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

by Frank T. Kryza

  Regrettably, Warrington not only kept this letter but shared it with Denham, further souring relations all around. By the end of September, his chastisement from London taken to heart, Denham was on his way back to Murzuk with Abu Bakr Bhu Khallum. Warrington watched Denham’s departure with a misgiving that he shared with the Colonial Office:

  The Hostile disposition existing in the Southern Mission, [he explained,] was due to the jealousy existing between Oudney and Denham. Probably the breach has been widened by various paragraphs in the news papers, saying that the Mission is under the immediate direction and auspices of the latter. [He added, gloomily,] Impossible to reconcile these gentlemen, and I should strongly recommend that Lt. Clapperton should be attached to Dr. Oudney. They are countrymen, very old friends, and Dr. Oudney has undoubtedly the most commanding influence over Lieut. Clapperton. Major Denham is of a difficult cast of character, and is more a Man of the World.

  In a further letter in December, he commented about what he had come to call the “Great Bone of Contention”:

  The Great Bone of Contention appears to me a jealousy as to whom the Mission is confided to. I think the orders and instructions speak for themselves, which clearly shew that Oudney and Denham are distinct and separate, it being the duty of the Former from his Official Appointment to afford every facility and to give every assistance to the latter….

  The Colonial Office, torn between Oudney’s prior claim to leadership, in point of time, and Denham’s, in point of influence, now suggested that a change be made in the expedition. Clapperton was to come under Oudney, and his place, as Denham’s aide, was to be taken by young Tyrwhitt. Warrington wrote to Denham in March 1823 to say that the Colonial Office had made these changes, authorizing Tyrwhitt to join him. Typically of Denham, he speculated Tyrwhitt was Warrington’s spy.

  Denham’s first journey to Murzuk had been bad, but the second was worse. The caravan spent three days passing the desolate chain of hills known as the Jebel es Sawda (Black Mountains), marching all day over glaring basalt, saved from tormenting thirst by a burst of providential rain. At Zeghren (Az Zighan) they rested a day, everybody, including a party of slaves, enjoying as much pure water as they could drink. They rested again at a date grove, but it was an exhausted and scarecrow crew that made its entry, with all the pomp and ceremony that could be mustered, into Murzuk.

  Abu Bakr Bhu Khallum had assembled a party of Meghara Arabs as an escort. These were tough fighting men—compact, hard, wiry, with an inborn contempt for city dwellers. Rigid in their religious and social behavior (they regarded circumcision and the shaving of hair from all parts of the body as necessary to manhood), they were expert warriors and horsemen. Cowardice was the greatest sin for them, yet Oudney recorded instances during the crossing when the troop bolted as one man in the face of danger. This strange behavior caused no comment among the Meghara when all could run away without shame. The dereliction of a single man, however, inevitably led to his public humiliation. The culprit would be displayed, bound, in front of the caravan with the bowels and offal of a sacrificed bull draped around his neck as a token of his disgrace.

  Love of war, bloodshed, cruelty, and an ability to hold a grudge forever made them uneasy traveling companions, but the fact that these warriors were at their happiest deep in the desert, a terrain they knew intimately, was a boon to the British explorers. For the moment, it was comforting to have as allies men who were feared by everyone else.

  To Denham, Bhu Khallum’s importance was shown clearly by the deference he was accorded. Half the population of Murzuk turned out to bid farewell to the great merchant, the women singing and dancing, the men executing the characteristic cavalry charge of which Arab people everywhere are so fond—hair-raising to guests, who stood still and watched the rushing horde stop on a penny within feet of them. Of this display Denham commented, with his usual cynicism, that “they charged with every appearance of ferocious courage, but on horses which were half dead from lack of food.”

  IT WAS A SORRY BAND of explorers that prepared to set off across the Sahara. Oudney’s heart was giving him trouble, Hillman was down with dysentery, and Clapperton had a raging fever. The British mission now consisted of four Britons, five servants, and four camel drivers. With the escort of two hundred men, the caravan was three hundred strong (attached also were a number of merchants from Tripoli and Sockna, under the protection of their own armed escorts).

  Sick, tired, or both, the explorers assembled outside the walls of the town on November 19, 1822. At dawn on that day, the Bornu mission, with Abu Bakr Bhu Khallum’s trade caravan, left Murzuk. The great sand snake would head due south through a great sand sea before reaching Lake Chad. Dispersing the bleak mood of the British was the belief that by traveling in force with such an experienced and powerful Arab leader, they stood a good chance of not getting lost or attacked.

  They were accompanied, for a mile or two, by half the townspeople of Murzuk. Ahead of them stretched twelve hundred miles of wilderness so barren that, even today, if a straight line is drawn in an atlas between Murzuk and Lake Chad (their first objective), only one outpost appears on it.

  Bhu Khallum was too experienced to take a direct a route, inviting attack. There was a “good track” to Traghan (Taraghin), one of the 109 walled towns of the Fezzan, and they followed it. The “good track” ended there. Onward to Maefen, the caravan stumbled over hard cracked earth, encrusted with salt, where it was difficult merely to put one foot in front of the other. Denham noted salt fields everywhere, covered with scintillating crystals. The next landmark required a trek of fourteen hours over a dreary plain where the camels stopped occasionally to crop aghul, the only living vegetation, and the Meghara Arabs vigilantly searched for date palms as sailors at sea look for landfall.

  Clapperton and Oudney were in bad shape. Both had contracted fevers in Murzuk, as had Hillman, and all were overwrought. Previous missions had done little to dispel ignorance about African travel. No one used mosquito nets or boiled water or took quinine as a prophylactic against malaria. Having a doctor along served little purpose, for medical knowledge was limited to cupping and taking calomel, or vinegar and water. Their equipment and camels, except firearms, differed little from that in use for a millennium. Survival depended not on medicines and purified water, but on two feet and the human virtues of courage, stamina, and determination.

  The tracks they took were lined with human skeletons, often near dried wells. Clapperton registered the mounting toll of bones with fear. Around a desiccated oasis, Denham saw “more than one hundred skeletons, some of them with the skin still remaining attached to the bones—not even a little sand thrown over them.” The Meghara Arabs roared with laughter at the concern the white explorers showed over these exposed human remains. “These creatures were only blacks,” they said, adding, “Nam boo!” (Damn their fathers!).* They played horrific games with the cadavers, using skulls as footballs and making comments on the gender of the scrags. “They began knocking about the limbs,” Denham wrote, “with the butt ends of their firelocks, saying, ‘This was a woman! This was a child!’ “

  They were on the infamous slaving route over which tens of thousands of black Africans, taken from their homes in the Sudan, were forced to march to slavery, to Tripoli. It was only too clear that multitudes had not made it. Clapperton recalled how surprised he had been to see a happy slave gang on first entry into Murzuk. The reason for their joy was now clear. They were alive. That they would soon be off to be fattened for the markets of Tripoli was a minor worry.

  It struck Clapperton that his own party still had a long way to go, and that the Bornu mission might well end up as these dead slaves the Meghara kicked around so irreverently. But if they died, at least they would not be found by subsequent explorers, Clapperton mused, with fetters joining corpse to corpse, each with manacles locked to wrists and ankles.

  There was no water now. The travelers had to tighten their belts and dream of the next oasis. Denham’
s diary became more laconic. He noted one day that a naga (a female camel) had given birth on the march, and that the caravan did not halt for so much as a second. The newborn was cared for—after all, it was a camel, a valuable property—but the unfortunate mother was allowed no rest. The calf was briefly carried, and then it, too, was forced to totter along on wavering legs. There was no time for sentiment or compassion. Everyone concentrated on the job of moving on. To stop was to die.

  Ill will and squabbling among the explorers added to their miseries and the horrors apparent on the road, with the Englishman Denham in constant conflict with the two Scots. Denham’s peremptory orders caused trouble. He belittled his companions and voiced paranoid accusations. Innocent events became, in his eyes, plots hatched against him; his only focus on the expedition came through a distorted lens of personal rivalry.

  It was this dreary crossing, with its endless billowing sand and camels dying of exhaustion, that became the setting for the first serious eruption between Denham and Clapperton. In December, somewhere between Murzuk and Bilma (a village 500 miles southwest of the Fezzanese capital), Denham ordered Clapperton, whose naval skill in plotting maps was highly developed, to give him the latitudes of various points. Clapperton refused, saying he would not be subject to “the whim of any man.” In fact, he swore that he would deny Denham all surveying observations he made during the expedition. He wrote that Denham “has quarreled with and browbeat every person belonging to the Mission or who has ever been attached to it.” Unbelievably, though they saw each other every day, they stopped speaking to each other, communicating only by letter, like an estranged couple still sharing the same house.

  In a note datelined “Tents, Jan. 1, 1823,” Clapperton informed Denham that “you take upon yourself a great deal to issue such orders [to give him latitudes] which could not be more imperative were they from the Horse Guards or Admiralty, you must not introduce a Martial system into what is civil and scientific, neither must you expect from me what it is your own duty to execute.”

  These words enraged Denham, whose knowledge of the use of sextant and compass were rudimentary (and whose own computed latitudes were found by later travelers to be wildly inaccurate). The trouble about these constant disputes, so trivial, was that all parties were stuck to one another like survivors on an atoll. Compounding the problem, each man insisted on sending copies of his letters to Warrington, who was expected to forward them to the Colonial Office. Transcripts of their ill-tempered correspondence departed weekly via a messenger service consisting of two Tebu tribesmen who left for the coast with the mail pouch, a sack of grain, a skin of water, and bags tied to their camels’ tails to catch the dung they saved for fuel. They traveled in pairs because only one was expected to survive. These messengers risked their lives—and many died—to convey the explorers’ malicious and petty squabbles back to Warrington and Downing Street.

  As the gaunt Tibesti Mountains, soaring nearly to 11,500 feet, receded away on their left, the track began to show more skeletons, averaging about eighty a day. When they reached El Hammar (Emi Tahmeli), the heaps of bones were so high that the appalled Englishmen noted that “they were countless.” Even in the face of this grim evidence, their concern was momentary, for these were men past caring about others. Tortured by thirst, desiccated, their eyes bloodshot and so swollen they could not close them, the explorers reached a place where the Meghara said there was a well, only to find that it had disappeared. As one man, the whole caravan dug frantically into the depression where the main well should have been. Under the sand it was still there. To inexperienced eyes, there was nothing but a hollow. Without guides, the British were certain they would have died at that spot, for all the guerbas were empty.

  Christmas Day came and went unmentioned. There was no esprit de corps left in the exhausted travelers. Arrival at the next filthy oasis was all they thought about, a place where crippling thirst, heat, and weariness could briefly be forgotten—if they were lucky. Sandstorms engulfed them with treacherous speed. For three days they huddled in rolled blankets, unable to move from hastily erected tents, praying that frail canvas shelters would resist the roaring chaos. Even the Meghara temporarily lost their bearings after this obliterating tempest, which buried half of the caravan’s possessions. After two days of running in circles, they found the trail again.

  On New Year’s Day, 1823, one of the Meghara caught a crippled juvenile hyena. Hobbling it further with cords, he shot it to pieces at close range, chortling and guffawing. Denham recorded the event, appalled.

  The explorers soon reached the village of Aney. Huge masses of square stones, so rectilinear that it was hard to believe they had been carved by nature and not by human hands, were used as pedestals for the huts of the inhabitants. The whole formed a bastion impossible to take by direct assault, a perfect retreat for the Tebus, who, though fierce fighters, lived in perpetual dread of Tuareg raids. The only approach to the upper surface of these sheer stone blocks was by rope ladders, which could be hastily drawn up in emergencies. The explorers had heard of the Tebu from Lyon’s account and were eager to learn more of this mysterious people—black Africans who had ventured deep into North Africa, and survived.

  The naturally fortified Tebu stronghold at Aney. The people of Aney built their homes on top of flat pedestals of rock like that on the left. By withdrawing the rope ladder from above, they flummoxed attackers

  The caravanners, Arab and English alike, went forward fearing the Tuareg, scourge of the Arab slave trader. Speeding through the desert like a night wind, the nomads regarded caravans as trespassers on their land, seizing their property, or worse. Sheikh Abu Bakr Bhu Khallum believed that precautions against them were useless. He terrorized the British explorers with lurid stories about these “masters of mutilation and torture.” The menace of their invisible presence hovered over the men like a shroud.

  Nearly a year to the day after the travelers landed in Tripoli they reached Tiggema (Achenouma), a village perched on top of a rock four hundred feet high, with vertical sides. Formations like this are common in parts of the Sahara (such as the stone “forest” in the region of Tamrit), but they were new to the Englishmen, and a pleasant change from the deadly monotony of the ergs and pebbled plains. They had reached the center of a fertile stretch of country, with a drenched wadi running through the middle of it, rich in date palms. There was plenty of fine grass, and over the trona, or saltwater lakes, plovers wheeled and called to one another in immense numbers. Clapperton went out to shoot some for dinner. Fresh from a roasting spit, everyone feasted on the birds.

  On January 12, the party reached Bilma, capital of the Tebu country, a collection of dingy huts surrounded by a mud wall. Around the village were several more salt lakes. Bilma was the heart of the salt trade and one of the richest salt centers in Africa. The precious mineral was packed into bags and traded throughout the Fezzan. The Tuareg kept a careful balance between raiding and exterminating the Tebu, for they had no wish to kill all the workers who mined this valuable commodity, and the Tebu could be aggressive if provoked. Disinclined to manual labor themselves, the Tuareg were happy to allow the Tebu to perform the backbreaking work and, to a certain extent, prosper. They took what they wanted when they wanted it. The Tuareg saw it as a justifiable tax for, after all, they were the lords of the desert.

  It seemed the caravan would never reach Bornu. As the humidity increased, the march became a nightmare of heat and sand and flies, the eternal plodding of camels, and, at night, remorseless cold under glaring stars. They could not go back, and they hardly dared to go forward. By late January, the caravanners began to see vegetation—clumps of weedy grasses and flowers appearing for the first time. The weeks of unrelieved discomfort and torment were coming to an end; they were approaching the southern edge of the Great Desert.

  On February 5, 1823, after ninety days in the wilderness, the caravan reached the shores of Lake Chad, a body of water the size of Switzerland never before seen by a white ma
n. Reeds ten feet high lined the banks, hiding the surface of the lake. The papyrus tufts were a reddish green; the water a greenish gray, turning a pale gold in the evenings.

  Climbing the crests of low dunes, the travelers could see wide sheets of the great lake, but they had no idea just how extensive it was. The smooth surface reflected the splendor of the sunset—serene, majestic, indifferent, hard. They were astonished they could not see land on the distant horizon.

  Denham and Clapperton explored Lake Chad, a body of water the size of New Jersey never before seen by white men. Denham nearly circumnavigated the shallow freshwater lake, minutely documenting the hydrodynamics of its source, the River Shari, shown here in a sketch by Denham with local fisherman harvesting a catch in their unique canoes and sailing vessels

  “Glowing with the golden rays of the sun in its strength,” Denham wrote, “was the great Lake Tsaad, the key objective of our search.” He promptly renamed it Lake Waterloo, a name that did not stick. Although Leo Africanus had written of this strange inland sea centuries before, armchair geographers doubted its existence. A lake in the Sahara? Balderdash! And yet here it was.