The Gates of Africa: Death, Discovery and the Search for Timbuktu

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The Gates of Africa: Death, Discovery and the Search for Timbuktu
Anthony Sattin

Due to the level of detail, maps are best viewed on a tablet.The history of the African Association, the world’s first geographical society, dedicated to the exploration of the interior of a continent known only through legend and vague report.Africa was once seen as an El Dorado – a gold-encrusted continent of hope and prosperity, where the ancient civilisations of the Phoenicians and the Egyptians might have survived intact.The African Association, the world’s first geographical society, set itself the task of revealing the mysteries of the interior of Africa. Founded in 1788 by a group of London-based gentlemen, made famous by the amazing exploits of its adventurers, for forty-three years it was engaged in a quest for geographical knowledge, personal glory, immense wealth and the fulfilment of national ambitions.There are two strands to the narrative. First there are the people who planned and paid for expeditions, the geographers, scholars, politicians, humanitarian activists and sharp-eyed traders, the richest commoner in England and two former prime ministers among them. Theirs is a lively tale of tavern meetings, court lobbying and salon intrigue during one of the most dramatic periods of world history.Then there are the adventurers, a mixed group of ex-cons and social outcasts – British, French, Germans and Americans among them – who went to the magical continent in search of glory and the unknown. They included Mungo Park, whose account of his travels was a bestseller for more than a century, and Jean Louis Burckhardt, discoverer of Petra and Abu Simbel. Each of their journeys was extraordinary, packed with drama and excitement, made notable by geographical discoveries and, with very few exceptions, ending in death.An outstanding account of a unique period characterised by the passion, ambition, courage and sheer sense of adventure of its participants.

The Gates of Africa

DEATH, DISCOVERY

AND THE SEARCH FOR TIMBUKTU

Anthony Sattin

DEDICATION (#ulink_d9c21cf5-2642-59d4-ba8b-a064e1da813a)

For Sylvie, ever my inspiration,

and for Johnny and Felix, our young adventurers

EPIGRAPH (#ulink_18db701a-9e92-554f-a47a-a690f40a5510)

‘TO LOVERS OF ADVENTURE AND NOVELTY,

AFRICA DISPLAYS A MOST AMPLE FIELD.’

James Rennell

CONTENTS

COVER (#u8b398370-28f3-50a4-9269-72a930a8717d)

TITLE PAGE (#u52c2bce4-3342-55a7-936e-ce439cf1115a)

DEDICATION (#u521e8675-679a-54bd-9e57-7c2f7a77ccdf)

EPIGRAPH (#u9e6d4d94-6339-5ff1-8cda-918ed9fced04)

MAPS

PREFACE: TALKING TIMBUKTU (#u11b6ae16-2ba7-5a88-b2b0-51cd8f23e7f9)

1. Exploration’s Godfather (#u5eb1b5f9-f47d-540e-b00e-1adf0f04165a)

2. The Charge of Ignorance (#u0b94aaba-e4b4-5d1d-a7bd-279bbb38ab8a)

3. A Friend to Mankind (#uedcb4b8d-ecd3-5035-9041-323c60551649)

4. The Oriental Interpreter (#u98afe849-cc72-5432-a8f6-ea679b3aa5be)

5. The Moors’ Tales (#u0ba9d5a2-1c87-51b8-b713-343b2ac4da87)

6. The Gambia Route (#u57b28b32-58f3-5a9d-9e7f-e31ec3430024)

7. The Political Player (#litres_trial_promo)

8. No Mean Talents (#litres_trial_promo)

9. Pity the White Man (#litres_trial_promo)

10. The Golden Harvest (#litres_trial_promo)

11. The Göttingen Connection (#litres_trial_promo)

12. Juset ben Abdallah (#litres_trial_promo)

13. Many Deaths (#litres_trial_promo)

14. The Swiss Gentleman (#litres_trial_promo)

15. Shaykh Ibrahim ibn Abdallah (#litres_trial_promo)

16. A New World Order (#litres_trial_promo)

17. The Fountains of the Sun (#litres_trial_promo)

18. The Spirit of Discovery (#litres_trial_promo)

EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)

NOTES (#litres_trial_promo)

BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)

INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)

P.S. IDEAS, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)

PROFILE OF ANTHONY SATTIN (#litres_trial_promo)

LIFE AT A GLANCE (#litres_trial_promo)

Q&A (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE BOOK (#litres_trial_promo)

A CRITICAL EYE (#litres_trial_promo)

THE VIEW FROM THE OTHER SIDE (#litres_trial_promo)

READ ON (#litres_trial_promo)

HAVE YOU READ? (#litres_trial_promo)

IF YOU LOVED THIS, YOU’LL LIKE … (#litres_trial_promo)

USEFUL WEBSITES (#litres_trial_promo)

CHRONOLOGY (#litres_trial_promo)

A NOTE ON SPELLING (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)

PRAISE (#litres_trial_promo)

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)

COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)

MAPS (#ue54373ae-5901-5d36-ba25-e1d62420fe9b)

Rennell’s map showing Herodotus’ knowledge of Africa (#litres_trial_promo)

Ledyard in Cairo on his way to Suakin, Lucas in Tripoli: a grand plan to bisect the northern half of Africa in 1788 (#litres_trial_promo)

Rennell’s map of Africa, 1790 (#litres_trial_promo)

Major Houghton’s progress in west Africa, 1790–91 (#litres_trial_promo)

Rennell’s 1793 map showing Houghton’s route to Bambuk (#litres_trial_promo)

Mungo Park’s first journey in west Africa, 1795–97 (#litres_trial_promo)

Hornemann’s route from Cairo to Murzuq, 1799 (#litres_trial_promo)

Detail from Rennell’s 1802 map of Hornemann’s journey (#litres_trial_promo)

Key locations for Park’s journey to Bussa and Hornemann’s to Bokani (#litres_trial_promo)

Burckhardt’s route to Cairo, 1809–12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Burckhardt’s travels in Africa and Arabia, 1812–17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Missions to the Niger: Clapperton, Denham and Oudney’s route, 1822–25 (#litres_trial_promo)

Laing’s route to Timbuktu, 1825–26 (#litres_trial_promo)

PREFACE (#ulink_e02251e8-08e7-5aae-b1dc-46dd11d40d06)

Talking Timbuktu (#ulink_e02251e8-08e7-5aae-b1dc-46dd11d40d06)

‘To EXPLORE, v.a. [exploro, Latin]

To try; to search into; to examine by trial.’

Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1785)

Beyond the crenellated towers of Cairo’s thousand-year-old Bab an-Nasr, Gate of Victory, stands a cemetery. Known as the City of the Dead, this swathe of tombs has become part of the city of the living, as its large tomb chambers look increasingly desirable in a city filled to bursting. There are always people milling around the main road into the cemetery, flower-sellers with wreaths and bouquets wrapped in palm fronds, chanters ready to recite suras from the Koran for a few notes, muscled grave-diggers, black-robed women ready to mourn on demand and a few guardians, keys hanging from their robes like jailers. Behind them, the cemetery is a maze of small tombs, shacks, graves, huts, cafés, storerooms and the occasional grand mausoleum. Once off the main street and into this confusion, it is easy to lose yourself, as I did, wanting to pay my respects to a man known both as Jean Louis Burckhardt and as Shaykh Ibrahim ibn Abdallah.

There are no written records of who is buried where in Bab an-Nasr. Instead the guardians store the knowledge and then pass it like an heirloom from father to son. Burckhardt, Shaykh Ibrahim, died almost two hundred years ago. According to the guidebook I had consulted, his tomb was lost. It seemed unlikely that a foreigner would ever find it, but Cairo is a city of wonders and one Eid, the feast at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, I went to look. There is a tradition of visiting the cemetery during the Eid, so the place was crowded and people had better things to do than to guide a foreigner around the tombs. But passed from one guardian to the next, I did eventually find a small nineteenth-century mausoleum containing a low white marble grave inscribed with Burckhardt’s titles as a hajj (one who has performed the pilgrimage to Mecca), as a shaykh and as al Lausani, the man from Lausanne. To this the guardian added the title of al Muslimayn, the two Muslims, which he meant as an indication of Burckhardt’s sanctity.

Let’s now jump back to the mid-nineteenth century, to 1853, when a thirty-two-year-old Anglo-Irishman disguised as an Afghani Muslim passed through that same massive gate. Then as now, the cemetery was ‘a favourite resort’ during the Eid. The man was Richard Burton. Fluent in Arabic, easy in his disguise, Burton found himself in a crowd of ‘jugglers, buffoons, snake-charmers, dervishes, ape-leaders, and dancing boys habited in women’s attire’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Expelled from Oxford University, and then disgraced as an officer in the East India Company’s army, Burton was passing through Cairo on his way to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca. Burton knew that Burckhardt had made the pilgrimage some forty years earlier, and it seems there was an element of homage in his mention of the Swiss traveller’s ‘humble grave’. Burton reported that some £20 had been raised among the city’s foreign community to cover the grave with what he called a fitting monument. ‘Some objection, however, was started, because Moslems are supposed to claim Burckhardt as one of their own saints.’

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Who was this Lausani shaykh, this Swiss traveller still revered in Cairo more than two hundred years after his death? Jean Louis Burckhardt came from a wealthy Swiss family whose business and domestic harmony was destroyed in the 1790s when they fell foul of an occupying French revolutionary army. The young Burckhardt grew up longing for a place where life and liberty were respected; as more of Europe fell to Napoleon Bonaparte, only England seemed to offer what he wanted. Burckhardt arrived in London in the summer of 1806 and, strange as it may sound, was introduced to a man who suggested he might like to become an explorer and who offered to send him into Africa to search for answers to questions about the rise of rivers, the extent of deserts, the state of empires and the whereabouts of goldfields. Burckhardt accepted. On his way there, he became the first European since the Crusaders to set eyes on the ancient Nabataean city of Petra and the first since antiquity to see the magnificent pharaonic temples at Abu Simbel. He also travelled further up the Nile than any recorded European before him. These were all remarkable achievements, but the object of his journey, the reason he had been sent, lay across the burning Sahara in Timbuktu.

Burton, who acknowledged Burckhardt as his favourite travel writer, certainly knew all about these achievements, as he did about Burckhardt’s groundbreaking pilgrimage to Mecca. That year of 1853, Burton travelled east from Cairo and made his own pilgrimage to Mecca. The following year he was in Abyssinia’s holy city of Harar, officially closed to non-Muslims, and five years later, with the backing of the Royal Geographical Society, he and his partner John Hanning Speke cut inland from the malarial Swahili coast in search of the source of the Nile and ensured their names would live on by becoming the first recorded Europeans to reach lakes Tanganyika and Victoria.

Books on the history of African geography are dominated by the stories of Burton and Speke and their contemporaries, particularly Livingstone and Stanley, Grant, and Samuel and Florence Baker. The names that stand out are almost exclusively Victorian. If an earlier African traveller is mentioned, it is likely to be James Bruce, a resourceful Scottish laird who travelled through the Ethiopian highlands in the 1760s in search of the source of the Nile. But Bruce is a man with an unfortunate reputation. In his own time he was accused of having made up the entire story of his travels: his critics suggested that instead of risking his life in Africa he had spent years in happy, peaceful seclusion somewhere around the Mediterranean before returning to Britain. An extended vacation in the south might have seemed tempting to his tormentors, but not, one suspects, to the irascible Bruce. Later critics dismissed Bruce for believing that the source he had reached was that of the White Nile, when in reality it was the Blue. Nevertheless his journey was one of the turning points in European involvement in Africa, for it demonstrated that one man could go a long way inland and live to tell the tale. In Brace’s case, home proved to be more dangerous than the wilds of Africa, for in 1794 he slipped on the stairs of his country house, struck his head and died, four years after the publication of his Travels. But what happened between Bruce and Burton, between the 1770s and 1850s? Burckhardt’s adventures provided a clue.

For years I collected information and anecdotes about him, talked about him in libraries in London and cafés in the Middle East, followed him on some of his journeys and kept an eye out for new sources of information. But the closer I came to Burckhardt, the more curious I became about the men who set him on his way. Who were they? Why were they prepared to spend time and money to solve the mysteries of the African interior? And how far did they succeed? My initial curiosity about Burckhardt eventually led me to the fantastic, improbable, tragic story that follows.

(#ulink_c4850331-6ed4-5af5-b719-117388f49dca) The marble cladding was added in the 1880s, apparently paid for by Europeans in Cairo. The small house that now covers the tomb was added in the 1920s or 1930s by the Burckhardt family in Switzerland, who continue to look after its upkeep. All very touching, though there is some doubt as to whether the great traveller’s bones lie beneath the cenotaph, or somewhere else in the cemetery.

1 (#ulink_cf30ddc2-360f-5ef6-9d71-ecd3089a384d)

Exploration’s Godfather (#ulink_cf30ddc2-360f-5ef6-9d71-ecd3089a384d)

‘Wide as the world is, traces of you are to be found

in every corner of it.’

Lord Hobart to Joseph Banks. 18 October 1793

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London, 9 June 1788

WHAT ADVENTURES these hands have had. They bear witness to the day he shimmied down a rope to escape a Portuguese blockade in the bay at Rio and another when he stroked the shapely curves of a girl on Tahiti – she had fire in her eyes, he later wrote, and he incurred the anger of a queen to enjoy her favours. They are plump, white, well-attended gentleman’s hands, protruding from a frilled cuff, and yet they have wielded knives to cut plant specimens around the world, held pencils to sketch, brushes to colour, positioned instruments to observe the transit of Venus and worked a pump to save Captain Cook’s ship from sinking. More recently – the previous year – they began to swell and ache with the onset of gout. Now, as he sits for the artist and Royal Academician John Russell, these hands are holding a sheet of paper on which is drawn an image of the moon.