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

by Frank T. Kryza

  A pathetic funeral service followed. Lander asked Bello for permission to bury his leader, and the sultan grudgingly put a court official and four slaves at his disposal. Clapperton’s body was planted on the back of a camel and draped with the Union Jack. Lander headed the procession out of Sokoto. “We travelled,” he wrote, “almost unobserved and at a solemn pace and halted near Jungavie, a village built on rising ground five miles southeast of the city.” No one listened as Lander read the Church of England burial service, his voice drowned out by the slaves who stood near the grave shrieking, not from grief, but rather about how the gratuity for their services should be divided.

  Hired as a servant, Lander now found himself alone in the African interior, commander of an expedition of one, surrounded by enemies and exhausted by illness. He too had malaria, and lay on his mat at Sokoto alternately sweating and shivering for two weeks after Clapperton’s death. Bello’s men searched the hut for weapons. They made it clear Lander was unwelcome and should leave expeditiously. Clapperton was dead, and Richard Lander’s position must have seemed to him a nightmare. What hope did he have? What possible chance could there be for a safe return to England? He wrote, despairingly,

  One hundred and fifteen days journey from the sea coast, surrounded by a selfish and barbarous race of strangers, my only friend and protector and last hope mouldering in his grave, and myself suffering dreadfully from fever, I felt as if I stood alone in the world and wished, ardently wished, I had been enjoying the same deep undisturbed cold sleep as my master, and in the same grave.

  This, it turned out, was far too bleak a view. Lander, as he would now demonstrate, had a knack for dealing with people at a personal level with all the warmth that Clapperton lacked. He made allies at Bello’s court. He was a “commonsense” sort of person and he was good at making the right decisions on gut instinct. Lander’s “last hope” was not, in fact, Hugh Clapperton, but his own fierce determination to live.

  Intent at first on carrying out Clapperton’s last wishes and returning via the northern route to Tripoli, he got permission from Bello to depart Sokoto with an escort. When he reached Kano, he was too poor to buy the camels and equipment he needed to cross the desert, so he decided to return the way he had come, to the coast and Badagri. He had already traveled this route, and he was glad not to have to join unfriendly Arabs for the long desert crossing. Also, he had caught from Clapperton the urge to discover, to be an explorer in his own right, and wanted, if the chance arose, to follow the Niger to the ocean in a canoe.

  Crossing Yoruba country with Pasco, Lander survived the trials that were by now familiar to Niger explorers: he nearly drowned crossing a river; he was speared by a Yoruba warrior; he had to give presents wherever he went; and he was nearly murdered by the comically evil eunuch Ebo, King Mansoleh’s adviser, who had harassed the explorers on the trip out.

  Lander was resourceful. When asked for a charm to cure infertility, rather than ridicule the patient, he offered cinnamon oil, a scent unknown to the locals, which impressed them deeply. He was happy to dispense magical potions and written charms, writing out scraps of English ballads against a variety of ailments. One good turn deserving another, the emir of Zaria offered Lander a young female slave for a wife, and he “accepted her with gratitude, as I knew she would be serviceable to me on my journey.” She washed his feet, bathed his temples with lime juice, and fanned him to sleep.

  Lander reached Badagri on November 21, 1827, seven months after Clapperton’s death. Gazing at the bay, fringed with palms and cocoa trees and the whitecaps on the great Atlantic Ocean beyond, he was sure his troubles were over. He had run the gauntlet of the African interior and was now only a ship’s journey from England. In fact, the most dire threat to his life was still ahead.

  Badagri in 1827 was a hellish place, a festering market for slaves run by thugs of a peculiarly brutal stripe, many of them Portuguese gangsters from Brazil. Since the English policed local waters, the slavers were afraid that Lander’s presence portended a raid from the Blockade Squadron. A trio of bandits went to the king of Badagri and told him that Lander was a spy. If he wasn’t stopped, they warned, he would return with an army. The gullible chief summoned Lander to a ritual “fetish hut.” Surrounded by hundreds of overexcited, spear-brandishing locals, the chief told Lander: “You are accused, white man, of designs against our kingdom, and are therefore desired to drink the contents of this vessel, which if the reports be true, will surely destroy you; whereas, if they be without foundation, you need not fear, Christian; the fetish will do you no injury, for the fetish will do that which is right.”

  Lander was presented a wooden bowl of clear liquid, probably a potion, he later speculated, made from an extract of the poisonous bark of the redwater tree,* and told to drink it. From the expression on the king’s face, he saw there was no alternative. “I took the bowl in my trembling hands,” he wrote, “and gazed for a moment at the sable countenances of my judges; but not a single look of compassion shone upon them; a dead silence prevailed in the gloomy sanctuary of skulls; every eye was intently fixed upon me; and seeing no possibility of escape, I offered up a prayer to the Throne of Mercy—the God of Christians—and hastily swallowed the fetish, dashing the poison chalice to the ground.”

  Lander got to his hut as fast as he could, where he forced himself to vomit the poison, evidently getting it all out in time. Since the fetish was often fatal, in the hours that followed, his accusers were amazed to see him still walking. The chief concluded that he must be under divine protection. Convinced now of his error, he befriended Lander, warning him never to go out alone or unarmed, for the Portuguese slavers would murder him at the first opportunity.

  With this trial behind him, Lander waited for a ship. He took ethnographic notes, appalled at the human sacrifices prevalent here. Prisoners of war were taken to the “fetish tree” and given flasks of rum to drink as they were bludgeoned to death with sledgehammers and picks. “The head is severed from the trunk with an axe,” he wrote, “and the smoking blood gurgles into a calabash. While this is in hand, other wretches furnished with knives cut and mangle the body in order to extract the heart entire from the breast, which being done, although it be yet warm and quivering with life, it is presented to the king … and his majesty and suite make an incision in it with their teeth, and partaking of the foamy blood, the heart is … affixed to the point of a tall spear and … paraded through town.”

  IN FEBRUARY 1828 the captain of the English brig Maria, hearing that an Englishman was stranded at Badagri, came to rescue Lander. The Maria took him to the island of Fernando Po, where the tired traveler was told a veteran explorer from an earlier mission to West Africa wanted to speak to him. This was none other than Dixon Denham, now resplendent in the feathered hat and gold-trimmed coat of His Majesty’s governor of Sierra Leone.* Denham heard from Lander that his old nemesis and mission partner Hugh Clapperton had died in Sokoto. Ever punctilious, Governor Denham “expressed infinite concern to hear of the fate of his coadjutor in the previous expedition,” Lander wrote.

  Lander, who had left home in 1825 a servant, returned to England three years later a hero, but one of peculiar appearance. He wrote that “on arriving in London, I was met in the streets by a Jew, who ran forth and cordially embraced me, asking how I had left our Hebrew brethren in Jerusalem. The fellow, by my beard and singular appearance, had taken it into his head that I belonged to his own fraternity, and was just returning from visiting the Holy City.”

  Richard Lemon Lander would go on to edit and publish, in 1830, what remained of Hugh Clapperton’s journals and records, guaranteeing Clapperton’s posthumous reputation as one of Britain’s great African explorers. That year, with his brother John, Lander returned to Africa and traced the course of the lower Niger to its delta, thus solving at last the question that had dogged Sir Joseph Banks so many years earlier. Published in 1832 in London, their joint account made both men celebrities. Lander had located the mouth of the rive
r Englishmen had sought for more than half a century, and it was in a place—the Oil Rivers—England’s sailors had known well for decades. The course of the great river Niger* could finally be traced, from origin to mouth.

  Thoroughly seduced by Africa, Richard Lander made a third trip there organized by Macgregor Laird in 1832, a commercial venture. That journey proved fatal. He survived Clapperton by seven years, killed by angry Africans in 1834, at twenty-nine still a young man.

  HISTORY HAS NOT BEEN KIND to Hugh Clapperton, never according him the fame Sir Richard Burton would later earn for his travels in East Africa (and for the gripping and wonderfully literate books he wrote), nor that granted to Henry Morton Stanley, who crossed the continent from ocean to ocean. Hugh Clapperton’s fragmentary contribution to the world’s increasing store of geographical knowledge earned him little credit, and no respect. There was not much romance in his expeditions, and less in his writing. He lacks the grace of Livingstone, the literary virtuosity of Burton, the personable qualities of Speke, the self-promoting (but always readable) compulsions of Stanley. Though lacking Stanley’s flair, in other ways he most resembles that explorer: tough, indomitable, irascible, certain of the rightness of his own causes, never willing to concede defeat. But he was not a gifted storyteller and he did not live to tell the tale of his second expedition in a book. But for Lander, and the account of his first trip Barrow insisted Denham include in Denham’s own narrative, he might be remembered only in footnotes.

  Too many men died under Clapperton’s command, and England seemed, temporarily, to have tired of the exploits of explorers in Africa, where men went mainly, it seemed, to die, discomfiting those who had sent them. Public interest in Africa would take thirty years to rekindle.

  Sadly, Clapperton went to his grave without having achieved any of his official goals. He did not find Timbuktu or the Niger’s mouth, nor did he reach an agreement with Sultan Bello to end slavery. His journal, retrieved by Lander, is for the most part dry and colorless, though long and detailed. Clapperton, wrote Lander, was “never highly elated … nor deeply depressed,” and one result of this stolid disposition was flat writing. Denham, who had published his florid and self-serving account of their first expedition, won all the attention and glory. This was unfair, for through his qualities of courage and leadership, and the way he stuck to his instructions at whatever cost (and in so many other respects), Clapperton was a far better explorer, and without question the better man.

  *In part because he was haunted by the memory of his father, Othman Dan Fodio, whose reputation as a warrior had grown to mythic proportions after his death. The shadow of his memory darkened Bello’s reign.

  *These were primitive medications of the era. Seidlitz salts were effervescing salts consisting of two powders stored in separate bottles, one with forty grains of sodium bicarbonate mixed with two drams of Rochelle salt (potassium sodium tartrate), and the other with thirty-five grains of tartaric acid per dose. When mixed together in water, they fizz impressively. Consumed while effervescing, they are a mild cathartic. Laudanum was a tincture of opium (usually dissolved in fortified wine, such as sherry) used as a painkiller, though it was rarely efficient because it also caused vomiting before the narcotic could be absorbed. Epsom salts, named for Epsom, England, were a bitter white crystalline salt consisting of magnesium sulfate, also having cathartic qualities when dissolved in water. These harsh chemicals, administered to a man near death, would tend to hasten it, though Lander, of course, could not have known this.

  *This tree (Erythrophleum guineense) is quite prevalent up and down the modern coast, where it is called “sasswood,” “ordeal tree,” “truthwood,” or “doom bark.” It is a large spreading tree valued for its shade. The boiled bark yields a red decoction containing a poisonous alkaloid, erythrophleine, which has properties similar to strychnine. In a bizarre irony, the tree’s wood, which is very hard and useful for carving, is nontoxic and makes elegant salad bowls, which are as strong as cast iron.

  *A post he would keep only months. He died May 8, 1828, at Freetown, of “coastal fever” (probably malaria), another victim of African disease.

  *At 2,950 miles in length, it is the world’s fourteenth longest stream, a tad longer than the Missouri.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE CITY OF LEGEND

  IN THE LAST DAYS of travel before Timbuktu itself came into view, Laing was under constant pressure from Mohammed bin Mokhtar, the late Sheikh Mokhtar’s son, to turn back. “This is not the time to visit the city,” Sidi Mohammed said. “The Fulani of Massina are about to seize the whole river.” In fact, it was no time for any foreigner to linger at the southern edge of the Sahara. Death was in the air.

  As Sidi Mohammed later reported to Warrington, all efforts to persuade Laing to turn back failed, though he was still a sick man and his superiors could not have held it against him had he simply made straight for the coast. But that was not going to happen; Sidi Mohammed did not understand what Timbuktu meant to Alexander Gordon Laing.

  Laing must have looked at his own footprints in the red murrum soil at the edge of the desert, not far from where the land became fertile, and realized that no Englishman had ever stood within 300 miles of where he now stood, not for centuries, anyway, and certainly not in recorded history. To turn back now? He was so close.

  And yet, to risk death again, to risk never seeing his wife, his beloved Emma. To risk entering a city where he might be executed on the spot. A reconnaissance without the possibility of retreat, without the well-trained reinforcements he had commanded in doing battle with the Ashanti. At this moment, Laing must have recognized he had reached the most critical stage of his journey. He had to pass through the last gate. Was he strong enough, was he clear-sighted enough, to meet this final challenge? Had he assessed correctly what lay ahead?

  A trip across the Sahara he had estimated would take, at most, a few weeks had in fact taken 399 days—he had counted every one—fifty-seven weeks of loneliness, suffering, privation, and bloodshed, fourteen months of solitude, without the companionship of a native of his own land, without the woman he loved—the wife he had abandoned just four days into their marriage. More than a year of solitary travel, including a horrific attack that had shattered his bones, crippled him, and nearly bled him dry.

  Laing was at the edge of the Great Desert. It was his destiny, he had written, to be the first explorer to reach Timbuktu. Now, the reddening and diminishing sand, the hint of moisture that came from the south, the smell of black Africa in the air, told him his victory was near. He would become the first European to visit Timbuktu, the first white man to see the city since a Plantagenet sat on the English throne. Nothing would stop him. No terrors, no hamada devils, no Fulani warriors…. He had been promised this prize, he was certain of it.

  Excepting the possibility of his death, what lay ahead was fulfillment. Fame, riches, the personal thanks of his king, the recognition that was his due, he felt, but that previously, in a profoundly painful and personal sense, had never come. If life had denied him position in an aristocracy of birth, he would now show he was worthy of membership in the aristocracy of merit, courage, intellect, and strength—an aristocracy of greater privilege than any duchy or earldom could imbue. He must have slept soundly that last night in the desert, a man convinced of his purpose.

  ON SUNDAY, August 13, 1826, more than a year after he kissed Emma good-bye and eight months to the day before Hugh Clapperton’s death, Alexander Gordon Laing saw the high walls of the lost city. Scorning his Muslim disguise, he threw it off and “as a Christian envoy of the King of England” boldly entered a place reputed to be as fanatically anti-Christian as Mecca itself.

  A sketch of Timbuktu by René Caillié made two years after Laing became the first European in several centuries to enter the “fabled lost city of Central Africa.” Caillié recorded that he was as profoundly disappointed by what he found there as Laing had been.

  He had found Timbuktu, the great
caravan terminal, the city that touched both desert and river, the mysterious trading metropolis built on gold, jewels, and ivory. He was the first Briton, and the first modern European, to set foot in this, the last truly remote population center on earth.

  Laing presented himself to Timbuktu’s governor, Othman bin Boubakr, who received him courteously and installed him in a little mud house (later restored, and which exists to this day). There he could rest and escape the sun. He was free to wander about the town; he even rode out, after nightfall, to Kabara, the port district of the city on the Niger. His military rank, coupled with his dignified bearing, so impressed the townspeople that they christened him “El Rais”—the Chief.

  The city center, about seven miles from the port, indicated that the Niger had shifted over the centuries, as all large-volume rivers do on flat land. At one time there had been a canal linking river and town, but silt had made it unusable. Timbuktu’s golden age had unquestionably ended long ago; the city was no longer a bustling center of culture and commerce.

  Laing was surely disappointed to discover in Timbuktu not even the palest shadow of the city abounding in wealth and architectural wonders that he—and all Europe—had imagined. The metropolis was quite obviously caught in a spiral of decay and war. The urban center, a sprawling river settlement, was little more than a collection of discontinuous mud villages scattered over acres of mud flats. A thousand years old, it had a look of irreversible decrepitude. Unprepossessing even from a distance, up close Timbuktu was dirty and falling apart, stinking horribly of unwashed people and sick animals. Potholes riddled streets that were thick with windblown garbage. The air reeked of dung and the pungent odor of stale urine. Rotting waste and the detritus of recent riots blocked every alley. Sand blew across scrawny acacia trees, hobbled camels, and domed huts. Inertia gripped everyone and everything.