скачать книгу бесплатно
The man is Sir Joseph Banks, the year 1788, and the irony of the situation is not lost on him. There is no chance that he will ever set foot on the moon and yet, thanks to the telescope created by his friend William Herschel (who has recently discovered the planet Uranus), he is able to observe its surface in some detail. On the other hand, he has set foot in Africa. He has walked through the lushness of old fruit trees, enjoyed the generosity of palms and discovered the necessity of shade trees. He has also seen some of its murderous stretches of treeless desert. Geographers and earlier travellers have pointed to a great desert, stretching across the northern half of the continent, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, pierced from south to north by the Nile. And below that, it was rumoured that there was a great river, the Niger, running across the latitudes. He can imagine the extremes, the withering sands, the vertiginous rocks, the torrential rivers, the vast scrublands scattered with shade trees, the lush tropical pastures and forests, the dusty villages, petty kingdoms, seasonal trading posts and, it is rumoured, the great empires ⦠and yet neither Herschel with his telescope nor any other Fellow of the Royal Society can devise a way for him to know for sure what lies in the interior of Africa.
The lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson, another of Sir Joseph Banksâ good friends, has recently defined a map as âa geographical picture on which lands and seas are delineated according to the longitude and latitudeâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet this does not describe the pages being sold in London, Paris or anywhere else on earth in 1788. In this, the twenty-seventh year of the glorious reign of the soon-to-be-mad King George III, a map of Africa still owes more to the hopeful imaginings of ancient and medieval geographers than to the lie of the land as it exists in this, the Age of Enlightenment.
In the middle of the map, the interior of the continent, some lines trace the course of rivers; several curves represent mountains. Near the edge of the outline, the names of many towns and a few great cities are written, among them Cairo and Morocco (Marrakesh). At the heart of the continent lies Timbuktu, legendary city of gold, capital of a mighty empire. But history, legend, rumour and deduction all suggest that there is much else beside. The seventeenth-century anthologist Samuel Purchas spelled it out when he wrote that âthe richest Mynes of Gold in the World are in Africa ⦠and I cannot but wonder, that so many have sent so many, and spent so much in remoter voyages to the East and West and neglected Africa in the midstâ.
(#litres_trial_promo)
There are several reasons for this sorry state of affairs. To Banks and his contemporaries Africa appears to be geographically hostile. In South America, they can sail up the Amazon, as the Spaniards have done. They can cut deep into North America along the Mississippi with the same ease, and cross much of Europe on the Rhône and the Rhine. But although ancient geographers have written of the Niger and the Nile, no European in the Age of Enlightenment has managed to get very far into Africa without running into trouble with the continentâs geography. Green, precipitous mountains, withering desert sands, blasting hot in summer, freezing in winter, torn apart by winds and sandstorms at other times of the year, mangrove swamps, tropical forests, rivers blocked by rapids, seasonal floods ⦠And to add to this geographical hostility, in many places they have also had to deal with the hostility of Africans, often caused by a mistrust of Christians by Muslims or by a well-founded suspicion that white-skinned foreigners bring trouble and steal trade.
There is more: even if the landscape or natives donât hold them up, the rains do, and with the rains come deadly diseases.
(#ulink_f3708f6a-f917-565a-9ed4-2af123881740) It is possible that some outsiders have made it deep into the continent â the sixteenth-century Portuguese certainly had a go, and two Italian priests were rumoured to have crossed from Tripoli to Katsina in modern-day Nigeria in 1711. But it is safe to say that most foreigners who have attempted to travel to the interior have died along the way, while the few survivors have left no detailed descriptions of where they have been or of what they found there. Or if they have, their descriptions are lost, misfiled, hidden, untranslated or otherwise not yet come into the hands of Sir Joseph Banks and his Enlightened friends.
This dearth of information might have halted the movement of Europeans into the interior of Africa, but it has not stopped geographers from pontificating on its secrets. Almost unanimously, they have drawn two great river systems that bisect the continent like clock hands pointing to nine oâclock. Wisdom â very ancient wisdom, at that â has it that the Niger River, the hour hand, runs parallel to the equator, and that somewhere to the east of centre of the continent it joins up with the Nile, the minute hand, which climbs due north. On some maps, a third great river, the Congo, is shown as a dash or an arc through the centre. To these dominant features, noble geographers have added other details. They are on safe ground along the coast, where they can plot towns and cities whose character and extent are known for a fact. But what to do with the interior? There are mountains, though no one in Europe knows where they begin or end; to these they have given fanciful names such as the Mountains of the Moon and the Mountains of Kong. Around them have been placed a clutch of kingdoms that some geographers have imagined as savage and barbarous. Others have conceived of noble capitals and mighty empires, worthy partners to Europeâs own kingdoms. Beyond this, mapmakers must choose between flights of fancy, or empty white spaces.
In recent years, Europeans, among them our Joseph Banks â the knighthood came in 1781, long after his travelling days â have sailed the seven seas, set foot on Australia, skirted both the north and south ice caps, observed the transit of Venus, escorted Tahitian royalty to London and even looked with some detail at the surface of the moon. Yet they and he remain surprisingly, frustratedly ignorant of Africa. Now they want to know more. Ever since James Braceâs return to Europe, their curiosity has been growing. âAfrica is indeed coming into fashion,â the chronicler Horace Walpole noted at the time. âThere is just returned a Mr Bruce, who has lived three years in the Court of Abyssinia, and breakfasted every morning with the maids of honour on live oxen. Otaheite [the Tahitian prince whom Cook brought to London] and Mr Banks are quite forgotten.â
(#litres_trial_promo)
(#ulink_a88a94ed-f63f-5614-8e49-b6e9fc406a3c)
In Londonâs salons, trading houses and government offices, the same questions are being asked: What does Africa consist of? Where are its legendary riches, the fields with their harvests of gold and precious stones? What of the achievements of its people? What do they grow there? What could Europeans grow there? What of their past, their future? A few, Sir Joseph among them, are also asking another question: How can they find out? He has to know.
We come to these questions at the other end of history, after the exploration of the continent and the subsequent scramble by European governments first to control Africa and then to colonise it. The oppression of the majority of Africans by a tiny minority of Europeans, the struggle for independence, the post-colonial catastrophes and the chaos and confusion that exists in many African countries today is a long, long way in the future.
We look at this puzzle of what lies in the interior of Africa from another point of view, coloured by the fact that Africa is now seen, in the words of a British prime minister, as âa scar on the conscience of the worldâ. How hard it is to forget all that, but how essential if we are to understand this story. It takes a great leap of imagination to appreciate how tantalising the African questions appear to Sir Joseph Banks in 1788 as he puts down the detailed map of the moon and picks up the sketchy map of the African interior.
A year and a half earlier, in January 1787, fifty-four years after the satirist Jonathan Swiftâs attack on geographers who âin Afric maps,/With savage pictures filled their gaps,/And oâer unhabitable downs,/Placed elephants for want of townsâ, the cartographer Samuel Boulton published a four-sheet map of Africa. Mapmaking is a matter of painstaking evolution. Scraps of information, gathered often in bizarre or dangerous circumstances, allow geographers to effect detailed corrections and minute expansions. Two paces forwards, one backwards. Boulton took as his starting point a map of Africa published in 1749 by the brilliant French geographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon dâAnville. In this, he behaved no differently to the mapmakers who had gone before him. Even the great dâAnville had used an earlier map as his starting point and was, in effect, drawing heavily on medieval and classical geographers. The Frenchman had gone a long way towards removing those elephants and beasts from the map; Boulton now attempted to go one step further. In keeping with an age that prided itself on the rigour of its scientific enquiries, he decided to remove every town, port and geographical feature, whether mountain, river or desert, of whose existence he was not certain.
Rennellâs map showing Herodotusâ knowledge of Africa
Another Frenchman, de Mornes, had tried this on his own map of Africa just sixteen years earlier, in 1761, but was led astray by his love of rationality. Instead of putting down what was known for certain from first-hand sources, he attempted to accommodate the stuff of legends: âIt is true,â de Mornes wrote on his map by way of explanation, âthat the centre of the continent is filled with burning sands, savage beasts, and almost uninhabitable deserts. The scarcity of water forces the different animals to come together to the same place to drink. Finding themselves together at a time when they are in heat, they have intercourse with one another, without paying regard to the differences between species. Thus are produced those monsters which are to be found there in greater numbers than in any other part of the world.â
(#litres_trial_promo) Geography, it will be clear from this, is a long and dangerous road, full of traps, ready to ensnare the well-intentioned but unwary traveller.
Like dâAnville and de Mornes, Boulton explained that he was including âall [Africaâs] states, kingdoms, republics, regions, islands, &c.â Crucially, however, there were to be no more elephants, no dragons or two-headed beasts to cover up his lack of knowledge. Out went the Garamantes, whose speech the Greek historian Herodotus had described as resembling âthe shrieking of a bat rather than the language of menâ. (Herodotus, it should be pointed out, did visit North Africa but did not get as far south as the land of the Garamantes.) Out too went the Blemmyes, whom the first-century Roman scholar Pliny the Elder described as having âno head but mouth and eyes both in their breastâ. The only decorations Boulton allowed on his map of Africa were some ships under sail in the oceans and a few African figures draped around the title, which pretty much summed up the status quo as far as Europeans were concerned. If he did not know something, he would rather leave a blank than hazard a guess. It proved to be more of a challenge than a cartographer in the Age of Enlightenment might have expected.
Since the Portuguese adventurer Lopes de Sequeira sailed around the continent 270 years earlier, there has been a regular and growing traffic between Europe and ports along Africaâs west coast and around the Cape of Good Hope. European sea captains have returned with charts, maps and soundings, gold, ivory and slaves and, perhaps most potent, a rich fabric woven from legends and hearsay. In West Africa, British traders have made headway up the Gambia River and their French rivals have done the same along the more northerly Senegal River. Plenty of Europeans have cut inland from the coast, some certainly making it a few hundred miles up the rivers, perhaps some of them even reaching the Niger and Timbuktu. A few have even sat down and written about their experiences, among them Richard Jobson, who sailed three hundred miles up the Gambia River in 1620 and returned to write The Golden Trade, or a Discovery of the River Gambia and the Golden Trade of the Aethiopians. Jobson clearly enjoyed his journey, describing how he shared âfamiliar conversation, fair acceptance, and mutual amityâ with people along the river, particularly with a local trader by the name of Bucknor Sano. From Sano, Jobson heard of a city, two monthsâ journey inland, âthe houses whereof are covered only with goldâ. Other travellers returned with tales of snow-capped mountains, vast rivers, terrible deserts, miraculous lakes â¦
But even if their experiences reached the ears of geographers, almost nothing they had to report advanced the cause of science, because they saw little of it first-hand. Even when they did see it, they took no bearings and recorded no distances between places, making it difficult and sometimes impossible for geographers to profit from their experiences. All this left Boulton having to explain in a box on his map that: âThe Inland Parts of Africa being but very little known and the Names of the Regions and Countries which fill that vast Tract of Land being for the Greatest part placed by Conjecture It may be judged how Absurd are the Divisions Traced in some Maps and why they were not followed in this.â As a result, the interior of Boultonâs map has more white than black, more virgin page than printerâs ink.
So matters stand on this June day in 1788 when Sir Joseph Banks, middle-aged, solidly-built, hair curled around his temples, powdered and puffed on top, steps out of his home, a corner house â number 32 â and into Soho Square.
(#ulink_33a5bf6d-6543-5e08-8929-e26cad3c43d1) The seventeen years that have passed since he was in Africa have transformed him, and nothing about his appearance suggests that he is anything other than a man of wealth and privilege. Outwardly, at least, the English gentleman and amateur have eclipsed the globetrotting man of action. In 1771, when he returned from his round-the-world voyage as the scientist on Cookâs voyage, Banks was hailed as a hero and revelled in his new-found status of celebrity traveller. In 1774, by which time he had made a voyage to Iceland, the chronicler James Boswell described him as âan elephant, quite placid and gentle, allowing you to get upon his back or play with his proboscisâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) By 1788, however, age and now gout have begun to sap some of his vigour. No longer a world traveller, Banks is now a grandee, a friend of the King and President of his Royal Society. He is a famous man. Extraordinarily well connected, he counts key politicians, big bankers, bankrupt old money, grand titles, leading businessmen and some of the most brilliant brains of the day among his circle of close friends. But for all that, it is the world beyond his island that continues to shape him and that has provided posterity with the material with which it has fashioned his image as the patron of travellers, the godfather of exploration and the caretaker of much of Britainâs colonial policy.
In the seventeen years since his return, the world has also changed: perhaps most significant, the American colonies have won their independence from the British crown. While mandarins in Londonâs ministries continue to respond to the loss like wounded parents, Sir Joseph has moved on. He spawns his own plans for new British interests abroad, fosters those of others and lends time, money and credibility to anything he thinks will further the interests of the country he loves so dearly. Increasingly his attention is drawn to Africa, and he remembers its remarkable richness and seductive promise. As he prepares to make the half-mile journey across the centre of London to St Albanâs Street, he does so knowing that he has a workable idea of how to improve the map of Africa. It is an idea that he will foster for the remainder of his long life and that will allow him to continue to exercise his love of both intellectual and â vicariously at least â of physical adventure.
Perhaps as he leaves home this day he remembers, as many of us do, the things he has not completed. Much has already been achieved, but so much more remains to be done. The First Fleet of convicts and settlers sailed from England the previous year and should by now be settled in the colony he has dreamed up, lobbied for and helped to equip at Australiaâs Botany Bay (the name Captain Cook gave to the bay where Banks went botanising). Seeds and cuttings are sent with increasing regularity from a range of contacts he has fostered around the world. As they arrive, they are stored in his Soho Square herbarium or planted out, propagated and studied at the botanical gardens he has helped to create at Kew. But the founding of the Royal Horticultural Society is in the future, as is the safekeeping of Linnaeusâ collection, the development of his own botanical garden, the advising of the King, his seat on the Privy Council and the boards of Trade arid Longitude. The future will indeed be fertile.
To maintain all his contacts, he has had to become a prodigious letter writer. Each morning a pile of correspondence is gone through in the study at Soho Square, Banks sitting at one of the desks in front of a sofa, the fireplace and a dozen good portraits in oil. A great deal of his correspondence concerns the Royal Society and its ever-widening range of interests, for he is guided by the visionary principle of universal knowledge and by his belief that resources should be pooled, advances shared and science in all its many branches should be fostered across national borders.
In this year of 1788 he is forty-five years old and has already been President of the Royal Society, the home of Englandâs finest scientists, for ten years. During this time, dissenters have complained that a heavy-drinking, adventure-loving botaniser is a far from worthy successor to a chair once occupied by the likes of Isaac Newton. But he has weathered their protests as he will weather others, with stoicism, confident that he can shrug them off.
The Royal Society met in its new quarters at Somerset House in the Strand, as usual, the previous evening and, as usual before the meeting, Sir Joseph opened his home both to members of the Society and to members of society. Three rooms in Soho Square were filled with scientists and philosophers, adventurers, businessmen and foreigners, all of them bearing seeds, whether physical or metaphorical, botanical or philosophical.
(#ulink_64457d11-9638-5305-8fb8-ca222c0b646f) There are letters to write on this Monday morning as a result of the Societyâs meeting: among others, to the botanist Johann Hedwig, Professor of Medicine at Leipzig, whom he wants to congratulate for having been elected âa foreign member of our Royal Societyâ. There is always too much correspondence to deal with, too many other tasks to be done, but now he puts them aside, or instructs others to continue with them, for he has a meeting to attend that will help to shape the future of Africa.
(#ulink_f21f5cd2-bbcf-5c3b-858e-947ca1273cb2) Eighteenth-century man, for all his advances, has yet to discover that the good Lord has given mosquitoes the ability to carry a virus by the name of malaria.
(#ulink_68c9128b-2951-50a9-b4d3-540b2d9f7966) Walpole went on: âMr Blake I suppose will order a live sheep for supper at Almackâs, and ask whom he shall help to a piece of the shoulder. Oh yes, we shall have negro butchers, and French cooks shall be laid aside. My Lady Townsend, after the rebellion, said, everybody was so bloodthirsty, that she did not dare to dine abroad, for fear of meeting with a rebel pie â now one shall be asked to come and eat a bit of raw mutton. In truth, I do think we are ripe for any extravagance.â
(#ulink_62215d8a-abd4-5cbd-b526-4336b49db084) Banks bequeathed the house to his librarian, Robert Brown, who rented part of it to the Linnaean Society. It was demolished in 1936 and the site is now covered by the London offices of 20th Century-Fox.
(#ulink_a99061cc-46b7-56a0-b411-64771f14310f) As T.J. Mathias put it in The Pursuits of Literature (1812), âSir Joseph Banks has instituted a meeting at his house in Soho Square, every Sunday evening, at which the literati and men of rank and consequence, and men of no consequence at all, find equally a polite and pleasing reception from that justly distinguished manâ.
2 (#ulink_bad21fd8-043e-5c65-9b28-3229e683e058)
The Charge of Ignorance (#ulink_bad21fd8-043e-5c65-9b28-3229e683e058)
âNo other part of the world abounds with gold and silver in greater degree ⦠and it is surprising that neither the ancient or modern Europeans notwithstanding their extraordinary and insatiable thirst after gold and silver, should have endeavoured to establish themselves effectively in a country much nearer to them than either America or the East Indies and where the object of their desires are to be found in equal, if not greater plenty.â
Encyclopaedia Britannica, second edition (1788)
London, 9 June 1788
THE CAPITAL is a mad, crowded jumble, its inhabitants gripped by a fever of activity. While Sir Joseph is on his way to his rendezvous in St Albanâs Street, Their Most Britannic (and still quite Germanic) Majesties King George III and Queen Charlotte Sophia are reviewing a troop of Dragoons. Mr Pitt the Younger, the twenty-eight-year-old Prime Minister, is immersed in the cares and affairs of State, turning over the debates in Parliament and deliberating on tensions in Europe. The Lord Chancellor is in his office appointing a new Lord Chief Justice â it isnât something he has done before: the previous incumbent, the Earl of Mansfield, held the post for thirty-two years. Like His Lordship, the new Chief Justice will have no trouble filling the prisons. Sir Joseph Banks knows all about this problem of overcrowding. The three female cells in Londonâs Newgate Jail are crammed with many more than the seventy prisoners they were intended to hold, as convicts sentenced to âTransportation to Parts Beyond the Seasâ wait for the arrival of ships to take them to Botany Bay, Sir Josephâs Australian project.
The Times has just called London âan emporium of all the world and the wonder of foreignersâ. Plenty of these âwonderingâ foreigners appear to be installed in the capital. âLondon abounds with an incredible number of these black men,â one commentator notes this year of 1788,
(#litres_trial_promo) while to the poet William Wordsworthâs eyes:
Among the crowd all specimens of man,
Through all the colours which the sun bestows,
And every character of form and face:
The Swede, the Russian; from the genial south,
The Frenchman and the Spaniard; from remote
America, the Hunter-Indian; Moors,
Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese,
And Negro Ladies in white muslin Gowns.
(#litres_trial_promo)
The worldâs largest city reaches out beyond the shores of Albion with more than just prison ships. There is plenty of movement through the port during these early days of June as ships arrive from Norway, Cadiz, Nantes, Venice and several tropical ports. âJust landed,â trills an advert for Youngâs Italian Warehouse on the front page of the paper this day, 9 June, âa large quantity of very curious Salad Oil, from Provence, Lucca, and Florence; Olives, Anchovies, Capers; Parmesan, Gruyer, and other foreign Cheese; Macaroni â¦â Some Londoners clearly have a taste for the finer things in life. There is foreign intelligence, too: news just in that the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey and Georgia â British colonies until eleven years ago â have agreed to join something called the United States of America. It is more salt in the festering wound of the mother nation. There is no appetite now for colonies if this is how the successful ones behave.
One other snippet of foreign intelligence reported this day has a bearing on our story: there is early news of an insurrection in France as demands grow for the King to make sweeping concessions and share power. A revolution is in the making.
Parliament, keen to break for summer recess as soon as its work is done, has its sights on matters abroad as well as near at hand. On this day, as Sir Joseph heads for his meeting, Honourable Members hear about the plight of American Loyalists, the problems in Scottish boroughs and the dilemma of the English Episcopal Church in Amsterdam. But the main debate concerns evidence given to support a âBill for regulating the transportation of Slaves from Africa to Americaâ. Here is a topic guaranteed to split the House as it is splitting the country, or at least that part of the country with moral, economic or political interest in such matters. The Times in its editorial has taken the side of Sir William Dolben, the politician who has sponsored the Bill, thundering that, âFor Englishmen to chain their innocent fellow-creatures together, and keep them in bondage for life, is much more repugnant to Christianity, than cutting off the ears of the enemy is barbarity, in the followers of Mahomet.â
(#litres_trial_promo) That afternoon, however, had the Honourable Members looked out of their windows they would have seen a very different sort of fleet sailing upstream past the Houses of Parliament as pleasure boats massed to contest the Annual Silver Cup and Cover.
Across the river in Croydon, a well-known boxer from Birmingham by the name of Futerel is failing to live up to his reputation as a destroyer of men. The contest, held in an impromptu ring, lasts an hour and ten minutes, which sounds reasonable enough, but according to reports Futerel spends much of this time âlying for a few minutesâ or pretending to be âa lump of doe in a sackâ. The Prince of Wales and his attendant Major Hanger happen to be among the disgusted audience. Suspicions of a fix are rife.
Nor is London lacking in artistic endeavour these bright days of June. At the Poetâs Gallery in Fleet Street, Mr Macklin is showing new work by a range of artists, among them Sir Joshua Reynolds and his rival, Thomas Gainsborough, now fighting a losing battle against cancer. The Theatre Royal in Covent Garden is spreading out the dust sheets as its audience flees to their country estates to escape the coming hot weather, but Sadlerâs Wells, which attracts a different sort of public and has only just opened for the summer season, is staging performances by a ten-year-old boy known as the Infant Hercules, while another character known as the Little Devil dances across a tightrope. Meanwhile, down at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane, the actor Mr Smith is pulling down the final curtain on a glorious thirty-five-year stage career by performing in Sheridanâs School for Scandal. After the performance, the socialite Lady Lucan is heard to say to Mrs Sheridan, the playwrightâs wife: âYou must certainly be a happy woman, Madam, who have the felicity of pleasing the man that pleases all the world.â The comment is worthy of one of Sheridanâs characters, because it is common knowledge that for some time the playwright has been looking elsewhere for his sexual pleasures.
Later, after the lights have gone out on anyone who has laid their head in a palace, a mansion, a house, an apartment, a lodging or a share of a bed in a doss-house, after the homeless have collapsed into a gin-induced haze in the cityâs parks or beneath its bridges, just as the clocks are striking midnight, an athletic man by the name of Foster Powell is seen leaving the capital for the northern city of York, hoping to get there and back by Saturday midnight, five full days. He is accompanied by two men on horseback and one on foot, presumably to ensure that he is not held up along the way â robbery on the Kingâs highway remains a common complaint. Powell intends to travel from midnight until eleven the next morning, rest until 5 p.m. and then walk through the night. To succeed, he needs to walk just over sixty-six miles a day. Long before the clock chimes and Powell sets out on his adventure, Sir Joseph Banks has embarked upon one of his own.
Mr Hunt, the obsequious proprietor of the St Albanâs Tavern, is an old hand at greeting the rich and famous at his establishment, for his rooms are a popular venue for political meetings and fashionable dinners, among them the regular though far from frequent meetings of the Saturdayâs Club. Little is known of the Club before this memorable day, not even whether it usually meets on a Saturday: after all, this is a Monday. But there is nothing unusual about its existence, for we are in the great age of clubs and societies. An active man about town can expect to belong to several of them, although perhaps not so many as Sir Joseph Banks, who is an esteemed member of the Royal Society Club, the Society of Dilettanti, the Society of Arts, the Society of Antiquaries, the Engineersâ Society, the Society for the Improvement of Naval Architecture and others. Most of these provide a good excuse for a social gathering of sometimes learned, usually entertaining, often heavy-drinking and invariably like-minded men. In this, the Saturdayâs Club is unexceptional; until this day, when something of immense and long-lasting consequence happens.
Banks turns off Pall Mall, enters the St Albanâs Tavern, is shown up the stairs and into a room rented for the occasion for a guinea. Only nine of the Clubâs dozen members are able to attend. After the greetings and an exchange of news, glasses are filled and a good dinner served.
Banksâ companions are all wealthy men with significant political and intellectual influence. Henry Beaufoy is a Quaker and Member of Parliament. The son of a vinegar manufacturer, he has shown more interest in politics than commerce and published his first paper, The Effects of Civilisation on the Real Improvement and Happiness of Mankind, before his twentieth birthday. When Gainsborough painted him, he chose to portray him as a romantic, a dandified English gentleman, his hair a little wild and swept back, left hand hidden in the breast of a blue, big-buttoned frock-coat, breeches tucked into riding boots, right hand resting on a cane. He possesses formidable debating skills, as one would expect of a founder of the Dissenting Academy, and is preparing to make a thundering speech in Parliament damning the captains of slaving vessels for mistreating their human cargoes and damning their defenders in Parliament with what he will call âthe stigma of everlasting dishonourâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) It will be one more step, he hopes, on the road to the abolition of slavery.
Alongside him is General Conway. At seventy, the General is the oldest of the group, a former Secretary of State, a retired army top brass, an amateur botanist and, like Banks and Beaufoy, an improver â he commissioned the bridge over the Thames at Henley. Surprisingly, he is also a linguist: a performance is announced for this very evening of a French play he has translated.
One of the youngest members of the Saturdayâs Club is the Irish aristocrat Francis Rawdon. Soon he will inherit the title Earl of Moira, and then earn that of Marquis of Hastings, will become an intimate of the Prince of Wales and be appointed Governor-General of India. But at this stage, at thirty-three years of age, he is merely a rising star, a tall man with a commanding manner who has come home from the American War of Independence with a reputation for being a reliable officer and with the rank of lieutenant colonel.
The other members are no less remarkable. William Pulteney is one of the richest men in the country, and Sir William Fordyce a doctor who has published works on subjects as varied as venereal diseases and the medical properties of rhubarb. Friends describe Fordyce as an unassuming, convivial man who seldom dines alone. The Earl of Galloway, on the other hand, is joyfully outspoken, particularly about his twin passions of agriculture and the abolition of slavery. Here too is the Commissioner for Trade and Plantations, Sir Adam Ferguson, and Andrew Stuart, a lawyer and sometime Member of Parliament, both government advisers. Of the three members who are unable to attend, Sir John Sinclair has been called âthe most indefatigable man in Englandâ â he will go on to create the Board of Agriculture and sit on the Privy Council â the Earl of Carysfort is a scholarly evangelist, while the most unusual man among them, Richard Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, has had the honour of occupying the chairs of both Divinity and Chemistry at Cambridge University. Between them, these dozen men wield great influence in many spheres of life, from government to commerce and science. Seven are members of the elevated Royal Society, eight have seats in Parliament and most own significant estates or control extensive business interests.
The records of this meeting are of a general nature, and although they tell us what is decided upon, they do not reveal who says what or in which order. It seems certain that mention is made of the Slavery Bill currently being discussed in Parliament, and from slavery conversation will naturally enough have turned to Africa.
Banks is the only member of the Saturdayâs Club who has been to Africa. Since his return he has funded several botanical expeditions to examine the continentâs rich flora. He has also received several proposals from people interested in making journeys into the interior and a suggestion that an Arabic-speaking slave from the West Indies be shipped back to Africa to travel inland. But he is not the only one to be interested in Africa, as is suggested by the fact that 1200 people subscribed to the first edition of The Letters of Ignatius Sancho,
(#ulink_6eea1565-29c4-5d53-a4a1-b4408b15ffc7) a freed slave. Another account of slavery, written by Olaudah Equiano,â (#ulink_214f4c4a-5d33-5b4a-9909-1b90cf6f6221) the son of a West African chief, is just now being prepared for the printers, backed among others by General Conway and Lord Rawdon, both now present in this upstairs room at the tavern.
If Banks has provided the original idea, Henry Beaufoy now pushes it forward. The geographer James Rennell, who is not present but who knows most of the members, will write later that Beaufoy smoothed the way for the Association, âa path which, more than any other person, he had contributed to open, and render smoothâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) Sir John Sinclair seems to have been the other key player â his son will later claim that he took âa leading partâ â although he is not present now as matters come to a head and the following resolution is made:
At an adjourned Meeting of the Saturdayâs Club, at the St. Albanâs Tavern, on the 9
of June, 1788.
PRESENT
ABSENT MEMBERS
Resolved, That as no species of information is more ardently desired, or more generally useful, than that which improves the science of Geography; and as the vast continent of Africa, notwithstanding the efforts of the ancients, and the wishes of the moderns, is still in a great measure unexplored, the members of this Club do form themselves into an Association for promoting the discovery of the inland parts of that quarter of the world.
(#litres_trial_promo)
The resolution oozes optimism, as does a four-page brochure the members publish soon after. This serves as a statement of intent, a sales document in which the full Plan of the Association is laid out. Both the minutes and the Plan are written by Henry Beaufoy, Secretary of the new Association; Banks, who has been appointed Treasurer, approves the text before it goes to the printers. In the Plan, Beaufoy explains the geographical attractions of Africa: âOf the objects of inquiry which engage our attention the most, there are none, perhaps, that so much excite continued curiosity, from childhood to age; none that the learned and unlearned so equally wish to investigate, as the nature and history of those parts of the world, which have not, to our knowledge, been hitherto explored.â
So far, so good. There follows something of an over-simplification: âTo this desire the Voyages of the late Captain Cook have so far afforded gratification, that nothing worthy of research by Sea, the Poles themselves excepted, remains to be examined.â Then Beaufoy gets to the point of the Association: much of Asia and America has recently been explored, as has the area north of Cape Town, while traders have made inroads up the rivers of West Africa. âBut not-withstanding the progress of discovery on the coasts and borders of that vast continent, the map of its interior is still but a wide extended blank.â He ends his introduction thus: âDesirous of rescuing the age from a charge of ignorance, which, in other respects, belongs so little to its character, a few individuals, strongly impressed with the practicability and utility of thus enlarging the fund of human knowledge, have formed the plan of an Association for promoting the discovery of the interior parts of Africa.â
(#litres_trial_promo)
Being British, they have also drawn up rules to regulate function and behaviour. They have committed themselves to paying a subscription of five guineas a year each for three years. During the Associationâs first year, they are invited to put forward the names of people they think will make suitable members â they clearly want the Association to grow, but they are not going to let in just anybody. And before they leave the tavern, they hold a ballot to choose a Committee: Banks and Beaufoy are elected along with Rawdon, Stuart and the Bishop of Llandaff. The Committee is then given responsibility for âthe choice of the persons who are to be sent on the discovery of the interior parts of Africa, together with the Societyâs correspondence, and the management of its fundsâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) With that, the meeting is adjourned, the room empties, the friends part, perhaps unaware of the significance of their resolution.
London is awash with Associations â there is one âfor preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellersâ and another âfor reducing the exorbitant Price of Butcherâs Meatâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) But this one is different. Until now, exploration has relied on the patronage of kings or governments, on trading companies and on the occasional enlightened, wealthy or speculative individual. This organisation is to be funded by a group of friends whose purpose is neither political nor commercial, although they will not deny that they have interests in both. The African Association has been created to mount expeditions and collect information that will lead to geographical advances and open up the continent. It is the start of a new era.
At this point it is worth pausing to consider to what purpose any new findings might be put. Sir John Sinclairâs son provided a blunt but also a neat answer. âHitherto,â he observed, âEuropeans had visited Africa to plunder, to oppress, and to enslave;- the object of this society was to promote the cause of science and humanity; to explore the mysterious geography, to ascertain the resources, and to improve the condition of that ill-fated continent.â
(#litres_trial_promo)
Promoting the cause of science and humanity encapsulates a large number of possibilities. Take the slave trade, for instance. Several members of the Association are active in the campaign to end slavery; those who are not are at least aware of predictions for the future of Britainâs trans-Atlantic trade. This trade depends on three points of contact. Britain exports cloth, metal (including guns) and other products of its growing industries to the West African coast. Trade between Britain and West Africa is clearly profitable: between 1720 and 1772 it grew from sixty-five ships carrying £130,000 worth of cargo (now roughly equivalent to £6.5 million) to 175 ships â a departure every two days â carrying £866,000 worth of goods (£43.3 million).
(#litres_trial_promo)
By 1788 these figures are considerably higher, and West Africa has become one of Europeâs major trading partners. But there is a limit to how much trade can grow between the two continents, as Africa has only a limited ability to pay for European goods. Gold dust, ivory, animal skins and senna
(#ulink_738abfc0-00be-5795-b36b-01ace2966c7c) are all accepted as objects of barter, but the vast and growing majority of European goods are paid for in Africa with slaves. These are then shipped across the Atlantic, where they are traded for sugar, rum and the other good things of the Caribbean, which are then brought back and sold in England. The development of Britainâs growing industries as well as the wealth of the West Indies depend on this triangular trade. If the sale of slaves is to be outlawed, how will West Africans pay for cloth and guns? The answer is obvious to anyone, such as Banks or Rennell, who knows their history, and it has a direct bearing on the Associationâs activities.
In 1324, Mansa Kankan Musa, the Emperor of Mali, decided to fulfil his articles of faith by making a pilgrimage to Mecca. He and his considerable entourage crossed the dessert and were treated royally by the Sultan when they arrived in Cairo. Horses and camels, food and water were then provided to smooth their way to Mecca and back to Egypt. The Emperor was so pleased with this treatment that, in the words of one observer, when he returned to the Nile he spread âupon Cairo the flood of his generosity: there was no person, officer of the court or holder of any office of the sultanate who did not receive a sum of gold from him. The people of Cairo earned incalculable sums from him, whether by buying and selling or by gifts. So much gold was current in Cairo that it ruined the value of money â¦â
(#litres_trial_promo) While it took a generation for the price of gold to recover in Cairo, the legend of Maliâs immense gold reserves lasted at least until the summer of 1788.
Mansa Musaâs extravagance (in the end, he spent so much that he was obliged to borrow money to get home) is not the only African story to have reached the Saturdayâs Clubâs eyes and ears. To them as to many in Europe at this time, West Africa, and particularly Mali, is a land of golden promise, another El Dorado. Al-Idrissi, the twelfth-century geographer, has described many civilised cities of central Africa, among them Kaugha, âa populous City, without Walls, famous for Business and useful for Arts for the Advantage of its Peopleâ; Kuku, where âthe Governors and Nobility are covered with Sattinâ; and Ghana, where the King, for decoration, had âan Lump of Gold, not cast, nor wrought by any other Instruments, but perfectly formed by the Divine Providence only, of thirty Pounds Weightâ. Leo Africanus, four hundred years later, had this to say of Timbuktu: âThe Inhabitants, and especially the Strangers that reside there, are very rich, insomuch that the present King gave both his Daughters in Marriage to two rich Merchants ⦠The rich King of Tombuto has in his Possession many golden Plates and Scepters, some whereof are 1300 Ounces in Weight, and he keeps a splendid and well-furnished Court ⦠The King at his own Expense liberally maintaineth here great Numbers of Doctors, Judges, Priests, and other learned Men. There are Manuscripts, or written Books, brought hither out of Barbary, which are sold for more Money than any other Merchandize. Instead of Money, they use Barrs of Gold â¦â
(#litres_trial_promo) Instead of slaves, so the thinking goes, they could pay for imported European goods with these âBarrs of Goldâ.
All this has made an impression on the imaginations of members of the Saturdayâs Club, as is clear from Beaufoyâs prediction that âTheir mines of gold (the improvable possession of many of the inland states) will furnish, to an unknown, and probably boundless extent, an article that commands, in all the markets of the civilized world, a constant and unlimited scale.â
(#litres_trial_promo) This might have been true several centuries ago, but by the end of the eighteenth century the gold reserves which Mansa Musa and the kings of Timbuktu had exploited are exhausted. Whatâs more, the great empires they supported have recently been torn apart by a reforming Islamic jihad. The great cities of Sudan have been reduced and their kings left in fear of their lives, while the internal trade has shrunk to a shadow of its former glory. All this, Beaufoy and the other members of the Association have yet to discover.
The lure of gold, the campaign to abolish slavery, the need to find new trading partners all add to the keenly felt desire to know what lies at the heart of Africa. By the end of the eighteenth century, breathtaking scientific advances have forced Europeans to reconsider their relationship with the world. The past is being uncovered â classical sites such as Pompeii are even now being excavated â the natural world is being classified by the likes of Linnaeus, while Cookâs voyages have shown that the physical world can also be known. In such a rampant intellectual climate, can the secrets of the African interior remain hidden for much longer?
Africa is a large continent, too large even for the ambitions of the Association: they must choose an area of interest within it. It is now beyond the bounds of possibility to resurrect their discussions or determine the way in which they reached this decision, but it is possible to look at the ideas that have informed their choices.
Beaufoy gives some pointers when he explains in the Plan of the Association how much of the rest of the world has been explored and recorded. Even parts of Africa are well known â he notes that the Swedish traveller Dr André Sparrman, a member of Cookâs second trans-global expedition, has travelled some way inland from Cape Colony in the south of the continent; the English translation of his Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, towards the Antarctic Polar Circle and round the World; hut chiefly into the Country of the Hottentots and Caffres, from the Year 1772, to 1776 appeared two years earlier, in 1786. Colonel Gordon, in charge of the Dutch garrison at the Cape, has since travelled inland as far as the Orange River, and perhaps his account will appear before long. In East Africa, James Bruceâs long-awaited, five-volume Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile is expected at any moment, although in the event it is not published until 1790. But little progress has been made in the inland parts of West Africa since early in the eighteenth century, when an Englishman by the name of Francis Moore and a Frenchman, André Brue, sailed up the Senegal and Gambia rivers. Of the interior of sub-Saharan Africa, the area loosely called Sudan (not to be confused with the present country further to the east), almost nothing new has been learned since the sixteenth-century descriptions of Leo Africanus.
Leoâs work on the interior stands out from earlier accounts, from the twelfth-century Nubian al-Idrissi for instance, from the Roman and Greek maps, even from the second-century Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy, because he actually visited many of the places he described. Born into a wealthy Moorish family in Granada in the 1490s and brought up in Fez after the fall of the Moorish kingdoms in Spain, he was taken travelling at an early age. By the time he was twenty he had already visited Tabriz in Persia and had crossed to Timbuktu on the southern side of the Sahara. Later, though it is not clear in which year, he returned south, revisited Timbuktu and then made a tour of the countries or territories of central North Africa. From Djenne and Gao in Mali, he travelled through Agadez, Kano and Burnu before making his way to Egypt. Then in 1518, on his way back to Morocco from Egypt, Italian pirates took him prisoner and his life changed. There was a chance that he might have been killed or sold as a slave, but his captors seem to have recognised that he was a man of learning and presented him to the Medici Pope Leo X. Leo, a shrewd judge of character and a notable patron of the arts, recognised the value of the tale the Moor had to tell. He went to great lengths to keep him in Rome, cosseting him with luxury and privilege, and going so far as to adopt him as his own godson. Renamed after his benefactor, baptised in the Christian faith and given the distinguishing name of Africanus, Leo the Moor sat down to write an account of the things he had seen and heard on his travels. His Descrittione dellâAfrica, published in 1550 and translated into English as A Geographical Historie of Africa in 1600, became the authority on African geography.
