HarperCollins first edition - 2006
In the first two decades of the 19th century, the 'lost' city of Timbuktu burned in the imagination of European geographers, explorers and fortune-hunters. Like El Dorado, the city was reputed to be a place of immense wealth and superior culture - fame and riches beckoned to anyone brave enough to get there. Founded around 1100 A.D. by Tuareg nomads, Timbuktu became an important trading post and crossroads. Arab traders from the Barbary states on the Mediterranean coast travelled across the inhospitable Sahara desert to link up with black Africa. It developed its markets, mosques, Islamic libraries and schools, often funded by the gold mines of West Africa, worked by black slaves for their black and Arab owners. By 1800, most of Africa still remained a blank space on maps. Crossing the Sahara and penetrating the Congo River basin were feats no one had lived to tell about. A phrase now used to diminish the importance of a loss, say at tennis, is "nobody died" - well in this rather harrowing story of European exploration of the Sahara and West Africa, it appears as if nearly everybody died. Not for nothing was the West African Coast known as the White Man's grave. In addition to diseases, such as malaria, whose cause was still misunderstood, the Africans and Arabs regarded European travellers as "the devil's children" and "enemies of the Prophet" who were bent on ending the lucrative Slave Trade and supplanting Arab caravans with British shipping.
The impetus, some would say the beginning, occurred on 9 June 1788, when nine titled Londoners met for dinner at St. Albans Tavern off Pall Mall. This Saturday's Club, led by Sir Joseph Banks (who had sailed with Captain Cook on his first expedition) set up what was to be later named the African Association and identified the river Niger and the legendary cities it supported, notably Timbuktu, as their first priority. Within a month of the dinner, the first explorer was on his way.
An American, 37 year-old John Ledyard, who had served in the British army, left England on 30th June 1788, arriving in Cairo on 19th August. The series of letters back to England suddenly stopped - Ledyard had inadvertently poisoned himself with a fatal dose of sulphuric acid. Simon Lucas was next. He left England in August 1788, reaching Tripoli in mid-October. He let his hair grow and wore Turkish dress, but failed to carry out a longer journey. He was named consul for Tripoli, dying at his post eight years later. The failure of these first two missions acted as a spur not a deterrent! There was a change of direction however. An Irish major, Daniel Houghton, was sent to the mouth of the Gambia and pushed up to the furthest navigable point of the river. Lured into the Sahara, native traders then robbed and killed him. Perhaps the most well-known to subsequent history was Mungo Park, a young Scottish physician. In May 1795, he sailed to the Gambia and struck inland. Tribesman constantly harassed him, demanding tolls, but his mission lasted more than two and a half years and his adventures and accomplishments rank among the greatest ever in the annals of African exploration. On 20th June 1796, Park became the first European on record to see the river Niger. The African Society, England and Europe were thrilled. In 1799, after the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, Banks urged his government to seize control of the Niger and its trade before the French did.
Park had returned to Scotland in 1797, but by 1802 he had tired of sedentary family life in Peebles. In 1804, supported by Banks, he proposed a second larger-scale expedition to the Niger. Starting from the Gambia again in March 1805, he reached the Niger in mid-August. He sailed off down the river in November and was never heard of again! Years later, in 1810, stories circulated he had been ambushed and killed. Friedrich Hornemann and a fellow German, Joseph Frendenburgh set out in 1798 in a Saharan caravan - Frendenburgh died at Murzuk and Hornemann, on another journey, after reaching the Niger, apparently expired with dysentery. Further expeditions, and deaths, followed. Henry Nicholls of malaria in April 1805; Major John Peddie in 1815 of coastal fever in Senegal; Captain Thomas Campbell soon after; Captain James Kingston Tuckey in October 1816, expiring on the deck of his flagship, still at anchor in the Congo estuary.
Government ministers in London were stunned that England's best and brightest had been wiped out in both of the expeditions (65% of the British contingent of 117 men died in Africa, while many of the rest were terminally ill when they landed in England).
The majority of Kryza's book now turns to the two men who became rivals in their pursuit of getting to Timbuktu first and mapping the full length of the river Niger. Major Alexander Gordon Laing, a 30 year-old Scot, sailed into Tripoli on 9th May 1825. He met the long-serving - in place since 1814 - and eccentric British Consul, Colonel Hanmer Warrington (b. 1778), a lovable John Bull of a man, whose family of seven sons and three daughters were not all present to greet Laing. However, the latter fell instantly in love with the second daughter, Emma. One of the tragedies of the story, is that the pair married but never consummated the tie and, Emma never saw her husband again once he had set off across the Sahara. The other important figure in Tripoli was the Bashaw - Yusuf Karamanli, "the Slave of Allah" and ruler of the city, who played a devious, almost treacherous, part in the following two years' events. Laing finally left Tripoli in July, heading south across the Sahara. A rather unsatisfactory map charts his meandering way, at least once going north rather than south, to Ghadomes, In-Salah, Timissoo and then Timbuktu. The author, having access to Laing's letters back to Warrington and London as well as others' accounts, gives a all-too realistic description of the awful terrain and frightful weather Laing and his party had to endure.
Alexander Laing and Hugh Clapperton
Three years earlier, another expedition had been sent out from London to explore the African interior. Led by Dr. Walter Oudney, a Lowland Scot and a physician like Mungo Park, and supported by his friend and neighbour, 33 year-old Lieutenant Hugh Clapperton - a gentleman of excellent, disposition, strong constitution, and temperate habits and Lieutenant Dixon Denham, a Sandhurst military instructor, it proved to be a disaster. Denham was a snob, domineering, insecure, jealous and burdened with a devious streak of real meanness. The expedition left Tripoli and headed south, aiming to discover Lake Chad. Clapperton and Denham soon grew to loathe each other but they reached Lake Chad, a body of water the size of Switzerland never before seen by a white man. The three man were regularly ill, with Oudney dying of consumption on 12th January 1824. Clapperton, alone now, entered the great trading city of Kano that same month. He also reached Bornu and Sokoto where he met up with Denham; together, after another awful journey across the Sahara, they reached Tripoli in January 1825. The mission had been a costly failure - they had not got to Timbuktu or discovered the Niger's termination. Denham published his Narrative of Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa in 1826. It read as if he had travelled alone. One 20thc historian wrote It remains difficult...to find a more odious man than Dixon Denham. Denham accumulated honours and was appointed governor of Sierra Leone in 1828. He died there of a fever the same year.
Dixon Denham
The rest of the book details the race for Timbuktu by Laing from Tripoli and Chatterton, returning to Africa, from the slave-trading station of Badagri on the West African coast. They were clearly jealous of each other and determined to be the winner. Accompanying Clapperton were Captain Robert Pearce, a naval officer, and Dr. Thomas Dickson, a Scottish surgeon (were they all Scottish?!) and Dr. Robert Morison, a naval surgeon and naturalist. Dickson died of fever, Morison died on the route back to Badagri, and Pearce fell into a stupor and died, aged 28, of jungle fever. Clapperton himself died of malaria in March 1827. His body, placed on the back of a camel and draped with the Union Jack, was taken out of Sokoto and buried in a little village five miles south east of the city. He had not found Timbuktu nor the Niger's mouth. Laing did achieve the former, entering the fabled city on 13th August 1826, over a year after he had left Tripoli and eight months after Clapperton's death. The city was a disappointment; moreover, he was soon (after 35 days) forced to leave as it was too dangerous for him. It was only in 1910 that his fate was discovered - murdered by an Arab, Sheikh Ahmadu El Abeyd.
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The English Blockade Squadron of West Africa was tagged the 'Coffin Squadron': between 1822 and 1830, of 1,568 sailors and soldiers in one detachment in West Africa, 1,298 (82%) died there of 'climatic fevers', 125 died on the voyage home, and half of the survivors died of tropical diseases after returning to England. Only 57 men (less than 4%) were discharged as 'fit'.
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