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

by Frank T. Kryza

  Chapter Twenty

  THE MYSTERY SOLVED

  WHAT REALLY HAPPENED to Alexander Gordon Laing? It would take nearly a century for the full story to be revealed. Since Bongola’s account was the only eyewitness report to survive, great weight has attached to his testimony. But how accurate was Bongola?

  At the time of his examination by Warrington, Bongola was certainly fearful of how the bashaw and his foreign minister, Hassuna D’Ghies, might react. The evidence he gave about Laing was thus suspect in the mind of Consul Warrington.

  If, in fact, the bashaw, Rousseau, and D’Ghies were not implicated in Laing’s death but knew that Warrington suspected otherwise, their only interest would have been to make sure that Bongola told the truth. Under these circumstances, it is probable that he did so, though in several minor respects his story conflicted with other contemporary reports. Although these were not firsthand recitals, they called for a more critical review of Bongola’s declaration. Every statement he made in his interrogation by Warrington was checked and confirmed. The only discrepancy adduced concerned the length of time he claimed Laing spent in Timbuktu—two months, an overstatement that cannot in fairness be held against a witness to whom chronological time meant very little.

  There the matter of Alexander Gordon Laing’s death and his lost papers rested for almost one hundred years. Although many hypotheses were advanced that the Laing journals reached Tripoli in 1827, no hard evidence ever surfaced either to confirm or to contradict the Monnier Commission’s judgment that Baron Rousseau was not involved in Laing’s death or the theft of his notes.

  From time to time, relics of Laing were reportedly discovered in the wilderness. Caillié, less than two years after Laing’s disappearance, wrote that “a Moor of Tafilet, who belonged to [my] caravan, had for his share of the spoil a sextant, which I was informed might be found in the country. As for the Major’s papers and journals, they were scattered among the inhabitants of the desert. During my stay at Gourland, a village of Tafilet, I saw a copper compass of English manufacture. Nobody could tell me whence this instrument had come, and I concluded that it had belonged to Laing.”

  The two references to Tafilet are an indication that Sheikh El Abeyd’s caravan was bound for Morocco. This is substantiated by Laing’s report from Timbuktu that he had encountered Moroccan merchants there. In 1880, the Austrian explorer Oskar Lenz asserted that a sheikh of Arawan had a number of Laing’s possessions, including “numerous bottles of medicine, clothes and underwear, written books and 45 Spanish Duros* in money.”

  Decades passed, and France emerged as the dominant colonial power in West Africa. In 1910, General François J. Clozel, the lieutenant governor of Haut-Sénégal-Niger, became intrigued by the Laing mystery. Hoping to prove incontrovertibly that his fellow Frenchman Caillié had been first to reach Timbuktu, Clozel ordered a new inquiry into Laing’s death. He reckoned that some evidence of Laing’s journey might be found, and that his journals, if they existed, could be retrieved. By this time, Timbuktu had become more accessible, part of the larger French sphere of influence. A French army officer stationed in Algeria, Alexandre Bonnel de Mézières, was tasked with carrying out the investigation. Bonnel de Mézières was delighted with the assignment, for he was an amateur student of African history and had long been fascinated by the Laing story and the secrets that still shrouded it.

  Bonnel de Mézières scoured the mosques and libraries of Timbuktu for evidence that Laing had been there, discovering among other things the mud house where Laing had resided. He found an eighty-two-year-old Timbuktu scholar, Mohammed Ould Mokhtar, who claimed to be the nephew of Sheikh Ahmadu El Abeyd, the Arab widely believed to have escorted Laing from Timbuktu and to have murdered him. Mohammed Ould Mokhtar told Bonnel de Mézières that his uncle had openly boasted of killing Laing. He enjoyed recounting to his extended family the bloody details of how he had, quite properly in his mind, slaughtered the infidel Christian.

  According to this man, Laing, accompanied by his two servants, departed Timbuktu and went ahead of El Abeyd, following the road to Arawan. About thirty miles from Timbuktu they came to a place called Sahab, where they rested in the tenuous shade of an acacia tree. Suddenly four horsemen appeared: El Abeyd, one Mohammed Faradji Ould Abdallah, and two others. El Abeyd rode up to Laing and called on him to renounce his faith and accept Islam. When Laing refused, El Abeyd ordered his men to kill the white man, but they hesitated. When the sheikh insisted, two of his slaves seized Laing’s arms and El Abeyd himself plunged a spear into Laing’s chest, instantly killing him. Faradji then decapitated him. They also killed an Arab boy in Laing’s party. Bongola was not mentioned in the Arab’s account.

  Excepting his money, all Laing’s possessions, including his papers, were burned, for Sheikh El Abeyd feared their alleged magical properties. He divided the cash with his three colleagues. “After that,” El Abeyd allegedly told his nephew, according to Bonnel de Mézières’s account, “we burned his cases, because he had come to poison the land, and we held our noses as we burned them.” The bodies were left unburied at the foot of a tree.

  Bonnel de Mézières was struck by the marked differences between the narrative he obtained from the aging descendant of Sheikh El Abeyd and Bongola’s sworn testimony before Consul Warrington eighty-three years earlier. Bongola had stated that the attack occurred at night, when he was sleeping at Laing’s side. Mohammed Ould Mokhtar’s account (at second hand, of course, and nearly a century after the event) described an attack by day when Laing was resting under a tree, a demand that he should renounce his faith, and upon his refusal, the plunging of a spear into his chest. Bonnel de Mézières also wondered why only the Arab boy had been murdered, while Bongola had clearly survived and returned to Tripoli.

  Bonnel de Mézières reasoned that the notion of Laing’s two servants suffering with their master from the thrusts and slashes of the attackers’ swords was consistent with a night attack, but not with an assault in daylight, when, typically, the infidel white man would have been singled out. Servants and slaves, after all, were valuable property and their lives would not have been squandered. Moreover, a night attack, like the one staged by Laing’s Tuareg escorts near Wadi Ahnet, was typical of the country.

  Bonnel de Mézières found two Arab manuscripts describing Laing’s death, dated the year 1242 (corresponding to 1826 in the Christian calendar). Taken to the spot where the murder reputedly occurred, Bonnel de Mézières recovered skeletal remains from a shallow grave at the base of an ancient tree, which he photographed. The bones, mainly pieces of skull and vertebrae, were taken to an army doctor, who identified them as belonging to a European adult and an adolescent of indeterminate race. Respectful of the human remains he had found, Bonnel de Mézières ordered a miniature coffin constructed to contain them. Later the skeletons were interred in the local European cemetery.

  Sheikh Ahmadu El Abeyd had bragged, his nephew claimed, that he left Laing unburied to be devoured by vultures. A passing Tuareg may have seen the bodies and buried them under the tree, not realizing that one was a Christian. (The corpses of Christians were believed by Arabs to be “unclean” and were typically not buried because they would render the earth infertile.)

  Based on this evidence, Bonnel de Mézières pieced together an account of Laing’s final days.

  On September 21, 1826, after being warned by Sheikh Othman that he was not safe in Timbuktu, Laing gathered his belongings. He took the time to send a final letter to Warrington, his last known written words. He described his difficulties and announced his intention to head west toward Segou and the Atlantic, apparently abandoning his quest for the source of the Niger. Ever the optimist, he said he hoped to get there in fifteen days.

  The small wooden coffin in which Laing’s remains were re-interred by Bonnel de Mézières in 1912, after he concluded his forensic investigations.

  The most direct route to Segou was along the river and its banks, but since that path was overrun with Fula
ni, Laing would detour north into the desert and then west. Not suspecting the trap that lay ahead, he accepted the offer of an apparently friendly sheikh named Ahmadu El Abeyd to take him part of the way.

  The next day, September 22, Laing likely left Timbuktu under the protection of Sidi Ahmadu, along with the ever-faithful Bongola and an Arab boy (possibly the source of the unidentified second skeleton). A day or two out of the city, Sheikh El Abeyd may have begun to argue with Laing about religion, urging him to embrace Islam, or he may simply have felt that Laing was worth robbing, or he may have been acting at the behest of unknown third parties. Soon they reached Sahab, thirty miles into the desert north of Timbuktu. There, Sheikh El Abeyd, either in someone’s pay or acting out of his own religious zealotry, turned on Laing and knocked him off his horse, commanding him to renounce Christianity and accept Islam.

  Laing refused. El Abeyd commanded his servants to kill him. When the servants would not obey, they were ordered to hold Laing’s arms so El Abeyd could do the job himself. El Abeyd thrust his sword into Laing’s chest. Laing’s body was then decapitated.

  THE EVIDENCE COLLECTED by Bonnel de Mézières differs from Bongola’s testimony, and both vary, in small ways, from other accounts of Laing’s death. But surely it cannot be a coincidence that two skeletons were exhumed from the tree at Sahab. They were likely those of Laing and the Arab boy. And while Bongola’s testimony could not pinpoint where the murder took place, he did say that it occurred on the third day out. Sahab was about thirty miles from Timbuktu, and it is likely that Laing would have reached it three days into his journey, for he typically started out late on the first day of a new leg.

  D’Ghies’s confession and the bashaw’s own admission of complicity proved, at least to Warrington, that Rousseau had somehow gotten wind of Laing’s death before anyone else, and that he found an opportunity to steal Laing’s journal. Bonnel de Mézières never did clear up that part of the mystery—indeed, the two Arabic accounts of Laing’s death he cites specify that all of Laing’s property and papers were burned. This is more probable than the elaborate conspiracy theory spun by the overwrought and sometimes overimaginative Warrington.

  GIVEN THESE CIRCUMSTANCES, most observers have concluded that Bongola’s testimony was accurate in all its important dimensions, and that Alexander Gordon Laing died at Sahab, probably at night, on Sunday, September 24, 1826.*

  A FINAL REVELATION, the most compelling of all, awaited Bonnel de Mézières: in a casual aside, Mohammed Ould Mokhtar told him that Sheikh Ahmadu El Abeyd had kept a souvenir of Laing’s death, a trophy. This was a “little gold rooster” that in 1910 was still in his family’s possession. Bonnel de Mézières asked to see this artifact. It was apparent at once to his Western eyes that the object before him was not a rooster at all, but a small golden bird Emma Warrington Laing had given her husband on their wedding day eighty-five years before, to bring him good luck on his long journey. That removed all doubt from Bonnel de Mézières’s mind that he had solved the enduring mystery of Laing’s disappearance and death.

  LAING’S FATE having been surmised by Warrington, there remained in the late 1820s the need to discover what had become of his journals. As far back as May, when he was recuperating from the ghastly Tuareg attacks, Laing had written that he intended to send his dispatches back to Tripoli from Timbuktu. These would certainly have included his journals, since he had received definitive instructions from Lord Bathurst to do so.* Their carrier, Laing wrote, would be Alkhadir, whom he had found to be “a remarkably fine young man.” Yet in August 1828, at long last, Alkhadir turned up in Tripoli with Laing’s letters but without his journals. This was the turning point in a quest that had been going on for some months and was to continue, with unabated wrangling between the British and the French, for several more years. It turned out to be a long and dreary chronicle that never reached closure, and from which none of the principal characters emerges with much credit.

  Alkhadir denied having brought the journals with him from Timbuktu. This meant little to Warrington, who believed that Alkhadir, like Bongola, was under the spell of Hassuna D’Ghies. Warrington, we read in a consular dispatch, “did not fail to observe upon the extraordinary length of time that the letters, particularly that of the 10th May, had been upon the road, and also that Alkhadir was the bearer of it … and lastly his coming down without the dispatches, of which Major Laing in that letter expresses an intention of making him the bearer…. His suspicions of foul play were never lulled, and received strength from the pains taken to prevent his intercourse with Alkhadir, and the Negro [Bongola], both of whom were fed and clothed by H. D’Ghies but rarely came to the British consulate, tho’ he expressed a wish to take the Negro into his service, both were examined by him and deposed to Major Laing’s having papers with him, also to various particulars relating to the murder—and yet nothing that could throw a light upon the fate of the papers was elicited from either.”

  As it was generally believed that the report of Laing’s death published in L’Etoile had originated with Baron Rousseau or Hassuna D’Ghies, Warrington inevitably suspected either or both of them of pilfering the journals. By October 1827 Warrington was convinced Rousseau had the journals and that “they would eventually come to light if the demand for their production were persevered in.” In this, of course, and not for the first time, he was wrong.

  IN THE DECADES of silence that followed Laing’s disappearance, something like the story Bonnel de Mézières eventually reconstructed must also have formed in the unhappy mind of Hanmer Warrington. With the certainty of Laing’s death and the departure of his longtime enemies Rousseau and Hassuna D’Ghies, Warrington fell into an angry lethargy, clinging to his post, the only thing that gave any meaning to his unhappy life. His neglected wife died. He outlasted even the change of the bashaw’s regime, carrying out his consular duties until 1846, when his quixotic temper and erratic behavior finally led to his forced resignation. He was now sixty-nine, but age had not mellowed him. That year, he quarreled with a Neapolitan consul named Morelli over a box of cigars. The next time he saw Morelli in the street, Warrington began thwacking him over the head with his walking stick.

  That was the last straw for the Foreign Office. King George IV had died in 1830, his brother, William IV, in 1837, and the scandal-hating Victoria had long since ascended the throne. The aging Warrington no longer had friends at court. A letter to Consul Warrington dated April 7, 1846, from Lord Wellington’s foreign secretary, George Hamilton Gordon, Earl of Aberdeen, arrived in Tripoli not long after the affair of the cigars:

  I regret to perceive in the Despatches now under my consideration that your conduct towards the Chevalier Morelli, the Consul of a Friendly Power of Her Majesty’s, has been and continues to be most unjustifiable and incomprehensible. Considering all the circumstances of these unbecoming altercations in which you have suffered your feelings to involve you, I regret to be compelled to observe that it appears to me that it would be no less for your own future comfort than for the benefit of Her Majesty’s service that you should make up your mind to retire.

  After thirty-two years, Warrington’s consular career in Tripoli had come to its ignominious end. Granted a pension of 900 pounds sterling a year, he was soon bound for the Greek port of Patras to visit his son-in-law, Thomas Wood, who was serving there as British consul. But Warrington was not the type who could survive the reflective inactivity of a graceful retirement. He drank vastly and died a year later.

  POOR EMMA WAS by then nearly twenty years in her grave. Emma’s desolation over Laing’s death, which was placed beyond all doubt when Bongola and Alkhadir arrived in Tripoli in August 1828, can only have been made more intense by learning from his last letters to her father that he had not written to her at all during the last weeks of his life. Whatever sympathy she may have received from her own family (for all his foibles, Hanmer Warrington was a doting father, and Emma was his favorite), she got none from her husband’s. Warrington complaine
d to Hay that when he wrote to Laing’s parents telling them of their son’s death, he got no reply. This seemed extraordinary to the consul after what he considered so desirable a marriage for the son. “I should apprehend,” he wrote in one of his more pompous moods, “in respect of Ancient Pedigree or even Pecuniary Resources that His Family must have been the gainers.” It did not occur to him that Emma’s ancient pedigree, on one side, anyway, may not have impressed Laing’s pious Scottish and schoolmarmish parents.

  Emma was not to know her second husband, Thomas Wood, longer than her first. After their marriage in April 1829, the couple went to Italy, to Leghorn, where she was to recover from her grief and where, her new groom hoped, the balmy climate might restore her shattered health. On October 2, 1829, less than six months after her second marriage, she died at Pisa of consumption, and was buried in the English cemetery there. She was twenty-eight years old and had survived her first husband by less than four years. Wood later married another of the Warrington girls, Emma’s older sister Jane, by whom he had four children.

  Her father attributed Emma’s broken health to anxiety over Laing. He cited to Hay the “Watchful Days and Sleepless Nights … and all the subsequent Tragical events” which brought “my adored Daughter to an Untimely Grave.” He took a final swipe at his archenemy: “Thus has that Monster of Iniquity the Baron Rousseau sacrificed two victims to his Diabolical Intrigue—for to my last, shall I conscientiously believe he was concerned in that sad history….”

  Timoléon Rousseau, who continued to pursue Emma even after Consul Warrington refused a second time to permit their marriage, fared no better than the woman he loved. He died March 6, 1829, five weeks before Emma married Thomas Wood, and only seven months before Emma herself passed away. He was thirty years old. His tombstone is preserved to this day in the French embassy in Libya. It is inscribed “Alexandre Timoléon Rousseau, Mort à Tripoli, Victime d’un amour insensé,”* words that might well have served, too, as Emma’s epitaph.