Mission at a time when its objects were so near being accomplished…. My countrymen [i.e., the Scots] are famed for caution, but he far surpasses them. And I am sure he would take nothing on his shoulders.… I really believe he would not go his body’s length without it was insured. His conduct has been all along what has tended to alienate affection…. For my part, I have never borne so much from any man as from him, and all for the sake of peace—it is not my disposition to be quarrelsome, on the contrary, to live in harmony with all men, and thank God, I have always been able in a great degree to do it, except with him. Had I known the man, I would have refused my appointment…. Destroy this, it may he considered spleen, envy, or some of the evil passions proceeding from a mind weakened by weakness. Take no notice of it, I beg, but always have in mind that “a Snake often lies concealed under the Grass.”
Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa's City of Gold Page 12
