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

by Frank T. Kryza

  White daylight poured onto the city walls, blinding yet reassuring. In the desert, sand entwined, concealed, bewildered, tormented—goaded by impetuous winds. Not so in Ghadames, where the sand was snowy and soft, an accomplice to truce with a desert that threatened just beyond city walls. In Ghadames, the sea appeared unwittingly in the colors used to paint the city. The cobalt of the deep ocean and the turquoise of waves against the sunlight defined the doors of the houses, painted blue. Even the sun, sinking into the blue horizon, enveloped the walls of the houses in a magical web of reflected tints of blue.

  *Satellite imagery shows that, as the crow flies, the distance between Tripoli and Ghadames is about 275 miles. The shortest land trail, to this day, is about 500 miles, given all the twists and turns occasioned by obstacles in the desert.

  *Laing’s close friend James Bandinel (1783–1849) was at the time employed as a clerk in the Foreign Office. He had earlier explored Melville Island in the Arctic and later became a prolific writer contra the slave trade. He preserved many of Laing’s letters, a collection that later become the property of the Royal Society, where it remains.

  *Zummita is roasted ground barley or a mixture of roasted barley flour, dates, and butter usually carried in a leather pouch. To this day, desert travelers typically dilute a little of this mixture with water in the palm of the hand or in a tin cup and make a paste which they consume before continuing on their way. It is the “fast food” of the Sahara.

  *“The souls of the damned,” a Coptic metropolitan of Khartoum once said, “speak through the throat of the camel.” It is a sound Paul Theroux has aptly called “that frightful groan, that awesome, existentially discontented noise.”

  ** A fonduk is a business establishment in northern Africa, or an inn or hotel.

  Chapter Twelve

  CLAPPERTON CATCHES UP

  HANMER WARRINGTON held Hugh Clapperton in high regard, and that was a frequent and intense source of irritation for Alexander Gordon Laing. At times, it appeared to Laing that Warrington was encouraging the more experienced sailor to rob him of what he hoped would be the capstone of his career.

  When Laing landed in Tripoli in May 1825, Warrington had already recommended that Clapperton, who had recently sailed for London, be sent back to Africa to search for the lower Niger from the Bight of Benin. The suggestion made sense from the standpoint of British policy, but it interfered with Laing’s personal plans, which involved reaching the same place via Timbuktu.

  Even more irritating—indeed, truly unendurable—was the train of correspondence from Warrington that dogged Laing as he crossed the Great Desert, letters suggesting that with Clapperton also in the field and likely to meet him en route, he would be able to cut short his journey and share the honors of discovery with his rival. That was the last thing Laing, thirsting for glory, wanted to do. Warrington was completely blind to this, or chose to ignore it.

  “I have endeavored,” Warrington wrote to Lord Bathurst after Laing left Tripoli, “to implant on the mind of Major Laing the cheering prospect of meeting Clapperton at Sockatoo.” Months later, he wrote to Laing, “You will certainly meet Clapperton at Yauri which I should think will render it unnecessary for you to go to Benin.” And two weeks later: “If you recollect, I always said you would meet Clapperton at Yauri & I think it more than probable now. He is an honest and good fellow & you will find him so.—When you meet him the course of the Niger is ascertained & I do not perceive the necessity of your going to Benin.”

  It was galling to Laing, now well into his perilous journey, to be told by his father-in-law that he expected Clapperton to forestall him in the main object of his expedition. Nonetheless, Laing’s confidence remained unshaken. “I understand,” he wrote to James Bandinel, his confidant in the Foreign Office, “that Captn. Clapperton has gone to the Bight to make the long looked for discovery, but he might have saved himself the trouble for the disclosure of that long hidden secret is left to me, as I hope to prove by March or April next.”

  Laing, for his part, would bide his time and go his own way, which he thought would be more worthwhile than “running a race with Captain Clapperton, whose only object seems to be to forestall me in discovery—Shou’d he succeed in reaching Tombuctoo, which I doubt much, I shall have much pleasure in meeting him.” Laing believed he would reach Timbuktu first, and he must have enjoyed imagining Clapperton’s reaction when he found Laing there, at the city gates, waiting to greet him.

  The Colonial Office, like Warrington, hoped that Clapperton would run into Laing somewhere in Africa, unaware that Clapperton also had no desire to meet the man he considered a challenger. Clapperton, too, had been told to proceed from Sokoto to Timbuktu—but only if Laing hadn’t made it there first. Lord Bathurst’s instructions (which Laing never saw), dated July 30, 1825, were explicit on this score: “You will also, during your stay in Central Africa, endeavour to visit the city of Tombuctoo, provided you shall not have heard that Major Laing had already accomplished that object,” words he must have found galling.

  There are sound reasons for thinking Clapperton was as jealous of Laing as Laing was of him, each man regarding the other as an unwelcome interloper. Warrington, who, to his great credit, was more committed to the results of exploration than in who would achieve them (notwithstanding his daughter’s vested interest in Laing’s success), had asked Clapperton, before returning to London, to leave him with any information about the interior helpful to Laing, who was shortly expected from Malta. That Warrington took the trouble, as he did, to record this request in a letter to Clapperton, then a guest in his house, suggests that he had been instructed to make it by the Colonial Office, and that he had already done so orally and received an unsatisfactory answer.

  This is what he wrote:

  To Lieutenant Clapperton. R.N.

  Sir,

  Having read to you the contents of a dispatch from the Right Honble Earl Bathurst of the 7th Dec. last, containing the information of the intention of His Lordship to send out an Officer direct to Tombuctoo to explore the course of the Niger.—I beg leave to submit to your consideration the propriety of your committing to paper whatever part of that important information you are in possession of which must tend considerably to assist the operations & labours of Capt. Laing & facilitate the object of the mission entrusted to Him—Probably a sketch of Bello’s map would be of the greatest importance accompanied with your Opinion & Advice & it only rests with me solemnly to assure you on my honor that whatever you may entrust to me will remain an inviolable secret with exception of communicating it to Capt. Laing on his arrival.

  With great esteem and friendly consideration

  I have the honour to be

  Sir,

  Your Obt. & Faithful Servt.

  [signed] H. Warrington

  Clapperton responded to Warrington the following day, when he must have received the written request, but he did not refer to it, possibly confirming the notion that he had no intention of helping Laing if he could avoid it. When Clapperton got back to London, he discovered that the colonial secretary, to whom he looked for further patronage, was in no mood to tolerate his pigheaded thinking. In August, Laing, who had reached Beni Ulid, wrote to Robert Wilmot Horton (Bathurst’s deputy) acknowledging, in a slightly acid tone, a letter “transmitting a copy of the opinions and suggestions which Lt. Clapperton had been called upon to furnish for my guidance…. [T]heir general tenor has been anticipated and acted upon.”

  Still smoldering over the letter he had received days earlier from his rival, Laing finally sent Warrington an amusing account of what Clapperton had said and what he thought of it. “By the bye,” he scrawled,

  I have received hints from the Colonial Office, furnished by Clapperton, evidently wrung from him for my guidance. They amount to this:

  “I must cordially co-operate with you.” Bono!

  “I must wear Turkish dress” just as “I must be kind and patient with the natives.” ’Tis not my nature to be o
therwise.

  “I must not take observations secretly.” The sun does not shine in sly corners!

  “I must not speak disrespectfully of the women.” I wonder how he found this out? I might have been a century in Africa and never made such a discovery!

  “I must not meddle with the females of the country.” Prodigious!

  “I must have presents to give away.” Sound advice!

  Having posted these sarcasms back to Tripoli, Laing struck off across the desert. “I care little for any information that Clapperton cou’d communicate,” he wrote to his friend Edward Sabine. “I smile at the idea of his reaching Tombuctoo before me—how can he expect it? Has he not already had the power? Has he not thrown away the chance? I cannot think what were his ideas—a man to be within two days of the Niger, and to come back without ever seeing it—I think I may safely aver, that had I been at Sakotoo—the problem wou’d have been long ago solved—and I feel certain that to me the honor of the solution is left.”

  In fact, some of Clapperton’s advice may have been wrong, if not outright dangerous. Mungo Park and many who came after him into Muslim territory often paid with their lives for refusing to conceal their Christian faith. And yet whether to penetrate these Muslim lands as an undisguised and professing Christian or a disguised and bogus Muslim became a highly controversial topic in British drawing rooms, where there were bound to be references to the treatment of Mungo Park who was, as he wrote, “obliged to suffer, with an unruffled countenance, the insults of the rudest savages on earth.”

  Some thought Laing would have been safer had he avoided wearing a “plain Turkish dress,” theorizing that no Englishman could credibly fool the local Arabs and would only invite their wrath by trying. Sir Richard Burton would prove them wrong thirty years later when he entered Mecca surreptitiously in 1855, but Burton was a master of disguise, spending hours on his makeup. Before his voyage, he took long baths in a spectrum of dyes to imbue his pale English skin with precisely the right color. He also submitted to the agony of circumcision. In Laing’s day, there was no consensus on how English explorers should present themselves in their African travels. There seemed to be deadly potential costs no matter what the approach.

  LORD BATHURST WAS IMPRESSED by Clapperton’s enthusiastic description of the newly discovered “Soudan lands,” and the respectful attention the explorer had received from Sultan Bello in February 1824. Bello’s promise to end slavery, and his invitation for an English consul and doctor to be sent out to Funda, had an authentic ring. British diplomacy had, as yet, nothing to do with African potentates, but the future seemed promising. Without hesitation, Bathurst commissioned Clapperton—who was eager to return to Africa as quickly as possible—to organize his second expedition to consolidate the work of the first. Its purpose would be to work out details with Sultan Bello for opening trade between Britain and the Hausa lands, and to further abolition of the slave trade.

  At Clapperton’s insistence, the Admiralty provided transportation for Clapperton and his party aboard the exceptionally fast sloop HMS Brazen. The logbook for the Brazen on August 28, 1825, reads: “Came on board Captains Clapperton and Pearce & Messrs Morison and Dickson and 4 Domestics on a Mission to the interior of Africa.”

  Accompanying Clapperton (without question, this time, chief of the mission) were Captain Robert Pearce, a naval officer who was second-in-command, Dr. Thomas Dickson, a Scottish surgeon, and Dr. Robert Morison, a naval surgeon who was also a naturalist.

  It was now the practice on African missions to take along a doctor, although precedent showed that, far from guaranteeing the health of the explorers, doctors were the climate’s first victims (indeed, Oudney and Ritchie had both been doctors). Notwithstanding the many expeditions sent to find the Niger and the large number of men who died of malaria and dysentery on these, no progress had been made in the treatment of tropical diseases by 1825. Fevers were believed to come from putrid air, and malaria had yet to be connected to mosquitoes. Fevers were all treated the same way, with bleeding, calomel, and emetics. Quinine was known as “a strengthening agent after fever or dysentery,” but using it prophylactically had as yet occurred to no one.*

  The logbook’s casual mention of four servants concealed the identity of a man who was to become one of the greatest of West Africa’s explorers: Richard Lemon Lander. Except for John Ledyard of Connecticut, the explorers searching for Timbuktu had until now all been army or navy officers like Clapperton and Laing, or physicians like Mungo Park. Lander, the accidental explorer, rose from working-class origins and came to Africa as a menial. He was born in 1804 in the Cornish town of Truro, the fourth of six children. His father kept a pub called the Fighting Cock and his grandfather had been a well-known wrestler at Land’s End in Cornwall. Lander left home at nine (for reasons he never revealed), and two years later went “into service” for a merchant who took him to the West Indies. He later went to South Africa as the servant of a colonial commissioner. In 1823 he returned to England, but he had become enamored of Africa. He wrote:

  Richard Lemon Lander, Clapperton’s servant and later his friend, in Arab dress, aged about twenty-five. With his brother, John, he returned to Africa to trace the course of the lower Niger Púver to its delta, thus solving a mystery that had puzzled geographers for centuries. Like Clapperton, he was claimed by Africa; he died in 1834, before he was thirty.

  There was a charm in the very sound of Africa that always made my heart flutter—whilst its boundless deserts of sand; the awful obscurity in which many of the interior regions were enveloped; the strange and wild aspects of countries that had never been trodden by the foot of a European, and even the very failure of all former undertakings to explore its hidden wonders, united to strengthen the determination I had come to.

  When he heard that Clapperton was setting out on a second mission, he volunteered to join him. Friends tried to dissuade him, citing the dangers and diseases, but Lander believed that “all men think all men are mortal but themselves.” He went to see Clapperton, who seemed “the very soul of enterprise and adventure.” Clapperton hired him on the spot. Lander, twenty-one years old when he left for Africa, was experiencing hero worship for his new boss. As the younger man observed, “It would not have been well for any haughtiness or reserve to be manifested toward me under such circumstances, merely because accident had thrown me into a lower rank of life than my master…. [S]uch, happily, was not the disposition of Captain Clapperton; the differences in our respective conditions were willingly levelled … and for my part I may justly say … that I would willingly have laid down my life for the preservation of his.”

  CLAPPERTON HAD LEFT SULTAN BELLO in Sokoto in May 1824 with the understanding that he would return by sea to the Gulf of Guinea. “Let me know the time,” the sultan told him, “and my messengers shall be down at any part of the coast you may appoint, to forward letters to me from the mission, on reception of which I will send an escort to conduct it to Soudan.” From Bornu’s capital of Kukawa, before setting off for Tripoli, Clapperton had confirmed to Bello in writing that he planned his return no later than July 1825. He hoped to land at Whydah (Ouidah), a natural harbor close to present-day Cotonou, Benin.

  When he got back to London (in June 1825) after an absence of more than forty months, Clapperton set to work impatiently to get back to Africa as quickly as possible, in spite of recurring attacks of what he called “the ague” (probably malaria). It was, of course, already far too late to rendezvous with Bello’s messengers in July, but Clapperton still hoped to reach the coast in time to make the 450-mile overland trip to Sokoto during the dry season. He stayed in England just long enough to outfit his second expedition and receive his new instructions from Bathurst.

  These instructions contained a long section on the suppression of slavery, charging Clapperton to “endeavour by every means … to impress on his [Sultan Bello’s] mind the very great advantages he will derive by putting a total stop to the sale of slaves to Christian merc
hants … and by preventing other powers of Africa from marching koffilas [slave caravans] through his dominions. You will inform him of the anxious desire which the King your Master [George IV] feels for the total abolition of this inhuman and unnatural traffic.”

  The Colonial Office directive reflected a slow turnabout in British slavery policy that can be credited to successful lobbying by abolitionists for many years. The Quakers had launched the campaign in 1783, after the rebellion of the American colonies in 1776 weakened vested proslavery interests. Within a quarter century, a band of ardent reformists succeeded in changing the attitude of a nation. In the House of Commons, William Wilberforce, “the nightingale of the House,” led a lifelong crusade against slavery. Abolitionists spread the humanitarian gospel of the age: the rights of man and the immorality of the ownership of humans. They gathered evidence on the inhuman treatment of slaves, organized a nationwide boycott of West Indian sugar, and drew up petitions to Parliament.

  At the same time, the economic underpinnings of slavery were weakening. In Britain, transformation from a mercantile to an industrial economy was under way, and the great trading companies found that their interests lay in opening new markets for industrial goods rather than in supporting slavery. Even before abolition, Liverpool was already diverting ships from the slave trade to cotton.

  One might take with a grain of salt the view of one well-known historian of eighteenth-century England: “The unweary, unostentatious, and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations.” The truth is, abolition also made sound business sense. Great Britain was, after all, a nation of capitalists.