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

by Frank T. Kryza

  Denham was peeved to hear from Tyrwhitt that Warrington had called him “unpopular,” and on June 25 he wrote to his brother Charles railing against “these insinuations by a man 1500 miles off who knows no more of the Interior of Africa than you do of the inside of the Lying In Hospital, who gets Drunk every night, and who Harasses the Minds of those he is bound to support with his Influence, that is the English Influence, for he has None in Tripoli, and when they have nothing but bad water to drink is rather unkind and ungenerous.”

  Denham took Tyrwhitt on an excursion along the southern tip of Lake Chad. On their return, they found Clapperton back, looking so awful Denham didn’t recognize him. “It was nearly eight months since we had separated,” Denham wrote, “and although it was midday I went immediately to the hut where he [Clapperton] was lodged; but so satisfied was I that the sunburnt sickly person that lay extended on the floor, rolled in a dark blue shirt, was not my companion, that I was about to leave the place, when he convinced me of my error, by calling me by name: the alteration was certainly in him most striking.”

  Together again at Kukawa, they found that the old hatreds still smoldered; they soon stopped talking to one another. Though their tents were a few yards apart, Clapperton informed Denham in writing of Oudney’s death.

  Communicating solely by letter, they could agree only that it was time to head north to Tripoli, and from there back to England. Both wanted badly to go home, where they each had solid achievements to report. As soon as he had recovered his health, Clapperton was determined to return to Africa and continue his dialogue with Sultan Bello. Denham had other plans: to parlay his experiences into a major book, bask in the limelight, and achieve leapfrog advancement in government service, perhaps as the governor of an African colony.

  Tyrwhitt was given the choice of going back with them. Although the deaths of Oudney and Toole must have been vivid in his mind, and the sight of the malarious Clapperton cannot have been reassuring, Tyrwhitt decided to stay.*

  On Tuesday, September 14, 1824, Clapperton, Denham, and Hillman set out across the desert along the same route they had taken twenty months earlier. They now faced, once again, a slow and painful journey across some of the worst country of the Sahara. The way back seemed a longer, harder march, with nothing but dates to eat. The camels bruised their padded feet on sharp rocks in the stony track; many died. Clapperton, weakened by malaria, suffered terribly. In spite of their common misery, nothing, it seemed, could improve relations between Clapperton and Denham. They did not share a spoken word during the whole 133-day crossing. Ten miles outside Tripoli, on January 25, 1825, the parched explorers saw a tent set up by Consul Warrington to greet them. Soon they were washing down anchovy sandwiches with “huge draughts of Marsala wine in glass tumblers,” experiencing the particularly intense sensation that comes from climbing out of a deep valley of pain to a threshold of pleasure. “It was quite indescribable,” Clapperton wrote.

  Back in Tripoli, Clapperton immediately drafted a letter to Warrington requesting that he open a formal inquiry into the charges Denham had made against him of homosexuality. He was astounded to hear that Denham had, months earlier, withdrawn the accusation.

  Warrington wisely persuaded Clapperton to let the matter drop, but the explorer then learned of a far more ominous threat: Lord Bathurst had sent another explorer, Captain Alexander Gordon Laing, on a Timbuktu-Niger mission.

  This was devastating news. In Sokoto, Clapperton had felt the Niger and Timbuktu within his grasp, merely days—weeks at most—away. Had Bello permitted it, he would already have clinched the prize, he thought. He realized now that he risked having it snatched from his hands by a younger man, an interloper who had never set foot in the Sahara.

  Like Mungo Park and others before him, Clapperton now became obsessed with Africa. Planning his next moves as he returned to Tripoli, he had not calculated that he was about to be caught up in a frenzied race with a fellow explorer, one he considered a poacher on what had become, because of the hardships already invested, his private hunting preserve. Though he had never met Laing, he recognized out of the blue that he detested him. Here was a man unworthy of the homage that would surely be accorded the discoverer of Timbuktu. Clapperton’s misfortunes—his malaria, his corrosive quarrels with Denham, the abominable death of his friend Oudney—all of these, instead of making him lose heart, had strengthened his determination to find the elusive river and the fabled town. Now all this was threatened, and by a mere tyro.

  Who would reach Timbuktu and the mouth of the Niger first? Clapperton was determined that it would be he. Adding to his frustration, the Colonial Office, unaware of the resentment Laing had aroused, ordered Clapperton to “commit to paper whatever part of that important information you are in possession of which must tend considerably to assist the operations and labors of Captain Laing.”

  Clapperton, enraged, refused this request. Why should he share secrets he had learned at such terrible personal cost? Warrington convinced him that the consequences of this stubbornness would be harsh, as Lord Bathurst had an icy and diminishing tolerance for the vanity of explorers. In the end, Clapperton reluctantly complied.

  Clapperton and Denham returned to England in June 1825, after an absence of three and a half years, to heroes’ welcome. They were promoted (Clapperton to captain and Denham to lieutenant colonel) and presented to George IV, who feted them at a weekend at Sandringham, the royal estate in Norfolk. The press compared them favorably to Marco Polo.

  In the England of their time, they were deemed successes. Considering the tensions involved, it is surprising they accomplished as much as they did. Though they failed to find Timbuktu or the termination of the Niger, they were the first Europeans to reach the kingdom of Bornu and stand on the shores of Lake Chad. They helped chart the African interior (chiefly owing to the accuracy of Clapperton’s surveys), about which nothing useful had been written since Leo Africanus in the sixteenth century. They had survived in the heart of Africa for three years, no small feat in itself, and demonstrated that the difficult “Tripoli route” across the Sahara to Bornu was passable by Europeans in Christian dress without insuperable dangers. They had proved that the mandate of the bashaw of Tripoli ran to Bornu (though not beyond), and that the Bornu kingdom and Sokoto caliphate were each important states, advanced and undiscovered civilizations, and great entrepôts of trade.

  Yet in its main goal the mission was a costly failure. Timbuktu remained undiscovered by Europeans and the question of the Niger’s termination remained unanswered. Complicating the Niger question, each of the explorers had a different and conflicting hypothesis. Oudney died convinced that the Niger emptied into a mysterious lake south of Lake Chad. Denham, who had explored more of Lake Chad than the other two, still believed the Niger was somehow connected to the great inland sea. Clapperton, on the basis of his talks with Sultan Bello, was converted to the idea that the Niger flowed into the Bight of Benin. Five years would pass before one of the three hypotheses was proved right.

  Having tasted celebrity, Clapperton was impatient to get back to Africa. This left Denham to write the account of the mission for publication. In this he not only cut all of Oudney’s interesting and useful report of the journey made to Ghat, but he watered down the contributions of both Oudney and Clapperton so that anyone reading his first draft would have surmised that the whole expedition had been carried out by one man, though here and there he acknowledged his comrades by interlarding the narrative with catty remarks about them. Fortunately, Sir John Barrow, secretary of the Admiralty and soon to become founder of the Royal Geographical Society, along with the publisher of the book, John Murray,* one of London’s most eminent editors, reviewed the manuscript. By comparing Denham’s draft with notes left them by Clapperton (including Oudney’s journals), they discovered the interpolations and excisions. Barrow reinserted some of the contributions of Oudney and Clapperton and cut most of Denham’s petulant carping.

  Still, in Narrative of Tra
vels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa, published in 1826, it sounds as if Denham traveled alone. The wealth of new material on the African interior made it a classic of exploration, but a flawed classic, for Denham succeeded in belittling the contributions of his partners while magnifying his own.

  Ironically, Denham, the self-proclaimed commander-in-chief of the mission, died before the solution to the mystery of the Niger became known. After capturing the popular admiration with his book, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and became the toast of London and a familiar guest at Lord Bathurst’s dinner table. He accumulated honors and was appointed governor of Sierra Leone in 1828. His return to West Africa proved his undoing, for he died there of fever the same year, aged forty-three.

  In reassessing Denham’s role today, it is hard to dissent from the verdict of one of the greatest amateur historians of African exploration, E. W. Bovill, who wrote of him in the early 1960s: “It remains difficult, in the checkered history of geographical discovery, to find a more odious man than Dixon Denham.” Denham, in the end, showed himself to be a duplicitous careerist with powerful friends who got him his place on the expedition roster and promoted him afterward. He succeeded in suppressing Clapperton’s account of the mission, at least for a time. Consequently, until the discovery of Clapperton’s journals years later, Denham’s account was the primary source dealing with the expedition.

  WHEN HUGH CLAPPERTON sailed to England in the spring of 1825, his ship’s wake must have crossed that of his rival, Alexander Gordon Laing. Laing had boarded his vessel in Falmouth in February to take him to Malta, and from there to Tripoli. Clapperton knew it was too late, if he was to catch up with Laing, to make his return journey from the north, so he persuaded Lord Bathurst to let him take the more dangerous path inland from the West African coast. From the swamp-infested shores of Sierra Leone, he would travel overland 450 miles due east to Timbuktu.

  This would cut 700 miles off the trip and give him, he hoped, the chance to overtake Laing.

  Dixon Denham, Clapperton’s nemesis, as he appeared shortly before his appointment as governor of Sierra Leone in 1827.

  To make up for time already lost, Clapperton persuaded the Admiralty to let him ship out on the speedy HMS Brazen, a sloop leaving for the West African coast to join the antislavery patrols then intercepting slave shipments to America. The Brazen left Spithead on August 28, 1825. Clapperton had been home less than three months.

  For his part, Lord Bathurst had high hopes that Clapperton would meet Laing in the African heartland, where the two men could join forces, greatly enhancing their chances of success by acting in concert over what Bathurst reckoned to be the smaller probability that either man would succeed alone. In the meantime, if they wanted to scramble to see who would be first, so be it. So long as it resulted in bonanzas for the British Crown, personal ambition, in Bathurst’s mind, was a perfectly acceptable spur for explorers, and cheaper than money.

  The race was on.

  *Hat Salah bore the title “Hajji” because he had made the pilgrimage, or hajj, to Mecca, prescribed as a religious duty for Muslims who could afford it, in those days a long and dangerous journey from Kano. Having performed this duty, such pilgrims were entitled (as they still are) to use, for the rest of their lives, the honorific “Hajji” or “El Hajj” before their names as a title of respect.

  *“Abdullah” was Clapperton’s traveling name. Rais simply means “chief” or “boss” and is still a common honorific in North Africa and the Middle East.

  *A fatal decision. Alcohol, loneliness, and fever sent Tyrwhitt to his grave only a few months after Denham and Clapperton left for the Mediterranean. His father’s reaction in Malta is not recorded.

  *John Murray (1778–1843), the son of the famous publisher of the same name, produced almost all of the most distinguished African travel books published in English in his lifetime. He was Laing’s publisher, as well as Sir Joseph Banks’s, Clapperton’s, Denham’s, Tuckey’s, and Lyon’s. Few men have done more (except Frank Cass, in the twentieth century) to inform the English reading public about Africa.

  Chapter Eleven

  OVER THE RIM OF THE WORLD

  DAYS BEFORE LEAVING TRIPOLI, Laing received the letter of advice Clapperton had been ordered to write by Lord Bathurst. It infuriated him. Counsel from a competitor, condescending at that, was the last thing he wanted as he set out on his great journey. The tone of the letter bent toward the patronizing. Clapperton advised Laing to be “kind and patient with the natives,” to take plenty of presents, and not to “meddle with local women.” Laing thought the language supercilious, haughty, disdainful—implying that Clapperton was the superior explorer and that Laing was a novice.

  Laing complained to Warrington that “we need not ghosts to rise from their graves to tell us such simple stuff.” He set out for Ghadames with the shadow of competition dogging him.

  To avoid bandits, Sheikh Babani mapped a circuitous route that doubled the distance from Tripoli to Ghadames from 500 to 1,000 miles.*

  The route across the Sahara, from Tripoli to Timbuktu, taken by Major Alexander Gordon Laing, as reconstructed in meticulous detail by the British amateur historian E. W. Bovill in the 1960s.

  Incredibly, Babani was still promising to get Laing to Timbuktu within ten weeks. The bashaw had allegedly paid Babani 4,000 Spanish dollars to see Laing safely to Timbuktu, but the sheikh told Laing he was doing it without pay and constantly dunned him for money. Everyone in the caravan appeared intent on extracting something from Laing. “I never met with such a set of greedy vagabonds,” he wrote to Warrington.

  Though he was dependent on Sheikh Babani, Laing had his own retinue of loyal men. With him were his Caribbean-born servant, Jack le Bore, and two West African ship’s carpenters: Roger, “a good-humored rough fellow, picking up Arabic fast,” and Harry, “a quiet, nobody disturbing sort of lad.” Laing also took camel drivers, a freed slave named Bongola, and a Jewish merchant and interpreter, Abraham Nahun. Eleven camels carried this menagerie. They were dressed as Muslims, mainly to avoid arousing comment from strangers, but “lest it should ever be supposed that we attempt to pass ourselves for what we really are not,” Laing wrote, he proposed to read prayers to his servants on Sundays, “on which days they would appear dressed as Englishmen.”

  Jack le Bore had been with Laing a long time. Laing records that he was “originally a native of Santo Domingo, and having entered into the French army as a trumpeter, was present at Austerlitz and many other of the important victories of Buonaparte…. He was taken prisoner in a French line battle ship by Sir Alexander Cochrane; after his exchange, he served in almost every country in Europe, and, at the peace, made his way back from Denmark to England, whence he volunteered for the late Royal Africa Corps, in which he served as bugle-major.” He met Laing on the Gold Coast and went with him to Falaba. His experience as an explorer in Africa was more extensive than Laing’s. He had the Scotsman’s absolute trust.

  The two naval carpenters worried Laing. “My two sailors,” he wrote, “although superior to the general run of the class to which they belong, are nevertheless exceedingly thoughtless, and give me much unnecessary trouble in watching them, for heedless of the dangers which attend such doings in these countries they will run after the ladies and entail annoyance and inconvenience upon both themselves and me.” He brought them along because he intended to navigate the Niger and they would be needed to make a vessel. In his baggage he also carried naval plumb lines for sounding the river depths.

  Laing’s expedition, officially christened the Timbuktu Mission by Lord Bathurst, had dual objectives: to find Timbuktu and the mouth of the Niger. Laing, like Clapperton, considered himself the successor to Mungo Park, and he set out to complete Park’s work by discovering the main course of the great river and its termination. The still-undiscovered city of Timbuktu, which Park had asserted lay close to the river, was clearly the key to the Niger. From Timbuktu Laing and his mentors though
t it would be possible, in spite of what had befallen Park, to follow the Niger to its mouth. At least its middle and lower course could more likely be traced from that point than by groping blindly in the wholly unexplored heart of the continent. Above all, Laing was impatient to reach the river before Clapperton, who he feared would “snatch the cup from my lips,” as he put it in a letter to his confidant, Bandinel.* By traveling through the dry desert from the north, he believed he had an excellent chance of succeeding.

  From the walls of Tripoli, Laing’s caravan crossed the semidesert flanking the coastal oases, a district sparsely populated by Bedouin tribesmen. They were traveling toward Beni Ulid, to the southeast, instead of directly toward Ghadames, to the southwest. The travelers picked their way past patches of green where rainwater had collected behind heaps of broken stone that had once formed Roman dams.

  In this, the earliest stage of the long journey, the most prominent point on the horizon was a diminutive mountain, a dark and forbidding rock frowning over the southern end of the Tripolitanian oasis. This mountain was said to warn of the approach of caravans from the south, its other side, for when it “sang,” Babani said the locals knew a caravan was about to come into view. The noise was likely produced by wind blowing through crevices of the torn rock.

  They reached Beni Ulid on August 1. Here they found a letter from Warrington that had overtaken the caravan. It told Laing that Clapperton was making a journey eastward from the Guinea coast and hoped to reach Sokoto, where he would meet his old friend Sultan Bello. Warrington expected Laing to make his way to Sokoto from Timbuktu so the two travelers could join forces. Laing was affronted by this idea, which he termed “hare-brained” to his fellow travelers, and sent a tepid reply back to Tripoli.