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

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The notes of Ben Ali’s interviews have not survived, but the Committee were clearly convinced by him, for they now tentatively agreed to his offer to take two of their missionaries into the interior. The proposed route was another departure for them: Ben Ali did not want to approach Africa by way of Cairo, Tripoli or even his native Morocco. Instead, he suggested that they abandoned their planned bisection of northern Africa and approached from the west, sailing up the River Gambia and then continuing overland to Timbuktu. For the Committee, this was a radical change in their approach to the continent, but it was less of a problem than the terms Ben Ali demanded. For his part in the adventure, he wanted the Association to provide him with £300 in cash or gold. With this, he would buy goods to trade in the interior, which would serve two crucial purposes: proceeds from the sale of these goods would pay for their travel deeper into the interior and, just as important, would also give credibility to their disguise as merchants. There was one other demand: if the mission was successful, if he and the two travellers reached Timbuktu and made it back to London, he wanted the Association to provide him with a pension of £200 a year.

The terms were steep. Ledyard’s mission had cost just over £237 and Lucas’ account, although the Committee didn’t know it at this point, had topped £400, so Ben Ali’s mission costs were not unexpected. But neither of the Association’s previous missionaries had received a salary or the promise of a pension. Apart from the money, there were concerns about the Moor’s reliability, and therefore also about the safety of whoever they sent out with him. The Committee argued the matter. Discussions went on for some weeks, and while they continued three more characters entered the story.

François Xavier Swediaur was a forty-year-old doctor, born in Austria of Swedish parents, who for some years had been practising medicine in London. He counted among his friends Sir William Fordyce, one of the Association’s founders; through Fordyce, Swediaur heard of Ben Ali. The Moor’s offer struck a chord: he had long wanted to do something different with his life, and this was the sort of opportunity he could not let pass. A few days later he volunteered to be the Association’s next geographical missionary, and recommended that a friend of his, Mr Hollen Vergen, be allowed to accompany him.

To Banks, Swediaur and Hollen Vergen offered a way out of the impasse the Committee had reached with Ben Ali. He could not bring himself to trust the Moor with the Association’s money, convinced there was a real possibility – a probability, even – that they would never hear from him again. If that were to happen, the Association’s credibility would be seriously compromised. But Banks and Fordyce had known Swediaur for years. They trusted him, and through him they could see a way to make the Moor’s proposition work.

Beaufoy still had his doubts. On 23 July he wrote to Banks that he had seen Swediaur and had told him, much to the doctor’s satisfaction, ‘that you seem inclined to place him at the head of the Gambia adventure and to give him the aid of the Moor, as a useful but subordinate partner in the business of the Journey’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Beaufoy was happy for Swediaur and Hollen Vergen to represent the Association, though like Banks he mistrusted Dodsworth and Ben Ali. As the success of the mission depended on Ben Ali, whatever Swediaur’s role, Beaufoy continued to raise objections, arguing that risking some £300 of the Association’s money in this way was ‘equally inconsistent with the state of our funds and with the common maxims of Mercantile prudence’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Banks now found a way around this impasse by introducing to the Committee someone who knew a great deal more than any of them about mercantile prudence.

Philip Sansom had made a fortune from trading abroad, and in the process had acquired a reputation in the City as a man of sound commercial sense. He was, as Banks also knew, very much in favour of abolishing slavery.

(#ulink_92bd4f76-4828-5796-ab74-e28a2716b928) At this stage, in the summer of 1789, Sansom was not a member of the Association – he didn’t sign up until 1791 – but Banks knew him well enough to make an approach, and Sansom appeared to be happy to help: together with several business colleagues he offered to send out a cargo of £500 worth of goods in the care of one of his own men. When they reached Timbuktu, Swediaur would be allowed to trade with these goods. Presumably Sansom and his partners thought it was worth risking £500 on a venture that might give them a toehold in the Timbuktu trade.

Banks was delighted. The plan, as laid out in the Committee’s minutes, ran as follows: Swediaur and Hollen Vergen, ‘being animated by an earnest desire of promoting the great object of the Association for the discovery of the Interior parts of Africa’, were to sail to the Gambia with Ben Ali as their guide and interpreter. While they made the much-longed-for journey to Timbuktu, Sansom’s cargo would remain on the Atlantic coast. Once the missionaries reached Timbuktu, the cargo would be sent on and Swediaur and Hollen Vergen would sell the goods. The financial arrangements had also fallen neatly into place: the Association would pay £300 travelling expenses for the three men, £125 to equip Swediaur and Hollen Vergen, £50 a year (for a maximum of three years) to Hollen Vergen and £100 to Swediaur if he reached Timbuktu and lived to tell the tale. Swediaur would also earn a commission on the sale of Sansom’s cargo. The only person who might possibly have been unhappy with the deal was Ben Ali, who had both a greater role and a greater reward in mind when he first approached the Association. But that kind of concern quickly became irrelevant on 6 August, when Sir Joseph scribbled a hasty note to Beaufoy: ‘The Moor is missing.’

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Dodsworth, who was still translating and, to some extent, chaperoning Ben Ali, had brought the bad news to Soho Square, announcing that the Moor had simply vanished, leaving his rooms and taking nothing with him. Not knowing of any other motive, Dodsworth assumed that he had killed himself ‘from his uneasiness of mind’.

(#litres_trial_promo) But Beaufoy quickly made enquiries and heard otherwise. Ben Ali, it seems, was lying low in Hampstead, forced into hiding by the appearance of an angry pregnant woman pressing paternity claims on him. She was not the first, and perhaps, like the others, she would not have managed to disrupt the Moor’s – and therefore the Association’s – plans had she not brought the police along with her. Dodsworth had already posted bail to keep Ben Ali out of jail on one occasion, but could see no way to help him now.

When Banks heard the news, he suffered one of his periodic eruptions of moral outrage. ‘How,’ he demanded to know, ‘is this Consonant with an intention of travelling in our service?’

(#litres_trial_promo) The answer was obvious: it was not.

Ben Ali simply disappeared from Hampstead, leaving a couple of angry women and fatherless children, and was never heard of again. A month or two later, Dr Swediaur collapsed: repeated bouts of colic forced him to give up any hopes of travelling to Timbuktu. As a result, Philip Sansom withdrew his offer of cargo and the plan on which Banks, Beaufoy and Rawdon had spent considerable time and energy was dead. But as soon became apparent, their efforts were not wasted.

They had not found the River Niger, nor had they seen Timbuktu. They knew nothing more about the course of the River Nile, nor of the extent of the great lakes they believed would be found in the centre of the continent. But Simon Lucas had returned safe and sound, thank God, and had brought a thorough description of the route south of Tripoli as given to him by Imhammad and confirmed by the Governor of Mesurata. Meanwhile, members in London had done their part in trying to redraw Boulton’s 1787 map by trawling for useful information.

Among the many people Banks contacted was James Matra in Morocco. Matra, who had already warned of the ‘absolute impossibility’ of exploring Africa through Morocco, now repeated his reservations in a letter from Gibraltar, explaining that, ‘After all my hopes [of providing new information] I am obliged to tell you my expectations of procuring you intelligence of the route thro [sic] the interior of this Country are wonderfully disappointed – I have Paper in abundance, but not to the purpose …’

(#litres_trial_promo) If he wasn’t able to deliver new intelligence, Matra could at least offer general encouragement: ‘By what I hear of Tombucktoo [sic], called by the Moors Timkitoo, it seems a Country well worth examining.’

(#litres_trial_promo) But at the same time as he was insisting that he had nothing new to tell Banks, Matra was writing a detailed account of the trade through Morocco for Lord Sydney, the Secretary of State for the Home Department and for the Barbary States of North Africa.

The previous October, most likely at Banks’ suggestion, Sydney had written to the British consuls in the Barbary States asking them to report on trade and trading routes into the Sahara and central Africa. Neither Tully in Tripoli nor Consul Logie in Algiers replied to His Lordship’s request, but Matra sent in a lengthy report from Tangier, which included this overview: ‘The Caravan Trade from Morocco to Guinea proceeds no further South than to Tambuctoo, the Capital of Negroland. This Town, I believe, is a general Rendezvous not only for the people of this Country [Morocco] but likewise for the Traders of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli …’ He then offered the sort of details he had told Banks were unavailable. The meat of it was this: caravans of up to three hundred people carried European products – cloths, beads, spices, brassware and needles – to the interior and brought tobacco and salt, gold dust, ivory, slaves and gum back to the north. As far as he could tell, as many as four thousand slaves were being marched across the desert to Morocco each year, among them eunuchs ‘of a Country called Bambara’,

(#litres_trial_promo) whose king was said to be happy to exchange some twenty of them for a good horse. Perhaps most tantalising for the African Association was news that the region of Timbuktu was inhabited ‘by a civilized and quiet People and abounds with large unfortified Towns … The Country is fruitful and produces much Corn and Rice near the Rivers or Lakes, I suppose, for I am informed it never rains there: It abounds likewise with Cattle and Sheep …’

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Much of this new information was published in The Proceedings of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, a report written by Beaufoy and published in 1790. Running to 115 quarto pages, it contains a remarkable amount of detail on the country previously marked on maps as Nigritia or Bilad as-Sudan (both terms refer to ‘the Land of the Blacks’). In the margin, beside each statement, Beaufoy identified the principal source of information, either Imhammad or Ben Ali. Here, at last, were men of the south describing their lands, the season for Saharan travel, the measures to be taken when travelling by camel, the distances that could reasonably be covered in a day – ‘three miles in the hour’ for ‘seldom more than seven or eight [hours] in a day’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Here too was confirmation of the existence of the great kingdoms of Katsina and Borno, of cities and towns – Murzuq, Domboo, Kanem, Ganatt, Assouda and Weddan – that had previously been known only by hearsay, and lists of hitherto unknown tribes, the Kardee, the Serrowah, the Showva, Battah, Mulgui and others. And here too was the first mention in any account of North Africa of a place called Tibesti, several hundred miles across the desert and described as mountainous, home to a wild tribe and to ‘vales fertile in corn and pasturage for cattle, of which they have numerous herds’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Their camels were said to be the finest in Africa.

There was much here to reassure the Committee, such as, for instance, Lucas’ claim that ‘travelling through all this part of Africa is considered as so secure, that the Shereef Imhammed, with the utmost chearfulness [sic] and confidence of safety, proposed to accompany and conduct Mr. Lucas, by the way of Fezzan and Cashna [Katsina], across the Niger, to Assenté [Ashanti], which borders on the Coast of the Christians’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Wishful thinking, but perhaps not impossible. Everything the Association had learned from its sources suggested that once a way into the interior was found, their problems would be over because, according to these accounts at least, food and water were abundant so long as you knew where to look for them. At the heart of these reports, unsurprisingly considering the informants were merchants, were descriptions of a lucrative trade in gold, salt, cotton, senna, ivory, ostrich feathers and a host of other commodities. Mention was also made of firearms: according to Imhammad, they were unknown in the inland states south of the Niger for the simple reason that ‘the Kings in the neighbourhood of the coast, [are] persuaded that if these powerful instruments of war should reach the possession of the populous inland States, their own independence would be lost’.

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Perhaps the most significant information concerns the Niger, and on this, as on much else, Imhammad and Ben Ali concur. ‘Of this river,’ Beaufoy wrote, ‘which in Arabic is sometimes called Neel il Kibeer, or the Great Nile, and at others, Neel il Abeed, or the Nile of the Negroes, the rise and termination are unknown, but the course is from East to West.’ Here we have it: Leo Africanus, the sixteenth-century traveller and writer, was refuted and the Age of Enlightenment had resolved, in theory at least, one of the enduring mysteries of African geography. There were other revelations as well: the elephants and savage beasts were to be replaced on the map by mountains of stupendous height, wide rivers and vast saltwater lakes. Much of this was simply wrong. But in London in that summer of revolution, neither Banks, Beaufoy nor anyone else suspected the magnitude of their errors.

The Committee were clearly disappointed at Lucas’ lack of endeavour, but equally they were delighted that he had returned and brought with him such corroboration. Whatever the cooling off between the missionary and his masters – and there is no further mention of Lucas’ mission in the Committee’s minute books – the Proceedings put a positive spin on the journey and generously explained that it had ended because he was ‘deprived of all prospect of arriving this year at Fezzan’.

(#litres_trial_promo) That may have been the end of Lucas, at least in our story, had not fortune brought to Beaufoy’s attention another North African with a story to sell.

Asseed El Hage Abd Salam Shabeeny (As Sayyid al Hajj Abd Salam Shabeni) – Shabeni for short – was born in Tetouan, a Moroccan town that looks down to the Mediterranean from the Rif Mountain s. Like Leo Africanus and Ben Ali, Shabeni was the son of a merchant. At fourteen years of age his father took him travelling, and for much of the next thirteen years he lived in Timbuktu. On his return to Tetouan, the young man decided it was time to make his mark and to branch out on his own. He travelled to Egypt and from there made the pilgrimage to Mecca, hence his title of el Hage, or al Hajj, the Pilgrim. Several years later, back in Tetouan, he set himself up as a merchant.

In this guise, as a trader, he travelled to Hamburg in 1789 to buy linen and anything else on which he could turn a profit back home. When his purchases had been baled up and a passage agreed, he boarded ship for the south. On their second day out of port, sailing through the North Sea, they were attacked (by whom he omits to say) and Shabeni was captured. Taken off the ship, he was landed at Ostend where, after almost seven weeks of captivity, he managed to secure his release. Instead of being home in Morocco in December 1789, Shabeni found himself in London, where he soon came to the attention of the African Association, an answer to Banks’ and Beaufoy’s prayers. He had spent thirteen years living in and travelling around the northern half of Africa, and he held out to the Association the prospect of an even more accurate and detailed description of the place.

Early in the spring of 1790, Beaufoy put aside his parliamentary duties to interview Shabeni and one of his companions. As with Ben Ali, Beaufoy offered Shabeni a deal: the Association would pay him twenty-five guineas in return for all he could tell them about the interior. As Shabeni spoke little or no English and Beaufoy knew even less Arabic, an interpreter was needed; Lucas was the obvious choice. Whatever Beaufoy had heard from Imhammad and Ben Ali now paled into insignificance as Shabeni described to his eager audience the great city of Timbuktu. It is easy to imagine the scene at Beaufoy’s house on Great George Street, the royal residences on one side and the Palace of Westminster, home of Parliament, on the other. When Shabeni started to talk, he transported them out of the room crowded with carved furniture, large oil paintings and knotted rugs and into the legendary African city. He began by describing its defences, a wide trench some twelve feet deep and a mud wall ‘sufficiently strong to defend the town against the wild Arabs’.

(#litres_trial_promo) There were three gates, lined with camel skin and ‘so full of nails that no hatchet can penetrate them; the front appears like one piece of iron’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Inside the walls, the Sultan lived in his considerable palace with an equally considerable harem. He was secure and wealthy, protected by a standing army of five thousand men and with such a store of wealth that he handed out gold dust to all and sundry, even his slaves. If this was good to hear, what came next was even better.

South-east of Timbuktu, eight or ten days downstream as he remembered it and around twelve hours’ journey inland from the river, Shabeni had entered a city that no one in Europe had ever even heard of. Hausa, he explained to the startled Beaufoy, was nearly as large as London. In fact it was so big that although he had lived there for two years, he never managed to see all of it. The King’s palace was equally imposing, hidden behind an eight-mile wall and protected by an army of 180,000 soldiers. Gold was found nearby, not by mining, for there were no mountains to excavate, but simply by digging up and refining the sand. There was a just government, conditions were stable, trade was profitable (caravans came from as far afield as India) and, perhaps most encouraging of all, unlike in many other places foreign merchants were required to pay neither tax nor duty to the Sultan, ‘as the Housaeens think they ought to be encouraged’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Even without any direct income from the foreigners, the royal revenue ‘is supposed to be immense’. Beaufoy suspended his disbelief and listened to this story with all the wonder of a child hearing a fairy tale. It was everything he and the Association had hoped for – civilisation, wealth and an enlightened ruler deep in the heart of Africa.

By the time the Committee published its Proceedings in 1790, membership had risen to ninety-five. But apart perhaps from Sir Joseph Banks, none of these eminent people had the slightest claim to be considered a geographer. Happily, one was at hand. James Rennell enters the story with a considerable reputation: he was the outstanding geographer of his generation, referred to as ‘the English d’Anville’. This did not do him justice, for in many ways he was a far greater geographer than the French master. He was now, in 1790, forty-eight years old, and travel and maps were his life. By 1792 he had become the Association’s official geographer and been offered its first honorary membership.

Rennell had lost his parents while still a child and been enlisted into the Royal Navy before his fifteenth birthday. This gave him the opportunity to travel and also provided the circumstances where his talent for surveying and drawing maps was brought out and recognised. He started as a conscript, but within six years had risen to the grand title of Surveyor-General of the East India Company’s dominions in Bengal. By the time he was twenty-one, he was responsible for mapping large swathes of India. There was excitement as well as responsibility – in 1770, he wrote to a friend, ‘I must not forget to tell you that about a Month ago, a large Leopard jumped at me, and I was fortunate enough to kill him by thrusting my Bayonet down his Throat. Five of my young Men were wounded by him; four of them very dangerously. You see I am a lucky Fellow.’ Six years later, with huge areas of ‘Hindostan’ mapped, his luck ran out near Bhutan when he was severely wounded in a skirmish with fakirs. He survived the attack, but the wounds never properly healed and the following year he was forced to resign his commission through ill health.

Rennell was back in London by 1778. A portrait by John Opie shows him to have a high forehead, long nose and sharp eyes. He looks like the sort of person who loves nothing better than to get involved in a tough but good-natured intellectual wrangle, although the words ‘diffident’, ‘unassuming’, ‘candid’ and ‘grave yet sweet’ crop up in descriptions of his character. He had returned from India with the rank of major and a pension – when the East India Company finally deigned to pay it – of £2000 a year (some £100,000 now), which meant he would not have to worry about money. Not that he was going to be idle. In 1778 he published a series of charts and maps of South Africa. Three years later the Bengal Atlas was published and in 1783 he celebrated the appearance of his masterwork, A Memoir of a Map of Hindostan, the first reliable map of India. By then he had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and was on friendly terms with Banks and several other members of the African Association: it was only a matter of time before they approached him to cast a geographer’s eye over the new information they had received and to see what light it threw on the map of Africa.

Rennell published his interpretations of the new information, his Construction of the Map of Africa, in 1790 as a companion piece to Beaufoy’s Proceedings. He began by noting that d’Anville used second- and twelfth-century geographers to fill in the centre of Africa and questioned why it had proved so difficult to obtain fresh information about the continent. The reason, he concluded, owed ‘more to natural causes, than to any absolute want of attention on the part of Geographers’:

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Africa stands alone in a geographical view! Penetrated by no inland seas, like the Mediterranean, Baltic, or Hudson’s Bay; nor overspread with extensive lakes, like those of North America; nor having in common with the other Continents, rivers running from the center to the extremities: but, on the contrary, its regions separated from each other by the least practicable of all boundaries, arid Desarts [sic] of such formidable extent, as to threaten those who traverse them, with the most horrible of all deaths, that arising from thirst! Placed in such circumstances, can we be surprised at our ignorance of its Interior Parts?

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Rennell’s new map of Africa used the latest intelligence collected by the Association. He still took d’Anville, Leo and al-Idrissi as his starting point, but he went on to test their findings against those of his travellers. Inevitably, given his enduring fascination with ancient geography, the Elucidations are sprinkled with references to the ancient writers he so revered, to Herodotus and Pliny, Arrian and Strabo. Often he agreed with them, as with the location of Murzuq, the main town of Fezzan, which Lucas had failed to reach. But there are several places where information gathered by the Association allowed Rennell the sweet sensation of breaking new ground by providing fresh plottings, among them the location of the Niger, Timbuktu and the oasis of Siwa, site of the ancient oracle of Jupiter Ammon. Nor could he resist trying to chart the course of the Niger:

The river known to Europeans by the name of Niger, runs on the South of the kingdom of Cashna, in its course towards Tombuctou; and if the report which Ben Alli heard in that town, may be credited, it is afterwards lost in the sands on the South of the country of Tombuctou.

On his map, Rennell marked the known part of the Niger with a continuous line, the speculative part – the run-off into the desert – with a dotted one. But he then went on to assert that ‘the Africans have two names for this river; that is, Neel il Abeed, or River of the Negroes; and the Neel il Kibeer, or the Great River. They also term the Nile (that is, the Egyptian River) Neel Shem: so that the term Neel, from whence our Nile, is nothing more than the appellative of River; like Ganges, or Sinde.’

(#litres_trial_promo) In this he was completely wrong. The Egyptian Nile is known as the Nil al Kabir; above Khartoum, the western branch of the river is known as the Nil al Abiat (hence his Abeed), or White Nile, the eastern branch along which James Bruce had already explored, being known as the Blue Nile. The word Nil or Neel referred solely to the Nile.

The Sharif Imhammad, Ben Ali and Shabeni had all used a day’s march as a measure of distance and, in the absence of any readings of longitude or latitude, Rennell had no choice but to use these to create geographical facts. It was a difficult task, perhaps ultimately an impossible one, as he realised when he tried to plot the whereabouts of Timbuktu. But ‘in using materials of so coarse a kind’, he apologised, ‘trifles must not be regarded’.

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In what way had this new information changed their understanding of Africa? While Ledyard was rotting in his Cairene grave, Lucas becoming reacquainted with the rituals of court life and Banks busy keeping the minds of government ministers on the fate of the Botany Bay colonists (and while they all watched with horror the unfolding terror in France), Beaufoy sat at his desk in Westminster and drew ‘conclusions of an important and interesting nature’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Having summed up the Association’s advances and dwelled on some of the minutiae of the facts, he turned to something he knew would touch his audience directly: the British Grand Tourist, he suggested, might consider ‘exchanging the usual excursion from Calais to Naples, for a Tour more extended and important’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The location of this place? None other than Fezzan. Here, he assured his readers, the amateur of archaeology would find fulfilment and the lover of Nature could discover much that was so far unknown in Europe. All of which was probably true, only first the traveller had to find a way of reaching Fezzan, something Lucas had failed to do.

Rennell’s map of Africa, 1790

For the more adventurous tourist, the possibilities seemed endless, even if the destinations were unknown:

The powerful Empires of Bornu and Cashna will be open to his investigation; the luxurious City of Tombuctou, whose opulence and severe police attract the Merchants of the most distant States of Africa, will unfold to him the causes of her vast prosperity; the mysterious Niger will disclose her unknown origin and doubtful termination; and countries unveiled to ancient and modern research will become familiar to his view.

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It was wishful thinking, of course. How was a Grand Tourist to swap Naples for central Sahara when Rennell was still struggling to locate with certainty Borno, Katsina or any of the other powerful empires? And how was an English lord or gentleman to succeed when a traveller of John Ledyard’s experience, who had sailed the world with Cook and crossed Siberia alone, had managed to go no further than Cairo and Simon Lucas hardly left sight of the coast?

The Association’s first resolution, drafted by Beaufoy that summer day back in 1788, stated that ‘no species of information is more ardently desired, or more generally useful, than that which improves the science of Geography’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Their area of enquiry was clearly fixed on the interior of the northern half of Africa, in particular the River Niger, the east – west trans-continental caravan routes and the whereabouts of Timbuktu. But Beaufoy now extended the bounds of the Association’s interests from geography and history to trade. And given that the flag followed trade just as much as trade followed the flag, he was also moving the Association into the realm of politics.

Beaufoy concluded by laying out the commercial possibilities the Association’s researches had exposed. ‘Of all the advantages to which a better acquaintance with the Inland Regions of Africa may lead, the first in importance is, the extension of the Commerce, and the encouragement of the Manufactures of Britain … One of the most profitable manufactures of Great Britain’,

(#litres_trial_promo) he went on, was firearms. These were currently traded along the coast. The rulers of the coastal states had effectively stopped the movement of weapons into the interior for the obvious reason that guns gave them an edge over their more powerful inland neighbours. If their rivals were able to buy European-made weapons, the coastal states would be overrun. British traders, Beaufoy seemed to be suggesting, need have no scruples about arming both sides in this conflict, nor about disturbing the balance of power. Perhaps he believed that this might in some way stop the flow of slaves from the interior to the coast.

As well as musing on the sale of firearms, Beaufoy drew some larger conclusions about the African trade. Merchants from Morocco, Tripoli, Egypt and elsewhere, he noted, went to the considerable expense of mounting caravans and making extraordinary journeys across the Sahara, with all the costs and dangers that this entailed, and were still able to turn a good profit. Millions of pounds were mentioned. And here the idea first suggested by Ben Ali reappears. Imagine, Beaufoy went on, how much profit British traders might make if they cut inland from the coast south of the Sahara, much less than half the journey of the northern African traders. This, of course, ignored the fact that no European he knew of had made that journey and lived to tell the tale. ‘Associations of Englishmen should form caravans, and take their departure from the highest navigable reaches of the Gambia [River], or from the settlement which is lately established at Sierra Leone.’ There would, he knew, be setbacks, as there always are with new ventures. But consider the market: appearing to pluck a figure from the air, for he had nothing more substantial to base it on, he estimated the population in the interior, of Katsina, Borno, Timbuktu and all those other places Rennell had recently plotted on his map, at probably more than one hundred millions of people’.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘The gain would be such as few commercial adventures have ever been found to yield.’

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After all these exhortations, it comes as no surprise that the Association’s next missionary was sent to find a route between the Gambia River, the Niger and ‘luxurious’, gold-plated Timbuktu.

(#ulink_e110790a-80d7-501e-a10a-8a04eb9cb390) Lettson studied medicine under Sir William Fordyce, one of the Association’s original members. He went on to found the Royal Humane Society and the Philosophical Society of London.

(#ulink_169477d8-8434-5d80-9078-00d7d51ef47a) Sansom later served as Deputy Chairman of the Sierra Leone Company, the philanthropic organisation that helped to establish a settlement for freed slaves in West Africa in 1787.

6 (#ulink_108eebd4-9605-59e1-869f-28a43d38b873)

The Gambia Route (#ulink_108eebd4-9605-59e1-869f-28a43d38b873)

‘On Saturday the African Club [the Committee] dined at the St Alban’s Tavern. There were a number of articles produced from the interior parts of Africa, which may turn out very important in a commercial view; as gums, pepper, &c. We have heard of a city … called Tombuctoo: gold is there so plentiful as to adorn even the slaves; amber is there the most valuable article. If we could get our manufactures into that country we should soon have gold enough.’

Sir John Sinclair, 1790

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IN 1782, six years before the Association was formed, Sir Joseph Banks found himself faced with a situation of the utmost delicacy. A Fellow of the Royal Society, a wealthy chemist by the name of John Price, announced that he had found a way of converting mercury into gold. Price’s claim caused a sensation, not least because it appeared to be verified by witnesses of great character: he had conducted the experiment at his Surrey laboratory, where, in the presence of their lordships Palmerston, Onslow and King, he produced a yellow metal that was proved, upon testing, to be gold. When word got out, Price quickly became a national hero, fêted throughout the land; Oxford University, perhaps a little opportunistically, even offered him an honorary degree. Barely audible over the clamour and adulation, Sir Joseph and some of his colleagues at the Royal Society announced that they simply didn’t believe him. Rather than draw more attention to the man, the Fellows decided to do nothing, in the hope that he would soon be exposed or forgotten. The opposite happened. Price published an account of his experiment, although not the actual formula for making the precious metal, and the book quickly sold out. Banks decided this story had gone far enough, and asked its author to be so kind as to repeat the experiment for the scrutiny of the Royal Society. Price agreed and, on the appointed day, welcomed three eminent Fellows into his lab. Instead of alchemy, they witnessed a different sort of experiment: Price swallowed a phial of poison and died before their eyes.

The Price episode was unusual but by no means unique. In an age of trial and error, when some scientists were making such huge advances, it seemed as though anything was possible, even the creation of gold from base metal. In such a climate, the idea of sending explorers off to an area that others had already visited and asking them to locate towns, rivers and goldfields that were known to exist must have seemed a low-risk adventure. And yet, for their third mission, the Association reigned in some of its ambition. The grand plan of bisecting the northern half of Africa, of sending one explorer to cross it from east to west and another from north to south, was abandoned. The next geographical missionary was to follow up the Hajj Shabeni’s suggestion and cut a passage through from the Atlantic coast to the Niger River. This plan was more specific than the previous one and, the Committee must have reckoned, more likely to succeed. Their traveller would head up the Gambia River and cut inland to the kingdoms of Bondo and Bambuk, both bywords for gold and lying in an area in which the French had been trying to open trade with the Atlantic. Beyond Bambuk lay the route to Timbuktu, a place where ‘gold is … so plentiful as to adorn even the slaves’, Committee member Sir John Sinclair noted, echoing the reports of earlier centuries. But if deciding on new routes of exploration was easy, choosing the right man for the job was not.

There was no shortage of volunteers – Banks’ archive is littered with applications – but the Committee had been criticised for their first choice of missionaries and also for the routes they had chosen, so this time they were going to take more care. In March 1789, James Bruce had warned Banks about Ledyard: ‘I am afraid,’ he wrote from his family seat in Kinnaird, Scotland, ‘your African or rather Nubian traveller will not answer your expectations … He is either too high or too low; for he should join the Jellaba at Suakim … or else he should have gone to Siout or Monfalout in Upper Egypt from Cairo, and, having procured acquaintance and accommodations there, set out with the great Caravan of Sudan, traversing first the desert of Selima to Dar Four, Dar Selé, and Bagirma, so on to Bournu, and down to Tombucto to the Ocean at Senega or the Gambia.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Harsh, perhaps, but history proved him right.

Not everyone was so critical of Ledyard, however. Thomas Jefferson, his patron in Paris, continued to refer to his ‘genius’, while the opinion-making Gentleman’s Magazine, considering his mission in its issue of July 1790, thought that ‘Such a person as Mr. Ledyard was formed by Nature for the object in contemplation; and, were we unacquainted with the sequel [his death in Cairo], we should congratulate the Society in being so fortunate as to find such a man for one of their missionaries.’ But then in January 1792, W.G. Browne, a traveller we shall meet in the field in the next chapter, wrote that ‘Ledyard, the Man employed by the society on the Sennar expedition, was a very unfit person; and, tho’ he had lived, would not have advanced many leagues on the way, if the judgement of people in Egypt concerning him be credited.’

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Lucas attracted just as much criticism. When news of his failure to get beyond the Libyan coast reached Tangier, James Matra, the Consul, wrote to Banks, ‘I am sorry for Lucas’ miscarriage, but his expedition has ended as ever I feared it would. He is nothing but a good natured fellow. It is very certain that a Moorish education [which Lucas had had as a slave to the Emperor of Morocco] plays the devil with us. Were you to take one from the first stock of Heroes and bring [him] up here, timidity would be the most certain though by far not the worst consequence of it.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Another of the Association’s missionaries, meeting Lucas several years later, wrote, ‘I don’t know if the Committee believes his excuses for his returning to England, or if they give them so little a credit as I do myself …’

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The obvious conclusion to be drawn in 1790 was that in their haste to get their first two missions off to Africa, the Committee had chosen men who were either inappropriate for the task they had been given, as in the case of Lucas, or insufficiently prepared, as could be said of Ledyard. It was clear that more than languages, which had been Lucas’ strength, or travel experience, which had recommended Ledyard, were needed to crack open the African shell. But then, consider the problems the Association’s missionaries faced. Apart from the fact that they were uncertain of where they were going and of what they would find when they got there, they needed to have a great facility with languages – take a trip along the River Niger in Mali now and you will find your boatman speaking at least half a dozen quite distinct languages or dialects in the course of a normal day, including Mandekan, Soninke, Wolof, Fulani and Songhay. They also needed extraordinary physical strength and what Banks would have called rude health. After all, they were being sent to an area that later came to be known as the white man’s grave. A long list of preventatives are recommended today to protect travellers in the region against cholera, yellow fever, typhoid, meningitis, polio, tetanus, diphtheria, hepatitis A and B, rabies and malaria, none of which had even been identified in the late eighteenth century. Diplomacy was another essential skill for the Association’s travellers. Throughout Africa there was great suspicion of Europeans and Americans. Why were they there? Were they preparing for an invasion? Were they going to take over local trade? Was it gold that drew them so far from home? Certainly no one in West Africa was going to be convinced by the sort of explanation Bruce and Ledyard offered in Cairo, that they were travelling out of curiosity, just to see where rivers rose, to know what lay across deserts. European involvement in the slave trade had revealed the brutish side of the Christian spirit and had shown how easily visitors could become raiders. If there had ever been any romantic speculation about white men in West Africa, it was long gone.

Miraculously, in the summer of 1790 the Committee received an offer of ‘services’ from someone who seemed to possess just about all of the experience and qualities they now knew they wanted. In July 1788, Banks’ friend and colleague at the Royal Society, the lawyer Sir William Musgrave, had written to suggest that a man by the name of Daniel Houghton might be of use to the Association. Nothing came of it at the time because Ledyard and Lucas had already been commissioned. But Houghton kept his eye on the Association’s progress, and when two years later he heard that the Committee were planning a new expedition, he was quick to repeat his offer.