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

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The King of Sennar had asked Bruce the same question. Bruce had refined his answer to suit local sensibilities and replied that he was travelling to atone for past sins. And how long had he been travelling? Some twenty years, he explained. ‘You must have been very young,’ the King observed, some of his harem behind him, ‘to have committed so many sins, and so early; they must all have been with women?’ Bruce, with unusual modesty, explained that only some of them were.

Seventy years later the traveller Alexander Kinglake met with a similar response: ‘The theory is that the English traveller has committed some sin against God and his conscience, and that for this the Evil Spirit has hold of him, and drives him from his home like a victim of the old Greek Furies, and forces him to travel over countries far and strange, and most chiefly over deserts and desolate places, and to stand upon the sites of cities that once were, and are no more, and to grope among the tombs of dead men.’

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The Association’s first geographical missionary appears to have had no such grilling, and reported to his masters in London that Aga Muhammad ‘gave me his hand to kiss, and with it the promise of letters, protection, and support, through Turkish Nubia, and also to some chiefs far inland’.

The Aga had never travelled as far south as Ledyard was intending to go. Nevertheless, he had very definite ideas about who and what he would meet on his way. Among them would be people who had the power to turn into strange animals. Ledyard tried to hide his amusement at the Aga’s credulity and replied that the prospect of meeting these bizarre people ‘rendered me more anxious to be on my voyage’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Aga was also curious to know how Ledyard was going to communicate with the people he would meet on his journey. ‘I told him, with vocabularies.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Which means that he was travelling with books as well as the leather pantaloons, hatchets and the rest of the paraphernalia he had bought in England. The Aga looked stunned. This was not the sort of foreigner he was used to seeing in Cairo.

Not that there was a shortage of foreigners in the city. Estimates vary like the population itself, which was frequently ravaged by plague, but Cairo at the end of the eighteenth century had a native population in the region of 250,000. The city was divided into three distinct areas, the Nile port of Boulak, ‘Old Cairo’ upstream from the port around the Roman and Arab settlements, and ‘Grand Cairo’, the medieval city at its heart, overlooked by the citadel, the home of the country’s rulers. Some European visitors described it as being as large in area as Paris. But unlike European cities, Cairo was reaching the low point of a long decline. It could boast fewer palaces, and fewer schools, than three or four hundred years earlier, and what had survived was mostly in a state of decrepitude. Only one aspect of the city’s life was thriving: the international transit trade. Thanks to Europe’s growing need to move people and cargo quickly to the East – thanks, too, to men such as Baldwin and Rossetti – there was considerable traffic between Alexandria and Suez. And Cairo was still also one of the hubs of the North African trade, with caravans arriving from Nubia and Abyssinia in the south, Fezzan and Tripoli in the west and, less common, from the heart of the continent. It was from these people that Ledyard hoped to glean some news of his intended final destination.

Ledyard was far from idle in his first week in the Egyptian capital, as he was quick to point out in his letters to Banks and Beaufoy. He had made various social calls to important Cairenes and had wandered the souks in search of traders from the south. ‘I have made the best inquiries I have been able … of the nature of the country before me; of Sennar, Darfoor, Wangara, of Nubia, Abyssinia, of those named, or unknown by name. I should have been happy to have sent you better information of those places than I am yet able to do. It will appear very singular to you in England, that we in Egypt are so ignorant of countries which we annually visit: the Egyptians know as little of geography as the generality of the French; and, like them, sing, dance, and traffic, without it.’ But there was one source of geographical information he was able to tap. These were people whom Ledyard calls ‘Jelabs’, and they were traders who had come from the interior to sell slaves in Cairo. He was clearly pleased with what they had to tell him and boasted, ‘I have a better idea of the people of Africa, of its trade, of the position of places, the nature of the country, manner of travelling, &c. than ever I had by any other means; and, I believe, better than any other means would afford me.’

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By 25 October, more than two months after his arrival in Cairo, Ledyard appeared to be set; with Rossetti’s help he had made arrangements to travel with a caravan heading south to Sennar. There is an irony in a man sent by a group clearly opposed to the slave trade preparing to travel with a slave caravan, but it is one that escaped the traveller himself. ‘The King of Sennar,’ he wrote, ‘is himself a merchant, and concerned in the Sennar caravans. The merchant here who contracts to convey me to Sennar, is Procurer at Cairo to the King of Sennar; this is a good circumstance, and one that I knew not of till to-day. Mr. Rossetti informed me of it. He informed me also, that this year the importation of Negro slaves into Egypt will amount to 20,00o.’

(#litres_trial_promo) As well as slaves, the traders brought camels, ostrich feathers, elephant teeth and gum Sennar, which, like gum Arabic, was tapped from acacia trees. The southbound caravan that Ledyard was going to join would be carrying a shipment of soap, antimony, red linen, razors, scissors, mirrors and beads.

Jared Sparks, Ledyard’s early-nineteenth-century biographer, states that by this time the American had adopted ‘a dress suited to the character he was to assume’. In other words, he was dressed as a Levantine traveller. But his disguise was clearly far from perfect, because on a visit to the slave market he was ‘rudely treated’ by some Turks, who recognised him as a ‘Frank’. Around this time he also ‘began in earnest to study the manners of the people around him, and particularly of the traders in the caravans, which were then at Cairo’.

(#litres_trial_promo) From them he collected plenty of information that he thought worth sending back to London. ‘A caravan goes from here to Fezzan, which they call a journey of fifty days; and from Fezzan to Tombuctou [Timbuktu], which they call a journey of ninety days. The caravans travel about twenty miles a day, which makes the distance on the road from here to Fezzan, one thousand miles; and from Fezzan to Tombuctou, one thousand eight hundred miles. From here to Sennar is reckoned six hundred miles.’ Some of this information was almost accurate: it is around 1200 miles in a straight line from Cairo to Fezzan, and twice that to Timbuktu. But Ledyard’s calculation for Sennar is woefully short – it is more like 1200 miles south of Cairo.

The prospect of the journey from Cairo must have seemed easy to the man who had crossed Russia with little money and without Imperial permission; Ledyard should be forgiven for thinking that the interior of Africa was within his reach, that fame was at hand and with it the means to settle back home in Connecticut and throw roses in his sisters’ laps. But although he had learned many things on his travels, he had not acquired the essential Oriental quality of patience. The Sennar caravan delayed its departure, and then again. And then again. As time passed, Ledyard became increasingly desperate to begin his African journey. Some of this is understandable: the man who had wanted to leave London the day after meeting Beaufoy had now been held up for some three months in the Egyptian capital. The false starts, delayed departures and repeated disappointments began to eat away at him; his letters and reports, entrusted to European sea captains, are full of warnings to himself that he must resist any urge towards ‘rashness’. Around this time he wrote to Beaufoy that ‘A Turkish sopha has no charms for me: if it had, I could soon obtain one here. I could to-morrow take the command of the best armament of Ishmael Bey

(#ulink_3c5db588-0af4-5f25-b573-e540f68f6d8d) – I should be sure of success, and its consequential honours. Believe me, a single well-done from your Association has more worth in it to me, than all the trappings of the East.’

At the end of October, Ledyard was sufficiently confident of his departure to assure Beaufoy that his next letter would be from Sennar or somewhere further into the continent. If his calculation of the distance between Cairo and Sennar was right, and if the caravan really did manage to cover twenty miles a day, then the journey might take around thirty days. To this would need to be added at least another month for his letter to reach London from Cairo – his first letter from Alexandria, sent in early August, didn’t reach Beaufoy until 18 October. The members of the Association might therefore have to wait until late January before receiving his news from Sennar. But some time early in January, before the Committee had received word from either Ledyard, Rossetti or Baldwin, rumours began to circulate in London that Ledyard was dead. Certainly he had not left Cairo when he intended, for he had written another farewell letter on 15 November, this time to Thomas Jefferson in Paris. He was, he said, ‘doing up my baggage for the journey’. But again he did not leave. Instead he became sick.

Late in November 1788, Ledyard began to suffer from what Beaufoy described as a bilious complaint – most likely some sort of gastric infection, so common among visitors to Egypt now as then. To speed up his recovery, he treated himself with what was, at the time, a common remedy, vitriolic or sulphuric acid. In his eagerness to be cured, he seems to have taken an overdose. Realising from the chronic burning pains in his gut that he had made a mistake, he tried to counteract the acid with tartar emetic, a toxic and irritating salt which, he must have hoped, would force him to vomit out the acid. But the damage was already done, as was clear from his continued internal bleeding.

Rossetti was there and offered what Beaufoy called ‘generous friendship’,

(#litres_trial_promo) as were Cairo’s finest doctors. But nothing they could suggest was effective against the damage done by the chemicals and exacerbated, in Beaufoy’s view, by the anxiety Ledyard felt at his failure to leave Cairo. By the end of November, according to Sparks – on 17 January, according to an announcement in the Gentleman’s Magazine – the great American survivor, the man who had returned home unharmed when Captain Cook had fallen, who had crossed Russia in defiance of a ban from the Empress Catherine, the African Association’s first geographical missionary was dead. ‘He was decently interred,’ Beaufoy assured the Association’s members, ‘in the neighbourhood of such of the English as had ended their days in the capital of Egypt.’

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Beaufoy, in writing of Ledyard’s end, stressed the American’s suitability for his mission – ‘he appeared to be formed by Nature for achievements of hardihood and peril’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Yet privately he could be forgiven for wondering whether Ledyard had been properly prepared for his mission. He might also have wondered what else the Association’s travellers would have to learn before they would be able to reveal the mysteries of the African interior. Neither Beaufoy nor Banks seemed to have reached the point, yet, when they would question their choice of route into the interior or the practicability of their ambitious plan to bisect the northern half of the continent. But then, at this stage they did not need to, because their second traveller was already in the court of the Bashaw (Pasha) of Tripoli, arranging permission and protection for his journey into the interior.

(#ulink_c459f8a1-1507-5c7f-b6a3-5a5ea98bde8e) There were rumours that Banks had become engaged to a young woman named Harriet Blosset before sailing with Cook. She certainly believed they were betrothed, and spent the years of his absence embroidering waistcoats for him. He had other ideas, as is indicated by a comment he made at the time about the women of South Africa: ‘had I been inclined for a wife I think this is the place of all others I have seen where I could have best suited myself (Lyte, p.141).

(#ulink_c459f8a1-1507-5c7f-b6a3-5a5ea98bde8e) Until his death at the house in 1782, Daniel Solander also lived at Soho Square. One of Banks’ assistants on the Cook voyage, he later became his librarian and keeper of the natural history collection at the British Museum.

† (#ulink_5145d5fe-77c6-5d41-b451-65766e628d02) Banks would bequeath the majority of his library, herbarium, manuscripts, drawings, engravings and all his other significant collections to the British Museum.

(#ulink_2a2cd3ed-58ed-533a-a314-c6ff0a1b0079) In 1999, the John Ledyard Scholarship Foundation was created in the US to honour students who follow the traveller’s example by dropping out of college and travelling more than two thousand miles from home at least three times.

(#ulink_0f77defd-227a-5554-8599-0fbc12951fe8) Ishmael, or more correctly Ismail, Bey was at that time the Shaykh al-Balad, the most powerful of the beys or nobles who wielded power in Egypt.

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The Oriental Interpreter (#ulink_8416ce62-78be-5085-a51d-6732d7dc092f)

‘MR LUCAS, ORIENTAL INTERPRETER, whose salary is £80 per ann, offers to proceed, by the way of Gibralter [sic] & Tripoli to Fezan, provided his Salary is continued to him during his Absense.’

Undated and unsigned note in the African Association’s papers, possibly written by Henry Beaufoy

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SIMON LUCAS, King George Ill’s Arabic interpreter, volunteered his services as soon as the Association was created, convinced that he was uniquely qualified to be a geographical missionary. The Committee seemed to agree. They discussed his proposal at their first meeting and noted his obvious qualities. It was proposed that Banks would ask Viscount Sydney, the Secretary of State for the Home Department, to obtain the King’s permission for Lucas to travel. His Majesty, it appears, had no objections to his interpreter going absent, nor to paying his salary while he was away, and so Lucas’ proposition was accepted. Banks and Beaufoy, fired with enthusiasm for their new project, felt they had made a great catch in securing his services, for his knowledge of north-west Africa was unrivalled in England. How he came by this knowledge was an oft-repeated story.

Like Beaufoy, Lucas’ father had been a London wine merchant. While Lucas was still in his teens – the dates are vague and some accounts refer to his still being a boy – his father sent him to Cadiz to learn the wine trade first-hand. Everything passed off well until he was on his way home at the end of this apprenticeship, when calamity struck: the ship in which he was sailing was attacked by the infamous ‘Sallee Rovers’. Of the many corsairs who operated along the Barbary Coast, the pirates from Morocco’s Atlantic port of Sali had a reputation for being the most ruthless and the most savage. But they were also businessmen and, when they could, would rather sell their captives as slaves than torment or torture them. This is exactly what they did with the young Englishman they hauled off the London-bound ship: Lucas was sold to the Emperor of Morocco, Sultan Sidi Muhammad.

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Lucas spent three years in the Sultan’s service. The great Imperial court at Meknes was more of a royal city than a palace, a labyrinth of enclosures, courtyards and chambers, the large harem at its centre protected by the Sultan’s feared Negro bodyguard. In this environment, surrounded by officials and functionaries, the young Englishman found that the only way to survive was to learn the language and adapt to the ways of the Moors. When he was finally able to leave, he didn’t get very far. On his release, he quickly made the short hop from the so-called Pillars of Hercules to Gibraltar, already held by the British. There he came to the attention of General Cornwallis, who recognised the value of his Moroccan experience and asked him to go back – not as a slave, this time, but in the service of his own King. The offer of so dramatic a reversal of fortune was too sweet for Lucas to resist and so, instead of sailing home to London, he returned to the Moroccan Emperor Sidi Muhammad’s court as British Vice-Consul and Chargé d’Affaires. Clearly the place and his position in it agreed with him, as he stayed for some sixteen years. When he finally returned to London, his knowledge of Arabic, of the manners and customs of the Moroccans, of the layout of their country and the functioning of their court was unrivalled in England and helped him to secure the post of Oriental Interpreter to King George III. Given his expertise, it would have made more sense for the African Association to have sent Lucas to Tangier or to the Atlantic port of Mogador (now known as Essaouira) and asked him to travel inland from there. But Lucas knew that Morocco was not safe to travel through, as did Banks, thanks to his correspondence with the current British Consul to the Emperor’s court, James Matra.

Matra had sailed with Banks and Captain Cook. While Banks returned to fame in London and the presidency of the Royal Society, Matra, who could count on neither contacts nor fortune, secured a posting as a secretary at the British Embassy in Constantinople. Eight years later, he asked Banks to help him find other employment, although without result. Back in London and living, as he wrote to Banks, ‘the life of a solitary fugitive’,

(#litres_trial_promo) various avenues were explored, several proposals suggested, but again without success. Then, in 1787, the post of British Consul in Morocco became free and Banks pulled strings to secure the appointment for Matra.

Matra’s opinion on the viability of travellers heading south from Morocco was unequivocal. ‘All investigation of the interiour [sic] part of Africa,’ he wrote to Banks in 1788, ‘as far as this Empire is concerned, is an absolute impossibility.,’

(#litres_trial_promo) The situation was unfortunate, but north-west Africa was out. In the meantime another option presented itself.

In 1786, Hajj Abd ar-Rahman, Foreign Minister to Ali Karamanli, Bashaw of Tripoli, arrived in London on an official mission that was to last fifteen months. During this time, he relied on Lucas both to help him on court matters and to assist him around the city. Lucas was hoping that Abd ar-Rahman would remember their friendship and cooperation and return the favour by ensuring his welcome in Tripoli. He was also counting on the Minister to persuade the Bashaw to offer his protection for the journey to the Fezzan, a place over which the Bashaw claimed nominal sovereignty. In The Proceedings of the Association, Beaufoy explained the plan. ‘To Mr. Lucas, in consideration of the knowledge which he possessed of the Language and Manners of the Arabs, they [the Committee] allotted the passage of the Desert of Zahara, from Tripoli to Fezzan; for they had learned from various information, that with this kingdom, which in some measures is dependent on Tripoli, the traders of Agadez and Tombuctou, and of other towns in the Interior of Africa, had established a frequent and regular intercourse.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Accordingly, Lucas was instructed to sail to Tripoli, cross the Sahara to the Fezzan and from there continue to the Gambia or the coast of Guinea. To get him there, in addition to his salary of £80, which the King had agreed to continue paying, the Association voted £100 to cover equipment, transport to Tripoli and to buy presents as sweeteners for the Bashaw and others at his court, the most popular of which turned out to be pairs of double-barrelled pistols. In addition, he was provided with letters of credit, to be drawn against Sir Joseph Banks. This credit – a total of £250 if he needed it – was to provide funds for his journey into the interior.

Unlike Ledyard, Lucas took time to prepare for his departure. He kitted himself out easily enough, packing a pocket compass, a thermometer, a pair of brass-mounted pistols and a silver watch. He also charged the Association for a scarlet kerseymere shawl, a crimson waistcoat with blue lining and gold lace trim and a matching skullcap, a crimson and blue sash, yellow slippers and white robes. But court obligations and illness delayed him, and it was not until 25 October that Lucas sailed from Marseilles.

Like Cairo and Damascus, Tripoli owed nominal allegiance to the Turkish sultans. But in 1711 the Tripolitan Viceroy Ahmed Karamanli had declared his independence and established a dynasty that was in its third generation by the time Simon Lucas’ ship tied up in the city’s fortified harbour. For this reason, Tripoli offered a warmer welcome to foreigners than many other ports along the turbulent North African coast. Its harbour was busy with sailing ships from around the Mediterranean, while its souks and caravanserais were crowded with Moorish traders who had brought their cargoes of spices, slaves, ivory and other exotica so much in demand in Europe.

Although it claimed control over vast territory stretching deep into the continent, whatever power and splendour Tripoli had once enjoyed had long since faded, and Ali Karamanli, the present Bashaw, had trouble maintaining the loyalty of his subjects. Beaufoy, always quick to point up a moral, wrote that ‘if he [the traveller] reflects on the nature of a despotic government, ever incompatible with permanent prosperity, he will not be surprised when he finds, on a nearer view, that the city … exhibits through all its extent, the marks of a rapid decay’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Moral decay, he insisted, was mirrored in physical decay.

Tripoli was unlike the Cairo Ledyard had visited or the ports of Morocco with which Lucas was familiar. Where Cairo could rely on its position on the increasingly busy trade route between Europe and the East, and Morocco dominated the west Saharan trade, as it had once controlled the golden city of Timbuktu, Tripoli depended for its survival on the spoils of the Barbary corsairs and on profits from caravan trading between the Mediterranean and central Africa.

Two thousand years earlier, the North African coast around Tripoli had flourished under Roman supervision, the coastal plains made fertile, the ports of Tripolitania kept busy. Under the loosening grip of the Bashaw Ali, however, the country was both unproductive and unstable, while the city was increasingly decrepit. It looked its best from the sea – ‘the whole of the town appears in a semicircle, some time before reaching the harbour’s mouth’, according to a visitor of Lucas’ time. ‘The extreme whiteness of square flat buildings covered with lime, which in this climate encounters the sun’s fiercest rays, is very striking.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The European consulates all looked out to sea, which helped consuls monitor the arrival of ships and also gave them the luxury of relieving sea breezes in the summer.

Beyond the port, consulates, palace and state mosque, the city was a jumble. The treasures of Africa were displayed in the covered bazaar: stacks of ostrich feathers, sacks of gums, lines of elephant tusks and hoards of gold. Once a week, in a long vaulted enclosure, there was also the pitiful sight of the slave market: European captives were stood on small platforms, while Africans, who had already been marched across the Sahara, now walked up and down to catch the eye of buyers who sat drinking coffee. Further inland, the city turned in on itself, a series of long unbroken walls hiding houses, the occasional square offering relief in the shape of a mosque or public bath. Beyond this, seasonal pastures provided grazing for goats and camels, and then gave way to the dust, shrub, rock and sand of the desert.

Lucas arrived in Tripoli knowing he could count on Richard Tully, the British Consul, and Hajj Abd ar-Rahman, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Abd ar-Rahman had returned to his city the previous year, and was still Foreign Minister. According to Miss Tully, the Consul’s sister, he ‘bears here so excellent a character that he is universally beloved by Christians, as well as Moors, and is adored by his family’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He also seems to have been a notable exception to the rule that everyone involved in North African court business was obliged to spin a web of intrigue and deceit.

The following morning the Minister took Lucas to meet the Bashaw, Ali Karamanli. Beaufoy had exaggerated when he called the palace ‘a mouldering ruin’, although it paled in comparison with the palaces of Sicily or Naples. Its forty-foot walls were pierced only by a few windows and a heavily guarded gate; its Chinese-tiled rooms were linked by dark, rank passages which exuded the stink of decay and an aura of gloom. Lucas was anxious as he passed through the outer public chambers and along these passages into the Bashaw’s audience hall. The coming interview was crucial to the success of his mission, for there was no chance of leaving for the south without the Bashaw’s permission; yet Ali was bound to be suspicious of the foreigner’s motives for wanting to make the journey.

The audience began with the usual formalities and exchange of greetings, and Lucas then presented the pair of double-barrelled pistols he had brought out from London. The Bashaw was a short, tubby, white-haired man, not yet fifty years old. He was pleased by the pistols, for no blacksmith in North Africa could produce such elaborate and dependable work. He was less thrilled by the request that accompanied them. Lucas wanted to be allowed to travel to the Fezzan, but no Christian the Bashaw knew of had ever been so far south of Tripoli. What, he asked, was a man like Lucas, a gentleman and courtier, going to do in such a Godforsaken place?

Lucas knew better than to tell the truth – that he wanted to follow the trade routes across the Sahara to Timbuktu – because he doubted whether the Bashaw would believe that the African Association was interested only in Africa’s geography. The Bashaw’s government still depended to some extent on the revenue earned from taxing trade caravans that passed through his lands. Whatever the Association’s motives, it was clearly not in the Bashaw’s interest to have the current situation disturbed by any outsiders.

Understanding this, Lucas lied. He made no mention of trade routes, maps or fabled cities of gold. Instead, he talked about the curiosity of scholars in London and of rumours of significant Roman antiquities in the Bashaw’s southernmost lands. It was these, he explained, that he had been sent to visit. On the way, he added, hoping to throw the Bashaw off the scent entirely, he had also been asked to look out for certain medicinal plants that could not be found in Europe.

The Bashaw was well aware that these Europeans had ulterior motives. He appears also to have realised that delay would be easier than refusal. Accordingly, he declared himself fascinated by Lucas’ proposed journey and eager to help in any way he could; Lucas would be free to leave as soon as safe transport could be arranged. What he had omitted to mention was that his guest might have to wait a long time before the route south would be considered safe, because at that moment the Arab tribes who lived between Tripoli and Fezzan had risen up against the Bashaw and had attacked several caravans, one of them only a few miles from the city. No sooner had he left the Bashaw’s presence than Lucas was apprised of the political situation: there were rumours that the Bashaw was raising an army of some five or six thousand men to go and settle scores. It immediately became clear that no permission would be granted for southbound travel. He was trapped in Tripoli.

In the end, his friend Abd ar-Rahman found a way out of this predicament by introducing him to two men newly arrived from the Fezzan. These men, who had brought a cargo of slaves and senna, were no ordinary traders, but members of the Fezzani royal family and sharifs, men who claimed to be of the bloodline of the Prophet Muhammad. As such, they commanded the respect of all Muslims, of whatever tribe or nationality. The elder of these two sharifs, Imhammad, was a prince of Fezzan, a short, dark-skinned man of some fifty years of age. The other sharif, a younger, taller, copper-skinned man named Fuad, was the King of Fezzan’s son-in-law.

Lucas immediately recognised the possibilities these two presented for him to make some progress into the interior. The sharifs announced that if the Englishman were willing to travel with them, they would guarantee his safe arrival in Fezzan. Once there, Fuad assured him, his father-in-law would be delighted to meet a Christian, as none had ever managed to travel so far south into the desert. As a way of sealing their agreement, Lucas offered the men a pair of pistols each, along with enough powder, ball and flints to keep them in use for some time. All that was needed now was for the Bashaw to approve of the sharifs’ offer. Any anxiety Lucas might have had on this front was dispelled when a good riding mule arrived from the royal stables and a Jewish tent-maker, also sent by the Bashaw, arrived to make a suitable tent for the Englishman’s rigorous journey. Encouraged by this, Lucas laid in supplies, dressed himself in Turkish clothes – he would obviously not be able to travel as an Englishman – and ordered a magnificent robe that he intended to give as a present to the King of Fezzan.

At 8.30 on the morning of Sunday, 1 February 1789, with Ledyard already dead and buried in Cairo, Lucas passed through the gates of Tripoli bound for the interior, armed with a recommendation from the Bashaw. With twenty-one camels to carry their cargo and baggage, the caravan consisted of the younger Sharif Fuad and three other merchants on horseback, the older Sharif Imhammad on an ass, Lucas’ black servant on a camel and a dozen men of Fezzan on foot. Walking along with them were three freed slaves and their wives, on their way to their homes across the desert. For his part, the African Association’s missionary now wore his hair so long that he looked, in his own words, ‘like a London Jew in deep mourning’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Dressed in his Turkish robes and riding the Bashaw’s fine mule, travelling in the company of descendants of the Prophet and a relative of the King of Fezzan, assured of the protection of the Bashaw of Tripoli and the friendship of his Foreign Minister, Lucas was as secure in his saddle as any eighteenth-century European traveller could be. Another traveller in his place would have been more optimistic about his chances of success. But Lucas was well aware that he was better suited to the rituals and intrigues of the court than the challenge of the desert.

There was a direct route south of Tripoli to Fezzan, but the sharifs, hoping to save themselves both trouble and money, had had their merchandise shipped to the port of Mesurata, about a hundred miles east of Tripoli. So the small caravan followed the coast and a week later found their merchandise arrived safely at Mesurata. So far, so good, but the travellers now discovered that there were no camels to carry their cargo to Fezzan. The camels that were usually available for hire belonged to Bedouin who were now off in the desert fighting the Bashaw’s forces. Even if the Bedouin could be found, they were going to be loath to rent out their pack animals at such an unstable time to someone travelling under the Bashaw’s protection. Various compromises were attempted, but by early March, a month after leaving Tripoli, it was clear that the sharifs were not going to find transport for their bales of goods. By then the hot weather had started and the season for crossing the desert was over.

‘Wearied by fruitless expectations of a peace,’ Beaufoy explained to the members of the Association, ‘disappointed in their expedients, and warned by the increasing heat, that the season for a journey to Fezzan was already past, the Shereefs [sic] now resolved to proceed to the intended places of their summer residence. The Shereef Fouwad [sic] retired to Wadan, his native town; and the Shereef Imhammed, with tears in his eyes, and an earnest prayer that he might see his friend Mr. Lucas again in November, retired to the mountains, where he had many acquaintance, and could live at small expense.’

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What was Lucas to do? There is no doubt that he could have gone on. He had money, connections and willing companions in the returning slaves, who were still keen to make the journey, in spite of the heat. He could speak the language, knew the customs, and no doubt looked even more like ‘a London Jew in deep mourning’ after a month out and a week on the move than he had when he left Tripoli. He also had plenty of transport, for although the twenty-one camels they had brought from Tripoli were not enough to carry the sharifs’ cargo – they reckoned they needed another 130 – they were more than enough to carry all that Lucas would need for the desert crossing. Ledyard would have gone on, as would most of the Association’s later travellers. But Lucas was not a man of action.

Abandoned by the two men who had guaranteed his safety on the journey into the desert, faced with the prospect of being caught in the Sahara during the summer – and remember, as far as he knew, no white man had ever been so far into the great desert in any season – fearful of passing through country in which the Bashaw was conducting a campaign of attrition against rebellious desert tribes, Lucas decided to turn back. On 20 March, as Beaufoy recorded in the Association’s Proceedings, ‘Mr. Lucas took leave of the Governor, to whose civilities he had been much indebted, and having accompanied a small caravan as far as Lebida, embarked on a coasting vessel at the neighbouring village of Legatah, and went by sea to Tripoli.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The Bashaw was clearly delighted to have this troublesome foreigner out of the desert, accepted the return of his mule and wished Lucas better luck for another year. Even then Lucas could have spent the summer on the coast. Had he done so, he might have become a celebrated traveller, in spite of himself, for in July the inhabitants of Tripoli were thrilled by the rare appearance of a prince of Borno, an entertaining, well-informed man with a taste for large pearls and jewel-encrusted earrings. This prince might have invited Lucas to visit his country. But Lucas did not stay. On 6 April he sailed out of Tripoli, spent an extended quarantine on Malta (there was a suspicion that there was plague in Mesurata), continued to Marseilles and was back in England by 26 July, some ten months after he had left. Unexpectedly, although he had failed to travel more than a few miles away from the African coast, he was not going home empty-handed.

Lucas had found it easier to strike up a conversation with the chatty fifty-year-old Imhammad than with his younger companion. The Englishman knew that Imhammad had travelled widely across the Sahara on slaving missions for the King of Fezzan, and when he realised he was not going to be able to cross the desert himself, he looked for a way of persuading Imhammad to share some of his knowledge of the south.

One evening in Mesurata, when the younger sharif Fuad was sitting elsewhere, Lucas unfolded the map of Africa he had brought from London. Imhammad’s curiosity got the better of him, and he asked if he could have a look at this drawing. The sharif had evidently never seen a map before, and Lucas was only too happy to explain what it represented and how useful it could be. Then came his masterstroke. He explained that he had brought it as a gift for the King of Fezzan, but was embarrassed to present it in its current state because he suspected that it contained many errors. Perhaps, the Oriental Interpreter now suggested, the sharif could help him correct those errors. Lucas would then be able to draw another map and would make two copies, one for the King and another for the sharif.

Under the circumstances Imhammad could hardly refuse to share his knowledge. Lucas led him over to a small dune a little way from the tents, so they would not be disturbed, and there, in the sand, began to question him about the geography of the land to the south, of Fezzan and the other kingdoms of the Sahara and of what lay beyond the desert. As the old Fezzani gave his answers, turning over in his mind memories of journeys he had made through the fiery heart of the continent, Lucas scribbled notes, drew sketches and wrote down the figures that represented the catch, the treasure, the achievement that he snatched from Africa and took with him back to his employers in London.

(#ulink_d90986fd-fc9d-5179-9643-04ea7e3eb18e) Sultan Sidi Muhammad was later to abandon the corsair jihad against Christian shipping and negotiate protection treaties under which people such as Lucas were able to sail the seas without fear of threat from Moroccan pirates. All that was in the future.

5 (#ulink_765e18c3-3b98-56a5-bad0-8645b731f9bb)

The Moors’ Tales (#ulink_765e18c3-3b98-56a5-bad0-8645b731f9bb)

‘The inland geography of that vast continent [is] an obscure scene which h as been less invisible to the Arabian Moors than to any other nation of the ancient or modern world.’

Edward Gibbon, Of the Position of the Meridional Line (1790–91)

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London, May 1789

CAREFUL READERS of the Gentleman’s Magazine of May 1789 will have spotted the following announcement, tucked away between a list of His Royal Highness, the Duke of Clarence’s household and notice of a meeting to decide whether a Coldstream Guards officer had behaved like a gentleman:

A general meeting of the subscribers to the association for promoting the discovery of the interior parts of Africa, was held at the St. Alban’s Tavern, when an account of the proceedings of the committee during the past year, and of the interesting intelligence which had been received in the course of it, particularly from the late Mr. Ledyard, was submitted to their consideration. By this intelligence, every doubt is removed of the practicability of the object for which the society was instituted; and as several persons have offered themselves as candidates to succeed the late Mr. Ledyard in the service of the Association, there is reason to suppose, that the knowledge already obtained will soon be followed by more extensive discoveries.

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The claim that ‘every doubt is removed of the practicability’ of getting to the interior was an exaggeration of epic proportions. The grand plan of bisecting northern Africa west of Sudan and south of Tripoli had come to nothing. And if Ledyard’s meagre report was the most important of the Association’s discoveries to date, then little had been achieved. But if the Committee took liberties in their announcement in the Gentleman’s Magazine, it was because it was intended as a rallying cry, a membership drive.

When they created the Association in June of the previous year, Banks, Beaufoy and the other Saturday’s Club members gave no indication of how large an organisation they envisaged. Within the first fortnight of its existence, fifteen names were added to those of the dozen founding members. Following the announcement in the Gentleman’s Magazine, word spread through salons, drawing rooms and clubs; membership was soon up to sixty. With members committed to paying the five-guinea subscription, the Association could now count on an annual income of at least £315, more than enough to keep a traveller in the field.

The new members were a more eclectic group than the founders, but they still reflected the areas of influence and interest of the five-man Committee, in particular of its key players, Banks, Beaufoy and Lord Rawdon. There was a large group of nobility, among them the Duke of Grafton and the Earl of Bute, both former prime ministers. Rawdon had signed up some of his relations, including his father, the Earl of Moira, and his uncle the Earl of Huntingdon. More surprising was the arrival of the Countess of Aylesbury. A woman in the club? In 1789? Indeed so, and neither by chance, mistake or manipulation. While some twenty-first-century London clubs continue to refuse female membership, in May 1789 the Committee of the African Association reached the enlightened conclusion that ‘The Improvement of Geographical knowledge is not unworthy the attention, or undeserving the Encouragement of the Ladies of Great Britain.’

Among this first intake of women, alongside the Countess of Aylesbury and Lady Belmore, was a Mrs Child, a useful addition: she might not have had a title, but she was married to one of London’s wealthiest bankers. Thomas Coutts, founder of the financial house that still bears his name, was also attracted to the project and became the Association’s banker of choice. Four members of the Hoare banking dynasty signed up too, three of them Evangelists and strongly opposed to the slave trade: Samuel Hoare Jr, the Quaker, was one of the original members of the 1785 Abolitionist Committee. Other notable new names included the potter Josiah Wedgwood, the historian Edward Gibbon – he had just published the final volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – the Orientalist William Marsden and John Hunter, reputed to be the finest surgeon at work in England. A considerable number of members were also Fellows of the Royal Society, unsurprising given that Banks was the President. Equally unsurprising, considering the anti-slavery sentiments of the Committee, many of these new members were actively working towards the abolition of slavery. Of this group, one man stands out, a visionary by the name of Dr John Lettson,

(#ulink_f3a430c1-5d0c-5681-8766-a6ceb4cef13e) a Quaker who had already taken the decisive step of freeing slaves on a West Indian plantation he inherited. But Richard Neave, a leader of the West India Merchants and a man inevitably involved in the slave trade, was also admitted, which points to a tension between the conflicting interests of abolitionists and planters.

Had these new recruits discovered the bungling nature of the Association’s first missions, of Ledyard’s unfortunate death in Cairo and Lucas’ lame approach to the Sahara, they might have disagreed with Beaufoy’s claim that ‘every doubt has been removed’. Some might have gone so far as to suggest that the Association’s cause was hopeless. But they had not been given all of the details and neither would they be, at least not for some time, because the Committee had included in their founding charter a resolution to share with the members only that information which ‘in the opinion of the committee, may, without endangering the object of their Association, be made public’.

(#litres_trial_promo) But even though they had covered their backs, there was a new urgency about the cause. Results were needed. All eyes turned to the south.

The Oriental Interpreter knew nothing of this as he watched the domes and minarets of Tripoli’s skyline disappear beyond the horizon. Even so, he must have had some anxiety about returning home without having seen the longed-for interior of the continent, and will have taken comfort from the knowledge that he would arrive in London in midsummer, when many members of the African Association would have fled the dust and stink and general rot of the overheated capital. The dust sheets would be on the furniture in Soho Square, Sir Joseph Banks would be in Yorkshire, revelling in the soothing greenery of his country seat of Revesby Abbey, while Henry Beaufoy would have returned to his country house near Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire. But Lucas’ predictions were confounded: at the end of July, the shutters were still open at 32 Soho Square and Beaufoy was still in residence at Great George Street. What had kept them up in town out of season?

While Lucas was settling into Consul Tully’s house in Tripoli the previous October, his employer, King George III, discovered that his eyes had become yellow, his urine brown, his mind disordered. Over a period of a couple of weeks His Britannic Majesty was reduced from a proud monarch to a man who cried to his children that he was going mad. The King’s ill health sparked a constitutional crisis as his son, George, Prince of Wales, was made Regent. The monarchy crisis touched each of the Association’s inner members, either as Members of Parliament or, as with Banks, because they were regulars at court. But by the time Lucas reached London, the King had recovered, a thanksgiving service had been held at St Paul’s Cathedral and a series of grand dinners and balls thrown at Windsor and across London to celebrate George’s return to form. No sooner was the English King out of trouble than his French counterpart, Louis XVI, was in it.

On 14 July, twelve days before Lucas set foot on English soil, citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille prison, murdered the governor and emptied its crowded cells. The French King’s inability to restore order fanned the hopes and the audacity of the revolutionaries. The game was up for the ancien régime, something Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire recognised even before the Bastille fell: in Paris on 8 July, she had dressed in mourning to visit the King and Queen at Versailles. The sentiment was accurate, though in the event, it was not until January 1793 that the republicans forced Louis to bow before M. Guillotine’s monstrous contraption.

To a man of Banks’ character, the fall of the French King was a reflection of the sickness of the world. Whatever the failings of Louis XVI, or of George III for that matter, Banks and many around him believed that progress, whether intellectual, social or economic, was most likely to be achieved under the guidance of a king, with the solid support of the nobility and land-owners and with the efforts of a contented workforce. Reports flooding in from France, where the revolution quickly spread out of the capital and chaos gripped the country, merely served to confirm Banks’ view.

In this year of revolution, 1789, over two hundred ships left England’s ports bound for Africa. Many of them returned bringing people as well as goods. Not slaves, for the law in England now discouraged that: any Africans shipped as slaves were instantly transformed into free men when they touched the shores of Albion. The Africans arriving in England in 1789 were a mixed bunch of traders, petitioners and adventurers, all drawn by the economic might as much as the social right of England and its capital, the world’s greatest city. Among them was a Moroccan named Ben Ali.

It is a measure of the Association’s fast-growing reputation that soon after his arrival in England, news of its mission came to the ears of Ben Ali. It is perhaps also a sign of their openness that the Committee were prepared to listen to what the Moor had to say: early in June, while Lucas was quarantined in the lazaretto of Malta, Ben Ali was invited to meet Banks, Lord Rawdon and other members of the Committee. An English Barbary trader by the name of Dodsworth, who was fluent in Magrebi Arabic, acted as interpreter.

The Moor began by laying out his credentials. He was a respected trader from the Atlantic coastal town of Safi, for many centuries one of the principal markets for Morocco’s trans-Saharan trade, and he believed he could help the Association’s missionaries reach the heart of Africa. On several occasions in the course of business, Ben Ali had crossed the Sahara. Timbuktu, the Niger and Bambara, places that had become a grail for the Association, were familiar to him. He was known there and had good contacts. What’s more, he would be happy to share his knowledge. He even had a proposition to make: for a fee, something the Association had not offered until now, and with certain guarantees, he would be happy to take two Europeans to Timbuktu.

Sitting in the luxurious surroundings of Sir Joseph Banks’ house, some of the world’s riches scattered around the room, the Moor must have calculated that if these men were at all serious about wanting to reach the African interior, they would pay him well. But the situation was not in fact so clear-cut. Banks wanted results, but experience as a traveller had taught him to treat such offers with caution. Money was not the issue: he had ample means to fund Ben Ali’s trip and had already paid considerably more to support other voyages of discovery. But this was Association business, and as Treasurer he knew they were already financially over-extended. So instead of producing a purse of gold from his breast pocket, as the Moor seems to have expected, Sir Joseph offered golden words and insisted that, for the moment at least, the Committee could offer nothing more. ‘We place Confidence in you,’ Ben Ali was told. ‘You should place some Confidence in us.’

The Moroccan, who had also seen something of the world, knew that reassurances and confidences would fill neither his belly nor his pocketbook. But rather than walk away from the Association, he tried a different approach. For reasons that are not clear, he singled out Lord Rawdon. Perhaps because the Irish peer was the youngest member of the Committee, perhaps because he appeared more sympathetic during the Committee hearing, or perhaps because Ben Ali believed he was the most trustworthy, or the most gullible – whatever the reason, on Wednesday, 10 June, Rawdon received a letter from a Dr W. Thomson. ‘At the desire of Said Aben Ali I write this … He talks of making with your Lp [Lordship] personally, a Covenant before God with Bread and Salt.’ Thomson was clearly reluctant to be writing the letter. ‘I endeavoured to explain to him,’ he continued, ‘that it was not for me to determine, either how far your L’p might be inclined to pledge your Honour as an Individual, considered apart from the Society, or to submit to any other Rites in giving your Word than what was usual with a British Nobleman.’

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The Moor had miscalculated: Rawdon had no intention of entering into any sort of rite. Instead, two days later, the peer met Banks and Beaufoy in Soho Square and between them they agreed to offer Ben Ali ‘an allowance’

(#litres_trial_promo) of three guineas a week for as long as it took Dodsworth, his interpreter, to write down his account of the interior of Africa. Ben Ali agreed, the work soon started and continued for the next seven weeks.