Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  In London nobody bothered about Franklin’s failings. When his journal was published the public was far too interested in his ordeal to bother with passages north, west, east or south. They wanted sensation, and Franklin supplied it. He became known as the man who ate his boots – actually they were soft moccasins, but who cared – and, like Parry, he became a hero of such stature that complete strangers crossed the street to shake his hand. It was hard to move without meeting someone willing to relate a second-hand story of his fortitude.

  Despite his failure in the field, Franklin’s renown at home ensured that he was not forgotten by Sir John Barrow, and in 1824 he became part of the most ambitious assault on the North-West Passage yet. That year Barrow dispatched four expeditions to various quarters of the Arctic: one ship, under Lieutenant George Lyon, was to sail to Repulse Bay, in Foxe Basin, and from there walk overland to Point Turnagain; another, under Parry, was to sail through Lancaster Sound and then south down Prince Regent Inlet; a third, under Lieutenant Frederick Beechey, was to sail through Bering Strait and attempt to break into the Passage from the west; Franklin, meanwhile, was to make a second overland journey with Richardson, this time to the Mackenzie River, from where the two men were to chart the coastline between the Mackenzie and the Coppermine, as well as to probe west towards Bering Strait. With luck, this torrential onslaught of men and materiel would sweep away the North-West Passage’s last defences and, if perhaps it was too much to hope that all four parties would meet in the middle, then it was not at all fanciful to expect that some contact would be made.

  This time Franklin was not going to make the mistakes he had made on his previous journey: to rely on the fur companies for support; and to take low-grade voyageurs as companions. Accordingly, he sent vast amounts of food to Canada during 1824, and placed an order for pemmican so large that the entire region could not meet it until the following spring. He had canoes built to his own specifications – strong but portable – and packed a novel collapsible boat against any repetition of his difficulties crossing the Coppermine. As to the composition of the group, Back and Richardson were once again present, along with one other midshipman, N. E. Kendall, and a professional naturalist named Drummond. The bulk of the party, however, was composed of British seamen: while recognizing that he would have to use Indian hunters once he was in the wild, Franklin wanted men beneath him who could be depended upon.

  Franklin’s party reached North America in April 1825, and by 16 August he was at the mouth of the Mackenzie. Having ascertained that it was ice-free, he retreated to a camp on the Great Bear Lake – Fort Franklin – where he settled down for a comfortable winter surrounded by all the food he could desire. The following June they returned to the delta and split into two groups: Franklin sailed west with Back and 14 men; Richardson, meanwhile, headed east to the Coppermine with Kendall and ten seamen. They were effortlessly successful. Richardson reached the Coppermine on 7 August, from where he walked overland to Fort Franklin. On the same date Franklin reached his furthest west, Foggy Island, where bad weather and lack of food forced him to turn back. He arrived at Fort Franklin three weeks after Richardson. It was a triumph. Between them they had covered 5,000 miles, of which 1,610 was virgin territory; they had charted practically the whole northern Canadian coast, proving that a navigable passage did exist, in summer at least; and they had done so without a single casualty.

  When they returned to Britain in September 1827 they were showered with honours and promotions. The other two expeditions from the east, those under Parry and Lyon, had been less successful, but Beechey had attained a new furthest east from Bering Strait, coming to within 160 miles of Franklin’s Foggy Island. The North-West Passage was all but in the bag. The channel between Beechey’s and Franklin’s furthest was a formality. All that remained was to find the section leading from Point Turnagain to Lancaster Sound. In 1845, after a brief hiatus during which the Admiralty’s attentions were diverted elsewhere, Franklin returned to the fray with a ground-breaking voyage that established him as one of the most famous explorers of his age.

  THE QUEST FOR THE NIGER

  Hugh Clapperton and Richard Lander (1821–31)

  In the first quarter of the 19th century the Niger River was a headache for Europe’s geographers. They knew it existed because everyone, including the Phoenicians, the Ancient Greeks and, not least, the West Africans who lived on it, had told them it did. But they were exercised as to where it went. Conflicting reports placed it in every corner of Africa: it was part of the Nile; it was linked to the Congo; it emanated from a series of lakes near the eastern coast; it vanished into a great sinkhole in the desert; it ran sometimes overground, sometimes underground, emerging who knew where to surprise the traveller with a sudden gush of water. It flowed north, south, east and, according to some theorists, west. Of the continent’s many mysteries, the Niger was one of the greatest.

  Where the Niger started was of little concern – somewhere in Senegal, most authorities agreed – but its end was a matter of dispute. In 1795 the Scottish explorer Mungo Park found its middle, describing a river ‘glittering to the morning sun, as wide as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing slowly to the eastward’. But where to the east? On a second journey in 1805 Park tried to answer that question, but he vanished along the way, together with his 44 redcoats. By all accounts he was attacked by natives in a narrow stretch of the river, his canoe overturned and he, his companions and his belongings were lost in the tumult. To the problem of finding the mouth of the Niger was added that of discovering what had happened to Park and, particularly, what had become of his journal. In 1816, therefore, Britain sent an expedition to the mouth of the Congo. The authorities – that is, Sir John Barrow of the Admiralty – saw nothing silly in this: there was no reason why the Niger (if that really was its name) should not curl from Senegal through west and central Africa to join the Congo. As the Congo was also called the Zaïre, why should it not, at some point, also be called the Niger? And, as both rivers were sometimes called the Nile, maybe they were both linked to the Egyptian river that bore the same name.

  The 1816 expedition, under Captain James Hingston Tuckey, was not successful. It went a few hundred miles upriver before being halted by a series of rapids, whereupon Tuckey and a small group staggered overland for a few weeks before dying of yellow fever. None of the officers, and very few of the crew, returned alive. This terrible start did not deter Barrow, however. In 1818 he sent another expedition under Dr Joseph Ritchie and Lieutenant George Lyon to Tripoli, expecting they would be able to catch one of the many caravans that he knew for a fact ran like clockwork up and down the Sahara. Once at the other side, they would be able to investigate another of Barrow’s theories: that the Niger emptied into Lake Chad. Lyon returned in 1820 with the news that Ritchie was dead, they had got nowhere, the caravans didn’t operate as Barrow thought they did, and that North Africa was an unwholesome, disease-ridden place whose inhabitants were ill-disposed towards Christians. Again, Barrow was unperturbed. In 1821 he learned that for just £6,000 the Pasha of Tripoli was willing to provide an escort to Lake Chad. So another small group was despatched, comprising two Scots: a serious-minded scientist named Walter Oudney and the tall, red-bearded, pipe-smoking figure of Lieutenant Hugh Clapperton; to these was attached an English artillery officer, Major Dixon Denham. Oudney was nominally in charge, but owing to an administrative oversight Denham had been given the impression that the expedition was his. The ensuing disputes were predictably virulent.

  The two Scots resented Denham’s high-handed manner. Oudney complained that had he known the man he would never have accepted the job. Clapperton was equally scathing, protesting that Denham’s ignorance of the most basic surveying skills was so profound as to render him a useless and expensive deadweight. For his part, Denham described them as the ‘most tiresome companions imaginable’. Of Clapperton he wrote: ‘so vulgar, conceited and quarrelsome a person I scarcely ever met with’. As for Oudney, he noted tartl
y that he spoke no foreign languages, could not ride a horse and had never in his life travelled further overland than 30 miles from Edinburgh. But despite this lack of qualifications, ‘this son of War, or rather Bluster, completely rules; therefore any proposition coming from me is generally negatived by a majority’.

  The situation was so little to Denham’s taste that he left Oudney and Clapperton to travel on their own to Murzouk, one of the gateways to the Sahara, following them on 5 March 1822 with a shipwright named William Hillman, who had agreed to accompany him as the expedition’s carpenter. When he reached Murzouk, however, Denham was disgusted to find that the local sultan – supposedly a vassal of the Pasha of Tripoli – had refused to supply the promised escort across the Sahara. Already disillusioned by the expedition, and irritated by the discomfort of his month-long journey from Tripoli, during which he had gone several days without water and had endured blinding sandstorms, Denham announced his immediate return to Tripoli. To Oudney, Clapperton and Hillman, none of whom was in good health, he promised that he would speak urgently to the Pasha and would return shortly with the escort. In fact, when he reached Tripoli all he did was book a passage to London via France. He had been promised a lieutenant-colonelcy for joining the expedition and, since it was impossible to cross the Sahara without the protection of arms and no such protection was forthcoming, he felt it was time to claim his reward. Far better, he reasoned, to press his case in person than by letter from some distant spot in the desert. Oudney and Clapperton did not learn of his change of heart until September. Their outrage was cut short by a fever that confined them to their beds for a fortnight and reappeared at intervals in the following weeks.

  If Denham had lost interest in the expedition, the British consul at Tripoli, Hanmer Warrington, had not. A man of force, charm and intelligence, who had occupied his post since 1814, he had inveigled himself so successfully into the Pasha’s confidence that he was, in all but name, his foreign secretary. It was he who pressed the Pasha to have an escort ready for the explorers and he who sent a message to Denham – currently in Marseilles – informing him of his success. Reluctantly, Denham returned to Africa, and on 30 October he galloped into Murzouk bearing the good, if untruthful, news that he alone had organized the escort they needed. Nobody came out to welcome him, which he thought odd until he peered into the white men’s quarters. Oudney and Clapperton lay on their beds, wracked by fever, while Hillman hobbled around weakly as their manservant. ‘Nothing could be more disheartening than their appearance,’ Denham remarked.

  They left Murzouk on 19 November for Bornu, a kingdom situated to the west of Lake Chad, from where they hoped to gain access to the Niger. The road to Bornu was 700 miles long and strewn with the bones of those who had fallen by the wayside. The cost of a Saharan passage was high: even if the wells were full, slave caravans expected to lose much of their human cargo; and whole caravans, larger in population than some towns, were known to have perished in the crossing. It was not just a matter of meeting the occasional skeleton, but of crunching over mats of them. At one point Denham was dozing on his camel when he was woken by the sound of breaking bones; he watched in horror as a skull, disturbed by the camel’s pads, bounced over the rocks. ‘This event,’ he wrote, ‘gave me a sensation which it took some time to remove.’ Occasionally, the bodies lay in piles a hundred deep, their limbs torn apart, a sight that troubled Oudney: ‘here a leg, there an arm, fixed with their ligaments at considerable distances from the trunk. What could have done this? ... Man forced by hunger, or the camels?’ And they weren’t always old dead, as Denham recorded: ‘One of the skeletons we passed today had a very fresh appearance; the beard was still hanging to the skin of the face and the features were still discernible.’

  The going was hard, through featureless pavements of black rock and precipitous dunes so high and convoluted that it was easy to imagine a caravan being swallowed in their depths. The few wells they met required heavy digging before they yielded a small flow of brackish fluid. By January 1823 four camels were dead from exhaustion, and the Europeans weren’t in much better shape. Oudney was so weak that he could not walk a hundred yards without a pause, Hillman could not walk at all – could not, in fact, even get off his mule without assistance – and Clapperton was still groggy from fever. However, they still had enough strength to squabble with Denham, who remained in good health and reciprocated energetically. They kept it up until 4 February when they saw a vision that temporarily dispelled their animosity. Before them, ‘glowing with the golden rays of the sun’, lay Lake Chad.

  After the nightmare of the desert, Lake Chad was an Eden. Pink forests of flamingos stood in its shallows, alongside thousands of pelicans. Fish were so numerous that they could be taken by hand. The shore was covered with trees, from whose branches hung monkeys and snakes. Buffalo, antelope, elephants, wild boar and guinea fowl roamed the countryside. The wildlife – so Denham said – was so tame that it was theirs for the asking: when he waded into the lake the flamingos shuffled aside to make space for him. The humans, too, seemed very amenable: after an initial flight, fearing that the caravan was a band of Tuareg, they welcomed the newcomers. His companions being under the weather, Denham was alone in recording the appearance of’good looking, laughing negresses, all but naked’, one of whom he purchased. The ruler of Bornu, Sultan El Kanemi, was no less hospitable than his subjects. Escorting them to his capital, Kuka,* he provided them with food, ordered houses to be built for them and offered to take them wherever they wished to go.

  By December Oudney and Clapperton were marching west, following the course of the River Yeou (Yobe) that flowed into Lake Chad. It was far too small to be the Niger, but it might be some secondary branch, perhaps proceeding from another lake into which the main river flowed. Denham, meanwhile, continued south around Lake Chad and discovered the River Shari. The Shari seemed the right size, but its upper stretches were in a war zone and Denham was unable to ascertain whether it was the Niger. He returned with little solid information other than that the natives inoculated themselves ‘by inserting into the flesh the sharp point of a dagger charged with the disease’. (In this they were apparently far ahead of Europeans, who had only recently taken to vaccination.) The Shari was not the river he sought, but it very nearly was; for if Denham had followed it to its source and then crossed the watershed he would have found the Benue, a river that did connect with the Niger. He returned to Kuka, where he waited to see what Oudney and Clapperton had found.

  The two Scots had aimed initially for Kano, a large town 300 miles from Lake Chad on the upper stretches of the Yeou. From there, if the river was not the Niger, they intended to strike west for Sokoto, capital of the Hausa nation. Oudney, alas, never saw either town. He died halfway to Kano on 12 January 1824. Collecting the doctor’s notes and journals, Clapperton continued on his own, reaching Kano on 20 January. Hoping to make an imposing entrance, he donned his naval uniform and strode into town but, to his surprise, nobody turned a hair. This was an important trading centre where one could buy a diverse array of goods – French writing paper, Egyptian cotton, Maltese swords, English umbrellas – and the sight of strangers in unusual costumes was nothing new to its inhabitants. Belatedly, Clapperton realized that these supposedly dark and ignorant regions of Africa were, in fact, highly sophisticated. The impression was reinforced when, after a fever-ridden month in Kano, he entered Sokoto on 16 March. Its ruler, Sultan Bello, was quite up to date with proceedings in the wider world, knew all about Britain’s military machinations, inquired penetratingly about its ambitions in India, and showed a remarkable familiarity with its press. Clapperton having brought a few newspapers with him to impress uneducated natives with the West’s mastery of the written word, Bello asked him to read them aloud so he could catch up with things.

  When Clapperton inquired about the Niger and, on the offchance, Timbuctoo, Bello’s response was guarded. Yes, there was a river to the south that his people called the Quorra; yes, he had hear
d of a white man who had been killed on it, his possessions having been taken by a local potentate, the Sultan of Yauri. And yes, he did know of Timbuctoo: it lay 600 miles to the west; but the way there was difficult and the tribes dangerous. He could not advise Clapperton to go there. Nor, for the same reasons, would it be wise to seek the Quorra. He said this in such menacing tones that Clapperton thought it prudent not to try his luck. To assuage his visitor’s curiosity, however, Bello drew a map in the sand to show the Quorra’s course. From its source the river curled northwards, then, at Park’s furthest recorded point, shot east to terminate in Egypt – as so many British geographers, whose opinions were reported in the papers that Bello read, thought it might. Clapperton thanked him and left for Bornu. Before departing, he recorded of the people of Sokoto that: ‘It is commonly believed among them that strangers would come and take their country from them, if they knew the course of the Quorra.’ Given the subsequent colonization of West Africa, one cannot but admire Bello for his sagacity and foresight.