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

by Frank T. Kryza

  While waiting for the courier to depart, Emma wrote her last, memorable letter to her husband.

  Tripoli, 10th November, 1826

  Yesterday, my beloved Laing, I had the pleasure of closing my letters and delivering them to the Maraboot and Jacob, who are now on the road to meet my own adored husband. I now begin to feel some ray of comfort. The departure of these people shews me that there is some prospect of my again being restored to happiness which for many a long month has been a stranger to my bosom. I have, this moment, by the Consul’s desire taken a duplicate of a letter, which he has already sent by the Maraboot, and by that letter I see that I have been kept in perfect ignorance of all the dreadful, cruel reports in circulation about you. I do not know whether so doing was cruelty or kindness. Why let me deceive myself with the hopes of your speedy return? The month I first expected you to return in passed away, and disappointed and sickened, I looked forward to the next, but to be disappointed again. At last the dreadful truth was revealed to me and without being at all prepared for it, the blow was most severe. I heard of your wounds, of your sickness—the chill of death appeared to pass over me, not a word, not a complaint could I utter, not a tear would fall from my eyes to relieve the agonising oppression of my heart. I spent the whole night in a state of stupefaction, not understanding anything I heard. The morning dawned, the first object that presented itself to my eyes was your dear picture which hung from my neck. At the sight, my recollection returned to me, and I wept over it almost heartbroken.

  Oh, my beloved, dearest Laing, alas, alas, what have you been exposed to, what danger, what suffering. To have saved you one pang, I would with joy have shed every drop of blood that warms this heart. Had I been with you in that fearful moment, my arms would have encircled you, might for some time have shielded you from the swords of those Daemons, and, at last, we might have fallen, pierced by the same weapon, our souls might have taken their flight together to that land where sorrow can never come. My beloved Laing, sorrow has laid a heavy hand on your Emma’s head, and so it has on yours. Alas, Laing, how cruel, how sad has been our fate. Are we destined to endure more misery, or will a kind Providence at length pity our unhappiness and restore us to each other? Will you, my own idolised husband, return to your Emma’s fond arms, will you come and repose on her faithful bosom? Will you restore happiness to her torn heart?

  Never for a Moment, my beloved Laing, have you been absent from my thoughts. You have always been present to my imagination, waking and sleeping. You will find your Emma the same in heart and soul, as when you last embraced her, entirely and forever devoted to her Laing. God of Heaven protect you, dearer to me than life. May he guide you in health and safety and may your own dear Emma be cold in death ere she shall again hear tidings of any evil or unhappiness having befallen her idolised husband.

  Adieu, my dear beloved, May Heaven soon restore you to the arms of your adoring, devoted wife,

  Emma Gordon Laing

  Emma Laing’s writing, like that of so many women of her era, was prone to what a modern reading sees as melodrama. But her own sincerity, and the effect of her words on her husband, cannot be doubted—she nearly brought him back from the desert when, at Ghadames, he unwrapped the ivory miniature and read how much she missed him. But in ending this letter with such heartrending words, she indicates that somewhere deep in her heart, perhaps she doubted she would ever see her husband again.

  The letter was never delivered, because Laing was not in Ghadames to receive it. Some years later, all these documents found their way back to Tripoli, where they were returned to the British consulate. Rather than restore Emma’s letter to his daughter, Warrington filed it in the consular archives. Of the many letters she is known to have sent to Laing on his long journey, it is the only original known to have survived.

  Christmas of 1826, a year beyond the Christmas Laing had promised he would be back in her arms, was a black time for Emma. In a tiny consular community prone to little cheer even in the best of times, rumors of bad news circulated obscenely, their repetition the major pastime of bored consuls and their hapless wives. Though the Warrington parents conspired with their other children to shelter Emma as much as possible from lurid speculation about Laing’s fate, averted faces, whispering that stopped at her approach, and looks of pity from her mother’s friends, even if inadvertent, must have been daily trials for her.

  Concern about Laing had been growing in Consul Warrington’s mind from the day he learned of the Tuareg attack, and he took advantage of his frequent audiences at the Castle to pump Yusuf Bashaw (whose “desert grapevine” was unsurpassed) for news. By the first days of the new year Warrington was becoming visibly worried. He put increasing pressure on the bashaw and his foreign minister to find out what had happened to Major Laing. After all, the British government had paid Tripoli’s ruler handsomely to assure Laing’s safety, and Warrington believed that Karamanli’s influence extended much farther than it really did. In Warrington’s mind, all answers lay at the Castle.

  In the early months of 1827, as rumors of Laing’s death circulated among the elites of Tripoli, Emma, finding the labored optimism of her parents intolerable, turned for sympathy and understanding to Timoléon Rousseau, eldest son of the French consul, who had long sought to marry her, starting his courtship of her well before Laing’s arrival in May 1825.

  Emma was usually not permitted to leave home unchaperoned, but now an exception was made. Though Warrington despised Timoléon, he let him take his daughter on long walks in town. The English Garden, though beautiful, was a lonely place, and Warrington understood that Emma found relief by losing herself in the crowds and bustle of the old city, in the company of the only male friend close to her own age.

  Nearly four months after his departure, at the end of February 1827, Warrington’s courier returned from Ghadames “without news, except that the letters to Major Laing had been forwarded south.” This was a blow to Warrington. He had hoped Jacob would find Laing in Ghadames and that they would return together. By now gossips in Tripoli spoke openly of Laing’s “disappearance” and the mystery surrounding his fate.

  It was Warrington’s nature to believe in plots, in part because of his long service in Tripoli, where conspiracies were always in the air. The paucity of news about Laing and the failure of any of his letters, journals, or papers to materialize led Warrington to suspect that a conspiracy hatched by his archenemy, Baron Rousseau, with the complicity of the bashaw or his intermediaries, must be responsible for Laing’s misfortunes. He began to imagine Yusuf Bashaw guilty of treachery, focusing his wrath mainly on one of the bashaw’s principal aides, his Francophile foreign minister, Hassuna D’Ghies.

  In March 1827, Warrington’s pressure on Yusuf Bashaw began to yield results. The ruler provided him with a poor English translation of a letter (but not a copy of the original) from a certain Mohammed el Washy, probably a merchant, undated, but addressed from Ghadames.

  To His Highness The Bashaw saluting &c:

  Respecting what you have written me, regarding the Christian & desiring me to send to Inquire about Him & to obtain certain news I prepared every thing to set off, & Provision I had sent on, & we intended to start in the morning, when there arrived some People in the Eveng. from Tuat, by which I received a Letter from my Friend, mentioning that the Christian was Dead after His arrival at Tombuctoo who came with the son of Sheikh Mocktar & after their arrival the Felata took Tombuctoo, & demanded that the Christian should be sent away, otherwise they would Plunder the Town.

  When the People of Tombuctoo found that the Felata were determined to have Him, they assisted Him to escape & gave Him a Man to conduct Him to Banbarra, the Felata hearing this followed Him on the road & Killed Him. This is the true news, & come from God.

  Just after this document arrived from Ghadames, the bashaw also forwarded a longer missive from Mohammed bin Mokhtar, who had helped conduct the injured Laing from his late father’s camp in the desert to the gates of Timbukt
u.

  Then it was that he [Laing] entreated us to send him with an escort to Timbuctoo, and to trust him to his fate…. [T]hen we gave him camels and confided him to one of our cousins, who accompanied him to Timbuctoo without the least disagreeable accident.

  About their arrival at Timbuctoo, came the letter of Hammed Ben Mohammed Labbou, a Tollany [probably Fulani], who possesses and resides upon the territory of Jeuni and that neighbourhood, in which he advises and commands to prevent the passage of Christians who come by sea to the interior of Soudan from Timbuctoo and from all places under their dominion….

  He adds that this hindrance is ordered by the Sovereign of the Faithful Sultan Mohammed Bello, who gives him to understand the intention of the Christians, and says that Soudan is feeble, and that the consequences of these visits of the Christians will be mischievous, and the cause of perpetual war.

  Then at the arrival of this order, the chief persons of Timbuctoo were embarrassed between obedience to the order of their new Sovereign, and the consideration they had for our recommendation. In order to reconcile the two interests, they permitted him to remain at Timbuctoo about a month, without allowing him to pass by water, until he met with the enemy of God and his prophet, Hamed Ben Abayd Ben Rachal El Barbuchy who persuaded him that he was able to conduct him to Arawan, from thence in order to embark at Sansandyng, and thence to continue his road to the great ocean.

  They departed from Timbuctoo together. When they reached almost half way, this guide ordered his negroes to seize the traveller in a cowardly manner, and to put him to a cruel death…. After this shocking action he searched his baggage. Every thing of a useless nature, as papers, letters, and books, were torn and thrown to the wind, for fear they should contain some magic, and the articles of value were retained. This is the faithful history of the circumstances. He who adds to or takes from these particulars does not declare the truth.

  Warrington was aghast. Who was Hamed Ben Abayd Ben Rachal El Barbuchy? This was a name unknown in Tripoli. And how could anyone expect him to believe that one Muslim would denounce another powerful Muslim as “the enemy of God and his prophet”? Surely, too, it was perfectly improbable that a Muslim sheikh writing to the Muslim ruler of Tripoli would privately mourn the death of a Christian? The letter had to be a piece of showmanship intended for English eyes, Warrington believed. The death of a Christian was usually a cause for rejoicing. Warrington was not sure what or whom to believe. Dutiful consul that he was, he sent copies of both letters to the Colonial Office under the following cover letter to Earl Bathurst:

  Tripoli, 31st March, 1827

  My Lord,

  I have the honor to refer your Lordship to [attached letters] being copies of two letters His Highness’s Minister brought to me this morning. In the evening arrived my Dragoman & Jacob (Clapperton’s late servant) who placed in my hands [more letters] evidently being meant as justification for having quitted their Post.

  It is indeed My Lord sad news, & although not confirmed to the full extent I do fear it is but too true—but I pray to God Almighty that it may prove otherwise …

  Warrington doubted the sheikh had written to the bashaw quite as the letter alleged. Indeed, everyone in Tripoli’s consular community knew that the bashaw, at this period, was fearful he would be indicted as an accessory to Laing’s death by the British government, and that he tried hard to appear well disposed toward Laing. But there was someone else at court who was not fond of Laing, or anyone English, and this man now found himself the target of Warrington’s ire.

  The British consul, distrusting the letters and angered beyond endurance by the delays in receiving Laing’s dispatches and obtaining reliable news about him, demanded a special audience with Yusuf Bashaw, which was granted on April 20, 1827. On entering the throne room, “it must have been immediately apparent from his demeanour that Colonel Warrington meant business,” according to a memorandum of the meeting written by his vice-consul, Giacomo Rossoni.* “The Bashaw’s impassive countenance, schooled as it was by race, training and tradition, betrayed no emotion, but his hand, as it stroked his beard, had the tremor that in a man of another faith might have denoted alcoholism [the bashaw had a well-known fondness for brandy]. When the Bashaw began to prevaricate, the Consul abandoned diplomatic language and attacked Hassuna directly.”

  Hassuna D’Ghies, the bashaw’s foreign minister, was the son of Mohammed D’Ghies, once Tripolitania’s prime minister. In 1818 Hassuna, still a young man, had been sent to Europe by his parents to complete his education, and he stayed in France for several years, learning to speak French fluently. He earned unwelcome notoriety in Marseilles for his “extravagance and folly,” becoming an early-day Arab playboy, “offering the ladies perfumes and shawls,” according to the French newspaper Le Sémaphore de Marseille.

  From Marseilles he went to London, steeped in debt, escorted by “women and creditors.” His preoccupation with money problems combined with his affinity for the French may have motivated Hassuna, according to Warrington’s hypothesis, to hinder Laing and other British explorers from penetrating into the interior. British influence, as he well knew, could eclipse the French in their efforts to colonize Africa and possibly presage the demise of the slave trade, an important source of his personal wealth. Upon his return to Tripoli (in November 1825), Hassuna was named minister for foreign affairs by Yusuf Bashaw. Hassuna had family ties with the Karamanlis, as well as wide-ranging business interests in Tripoli and Ghadames.

  Consul Warrington had been wary of Hassuna from the day of his appointment. Hassuna did little to conceal his preference for all things French to Britain and the British. Moreover, his post gave him access to incoming documents, including letters or dispatches Laing might have sent home with any merchant doing business with the Castle, or any minor functionary of the bashaw’s government. Warrington also knew that Hassuna was heavily in debt and needed money urgently—he owed 60,000 francs to the French consul alone.

  That April day in the Castle, Warrington was livid. He suspected that Hassuna had intercepted official communications from Laing to His Britannic Majesty’s government. “From Laing’s remarks in the few despatches which had been received from him, it was obvious that other despatches had not arrived,” Rossoni recounted. Where were they? What explanation could Hassuna give for the delay in delivering Laing’s letters and dispatches?

  At first, Hassuna was evasive, but Warrington was in no mood to put up with half-truths. He pressed hard. “Hassuna’s face assumed a yellowish, unhealthy tinge. Cornered, he muttered in Arabic, ‘Well, it is no great matter after all.’ The Bashaw, angered by his minister’s loss of face, was stung out of his impassivity. He raved at Hassuna in the same language. ‘No great matter, indeed! No great matter….’ The minister shrank away, appalled by the Intensity of his Master’s Rage, as His Highness added that he would appoint another to be his Intermediary with the British Consul.”

  The bashaw was in an unenviable position. European explorers had died before, but never with such alarming consequences. It is entirely possible that he did not have the slightest idea what had happened to Laing or his papers, and he probably could not begin to understand the tremendous importance his quixotic British consul attached to them.

  While Britain’s energetic activity to suppress the slave trade in the 1820s was far from effective, the diplomatic and military operations undertaken on behalf of this effort led Whitehall to much greater involvement in African affairs. Lord Bathurst was especially interested in acquiring new domains for his king to serve as bases for suppressing the “traffick” and for stimulating replacement commerce. He succeeded brilliantly—adding Sierra Leone in 1808; the Gambia in 1816; and the Gold Coast in 1821 to the burgeoning British Empire.

  British naval squadrons touring the coast of Africa, stopping and inspecting suspected slavers of other nations and forcing African tribal chiefs to sign antislavery treaties, while they did not halt the expansion of the slave trade, helped Britain attain
a commanding position along the west coast. This contributed to the expansion of England’s commercial and colonial territory.

  The importance attached to the work of African explorers in London and Paris cannot be overstated. Africa was the last continent to be carved up into colonies, and by 1825 competition for territory was fierce. In the early 1800s, colonial possessions in Africa were few, limited to the littoral, with large sections of the coastline and all the interior kingdoms still untouched. By 1900 Africa would be divided into families of separate possessions under the administration of European nations (with hardly any exceptions—independent Morocco and Ethiopia come to mind). Competition from the French was particularly worrisome to the British, for France was the lone European nation that had established a beachhead in Islamic North Africa.

  The journals, maps, notes, and drawings of explorers like Laing and Clapperton had tremendous value in furthering political and economic agendas in Africa. These documents were literally worth more than their weight in gold to Britain and France. Lives were willingly sacrificed for them. They were road maps to a part of the globe less known than the surface of the moon. The moon, at least, could be surveyed with telescopes.

  WHEN WARRINGTON RETURNED to his consulate after his explosive visit with the bashaw, a visitor was announced. It was the disgraced minister, Hassuna, who began to babble apologies and excuses in English. “Hassuna came & cried like a child & actually supplicated my Forgiveness & Protection on his Knees,” Warrington wrote later that day to Bathurst. “I told him it was my Religion to return Good for Evil, & however Shameful his conduct had been, that my influence should be exerted in his favor, altho’ I could not transact Business with him any longer in Person.”