If the journey to the Hoggar had been hard, their discomfort increased a thousandfold once they entered the Ténéré. Here was a 100-mile stretch of sand without pasture or game, whose wells were unreliable and whose only comfort was the uncertain prospect of reaching the other side. Already weakened by ill-treatment and lack of food, the camels died en masse. Sometimes they did so with grace, sinking to their knees mid-journey and refusing to budge, peering hopefully after the caravan until they became just a dark blot on the horizon. Sometimes they collapsed at the evening stop. ‘The camp had the appearance of a slaughterhouse,’ one of Lamy’s sergeants wrote in his diary. ‘We saw nothing but camels lying outstretched, agonising, the neck twisted and between their legs.’ During the course of six days almost 100 camels perished. Foureau had brought his own hardened mounts, but even they fell by the wayside. After a week in which a further 140 beasts died, he became seriously worried. ‘In the conditions in which we find ourselves, these numbers are terrible and alarming. It has to be said that, in the middle of the desert, a group of men who see their caravan, or their animals, disappear, is irrevocably lost; nothing can save them; there is nothing left but to lie down in the shade of a boulder and wait for the final deliverance, that is to say, death.’
Even when the expedition crossed the Ténéré and reached the relative prosperity of the Soudan – as the semi-arid territory between the desert and the tropics was then known – the camels continued to die. Forty-three went at their first stop, 35 at the next, then another 19, then 15. By the time the expedition reached Iférouâne, a dusty, godforsaken town in modern Niger, it had only 585 camels to its name. In the expectation of being able to buy replacements, Foureau and Lamy settled down for a well-deserved rest. (By this time they had marched across 1,800 miles of desert.) The rest lasted longer than they would have wished. No fresh mounts were forthcoming, and for two months they sat in Iférouâne while their supplies ran out and the Tuareg launched piecemeal raids that on one occasion escalated into a frontal assault that was repelled only by the use of Lamy’s artillery. And still the camels died – ‘wax models placed by a fire could not melt away faster,’ Foureau recorded in dismay. Soon their caravan numbered less than 200 beasts. The Frenchmen sent messages to the Sultan of Agadez, 200 miles to the south, asking for replacements. The sultan replied that he had none. Would some millet be of use? By 5 June 1899 there remained only 75 beasts of the 1,004 with which they had set out nine months before. In despair, Lamy raided the surrounding countryside for pack animals – donkeys, mostly, and a few camels – and then, having destroyed every inessential piece of equipment, the expedition set out for Agadez on 10 June.
Misled by their guides, they meandered across the Soudan, discarding baggage as their camels and donkeys died. Sometimes they buried their cartridges in the hope of retrieving them, but mostly they just blew them up. Personal belongings were burned, as were clothes. Men and officers alike went barefoot. One sergeant made a pair of trousers from date sacks, but he was an exception. Hunger stalked them. When the column reached Agadez on 28 July, firing a cannon to announce its arrival, it was in a sorry state. Most of the men were naked, and Foureau, stricken by fever and dressed in a purple vest, hung feebly from his saddle. Their spirits rose, however, when the sultan, riding out to greet them, promised both food and camels.
Ten days later, by which time nothing had materialized save a small quantity of millet, Lamy became angry. And when he discovered that he had not been dealing with the sultan after all, but with one of his viziers, he lost his temper. On 9 August he trained his cannon on the town and announced that unless he received camels and a guide forthwith he would level every building in sight. The sultan immediately produced several hundred donkeys which, he protested, was all he had in the way of transport. Lamy accepted the gift reluctantly. On 10 August, to the relief of all, the French column left Agadez for the town of Zinder, 300 miles to the south.
The wells were dry, the heat unbearable and the pasture nonexistent. The donkeys died, and the guide led them in the wrong direction (Lamy shot him when he found out). Forced to retreat, the expedition was then hit by one of the most violent sandstorms Foureau had ever experienced. One minute they were plodding through the scrub under clear skies; the next they felt a gust of wind and looked up to see the horizon covered in huge, plumed clouds, of a sinister copper colour. ‘They advanced with fantastic speed and swept over us with a force that nothing could resist,’ Foureau wrote, ‘blinding everybody, blowing the baggage from the camels’ backs, knocking over the mules. It was impossible to turn your back to it. Sand and gravel flew from every direction. We could not see farther than a few metres.’ The storm lasted five and a half hours, and when they returned to Agadez on 18 August Lamy was in such a vile temper that he had to be restrained from blowing the sultan and his town to bits. Even Foureau, who normally took these things in his stride, acknowledged that they had suffered. As he later recalled, in a lecture to London’s Royal Geographical Society, ‘This march, made under a high temperature by men heavily loaded, without a drop to drink... has hardly a parallel in the history of exploration’.
Foureau and Lamy spent another two months at Agadez, negotiating with the sultan for food and camels, until in mid-October Lamy lost patience. He occupied the town’s wells and offered the sultan a swap: water for transport. Once again, force worked. The sultan assembled a motley of animals – cows, donkeys and a few camels – and on 17 October the expedition left again for Zinder. Rain had fallen in the interim, making their second journey considerably easier than the first. They had a hard time, nonetheless. The newly verdant countryside was full of thorns and nettles, which were agony to the semi-naked men who pushed through them. And their camels kept dying: on 28 October they lost the last of the original batch.
They reached Zinder on 2 November 1899, parched, hungry and so ragged that they looked more like a collection of bandits than representatives of a European great power. They were greeted by cavalcades of trumpet-blowing African cavalry and – to their astonishment – by a troop of neatly dressed, well-fed troops from French Senegal. During their ordeal Foureau and Lamy had all but forgotten that they were part of a three-pronged attack on Lake Chad. The Senegalese, who were part of that attack, had been left at Zinder to accompany Lamy on his route south. They had food, clothes and, above all, women, all of which the newcomers were cordially invited to share. As the expedition was helped gently into town, some of its members began to cry.
Re-equipped and reinvigorated, the expedition proceeded on its march. On 21 January 1900 Foureau caught his first glimpse of Lake Chad. ‘Here it really is,’ he exulted, ‘the long hoped for lake, the goal of our efforts during these past months, my dream for more than twenty years!’ He wrote lyrically of glittering expanses of water, interspersed with islets of reeds, whose shores teemed with game. One day he watched for ten whole minutes as a herd of antelope passed by. His excitement evaporated as the expedition circled Chad to rendezvous with the rest of the force from Senegal. Less a lake than a large, swampy soakaway, Chad was surrounded by marshes and bogs, through which the soldiers waded, cursing. It was only marginally better than being in the desert.
In March they made contact with the Senegalese detachment. And then, to their wonder, they were joined by the Congolese, who had been struggling north to make the Chad rendezvous for more than two years. Both the Congolese and the Senegalese had suffered severely to get where they were and having reached their objective they released their frustration in an orgy of violence. Foureau took no part in the ensuing deplorable bloodshed. Before the action started he had already left Lamy to his devices and was canoeing up one of Lake Chad’s tributaries, the River Shari, from whose headwaters he crossed to those of the Gribingui and thence down to the Congo. He reached Brazzaville on 21 July 1900. By 2 September, having caught a steamer from the mouth of the Congo, he was back in France.
Foureau’s journey was without parallel in the annals of either French col
onialism or Saharan exploration. No European had crossed the desert from top to bottom with such a large body of men. It was near miraculous that they had reached the other side with so few (human) casualties. And although he devoted only 70-odd pages of an 829-page-long journal to the final leg from Chad to the Congo, this part of the journey was in itself a considerable achievement. Admittedly, the military side of his expedition had been less than glorious – Lamy was among the many men who fell in the carnage that brought Chad under French control – but Foureau distanced himself from these unsavoury acts. He stressed, instead, the sheer distance he had covered – 2,500 miles – and the amount of scientific data he had recorded. When his data was eventually published and presented to the Geographical Society of Paris its substance – rock and soil analyses, observations concerning the proportions of African women’s breasts, and a number of poorly developed photographs – may have seemed disproportionate to the time, money and lives expended on its collection. Nobody, however, really cared. Foureau had shown that Frenchmen could cross the Sahara, and this was what mattered.
‘The circle is now completed,’ he wrote in conclusion, ‘the work is accomplished, the dream so long pursued has been realised. Farewell Africa. Be kind and hospitable to those who come after us.’ He never went to the Sahara again.
ITALY’S NORTHERNMOST
The Duke of Abruzzi (1899–1900)
Europe’s royal families were no strangers to exploration, having for centuries lent their name (and sometimes their money) to ventures of every conceivable nature. But sponsorship was as far as they cared to go: actually to participate in an expedition was unthinkable. By the end of the 19th century, however, a disturbing trend had become apparent: many of the younger members showed an eagerness for exotic locations, exposing themselves to unhealthy climates and dangerous wildlife in the pursuit of unnecessary adventure. Fortunately for their parents, they were so cosseted that even when hunting tigers or rhinos they were never placed in much discomfort, let alone danger. The Duke of Abruzzi, however, was an exception to the rule.
Luigi Amadeo Giuseppe Mario Fernando Francesco di Savoia-Aosta, Duke of Abruzzi, Prince of the ancient House of Savoy, third son of the King of Spain, cousin to the King of Italy, was a devotee of danger. In 1894, aged 21, he mastered the Matterhorn’s perilous Zmutt Ridge and three years later became the first person to climb Alaska’s Mount St Elias. Fresh from this triumph, he set his hat at the North Pole. In 1898 he visited Norway in order to quiz Fridtjof Nansen about his recent journey over the ice, and then, in quick succession, sent an order to Siberia for 120 sledge dogs, purchased an Arctic steamer which he rechristened Stella Polare, hired a Norwegian crew to man it, scoured the Italian navy for a team of would-be explorers, and informed an old mountaineering colleague, Captain Umberto Cagni, that he was to prepare for a new excursion. There was none of the usual flummery involving governmental permission, the approval of geographical societies and the long, tedious business of fundraising. When a man of Abruzzi’s wealth and connections wanted something to happen it happened. By mid-August 1899 the Stella Polare was at Franz Josef Land, and by the beginning of September it was ice-bound in Teplitz Bay on Prince Rudolf Island, the northernmost landmass of the archipelago.
Not everything had gone to plan. When Abruzzi collected his dogs from Archangel they were smaller and unhealthier than he had anticipated, and required much bringing on. (Their individual characters and state of health would be a recurring theme of his journal.) And while making its way into Teplitz Bay the Stella Polare had been stabbed by a pressure ridge. It was now uninhabitable thanks to the inflow of water and, worse, was perhaps mortally crippled. But Abruzzi did not care. Ordering Cagni to fix it, he sprang ashore and oversaw the construction of their winter quarters.
In the past, Arctic explorers had either wintered aboard ship, had constructed wooden huts near the shore or, in extremis, had huddled in igloos or stone dens. Abruzzi was having none of this. He erected two tents, complete with campbeds and feather mattresses, for sleeping quarters. Around these he erected a marquee that contained their stoves and cooking equipment. Enclosing it all was an even larger, grander marquee, in which they stacked their provisions. The triple-insulated pavilion kept them so warm that some nights Abruzzi had to douse the fires.
Abruzzi’s attack on the Pole was well thought out. Three sledge parties would depart the following spring, two of them carrying supplies and the third being the group that would make the final assault on the Pole. The support teams would drop out, in carefully calculated stages, leaving the third to continue until its provisions were exhausted – except, that is, for what was necessary for the return journey. At what point the final team would have to turn back Abruzzi could not guess. They would probably not reach the Pole itself, but he hoped ardently that they would reach a new furthest north. It was much like Nansen’s journey, but in reverse and with certain vital modifications. The Italians took kayaks, even though they did not know how to use them. But they rejected skis: instead, the sledgers were to run behind the dogs in finneskoes, canoe-shaped leather galoshes stuffed with dried grass that had been used for centuries in Lapland. Also, in a flight of Jules Verne-like fancy, Abruzzi had decided the travellers’ loads could be lightened if miniature hydrogen balloons were attached to their sledges. The image of men struggling through the snow while their sledges bobbled behind them is as appealing now as it obviously was then. In practice the balloons were a failure, but the generator that had been designed to inflate them came in handy; Cagni used it to pump the Stella Polare free of water and was thus able to make it seaworthy once again. ‘I did not believe it possible!’ enthused Abruzzi on 15 November.
That winter, in preparation for the spring onslaught, the Italians honed their sledging skills with forays across Prince Rudolf Island. They all passed muster save for their leader. Caught in a sudden storm, Abruzzi sped over the edge of a glacier and into the sea. Clambering to safety, he made his way in the darkness back to the pavilion, where the tips of two frostbitten fingers had to be amputated. The wounds healed slowly, and come spring he was still unfit for the journey north. Reluctantly, he transferred command of the sledge parties to Cagni.
Cagni left Teplitz Bay on 11 March 1900 with ten men, 102 dogs and 13 sledges, each of which carried 510 pounds of food and equipment. After the supply teams had turned back, Cagni and three others would be left with five sledges, 48 dogs and food for 60 days. During the first stages of their march the cold was frightful. At 80° F below freezing the metal in their sledge runners and their ice-axes turned brittle as glass. They went to bed in sleeping bags that were frozen stiff and, on waking, donned clothes that within 30 minutes ‘had already become a cuirass of ice’. They moved so slowly that Cagni sent the support teams home ahead of time. And then, in a burst of madness, he decided to make a dash for the Pole once the last party had left. If they reduced their rations there was a chance they might make it. For a while the Arctic led them onwards. With smooth ice and warm days, they ran for up to 12 hours per day, clocking off the miles in a mania of exhilaration. ‘We did not feel the fatigue,’ Cagni wrote, ‘it seemed that life on that endless white plain consisted of placing one foot before the other, and we seemed to find in this mechanical movement peace of mind and repose for the body.’
On 24 April sanity returned. They were at 86° 34’ N, had beaten Nansen by 21 miles and had 30 days’ food remaining – plus their dogs. Cagni wandered alone over the pack and stared into the distance. ‘On the clear horizon, in the form of a crown extending from east to west, was a bluish wall, which, seen from afar, appeared insurmountable.’ Was it the edge of the North Pole, the brink of a tremendous landmass? All Cagni knew was that ‘It was for us Terrae ultima thule’. They had no choice but to turn south for Teplitz Bay.
It was 250 miles to Franz Josef Land, and Cagni estimated that their provisions would carry them 360 miles if conditions held good. There was a deadline of sorts to be met: if they did not reach solid l
and by the end of May they were likely to be stranded by the summer thaw. But as they sped over the pack they had no doubt they would be at Teplitz Bay before the ice melted. On 28 April Cagni judged that another four or five days would see them to safety. Even if they went at their slowest ever rate the Stella Polare could not be a month distant. Over the following days they were hampered by storms and freezing temperatures. At one point Cagni became so badly frostbitten that he had to amputate the tip of his little finger using nothing more sophisticated than a pair of scissors. Even so, by 8 May they were at 83° and the ship was only 120 miles away. ‘From this moment we feel we can live free of anxiety,’ Cagni wrote.
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