Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  The boats were not those of friendly traders but of pirates. A short tussle ensued, during which they lost their clothes, their guns, Richard’s journal, all Park’s memorabilia and everything of value that they possessed, before being hauled to meet the pirate chief, King Obie, at his palace. John Lander, who had somehow retained his notebook, scribbled a description of the outlandish figure before them. ‘His head was graced with a cap shaped like a sugar loaf, and thickly covered with strings of coral and pieces of broken looking glass ... his neck, or rather his throat, was encircled with several strings of the same kind of bead, which were fastened so tightly, as in some degree to affect his circulation, and to give his throat and cheeks an inflamed appearance ... He wore a short Spanish surtout of red cloth, which fitted close to his person, being much too small... Thirteen or fourteen bracelets (we had the curiosity to count them) decorated each wrist, and to give them full effect, the sleeves of the coat had been cut off... The king’s trousers ... reached no further than his legs, the lower parts ... being ornamented like the wrists and with precisely the same number of strings of beads; besides which, a string of little brass bells encircled each leg above the ankles.’ King Obie shook his legs to make the bells tinkle, then informed the Landers that they were now his property. They need not worry, though, because there was an English ship at the river mouth, the Thomas of Liverpool, whose captain would undoubtedly pay the 20-slaves’-worth he had set as the price of their release. There was one proviso: all negotiations were to be conducted inland; under no circumstances could the Landers go to the coast.

  The Landers knew very well that the type of captain to be found in these waters – the Thomas was ostensibly trading for palm oil – would be unwilling to spend that amount, and would certainly not do so if he couldn’t see what he was buying. They had all but resigned themselves to being ‘classed with the most degraded and despicable of mankind, [to] become slaves in a land of ignorance and barbarism’, when a saviour emerged from downriver. King Boy, who ruled the coastal region of Brass, was willing to sell them on Obie’s behalf for 15 extra slaves and a cask of rum. They left in Boy’s canoe on 12 November to complete the remaining 60 miles to the river mouth. In his mind, Richard Lander was already standing on the brig, freshly washed and relating the details of his triumphant journey to a sympathetic captain. At Brass, however, King Boy decided that, while Richard could visit the Thomas, John, Pasko and the others must stay where they were. Richard Lander was not happy about these conditions, but was certain that the captain of the Thomas would honour the deal.

  The captain, a man named Lake, was not in a good mood. Four of his eight crew were dead and the remainder were bedridden. He was stuck behind a sandbar at the mouth of the Niger and his only way out was to pay a notoriously treacherous pilot to see him through the shallows. As Lander approached the Thomas, ‘the emotions of delight... quite beyond my powers of description’, Lake watched with a sullen eye. When the stranger climbed aboard, presented Barrow’s orders and asked if he could draw a bill to pay his captors, Lake exploded. ‘If you think you have a — fool to deal with you are mistaken; I’ll not give you a b — y flint for your bill, I would not give you a — for it.’ But then his tone changed. Among King Boy’s captives were men who could replace his lost crew. He told Boy to have the men on board within three days or he would sail without them and Boy would never get a penny for his so-called slaves. Heartened by the prospect of action, he hauled his mate, Spittle, from his sickbed and sent him to reconnoitre the sandbar. When Lander protested at Lake’s language and callous attitude Lake told him to — off. When the pilot captured Spittle and asked £50 for his return Lake said the same to him too. Against all wisdom, King Boy ferried John Lander and the remnants of the Niger expedition to the Thomas. Lake accepted the ‘goods’ and told Boy that he wasn’t to expect a penny out of the deal; moreover, if Spittle wasn’t returned forthwith he would summon 1,000 men-of-war and blast Brass to pieces. Spittle was duly returned.

  How right Sultan Bello had been to reject the approaches of men like Clapperton and Lander: they might have seemed helpless at the time, but they were harbingers of a power that would eventually swallow scores of West African nations similar to his own. At the same time, one cannot but admire Lake’s audacity. He did not have 1,000 men-of-war – he barely had a crew – and his single weapon was a small cannon. He was far weaker than the men of Brass whose powerful artillery was ranged on his ship. The winds, too, were against him: as soon as he raised anchor he would be blown ashore, where small groups of armed warriors awaited his arrival, cheerfully pointing out places where he could land. All he had was a foul-mouthed strength of purpose and one vital bit of luck. At 8.00 a.m. on 27 November the prevailing northerly winds switched to a tiny sea breeze, and with the use of boats Lake dragged the Thomas over the sandbar in three fathoms of water. He deposited the Landers on Fernando Po, a small island to the east of the mouth of the Niger, before going about his undefined and shady business. The last they saw of their crude but effective saviour was his ship rounding a headland, pursued by pirates. There came the sound of cannon-fire and then darkness fell. The next day the sea was clear. Lake and his ship were never heard of again.

  On 10 June 1831 Richard Lander was in London, presenting his findings to the Admiralty. Despite a few misgivings as to the paucity of facts and figures, his report was received warmly. It was, according to the Edinburgh Review, ‘perhaps the most important discovery of the age’. The scale of the achievement was not reflected in the reward. The Landers received precisely what they had asked at the outset: in Richard’s case £100 and in John’s nothing. In 1832 Richard Lander received the Royal Geographical Society’s first gold medal, but he was not there to collect it. In that year he had sailed for the Gulf of Benin to lead a commercial expedition up the Niger. Near Bussa his party was attacked by 10,000 angry Africans, one of whom aimed his musket at Lander. A copper bolt struck him near the anus. Gangrene ensued and he died on 2 February 1834. Ravaged by disease, the expedition hastily retired. When it reached Britain only eight of its 48 members were still alive.

  The quest for the Niger had taken 40 years and had killed practically every man who joined it. Geographers such as Barrow could perhaps take pride in having filled another small blank on the atlas. But their pride was bought at huge financial and human cost. Moreover, as Lander’s final, fatal mission showed, while the Niger may have been ‘found’, it had very obviously not been conquered.

  THE ROAD TO TIMBUCTOO

  Gordon Laing and René Caillié (1824–8)

  Timbuctoo! Here was a word that quickened the spirit of every red-blooded explorer. What were Atlantis and Eldorado against these three sing-song syllables? Timbuctoo was the end of the world and its beginning. In an age that knew nothing of the Olduvai Gorge and the Rift Valley, Timbuctoo was the ancient heart of Africa. It was so distant as to be a byword for distance and so wealthy as to stagger the imagination. In Timbuctoo people could hardly stand from the weight of gold they wore; their doors had gold locks and gold bolts; the streets were literally paved with the stuff; the climate was healthy and invigorating; and the inhabitants’ libidos were so inflamed that it was hard to move without tripping over an act of copulation. At the same time Timbuctoo was a city of culture and sophistication, a repository of learning whose universities and libraries contained rich and marvellous secrets.

  So, at least, the story went in the 18th century. In fact no Westerner had ever visited the place, and everything about it was the product of wishful thinking. The legend had arisen in the 14th century when the Arab traveller Ibn Battuta returned from the gold-rich Empire of Mali and mentioned in his journal that one of Mali’s trade centres went by the name of Timbuctoo. Mali’s gold soon ran out, but the connection between Timbuctoo and extravagant wealth refused to die. Indeed, the rumours swelled with every passing century until Timbuctoo was fixed in the European mind as the source of Africa’s riches. ‘Its treasures [surpassed] those of Mexico
and Peru,’ read one 17th-century report. ‘The roofs of the houses were represented to be covered with plates of gold... and the mountains had only to be excavated to yield a profusion of the metallic treasure.’ Scholars as well as merchants lusted after it, for it was said that: ‘We shall one day correct the texts of our Greek and Latin classics by the manuscripts which are preserved there.’ In 1809 an English trader in Morocco named James G. Jackson published An Accurate and Interesting Account of Timbuctoo, the Great Emporium of Central Africa, in which he wrote that Timbuctoo (which he had never seen) was situated so prosperously on the Niger that its outlying villages were ‘as populous as those of any river in China’ and that its rulers moved from palace to lustrous mosque accompanied by retinues of slaves. His book proved so popular that it was still in print eleven years later.

  What made the legend so tantalizing was the fact that, although Timbuctoo did exist and was indeed one of the main embarkation points for trans-Saharan caravans, no white man seemed able to reach it. Situated on the Niger’s uppermost bulge, it could only be approached via the banditridden desert to the north or the pestilential tropics of West Africa. Both routes had been tried and both had been found too unhealthy for a Westerner’s liking. In 1618, for example, an English company had been formed expressly for the purpose of trading with Timbuctoo. First one, then the other, of its two expeditions were lost in the Gambia, setting a precedent that soon began to look inviolable. Whether Europeans came from the north, east, west or south, whether they travelled singly or in groups, they could not break the cordon of inaccessibility that surrounded Timbuctoo. In the late 18th century Sir Joseph Banks, President of the African Association, turned his mind to the problem, despatching in rapid succession the American John Ledyard, the Irishman Daniel Houghton and the ‘Moor’ Ben Ali. The first two died in the attempt and the third didn’t even bother, vanishing somewhere in London. In 1795 Banks sent the Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who survived imprisonment and near-starvation to reach the Niger, but still failed to find Timbuctoo. He went back again in 1805, this time with an escort of 44 redcoats. The soldiers died of disease, and at some unknown date Park was attacked and killed while navigating a stretch of rapids.

  While Banks pondered his next move, an American sailor materialized at the British consulate in Mogador (then an important port on Morocco’s western seaboard) with the news that he had reached the city they had all been trying to find. He was taken to London, where he related his story to the Committee of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, a body affliated to the African Association. Calling himself variously Benjamin Rose and Robert Adams, he claimed to have been shipwrecked off the North African coast in 1810 and subsequently enslaved by Moroccan traders who forced him to join a caravan to Timbuctoo. In hindsight, his description of desert travel was very accurate – the steady progress of 15 to 20 miles per day, the unreliability of the wells, the callous treatment accorded to those who failed to keep pace – but what he had to say about Timbuctoo struck the Committee as ludicrous. He portrayed it as a ‘dull, filthy and exceedingly unattractive town’, where not a speck of gold was to be seen but whose inhabitants were reasonably hospitable. Occasionally it was visited by Arab merchants in the tobacco trade. Considering ‘how widely his account of Timbuctoo differed from the notions generally entertained of the magnificence of that city, and of its civilisation and of its inhabitants’, the Committee felt justified in dismissing his tale. In doing so, it noted that the Mogador consul had portrayed him as ‘exceedingly stupid and insensible’. Accordingly, more expeditions were sent forth, each larger and more expensive than the last, but just as unsuccessful.

  Banks died in 1820, but his programme was perpetuated by his acolyte, John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty. Barrow had as little luck as Banks until, in 1824, one Captain Gordon Laing put his name forward for the task. Born in 1794, Laing was an impulsive and energetic, if opinionated, Scot who had served in Senegal, had discovered what he believed to be the source of the Niger and was willing not only to travel from Tripoli to Timbuctoo but to trace the course of the Niger to its mouth, a project that had long exercised Europe’s geographers. Normally, Barrow rejected such crackpot notions – he had already sponsored several expeditions to the Niger, all of which had failed – but Laing’s proposal was financially irresistible. He was willing to go without salary at an initial outlay of £640 10s. plus annual costs of £173 7s. 6d. This was incomparably cheaper than anything to date. To put it in context, one previous expedition, that led by Major Peddie, which returned from West Africa in 1821 with most of its members dead, had cost £13,000 and the bills yet to be presented would push the figure to £40,000. How could Laing’s offer be refused?

  Barrow gave his approval, and in May 1825 Laing – newly promoted to major – arrived in Tripoli, where the crews of two British ships scaled the rigging to give him three cheers. ‘There are moments in a man’s life,’ wrote Laing, ‘which he would not exchange for living years.’ He then met the British consul, Hanmer Warrington, fell in love with his daughter Emma and proposed to her. Warrington was taken aback: he was not at all sure that he wanted this strange, impulsive adventurer as a son-in-law; moreover he had doubts as to his physical and mental stability. ‘I much fear the delicate state of his health will not carry him through this arduous task, he wrote. The wedding went ahead, but Warrington imposed a condition that the union not be consummated until Laing had returned from Timbuctoo. Laing accepted without demur. Emma was his love, but Timbuctoo was his goal: ‘I am so wrapt up in the success of this enterprise that I think of nothing else all day and dream of nothing else all night.’ Blithely, he ordered Warrington to pay the Pasha of Tripoli £4,000 for permission to pass unhindered through his territory. That he had at a stroke increased the cost of his expedition sixfold bothered him not at all. ‘I shall do more than has ever been done before,’ he boasted, ‘and shall show myself to be what I have ever considered myself, a man of enterprise and genius.’

  He left Tripoli in July 1825 with several camels, a quantity of food, three guides, an interpreter and a few servants. ‘Please God,’ he wrote to Emma Warrington, ‘[I] shall sleep in the long-looked-after city in forty-two days more.’ His estimate was characteristically over-optimistic. Travelling via the Tripolitanian town of Ghadames, he reached the central Saharan oasis of In Salah on 2 December, by which time his self-imposed deadline had long expired. The journey had not been easy – food and water ran short; continual detours had to be made to avoid bandits – and at In Salah he found himself the object of intense and less than welcome curiosity. Few of the oasis-dwellers had ever seen a white man, with the result that at one point he had to stand on a roof while a hundred-strong crowd gathered to stare at him. Eventually, he had to nail his door shut to keep the hordes at bay.

  Alone as he was, uncertain as to what lay ahead and fearful as to his safety – Christians were treated with suspicion in the predominantly Muslim Sahara – Laing’s confidence waxed and waned but, if his correspondence is anything to go by, was never eclipsed. In a letter to his sister, he bragged: ‘I am already possessed of much curious and valuable information, and feel confident that I shall realize the most sanguine expectations of my numerous friends.’ A few sentences later: ‘My father used often to accuse me of want of common sense ... ‘Tis true, I never possessed any, nor ever shall ... I admit that common sense is more necessary for conducting the petty affairs of life than genius or enterprise, but the man who soars into the regions of speculation should never be hampered by it.’ To Warrington: ‘I am still the African traveller, and as eager as ever for discovery.’ But then, ‘I am now almost afraid to trust myself with the full swing of thought, and for the first time in my life I express a wish that I had with me a companion de voyage ... who would have united with me in saying, “I have not travelled to Timbuctoo for the sake of any other reward than that which I shall derive from the consciousness of having achieved an enterprise which will rescue my name from obl
ivion.”’ This last piece of false modesty came hard on the heel of several missives inquiring about the colonelcy he felt his achievements merited. On 25 December he wrote to a minion of the colonial secretary, Lord Bathurst (who awarded such promotions), assuring him ‘with how much sincerity I wish His Lordship all the compliments and many happy returns of the season’. It was certainly the first, and probably the most unlikely, greeting ever to be sent from the middle of the Sahara.

  Laing stayed in In Salah for more than a month while Tuareg tribesmen – notorious predators of the trans-Saharan trade routes – roamed hungrily to the south. As the oasis became choked with other caravans waiting, like his own, for a chance to reach Timbuctoo, he became more uncertain. His state of mind was not helped by the arrival of a portrait of Emma Warrington he had commissioned in Tripoli, which showed her to be a trifle peaky. ‘My Emma is ill, is melancholy, is unhappy – her sunken eye, her pale cheek and colourless lips,’ he wrote. ‘Should anything happen to my Emma, which God forbid, I no longer wish to see the face of man; my course will be run – a few short days and I shall follow her to heaven ... I must lay down my pen awhile – oh that picture.’

  On 9 January 1826 the road was deemed safe, and his spirits rose. Two weeks into the journey he wrote that: ‘I have little ... to say more than my prospects are bright and expectations sanguine. I do not calculate upon the most trifling future difficulty between me and my return to England.’ Not long afterwards his caravan was attacked by Tuareg, who killed as many men as they could before ransacking the convoy’s valuables. They sliced open Laing’s tent and shot, stabbed and hacked him before leaving him for dead. The following day, very much to his own surprise, Laing resurfaced. He wrote a graphic report to Warrington. ‘To begin from the top: I have five sabre cuts on the crown of the head and three on the left temple, all fractures from which much bone has come away; one on my left cheek which fractured the jaw bone and has divided the ear, forming a very unsightly wound; one over the right temple and a dreadful gash on the back of the neck, which slightly grazed the windpipe; a musket ball in the hip, which made its way through my back, slightly grazing the backbone; five sabre cuts on my right arm and hand, three of the fingers broken, the hand cut three-fourths across, and the wrist bones cut through; three cuts on the left arm, the bone of which has been broken but is again uniting; one slight wound on the right leg and two with one dreadful gash on the left, to say nothing of a cut across the fingers of my left hand, now healed up.’