The Sahara Read online

  Serious exploration of the Sahara was impossible, though, while people relied on a twelfth-century copy of Ptolemy’s second-century map, and for local intelligence they turned to Herodotus and Pliny as much as to the most up-to-date volume dealing with Saharan geography: Leo Africanus’ 1550 Description of Africa. These tomes were hardly sufficient preparation before setting off to “the Interior Parts of Africa’’. For example, both al-Idrisi and Leo Africanus insisted that the River Niger flowed east to west, emerging into the Atlantic in the area of Senegal and the Gambia, which was wrong. Pliny got it right when he said that the river flowed from west to east, but he then blundered when he said it ended where it entered the Nile. There were also those who believed Ptolemy’s view that the Niger was an independent, intra-African river that did not empty out into any sea or ocean at all.

  The blank canvas of the Sahara, 1790

  Like the British government, Joseph Banks (1743-1820) and his co-founders of the African Association had various interests that were not limited to exploration. Apart from the avowed pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, the African Association was keen to see an extension of Britain’s influence in the world, gained in the first place by leading the Industrial Revolution. In part secured though the services of the Royal Navy, this significant industrial advantage over her European rivals meant unequalled global power for Britain, a position she would not willingly yield. Banks, who accompanied Cook on his first voyage and supplied the expedition’s artists and naturalists at his own expense, and who was elected President of the Royal Society upon his return, had his own commercial and humanitarian concerns, which helped him to decide which proposals received by the association ought to be pursued.

  To put in context the birth of what was to become one of the most influential societies in the decades ahead, six months earlier The Times of London had been launched, and twelve days after the meeting in the tavern, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution of the emergent United States. It was fitting, therefore, that the first explorer the African Association sent to discover the route of the River Niger and locate Timbuktu should be an American.

  During its inaugural evening the association had agreed to employ the services of one Simon Lucas, but his departure from England was delayed because of ill health. Having learnt some Arabic during a three-year period as a slave in Morocco, Lucas was “allotted the passage of the Zahara [sic], from Tripoli to Fezzan”. Lucas did eventually make it to Tripoli, but was unable to journey south through the Sahara because of tribal fighting, and so returned to England with little to show for his efforts.

  Reckoned to have covered more miles than any other man alive at the time, John Ledyard’s (1751-89) credentials as a traveller were impeccable. A native of the pre-revolutionary colony of New England, Ledyard fled from student life in his first year at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. Leaving with some elan, he cut down a tree and carved a fifty-foot canoe, a skill he learned from the Iroquois, and paddled down the Connecticut river to his grandfather’s house. Enlisting in the British Navy, he sailed on HMS Resolution with Cook on the captain’s third and fatal voyage, during the course of which America declared independence. Following this epic sea-voyage, Ledyard attempted to make an overland crossing of the Russian Empire. Having got as far as Irkutsk, and in spite of the diplomatic efforts of Thomas Jefferson, then US minister to France, Ledyard was arrested as a spy on the personal order of Catherine the Great, and brought back west, being deported over the border into Poland.

  Having found admirers on the committee of the association, Ledyard set out for Egypt from London on 30 June 1788. His plan was to spend time securing guides and otherwise preparing for his trans-Saharan trek. Things, inevitably enough, did not go as planned. While in Cairo, Ledyard contracted a stomach bug and decided to treat himself with sulphuric acid, a then common treatment for such stomach ailments. Unfortunately for the association, and even more so for Ledyard, he overdosed on his medicine, died in the Egyptian capital in January 1789 and was buried in an unknown grave next to the River Nile.

  Although he had already traversed great portions of the globe, no one had asked whether Ledyard was really the best-qualified candidate for the Saharan mission. He did not speak Arabic and had never travelled in desert lands. Almost universal ignorance in London also meant that nobody wondered why, if he was searching for Timbuktu, Ledyard should start his journey from the opposite corner of the Sahara. It is ironic that while these undoubtedly brave explorers were setting off from the port cities of North Africa, European kinsmen had already established about thirty forts along the West African coastline, just a few hundred miles from most Saharan gold mines.

  The African Association, we have seen, hoped to discover the course of the River Niger and reach Timbuktu. While the city had been the intellectual and cultural centre of the Mali Empire, the gold actually came from elsewhere - a fact that would be immaterial had the association’s sole intention been to plumb the region’s intellectual treasures. If that had indeed been its goal, it is unlikely, however, that it would have attracted the patronage of so many merchants. And if trade interests were paramount for the merchants, so was humanitarianism for more religiously inclined souls. It was only the year before the association’s founding in 1788 that William Wilberforce formed the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade leading to a twenty-year battle in and out of the courts and culminating in the end of the slave trade in the British Empire, under the terms of the 1807 Slave Trade Act.

  To understand the close relationship between business and exploration, it is worth noting that even the German explorer Heinrich Barth (1821-65) - often cited as the most scientific of nineteenth-century Saharan travellers-cum-scholars - was funded mainly by a group of British merchants. This is not to suggest that Barth’s reputation for scholarship is not justified. The journals he wrote about his extensive journeys and the people and places he saw are often the only first-hand sources that exist from this period.

  And so it was, undaunted by Ledyard’s death, that the association sanctioned more intrepid adventurers. An Irishman who had served in the British Army, Major Daniel Houghton (c. 1740-91), was an ideal candidate, as the records of the African Association say, “as well from his knowledge of the Negro Nations in the neighbourhood of the Gambia, among whom he has travelled, as from the ardor [sic] of his mind and the strength of his Constitution, appears to the Committee to be qualities for the business which he proposes to undertake.” It was certainly in Houghton’s favour that he had spent time overseas, living both in Morocco and for four years on Goree Island off the coast of Senegal at Dakar, where he had learnt local languages. At the time of his appointment, money was of more pressing interest than extending his knowledge since the former soldier was down on his luck - unemployed and penniless with a wife and family to support.

  Working for the glory of the association and fame and riches for himself, Houghton set off for the Gambia in 1790, having kitted himself out with second-hand clothes and equipment that the association had earlier bought for Lucas, which he gave back upon his return. Houghton carried with him a list of 54 questions that he was to ask anyone he met on his journey who had visited the land of the Hausa or Timbuktu. The decision to change the starting point of this expedition took into consideration Houghton’s experience of the general area, and immediately put him more than 1500 miles closer to the Niger than Lucas or Ledyard ever got.

  Although warmly received upon his arrival by the King of Barra at the mouth of the River Gambia - the king remembering Houghton from his time on Goree Island - once he left the monarch’s sphere of influence Houghton frequently encountered the problem of suspicious locals. Many of these were already engaged in trade and were naturally keen to protect their interests. Whatever the alien, white stranger claimed to be interested in, the locals were sure that Houghton’s arrival did not bode well for them. Travelling slowly up river, he mana
ged to survive a strenuous year moving further inland than any European before him before eventually dying near the village of Simbing in modern-day Mali. He had got to within 500 miles of Timbuktu and was just 200 miles short of the River Niger.

  The next “Geographical Missionary”, as the association now called its adventurers, to be dispatched was to become its most famous. From Selkirkshire, Scotland, at the time of his commission Mungo Park (1771-1806) was penurious (seemingly a prerequisite for selection by the association) and hopeful of making a fortune for himself through his Saharan explorations. A determined and physically robust character, with the practical advantage of being a doctor, Park was resourceful where he was unskilled. Lacking Arabic, he travelled with an Arabic grammar for reference; for non-verbal sparring he kept handy a brace of shotguns and a pair of pistols.

  Initially following Houghton’s path along the Gambia river, Park too wrote that he came into contact with distrustful and hostile local rulers. One of these, a Moorish chieftain, had Park incarcerated for four months until he effected a pre-dawn escape on horseback. Lesser characters would now have had enough adventure and returned home. But not Park who, although now completely alone and with nothing more than some spare clothes, pressed on with his mission to find the River Niger.

  Park not only avoided recapture but also managed to live off his wits, guile and the generosity of locals who fed him. He relied especially, he writes, on the kindness of the women he met. Goodness knows what impression the bedraggled Scot must have made on those he encountered: an unimaginably bizarre beggar emerging from out of the bush. After three weeks living on the run in this fashion, Park eventually reached “the great object of my mission, the long sought-for majestic Niger, glittering in the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing slowly to the eastward.”

  Fever ridden, Park got back to London, via Antigua, and was given a rapturous - in suitably Victorian style - welcome home. In spite of not having reached Timbuktu, Park had settled the question regarding the direction in which the Niger flowed. More importantly, as the first European to reach the Niger and return alive, the association decided he was “permitted to publish, for his own emolument, under the Sanction and Patronage of this Association, a detailed account of his Travels in the interior of Africa, the incidents that occurred to him and the observations which occurred to him during the course of his Journey.” His book, Travels into the Interior Districts of Africa, was a huge success and much-translated, earning him about £1000. His story also boosted membership of the association and inspired numerous future expeditions to the Niger and Saharan interior.

  Returning to Scotland, Park married, started practising medicine and became bored, writing to Banks at the association that “a country surgeon is at best but a laborious employment.” Park set off for Africa again in 1805, this time as the head of a large government-sponsored attempt to develop friendly relations and trading rights along the Niger. Bureaucratic delays in London before the start of the journey meant that the forty strong party of Europeans and their African porters and guides were caught in the rainy season shortly after they set out. Rather than sitting out the rains (the only sensible thing to do), a frustrated and misguided Park forced the expedition into a march-or-die type mission. Naturally, one by one, they died, from fever, from wild animal attacks and by drowning. In a testament to his strength and vainglorious self-belief, Park was among the last of the Europeans to die. Following the umpteenth attack by natives, his boat overturned, drowning him and his companions in the river which had, eight years earlier, brought him fame and fortune.

  Park’s adventures remained a source of inspiration through the nineteenth and indeed twentieth century, for one thing inspiring the outrageously ribald and entertaining Water Music. Published in 1981, this was the debut novel of Tom Coraghessan, or T C., Boyle. The story opens with Park in Africa during his first mission but it is after his return to London and his hero’s welcome that the story really takes off, when we meet the story’s fictional anti-hero, Ned Rise. A pimp, thief and all-round ne’er-do-well, Rise is the quintessence of a man without prospects but plenty of plans. Partly the story of travellers in a foreign land, it also cleverly highlights the clash of civilizations between the desert-dwelling Moors and the sub-Saharan black-African tribes, both of whom are as alien to one another as the Scottish explorer is to them both.

  Hornemann

  While Park was on his first African trip, the Association had secured another willing and impoverished recruit to their cause, one Friedrich, or Frederick, Hornemann (1772-1801), from Lower Saxony, who was recommended to Banks by a German friend. Perhaps learning from previous mistakes, the association sent Hornemann to the University of Gottingen, funding his Arabic studies before dispatching him. First, Hornemann had to cross France, which was then at war with England. That he did so safely, armed with a letter of passage which Banks had secured from the authorities in Paris, gives one an indication both of Banks’ impeccable contacts and his determination.

  Arriving in Cairo in September 1797, Hornemann planned to cross the Sahara along the route that the ill-fated Ledyard had planned. While there he continued learning Arabic, becoming proficient enough to become the first of the Association’s men to travel in disguise, as a local trader. In this unremarkable guise of a man from some distant Islamic land, he joined a caravan that was formed to cross the desert. Whether a Christian in disguise or an innocent Muslim trader, there was safety in numbers in the lawless Sahara.

  Unfortunately for Hornemann, the caravan’s departure from Cairo for Bornu was delayed because of a local outbreak of plague. Just when the threat of the epidemic passed, events of global importance transpired to thwart his departure as Napoleon invaded Egypt. Without the permission of the de facto authorities, Bornemann’s preparations would come to nothing. Yet, as Jules Verne wrote in his Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century, the situation was resolved when Hornemann was presented “to Napoleon Buonaparte [sic], who was then in command of the French forces in Egypt. From him he received a cordial welcome, and Buonaparte placed all the resources of his country at his service.” Once again it seemed that the French authorities were more interested in advancing than stand ing in the way of exploration.

  The African Association was delighted by their latest protégé, and put their faith in his abilities, not least his passing for an Arab in hostile territory. Indeed, so confident were they in Bornemann’s capabilities that they did not pursue enquiries for some time after communications from him ceased. In his last letter to arrive in London, Bornemann had written, “My intention is, respecting that I am the first Traveller in this part of the world going so far, not to stay longer than till the month of September at Bornou [sic] [Chad], but to go to Kashna with that great Caravan, which is always in time travelling from Bornou to Soudan.” It appears that Bornemann’s disguise held up well, and he managed to travel undetected, albeit accompanied by another German as his interpreter, a Muslim convert called Joseph Freudenburg, Bornemann’s Arabic not being adequately fluent.

  From Cairo Bornemann and Freudenburg travelled via the oases of Siwa and Aujila to Murzuq, before heading north to Tripoli on the coast. While in Tripoli, Bornemann sent his journals back to London before retracing his steps to Murzuq and continuing south from there to Bornu, where he may have got within sight of Lake Chad. On leaving Bornu, he turned west, getting as far as Bokani, in modern Nigeria, just short of the Niger. There he died some time later of dysentery, a more peaceful if no less unpleasant end than the violent deaths met by many of his fellow explorers.

  The Lutheran minister’s son was highly regarded by the locals, who thought him a distinguished Muslim holy man. Partly because of his crossing of the Sahara, the first from the north to the east by a European since Roman times, and also because of his journals, which were the first truly scientific study of the region, Bornemann must be regarded as the most successful “Geograph
ical Missionary” sponsored by the Association. News of his death would not reach the African Association in London until 1819, nineteen years after they received his notebooks sent from Tripoli.

  If the agents of the African Association failed to reach Timbuktu or trace the length of the Niger, the impact of their endeavours was still great, not least encouraging other explorers to follow in their footsteps. The invasion by Napoleon exposed Europeans, for the first time since the Roman Empire, to the art and culture of Ancient Egypt, which triggered a decades-long wave of scientific and cultural interest in all things Egyptian, guiding architects and fashionable society among others in the footsteps of the ancients. Regardless of the impact of French culture on Egypt, most notably the introduction of the French administrative and judicial systems, it was not nearly so great as the impact Egyptian culture had on the whole of Western Europe.

  Napoleon’s July 1798 invasion of Egypt, nine years after the start of the French Revolution, represented a collision of two civilizations, one new, dynamic, inexperienced and immature, the other, ancient, traditional and conservative. According to al-Jabarti (1753-1825), an Egyptian chronicler whose non-European perspective is very valuable, he and his countrymen initially assumed that the French invasion was a continuation of the Crusades. Only later did he alter his judgment, seeing it as a cultural rather than a religious attack.

  After the French invasion, Hornemann wrote to the African Association justifying his decision to travel in disguise, observing that