The Gates of Africa: Death, Discovery and the Search for Timbuktu
Anthony Sattin
Due to the level of detail, maps are best viewed on a tablet.The history of the African Association, the world’s first geographical society, dedicated to the exploration of the interior of a continent known only through legend and vague report.Africa was once seen as an El Dorado – a gold-encrusted continent of hope and prosperity, where the ancient civilisations of the Phoenicians and the Egyptians might have survived intact.The African Association, the world’s first geographical society, set itself the task of revealing the mysteries of the interior of Africa. Founded in 1788 by a group of London-based gentlemen, made famous by the amazing exploits of its adventurers, for forty-three years it was engaged in a quest for geographical knowledge, personal glory, immense wealth and the fulfilment of national ambitions.There are two strands to the narrative. First there are the people who planned and paid for expeditions, the geographers, scholars, politicians, humanitarian activists and sharp-eyed traders, the richest commoner in England and two former prime ministers among them. Theirs is a lively tale of tavern meetings, court lobbying and salon intrigue during one of the most dramatic periods of world history.Then there are the adventurers, a mixed group of ex-cons and social outcasts – British, French, Germans and Americans among them – who went to the magical continent in search of glory and the unknown. They included Mungo Park, whose account of his travels was a bestseller for more than a century, and Jean Louis Burckhardt, discoverer of Petra and Abu Simbel. Each of their journeys was extraordinary, packed with drama and excitement, made notable by geographical discoveries and, with very few exceptions, ending in death.An outstanding account of a unique period characterised by the passion, ambition, courage and sheer sense of adventure of its participants.
The Gates of Africa
DEATH, DISCOVERY
AND THE SEARCH FOR TIMBUKTU
Anthony Sattin
DEDICATION (#ulink_d9c21cf5-2642-59d4-ba8b-a064e1da813a)
For Sylvie, ever my inspiration,
and for Johnny and Felix, our young adventurers
EPIGRAPH (#ulink_18db701a-9e92-554f-a47a-a690f40a5510)
âTO LOVERS OF ADVENTURE AND NOVELTY,
AFRICA DISPLAYS A MOST AMPLE FIELD.â
James Rennell
CONTENTS
COVER (#u8b398370-28f3-50a4-9269-72a930a8717d)
TITLE PAGE (#u52c2bce4-3342-55a7-936e-ce439cf1115a)
DEDICATION (#u521e8675-679a-54bd-9e57-7c2f7a77ccdf)
EPIGRAPH (#u9e6d4d94-6339-5ff1-8cda-918ed9fced04)
MAPS
PREFACE: TALKING TIMBUKTU (#u11b6ae16-2ba7-5a88-b2b0-51cd8f23e7f9)
1. Explorationâs Godfather (#u5eb1b5f9-f47d-540e-b00e-1adf0f04165a)
2. The Charge of Ignorance (#u0b94aaba-e4b4-5d1d-a7bd-279bbb38ab8a)
3. A Friend to Mankind (#uedcb4b8d-ecd3-5035-9041-323c60551649)
4. The Oriental Interpreter (#u98afe849-cc72-5432-a8f6-ea679b3aa5be)
5. The Moorsâ Tales (#u0ba9d5a2-1c87-51b8-b713-343b2ac4da87)
6. The Gambia Route (#u57b28b32-58f3-5a9d-9e7f-e31ec3430024)
7. The Political Player (#litres_trial_promo)
8. No Mean Talents (#litres_trial_promo)
9. Pity the White Man (#litres_trial_promo)
10. The Golden Harvest (#litres_trial_promo)
11. The Göttingen Connection (#litres_trial_promo)
12. Juset ben Abdallah (#litres_trial_promo)
13. Many Deaths (#litres_trial_promo)
14. The Swiss Gentleman (#litres_trial_promo)
15. Shaykh Ibrahim ibn Abdallah (#litres_trial_promo)
16. A New World Order (#litres_trial_promo)
17. The Fountains of the Sun (#litres_trial_promo)
18. The Spirit of Discovery (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
NOTES (#litres_trial_promo)
BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)
INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. IDEAS, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
PROFILE OF ANTHONY SATTIN (#litres_trial_promo)
LIFE AT A GLANCE (#litres_trial_promo)
Q&A (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE BOOK (#litres_trial_promo)
A CRITICAL EYE (#litres_trial_promo)
THE VIEW FROM THE OTHER SIDE (#litres_trial_promo)
READ ON (#litres_trial_promo)
HAVE YOU READ? (#litres_trial_promo)
IF YOU LOVED THIS, YOUâLL LIKE ⦠(#litres_trial_promo)
USEFUL WEBSITES (#litres_trial_promo)
CHRONOLOGY (#litres_trial_promo)
A NOTE ON SPELLING (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
PRAISE (#litres_trial_promo)
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
MAPS (#ue54373ae-5901-5d36-ba25-e1d62420fe9b)
Rennellâs map showing Herodotusâ knowledge of Africa (#litres_trial_promo)
Ledyard in Cairo on his way to Suakin, Lucas in Tripoli: a grand plan to bisect the northern half of Africa in 1788 (#litres_trial_promo)
Rennellâs map of Africa, 1790 (#litres_trial_promo)
Major Houghtonâs progress in west Africa, 1790â91 (#litres_trial_promo)
Rennellâs 1793 map showing Houghtonâs route to Bambuk (#litres_trial_promo)
Mungo Parkâs first journey in west Africa, 1795â97 (#litres_trial_promo)
Hornemannâs route from Cairo to Murzuq, 1799 (#litres_trial_promo)
Detail from Rennellâs 1802 map of Hornemannâs journey (#litres_trial_promo)
Key locations for Parkâs journey to Bussa and Hornemannâs to Bokani (#litres_trial_promo)
Burckhardtâs route to Cairo, 1809â12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Burckhardtâs travels in Africa and Arabia, 1812â17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Missions to the Niger: Clapperton, Denham and Oudneyâs route, 1822â25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Laingâs route to Timbuktu, 1825â26 (#litres_trial_promo)
PREFACE (#ulink_e02251e8-08e7-5aae-b1dc-46dd11d40d06)
Talking Timbuktu (#ulink_e02251e8-08e7-5aae-b1dc-46dd11d40d06)
âTo EXPLORE, v.a. [exploro, Latin]
To try; to search into; to examine by trial.â
Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1785)
Beyond the crenellated towers of Cairoâs thousand-year-old Bab an-Nasr, Gate of Victory, stands a cemetery. Known as the City of the Dead, this swathe of tombs has become part of the city of the living, as its large tomb chambers look increasingly desirable in a city filled to bursting. There are always people milling around the main road into the cemetery, flower-sellers with wreaths and bouquets wrapped in palm fronds, chanters ready to recite suras from the Koran for a few notes, muscled grave-diggers, black-robed women ready to mourn on demand and a few guardians, keys hanging from their robes like jailers. Behind them, the cemetery is a maze of small tombs, shacks, graves, huts, cafés, storerooms and the occasional grand mausoleum. Once off the main street and into this confusion, it is easy to lose yourself, as I did, wanting to pay my respects to a man known both as Jean Louis Burckhardt and as Shaykh Ibrahim ibn Abdallah.
There are no written records of who is buried where in Bab an-Nasr. Instead the guardians store the knowledge and then pass it like an heirloom from father to son. Burckhardt, Shaykh Ibrahim, died almost two hundred years ago. According to the guidebook I had consulted, his tomb was lost. It seemed unlikely that a foreigner would ever find it, but Cairo is a city of wonders and one Eid, the feast at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, I went to look. There is a tradition of visiting the cemetery during the Eid, so the place was crowded and people had better things to do than to guide a foreigner around the tombs. But passed from one guardian to the next, I did eventually find a small nineteenth-century mausoleum containing a low white marble grave inscribed with Burckhardtâs titles as a hajj (one who has performed the pilgrimage to Mecca), as a shaykh and as al Lausani, the man from Lausanne. To this the guardian added the title of al Muslimayn, the two Muslims, which he meant as an indication of Burckhardtâs sanctity.
Letâs now jump back to the mid-nineteenth century, to 1853, when a thirty-two-year-old Anglo-Irishman disguised as an Afghani Muslim passed through that same massive gate. Then as now, the cemetery was âa favourite resortâ during the Eid. The man was Richard Burton. Fluent in Arabic, easy in his disguise, Burton found himself in a crowd of âjugglers, buffoons, snake-charmers, dervishes, ape-leaders, and dancing boys habited in womenâs attireâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) Expelled from Oxford University, and then disgraced as an officer in the East India Companyâs army, Burton was passing through Cairo on his way to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca. Burton knew that Burckhardt had made the pilgrimage some forty years earlier, and it seems there was an element of homage in his mention of the Swiss travellerâs âhumble graveâ. Burton reported that some £20 had been raised among the cityâs foreign community to cover the grave with what he called a fitting monument. âSome objection, however, was started, because Moslems are supposed to claim Burckhardt as one of their own saints.â
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Who was this Lausani shaykh, this Swiss traveller still revered in Cairo more than two hundred years after his death? Jean Louis Burckhardt came from a wealthy Swiss family whose business and domestic harmony was destroyed in the 1790s when they fell foul of an occupying French revolutionary army. The young Burckhardt grew up longing for a place where life and liberty were respected; as more of Europe fell to Napoleon Bonaparte, only England seemed to offer what he wanted. Burckhardt arrived in London in the summer of 1806 and, strange as it may sound, was introduced to a man who suggested he might like to become an explorer and who offered to send him into Africa to search for answers to questions about the rise of rivers, the extent of deserts, the state of empires and the whereabouts of goldfields. Burckhardt accepted. On his way there, he became the first European since the Crusaders to set eyes on the ancient Nabataean city of Petra and the first since antiquity to see the magnificent pharaonic temples at Abu Simbel. He also travelled further up the Nile than any recorded European before him. These were all remarkable achievements, but the object of his journey, the reason he had been sent, lay across the burning Sahara in Timbuktu.
Burton, who acknowledged Burckhardt as his favourite travel writer, certainly knew all about these achievements, as he did about Burckhardtâs groundbreaking pilgrimage to Mecca. That year of 1853, Burton travelled east from Cairo and made his own pilgrimage to Mecca. The following year he was in Abyssiniaâs holy city of Harar, officially closed to non-Muslims, and five years later, with the backing of the Royal Geographical Society, he and his partner John Hanning Speke cut inland from the malarial Swahili coast in search of the source of the Nile and ensured their names would live on by becoming the first recorded Europeans to reach lakes Tanganyika and Victoria.
Books on the history of African geography are dominated by the stories of Burton and Speke and their contemporaries, particularly Livingstone and Stanley, Grant, and Samuel and Florence Baker. The names that stand out are almost exclusively Victorian. If an earlier African traveller is mentioned, it is likely to be James Bruce, a resourceful Scottish laird who travelled through the Ethiopian highlands in the 1760s in search of the source of the Nile. But Bruce is a man with an unfortunate reputation. In his own time he was accused of having made up the entire story of his travels: his critics suggested that instead of risking his life in Africa he had spent years in happy, peaceful seclusion somewhere around the Mediterranean before returning to Britain. An extended vacation in the south might have seemed tempting to his tormentors, but not, one suspects, to the irascible Bruce. Later critics dismissed Bruce for believing that the source he had reached was that of the White Nile, when in reality it was the Blue. Nevertheless his journey was one of the turning points in European involvement in Africa, for it demonstrated that one man could go a long way inland and live to tell the tale. In Braceâs case, home proved to be more dangerous than the wilds of Africa, for in 1794 he slipped on the stairs of his country house, struck his head and died, four years after the publication of his Travels. But what happened between Bruce and Burton, between the 1770s and 1850s? Burckhardtâs adventures provided a clue.
For years I collected information and anecdotes about him, talked about him in libraries in London and cafés in the Middle East, followed him on some of his journeys and kept an eye out for new sources of information. But the closer I came to Burckhardt, the more curious I became about the men who set him on his way. Who were they? Why were they prepared to spend time and money to solve the mysteries of the African interior? And how far did they succeed? My initial curiosity about Burckhardt eventually led me to the fantastic, improbable, tragic story that follows.
(#ulink_c4850331-6ed4-5af5-b719-117388f49dca) The marble cladding was added in the 1880s, apparently paid for by Europeans in Cairo. The small house that now covers the tomb was added in the 1920s or 1930s by the Burckhardt family in Switzerland, who continue to look after its upkeep. All very touching, though there is some doubt as to whether the great travellerâs bones lie beneath the cenotaph, or somewhere else in the cemetery.
1 (#ulink_cf30ddc2-360f-5ef6-9d71-ecd3089a384d)
Explorationâs Godfather (#ulink_cf30ddc2-360f-5ef6-9d71-ecd3089a384d)
âWide as the world is, traces of you are to be found
in every corner of it.â
Lord Hobart to Joseph Banks. 18 October 1793
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London, 9 June 1788
WHAT ADVENTURES these hands have had. They bear witness to the day he shimmied down a rope to escape a Portuguese blockade in the bay at Rio and another when he stroked the shapely curves of a girl on Tahiti â she had fire in her eyes, he later wrote, and he incurred the anger of a queen to enjoy her favours. They are plump, white, well-attended gentlemanâs hands, protruding from a frilled cuff, and yet they have wielded knives to cut plant specimens around the world, held pencils to sketch, brushes to colour, positioned instruments to observe the transit of Venus and worked a pump to save Captain Cookâs ship from sinking. More recently â the previous year â they began to swell and ache with the onset of gout. Now, as he sits for the artist and Royal Academician John Russell, these hands are holding a sheet of paper on which is drawn an image of the moon.
The man is Sir Joseph Banks, the year 1788, and the irony of the situation is not lost on him. There is no chance that he will ever set foot on the moon and yet, thanks to the telescope created by his friend William Herschel (who has recently discovered the planet Uranus), he is able to observe its surface in some detail. On the other hand, he has set foot in Africa. He has walked through the lushness of old fruit trees, enjoyed the generosity of palms and discovered the necessity of shade trees. He has also seen some of its murderous stretches of treeless desert. Geographers and earlier travellers have pointed to a great desert, stretching across the northern half of the continent, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, pierced from south to north by the Nile. And below that, it was rumoured that there was a great river, the Niger, running across the latitudes. He can imagine the extremes, the withering sands, the vertiginous rocks, the torrential rivers, the vast scrublands scattered with shade trees, the lush tropical pastures and forests, the dusty villages, petty kingdoms, seasonal trading posts and, it is rumoured, the great empires ⦠and yet neither Herschel with his telescope nor any other Fellow of the Royal Society can devise a way for him to know for sure what lies in the interior of Africa.
The lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson, another of Sir Joseph Banksâ good friends, has recently defined a map as âa geographical picture on which lands and seas are delineated according to the longitude and latitudeâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet this does not describe the pages being sold in London, Paris or anywhere else on earth in 1788. In this, the twenty-seventh year of the glorious reign of the soon-to-be-mad King George III, a map of Africa still owes more to the hopeful imaginings of ancient and medieval geographers than to the lie of the land as it exists in this, the Age of Enlightenment.
In the middle of the map, the interior of the continent, some lines trace the course of rivers; several curves represent mountains. Near the edge of the outline, the names of many towns and a few great cities are written, among them Cairo and Morocco (Marrakesh). At the heart of the continent lies Timbuktu, legendary city of gold, capital of a mighty empire. But history, legend, rumour and deduction all suggest that there is much else beside. The seventeenth-century anthologist Samuel Purchas spelled it out when he wrote that âthe richest Mynes of Gold in the World are in Africa ⦠and I cannot but wonder, that so many have sent so many, and spent so much in remoter voyages to the East and West and neglected Africa in the midstâ.
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There are several reasons for this sorry state of affairs. To Banks and his contemporaries Africa appears to be geographically hostile. In South America, they can sail up the Amazon, as the Spaniards have done. They can cut deep into North America along the Mississippi with the same ease, and cross much of Europe on the Rhône and the Rhine. But although ancient geographers have written of the Niger and the Nile, no European in the Age of Enlightenment has managed to get very far into Africa without running into trouble with the continentâs geography. Green, precipitous mountains, withering desert sands, blasting hot in summer, freezing in winter, torn apart by winds and sandstorms at other times of the year, mangrove swamps, tropical forests, rivers blocked by rapids, seasonal floods ⦠And to add to this geographical hostility, in many places they have also had to deal with the hostility of Africans, often caused by a mistrust of Christians by Muslims or by a well-founded suspicion that white-skinned foreigners bring trouble and steal trade.
There is more: even if the landscape or natives donât hold them up, the rains do, and with the rains come deadly diseases.
(#ulink_f3708f6a-f917-565a-9ed4-2af123881740) It is possible that some outsiders have made it deep into the continent â the sixteenth-century Portuguese certainly had a go, and two Italian priests were rumoured to have crossed from Tripoli to Katsina in modern-day Nigeria in 1711. But it is safe to say that most foreigners who have attempted to travel to the interior have died along the way, while the few survivors have left no detailed descriptions of where they have been or of what they found there. Or if they have, their descriptions are lost, misfiled, hidden, untranslated or otherwise not yet come into the hands of Sir Joseph Banks and his Enlightened friends.
This dearth of information might have halted the movement of Europeans into the interior of Africa, but it has not stopped geographers from pontificating on its secrets. Almost unanimously, they have drawn two great river systems that bisect the continent like clock hands pointing to nine oâclock. Wisdom â very ancient wisdom, at that â has it that the Niger River, the hour hand, runs parallel to the equator, and that somewhere to the east of centre of the continent it joins up with the Nile, the minute hand, which climbs due north. On some maps, a third great river, the Congo, is shown as a dash or an arc through the centre. To these dominant features, noble geographers have added other details. They are on safe ground along the coast, where they can plot towns and cities whose character and extent are known for a fact. But what to do with the interior? There are mountains, though no one in Europe knows where they begin or end; to these they have given fanciful names such as the Mountains of the Moon and the Mountains of Kong. Around them have been placed a clutch of kingdoms that some geographers have imagined as savage and barbarous. Others have conceived of noble capitals and mighty empires, worthy partners to Europeâs own kingdoms. Beyond this, mapmakers must choose between flights of fancy, or empty white spaces.
In recent years, Europeans, among them our Joseph Banks â the knighthood came in 1781, long after his travelling days â have sailed the seven seas, set foot on Australia, skirted both the north and south ice caps, observed the transit of Venus, escorted Tahitian royalty to London and even looked with some detail at the surface of the moon. Yet they and he remain surprisingly, frustratedly ignorant of Africa. Now they want to know more. Ever since James Braceâs return to Europe, their curiosity has been growing. âAfrica is indeed coming into fashion,â the chronicler Horace Walpole noted at the time. âThere is just returned a Mr Bruce, who has lived three years in the Court of Abyssinia, and breakfasted every morning with the maids of honour on live oxen. Otaheite [the Tahitian prince whom Cook brought to London] and Mr Banks are quite forgotten.â
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In Londonâs salons, trading houses and government offices, the same questions are being asked: What does Africa consist of? Where are its legendary riches, the fields with their harvests of gold and precious stones? What of the achievements of its people? What do they grow there? What could Europeans grow there? What of their past, their future? A few, Sir Joseph among them, are also asking another question: How can they find out? He has to know.
We come to these questions at the other end of history, after the exploration of the continent and the subsequent scramble by European governments first to control Africa and then to colonise it. The oppression of the majority of Africans by a tiny minority of Europeans, the struggle for independence, the post-colonial catastrophes and the chaos and confusion that exists in many African countries today is a long, long way in the future.
We look at this puzzle of what lies in the interior of Africa from another point of view, coloured by the fact that Africa is now seen, in the words of a British prime minister, as âa scar on the conscience of the worldâ. How hard it is to forget all that, but how essential if we are to understand this story. It takes a great leap of imagination to appreciate how tantalising the African questions appear to Sir Joseph Banks in 1788 as he puts down the detailed map of the moon and picks up the sketchy map of the African interior.
A year and a half earlier, in January 1787, fifty-four years after the satirist Jonathan Swiftâs attack on geographers who âin Afric maps,/With savage pictures filled their gaps,/And oâer unhabitable downs,/Placed elephants for want of townsâ, the cartographer Samuel Boulton published a four-sheet map of Africa. Mapmaking is a matter of painstaking evolution. Scraps of information, gathered often in bizarre or dangerous circumstances, allow geographers to effect detailed corrections and minute expansions. Two paces forwards, one backwards. Boulton took as his starting point a map of Africa published in 1749 by the brilliant French geographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon dâAnville. In this, he behaved no differently to the mapmakers who had gone before him. Even the great dâAnville had used an earlier map as his starting point and was, in effect, drawing heavily on medieval and classical geographers. The Frenchman had gone a long way towards removing those elephants and beasts from the map; Boulton now attempted to go one step further. In keeping with an age that prided itself on the rigour of its scientific enquiries, he decided to remove every town, port and geographical feature, whether mountain, river or desert, of whose existence he was not certain.
Rennellâs map showing Herodotusâ knowledge of Africa
Another Frenchman, de Mornes, had tried this on his own map of Africa just sixteen years earlier, in 1761, but was led astray by his love of rationality. Instead of putting down what was known for certain from first-hand sources, he attempted to accommodate the stuff of legends: âIt is true,â de Mornes wrote on his map by way of explanation, âthat the centre of the continent is filled with burning sands, savage beasts, and almost uninhabitable deserts. The scarcity of water forces the different animals to come together to the same place to drink. Finding themselves together at a time when they are in heat, they have intercourse with one another, without paying regard to the differences between species. Thus are produced those monsters which are to be found there in greater numbers than in any other part of the world.â
(#litres_trial_promo) Geography, it will be clear from this, is a long and dangerous road, full of traps, ready to ensnare the well-intentioned but unwary traveller.
Like dâAnville and de Mornes, Boulton explained that he was including âall [Africaâs] states, kingdoms, republics, regions, islands, &c.â Crucially, however, there were to be no more elephants, no dragons or two-headed beasts to cover up his lack of knowledge. Out went the Garamantes, whose speech the Greek historian Herodotus had described as resembling âthe shrieking of a bat rather than the language of menâ. (Herodotus, it should be pointed out, did visit North Africa but did not get as far south as the land of the Garamantes.) Out too went the Blemmyes, whom the first-century Roman scholar Pliny the Elder described as having âno head but mouth and eyes both in their breastâ. The only decorations Boulton allowed on his map of Africa were some ships under sail in the oceans and a few African figures draped around the title, which pretty much summed up the status quo as far as Europeans were concerned. If he did not know something, he would rather leave a blank than hazard a guess. It proved to be more of a challenge than a cartographer in the Age of Enlightenment might have expected.
Since the Portuguese adventurer Lopes de Sequeira sailed around the continent 270 years earlier, there has been a regular and growing traffic between Europe and ports along Africaâs west coast and around the Cape of Good Hope. European sea captains have returned with charts, maps and soundings, gold, ivory and slaves and, perhaps most potent, a rich fabric woven from legends and hearsay. In West Africa, British traders have made headway up the Gambia River and their French rivals have done the same along the more northerly Senegal River. Plenty of Europeans have cut inland from the coast, some certainly making it a few hundred miles up the rivers, perhaps some of them even reaching the Niger and Timbuktu. A few have even sat down and written about their experiences, among them Richard Jobson, who sailed three hundred miles up the Gambia River in 1620 and returned to write The Golden Trade, or a Discovery of the River Gambia and the Golden Trade of the Aethiopians. Jobson clearly enjoyed his journey, describing how he shared âfamiliar conversation, fair acceptance, and mutual amityâ with people along the river, particularly with a local trader by the name of Bucknor Sano. From Sano, Jobson heard of a city, two monthsâ journey inland, âthe houses whereof are covered only with goldâ. Other travellers returned with tales of snow-capped mountains, vast rivers, terrible deserts, miraculous lakes â¦
But even if their experiences reached the ears of geographers, almost nothing they had to report advanced the cause of science, because they saw little of it first-hand. Even when they did see it, they took no bearings and recorded no distances between places, making it difficult and sometimes impossible for geographers to profit from their experiences. All this left Boulton having to explain in a box on his map that: âThe Inland Parts of Africa being but very little known and the Names of the Regions and Countries which fill that vast Tract of Land being for the Greatest part placed by Conjecture It may be judged how Absurd are the Divisions Traced in some Maps and why they were not followed in this.â As a result, the interior of Boultonâs map has more white than black, more virgin page than printerâs ink.
So matters stand on this June day in 1788 when Sir Joseph Banks, middle-aged, solidly-built, hair curled around his temples, powdered and puffed on top, steps out of his home, a corner house â number 32 â and into Soho Square.
(#ulink_33a5bf6d-6543-5e08-8929-e26cad3c43d1) The seventeen years that have passed since he was in Africa have transformed him, and nothing about his appearance suggests that he is anything other than a man of wealth and privilege. Outwardly, at least, the English gentleman and amateur have eclipsed the globetrotting man of action. In 1771, when he returned from his round-the-world voyage as the scientist on Cookâs voyage, Banks was hailed as a hero and revelled in his new-found status of celebrity traveller. In 1774, by which time he had made a voyage to Iceland, the chronicler James Boswell described him as âan elephant, quite placid and gentle, allowing you to get upon his back or play with his proboscisâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) By 1788, however, age and now gout have begun to sap some of his vigour. No longer a world traveller, Banks is now a grandee, a friend of the King and President of his Royal Society. He is a famous man. Extraordinarily well connected, he counts key politicians, big bankers, bankrupt old money, grand titles, leading businessmen and some of the most brilliant brains of the day among his circle of close friends. But for all that, it is the world beyond his island that continues to shape him and that has provided posterity with the material with which it has fashioned his image as the patron of travellers, the godfather of exploration and the caretaker of much of Britainâs colonial policy.
In the seventeen years since his return, the world has also changed: perhaps most significant, the American colonies have won their independence from the British crown. While mandarins in Londonâs ministries continue to respond to the loss like wounded parents, Sir Joseph has moved on. He spawns his own plans for new British interests abroad, fosters those of others and lends time, money and credibility to anything he thinks will further the interests of the country he loves so dearly. Increasingly his attention is drawn to Africa, and he remembers its remarkable richness and seductive promise. As he prepares to make the half-mile journey across the centre of London to St Albanâs Street, he does so knowing that he has a workable idea of how to improve the map of Africa. It is an idea that he will foster for the remainder of his long life and that will allow him to continue to exercise his love of both intellectual and â vicariously at least â of physical adventure.
Perhaps as he leaves home this day he remembers, as many of us do, the things he has not completed. Much has already been achieved, but so much more remains to be done. The First Fleet of convicts and settlers sailed from England the previous year and should by now be settled in the colony he has dreamed up, lobbied for and helped to equip at Australiaâs Botany Bay (the name Captain Cook gave to the bay where Banks went botanising). Seeds and cuttings are sent with increasing regularity from a range of contacts he has fostered around the world. As they arrive, they are stored in his Soho Square herbarium or planted out, propagated and studied at the botanical gardens he has helped to create at Kew. But the founding of the Royal Horticultural Society is in the future, as is the safekeeping of Linnaeusâ collection, the development of his own botanical garden, the advising of the King, his seat on the Privy Council and the boards of Trade arid Longitude. The future will indeed be fertile.
To maintain all his contacts, he has had to become a prodigious letter writer. Each morning a pile of correspondence is gone through in the study at Soho Square, Banks sitting at one of the desks in front of a sofa, the fireplace and a dozen good portraits in oil. A great deal of his correspondence concerns the Royal Society and its ever-widening range of interests, for he is guided by the visionary principle of universal knowledge and by his belief that resources should be pooled, advances shared and science in all its many branches should be fostered across national borders.
In this year of 1788 he is forty-five years old and has already been President of the Royal Society, the home of Englandâs finest scientists, for ten years. During this time, dissenters have complained that a heavy-drinking, adventure-loving botaniser is a far from worthy successor to a chair once occupied by the likes of Isaac Newton. But he has weathered their protests as he will weather others, with stoicism, confident that he can shrug them off.
The Royal Society met in its new quarters at Somerset House in the Strand, as usual, the previous evening and, as usual before the meeting, Sir Joseph opened his home both to members of the Society and to members of society. Three rooms in Soho Square were filled with scientists and philosophers, adventurers, businessmen and foreigners, all of them bearing seeds, whether physical or metaphorical, botanical or philosophical.
(#ulink_64457d11-9638-5305-8fb8-ca222c0b646f) There are letters to write on this Monday morning as a result of the Societyâs meeting: among others, to the botanist Johann Hedwig, Professor of Medicine at Leipzig, whom he wants to congratulate for having been elected âa foreign member of our Royal Societyâ. There is always too much correspondence to deal with, too many other tasks to be done, but now he puts them aside, or instructs others to continue with them, for he has a meeting to attend that will help to shape the future of Africa.
(#ulink_f21f5cd2-bbcf-5c3b-858e-947ca1273cb2) Eighteenth-century man, for all his advances, has yet to discover that the good Lord has given mosquitoes the ability to carry a virus by the name of malaria.
(#ulink_68c9128b-2951-50a9-b4d3-540b2d9f7966) Walpole went on: âMr Blake I suppose will order a live sheep for supper at Almackâs, and ask whom he shall help to a piece of the shoulder. Oh yes, we shall have negro butchers, and French cooks shall be laid aside. My Lady Townsend, after the rebellion, said, everybody was so bloodthirsty, that she did not dare to dine abroad, for fear of meeting with a rebel pie â now one shall be asked to come and eat a bit of raw mutton. In truth, I do think we are ripe for any extravagance.â
(#ulink_62215d8a-abd4-5cbd-b526-4336b49db084) Banks bequeathed the house to his librarian, Robert Brown, who rented part of it to the Linnaean Society. It was demolished in 1936 and the site is now covered by the London offices of 20th Century-Fox.
(#ulink_a99061cc-46b7-56a0-b411-64771f14310f) As T.J. Mathias put it in The Pursuits of Literature (1812), âSir Joseph Banks has instituted a meeting at his house in Soho Square, every Sunday evening, at which the literati and men of rank and consequence, and men of no consequence at all, find equally a polite and pleasing reception from that justly distinguished manâ.
2 (#ulink_bad21fd8-043e-5c65-9b28-3229e683e058)
The Charge of Ignorance (#ulink_bad21fd8-043e-5c65-9b28-3229e683e058)
âNo other part of the world abounds with gold and silver in greater degree ⦠and it is surprising that neither the ancient or modern Europeans notwithstanding their extraordinary and insatiable thirst after gold and silver, should have endeavoured to establish themselves effectively in a country much nearer to them than either America or the East Indies and where the object of their desires are to be found in equal, if not greater plenty.â
Encyclopaedia Britannica, second edition (1788)
London, 9 June 1788
THE CAPITAL is a mad, crowded jumble, its inhabitants gripped by a fever of activity. While Sir Joseph is on his way to his rendezvous in St Albanâs Street, Their Most Britannic (and still quite Germanic) Majesties King George III and Queen Charlotte Sophia are reviewing a troop of Dragoons. Mr Pitt the Younger, the twenty-eight-year-old Prime Minister, is immersed in the cares and affairs of State, turning over the debates in Parliament and deliberating on tensions in Europe. The Lord Chancellor is in his office appointing a new Lord Chief Justice â it isnât something he has done before: the previous incumbent, the Earl of Mansfield, held the post for thirty-two years. Like His Lordship, the new Chief Justice will have no trouble filling the prisons. Sir Joseph Banks knows all about this problem of overcrowding. The three female cells in Londonâs Newgate Jail are crammed with many more than the seventy prisoners they were intended to hold, as convicts sentenced to âTransportation to Parts Beyond the Seasâ wait for the arrival of ships to take them to Botany Bay, Sir Josephâs Australian project.
The Times has just called London âan emporium of all the world and the wonder of foreignersâ. Plenty of these âwonderingâ foreigners appear to be installed in the capital. âLondon abounds with an incredible number of these black men,â one commentator notes this year of 1788,
(#litres_trial_promo) while to the poet William Wordsworthâs eyes:
Among the crowd all specimens of man,
Through all the colours which the sun bestows,
And every character of form and face:
The Swede, the Russian; from the genial south,
The Frenchman and the Spaniard; from remote
America, the Hunter-Indian; Moors,
Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese,
And Negro Ladies in white muslin Gowns.
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The worldâs largest city reaches out beyond the shores of Albion with more than just prison ships. There is plenty of movement through the port during these early days of June as ships arrive from Norway, Cadiz, Nantes, Venice and several tropical ports. âJust landed,â trills an advert for Youngâs Italian Warehouse on the front page of the paper this day, 9 June, âa large quantity of very curious Salad Oil, from Provence, Lucca, and Florence; Olives, Anchovies, Capers; Parmesan, Gruyer, and other foreign Cheese; Macaroni â¦â Some Londoners clearly have a taste for the finer things in life. There is foreign intelligence, too: news just in that the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey and Georgia â British colonies until eleven years ago â have agreed to join something called the United States of America. It is more salt in the festering wound of the mother nation. There is no appetite now for colonies if this is how the successful ones behave.
One other snippet of foreign intelligence reported this day has a bearing on our story: there is early news of an insurrection in France as demands grow for the King to make sweeping concessions and share power. A revolution is in the making.
Parliament, keen to break for summer recess as soon as its work is done, has its sights on matters abroad as well as near at hand. On this day, as Sir Joseph heads for his meeting, Honourable Members hear about the plight of American Loyalists, the problems in Scottish boroughs and the dilemma of the English Episcopal Church in Amsterdam. But the main debate concerns evidence given to support a âBill for regulating the transportation of Slaves from Africa to Americaâ. Here is a topic guaranteed to split the House as it is splitting the country, or at least that part of the country with moral, economic or political interest in such matters. The Times in its editorial has taken the side of Sir William Dolben, the politician who has sponsored the Bill, thundering that, âFor Englishmen to chain their innocent fellow-creatures together, and keep them in bondage for life, is much more repugnant to Christianity, than cutting off the ears of the enemy is barbarity, in the followers of Mahomet.â
(#litres_trial_promo) That afternoon, however, had the Honourable Members looked out of their windows they would have seen a very different sort of fleet sailing upstream past the Houses of Parliament as pleasure boats massed to contest the Annual Silver Cup and Cover.
Across the river in Croydon, a well-known boxer from Birmingham by the name of Futerel is failing to live up to his reputation as a destroyer of men. The contest, held in an impromptu ring, lasts an hour and ten minutes, which sounds reasonable enough, but according to reports Futerel spends much of this time âlying for a few minutesâ or pretending to be âa lump of doe in a sackâ. The Prince of Wales and his attendant Major Hanger happen to be among the disgusted audience. Suspicions of a fix are rife.
Nor is London lacking in artistic endeavour these bright days of June. At the Poetâs Gallery in Fleet Street, Mr Macklin is showing new work by a range of artists, among them Sir Joshua Reynolds and his rival, Thomas Gainsborough, now fighting a losing battle against cancer. The Theatre Royal in Covent Garden is spreading out the dust sheets as its audience flees to their country estates to escape the coming hot weather, but Sadlerâs Wells, which attracts a different sort of public and has only just opened for the summer season, is staging performances by a ten-year-old boy known as the Infant Hercules, while another character known as the Little Devil dances across a tightrope. Meanwhile, down at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane, the actor Mr Smith is pulling down the final curtain on a glorious thirty-five-year stage career by performing in Sheridanâs School for Scandal. After the performance, the socialite Lady Lucan is heard to say to Mrs Sheridan, the playwrightâs wife: âYou must certainly be a happy woman, Madam, who have the felicity of pleasing the man that pleases all the world.â The comment is worthy of one of Sheridanâs characters, because it is common knowledge that for some time the playwright has been looking elsewhere for his sexual pleasures.
Later, after the lights have gone out on anyone who has laid their head in a palace, a mansion, a house, an apartment, a lodging or a share of a bed in a doss-house, after the homeless have collapsed into a gin-induced haze in the cityâs parks or beneath its bridges, just as the clocks are striking midnight, an athletic man by the name of Foster Powell is seen leaving the capital for the northern city of York, hoping to get there and back by Saturday midnight, five full days. He is accompanied by two men on horseback and one on foot, presumably to ensure that he is not held up along the way â robbery on the Kingâs highway remains a common complaint. Powell intends to travel from midnight until eleven the next morning, rest until 5 p.m. and then walk through the night. To succeed, he needs to walk just over sixty-six miles a day. Long before the clock chimes and Powell sets out on his adventure, Sir Joseph Banks has embarked upon one of his own.
Mr Hunt, the obsequious proprietor of the St Albanâs Tavern, is an old hand at greeting the rich and famous at his establishment, for his rooms are a popular venue for political meetings and fashionable dinners, among them the regular though far from frequent meetings of the Saturdayâs Club. Little is known of the Club before this memorable day, not even whether it usually meets on a Saturday: after all, this is a Monday. But there is nothing unusual about its existence, for we are in the great age of clubs and societies. An active man about town can expect to belong to several of them, although perhaps not so many as Sir Joseph Banks, who is an esteemed member of the Royal Society Club, the Society of Dilettanti, the Society of Arts, the Society of Antiquaries, the Engineersâ Society, the Society for the Improvement of Naval Architecture and others. Most of these provide a good excuse for a social gathering of sometimes learned, usually entertaining, often heavy-drinking and invariably like-minded men. In this, the Saturdayâs Club is unexceptional; until this day, when something of immense and long-lasting consequence happens.
Banks turns off Pall Mall, enters the St Albanâs Tavern, is shown up the stairs and into a room rented for the occasion for a guinea. Only nine of the Clubâs dozen members are able to attend. After the greetings and an exchange of news, glasses are filled and a good dinner served.
Banksâ companions are all wealthy men with significant political and intellectual influence. Henry Beaufoy is a Quaker and Member of Parliament. The son of a vinegar manufacturer, he has shown more interest in politics than commerce and published his first paper, The Effects of Civilisation on the Real Improvement and Happiness of Mankind, before his twentieth birthday. When Gainsborough painted him, he chose to portray him as a romantic, a dandified English gentleman, his hair a little wild and swept back, left hand hidden in the breast of a blue, big-buttoned frock-coat, breeches tucked into riding boots, right hand resting on a cane. He possesses formidable debating skills, as one would expect of a founder of the Dissenting Academy, and is preparing to make a thundering speech in Parliament damning the captains of slaving vessels for mistreating their human cargoes and damning their defenders in Parliament with what he will call âthe stigma of everlasting dishonourâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) It will be one more step, he hopes, on the road to the abolition of slavery.
Alongside him is General Conway. At seventy, the General is the oldest of the group, a former Secretary of State, a retired army top brass, an amateur botanist and, like Banks and Beaufoy, an improver â he commissioned the bridge over the Thames at Henley. Surprisingly, he is also a linguist: a performance is announced for this very evening of a French play he has translated.
One of the youngest members of the Saturdayâs Club is the Irish aristocrat Francis Rawdon. Soon he will inherit the title Earl of Moira, and then earn that of Marquis of Hastings, will become an intimate of the Prince of Wales and be appointed Governor-General of India. But at this stage, at thirty-three years of age, he is merely a rising star, a tall man with a commanding manner who has come home from the American War of Independence with a reputation for being a reliable officer and with the rank of lieutenant colonel.
The other members are no less remarkable. William Pulteney is one of the richest men in the country, and Sir William Fordyce a doctor who has published works on subjects as varied as venereal diseases and the medical properties of rhubarb. Friends describe Fordyce as an unassuming, convivial man who seldom dines alone. The Earl of Galloway, on the other hand, is joyfully outspoken, particularly about his twin passions of agriculture and the abolition of slavery. Here too is the Commissioner for Trade and Plantations, Sir Adam Ferguson, and Andrew Stuart, a lawyer and sometime Member of Parliament, both government advisers. Of the three members who are unable to attend, Sir John Sinclair has been called âthe most indefatigable man in Englandâ â he will go on to create the Board of Agriculture and sit on the Privy Council â the Earl of Carysfort is a scholarly evangelist, while the most unusual man among them, Richard Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, has had the honour of occupying the chairs of both Divinity and Chemistry at Cambridge University. Between them, these dozen men wield great influence in many spheres of life, from government to commerce and science. Seven are members of the elevated Royal Society, eight have seats in Parliament and most own significant estates or control extensive business interests.
The records of this meeting are of a general nature, and although they tell us what is decided upon, they do not reveal who says what or in which order. It seems certain that mention is made of the Slavery Bill currently being discussed in Parliament, and from slavery conversation will naturally enough have turned to Africa.
Banks is the only member of the Saturdayâs Club who has been to Africa. Since his return he has funded several botanical expeditions to examine the continentâs rich flora. He has also received several proposals from people interested in making journeys into the interior and a suggestion that an Arabic-speaking slave from the West Indies be shipped back to Africa to travel inland. But he is not the only one to be interested in Africa, as is suggested by the fact that 1200 people subscribed to the first edition of The Letters of Ignatius Sancho,
(#ulink_6eea1565-29c4-5d53-a4a1-b4408b15ffc7) a freed slave. Another account of slavery, written by Olaudah Equiano,â (#ulink_214f4c4a-5d33-5b4a-9909-1b90cf6f6221) the son of a West African chief, is just now being prepared for the printers, backed among others by General Conway and Lord Rawdon, both now present in this upstairs room at the tavern.
If Banks has provided the original idea, Henry Beaufoy now pushes it forward. The geographer James Rennell, who is not present but who knows most of the members, will write later that Beaufoy smoothed the way for the Association, âa path which, more than any other person, he had contributed to open, and render smoothâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) Sir John Sinclair seems to have been the other key player â his son will later claim that he took âa leading partâ â although he is not present now as matters come to a head and the following resolution is made:
At an adjourned Meeting of the Saturdayâs Club, at the St. Albanâs Tavern, on the 9
of June, 1788.
PRESENT
ABSENT MEMBERS
Resolved, That as no species of information is more ardently desired, or more generally useful, than that which improves the science of Geography; and as the vast continent of Africa, notwithstanding the efforts of the ancients, and the wishes of the moderns, is still in a great measure unexplored, the members of this Club do form themselves into an Association for promoting the discovery of the inland parts of that quarter of the world.
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The resolution oozes optimism, as does a four-page brochure the members publish soon after. This serves as a statement of intent, a sales document in which the full Plan of the Association is laid out. Both the minutes and the Plan are written by Henry Beaufoy, Secretary of the new Association; Banks, who has been appointed Treasurer, approves the text before it goes to the printers. In the Plan, Beaufoy explains the geographical attractions of Africa: âOf the objects of inquiry which engage our attention the most, there are none, perhaps, that so much excite continued curiosity, from childhood to age; none that the learned and unlearned so equally wish to investigate, as the nature and history of those parts of the world, which have not, to our knowledge, been hitherto explored.â
So far, so good. There follows something of an over-simplification: âTo this desire the Voyages of the late Captain Cook have so far afforded gratification, that nothing worthy of research by Sea, the Poles themselves excepted, remains to be examined.â Then Beaufoy gets to the point of the Association: much of Asia and America has recently been explored, as has the area north of Cape Town, while traders have made inroads up the rivers of West Africa. âBut not-withstanding the progress of discovery on the coasts and borders of that vast continent, the map of its interior is still but a wide extended blank.â He ends his introduction thus: âDesirous of rescuing the age from a charge of ignorance, which, in other respects, belongs so little to its character, a few individuals, strongly impressed with the practicability and utility of thus enlarging the fund of human knowledge, have formed the plan of an Association for promoting the discovery of the interior parts of Africa.â
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Being British, they have also drawn up rules to regulate function and behaviour. They have committed themselves to paying a subscription of five guineas a year each for three years. During the Associationâs first year, they are invited to put forward the names of people they think will make suitable members â they clearly want the Association to grow, but they are not going to let in just anybody. And before they leave the tavern, they hold a ballot to choose a Committee: Banks and Beaufoy are elected along with Rawdon, Stuart and the Bishop of Llandaff. The Committee is then given responsibility for âthe choice of the persons who are to be sent on the discovery of the interior parts of Africa, together with the Societyâs correspondence, and the management of its fundsâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) With that, the meeting is adjourned, the room empties, the friends part, perhaps unaware of the significance of their resolution.
London is awash with Associations â there is one âfor preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellersâ and another âfor reducing the exorbitant Price of Butcherâs Meatâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) But this one is different. Until now, exploration has relied on the patronage of kings or governments, on trading companies and on the occasional enlightened, wealthy or speculative individual. This organisation is to be funded by a group of friends whose purpose is neither political nor commercial, although they will not deny that they have interests in both. The African Association has been created to mount expeditions and collect information that will lead to geographical advances and open up the continent. It is the start of a new era.
At this point it is worth pausing to consider to what purpose any new findings might be put. Sir John Sinclairâs son provided a blunt but also a neat answer. âHitherto,â he observed, âEuropeans had visited Africa to plunder, to oppress, and to enslave;- the object of this society was to promote the cause of science and humanity; to explore the mysterious geography, to ascertain the resources, and to improve the condition of that ill-fated continent.â
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Promoting the cause of science and humanity encapsulates a large number of possibilities. Take the slave trade, for instance. Several members of the Association are active in the campaign to end slavery; those who are not are at least aware of predictions for the future of Britainâs trans-Atlantic trade. This trade depends on three points of contact. Britain exports cloth, metal (including guns) and other products of its growing industries to the West African coast. Trade between Britain and West Africa is clearly profitable: between 1720 and 1772 it grew from sixty-five ships carrying £130,000 worth of cargo (now roughly equivalent to £6.5 million) to 175 ships â a departure every two days â carrying £866,000 worth of goods (£43.3 million).
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By 1788 these figures are considerably higher, and West Africa has become one of Europeâs major trading partners. But there is a limit to how much trade can grow between the two continents, as Africa has only a limited ability to pay for European goods. Gold dust, ivory, animal skins and senna
(#ulink_738abfc0-00be-5795-b36b-01ace2966c7c) are all accepted as objects of barter, but the vast and growing majority of European goods are paid for in Africa with slaves. These are then shipped across the Atlantic, where they are traded for sugar, rum and the other good things of the Caribbean, which are then brought back and sold in England. The development of Britainâs growing industries as well as the wealth of the West Indies depend on this triangular trade. If the sale of slaves is to be outlawed, how will West Africans pay for cloth and guns? The answer is obvious to anyone, such as Banks or Rennell, who knows their history, and it has a direct bearing on the Associationâs activities.
In 1324, Mansa Kankan Musa, the Emperor of Mali, decided to fulfil his articles of faith by making a pilgrimage to Mecca. He and his considerable entourage crossed the dessert and were treated royally by the Sultan when they arrived in Cairo. Horses and camels, food and water were then provided to smooth their way to Mecca and back to Egypt. The Emperor was so pleased with this treatment that, in the words of one observer, when he returned to the Nile he spread âupon Cairo the flood of his generosity: there was no person, officer of the court or holder of any office of the sultanate who did not receive a sum of gold from him. The people of Cairo earned incalculable sums from him, whether by buying and selling or by gifts. So much gold was current in Cairo that it ruined the value of money â¦â
(#litres_trial_promo) While it took a generation for the price of gold to recover in Cairo, the legend of Maliâs immense gold reserves lasted at least until the summer of 1788.
Mansa Musaâs extravagance (in the end, he spent so much that he was obliged to borrow money to get home) is not the only African story to have reached the Saturdayâs Clubâs eyes and ears. To them as to many in Europe at this time, West Africa, and particularly Mali, is a land of golden promise, another El Dorado. Al-Idrissi, the twelfth-century geographer, has described many civilised cities of central Africa, among them Kaugha, âa populous City, without Walls, famous for Business and useful for Arts for the Advantage of its Peopleâ; Kuku, where âthe Governors and Nobility are covered with Sattinâ; and Ghana, where the King, for decoration, had âan Lump of Gold, not cast, nor wrought by any other Instruments, but perfectly formed by the Divine Providence only, of thirty Pounds Weightâ. Leo Africanus, four hundred years later, had this to say of Timbuktu: âThe Inhabitants, and especially the Strangers that reside there, are very rich, insomuch that the present King gave both his Daughters in Marriage to two rich Merchants ⦠The rich King of Tombuto has in his Possession many golden Plates and Scepters, some whereof are 1300 Ounces in Weight, and he keeps a splendid and well-furnished Court ⦠The King at his own Expense liberally maintaineth here great Numbers of Doctors, Judges, Priests, and other learned Men. There are Manuscripts, or written Books, brought hither out of Barbary, which are sold for more Money than any other Merchandize. Instead of Money, they use Barrs of Gold â¦â
(#litres_trial_promo) Instead of slaves, so the thinking goes, they could pay for imported European goods with these âBarrs of Goldâ.
All this has made an impression on the imaginations of members of the Saturdayâs Club, as is clear from Beaufoyâs prediction that âTheir mines of gold (the improvable possession of many of the inland states) will furnish, to an unknown, and probably boundless extent, an article that commands, in all the markets of the civilized world, a constant and unlimited scale.â
(#litres_trial_promo) This might have been true several centuries ago, but by the end of the eighteenth century the gold reserves which Mansa Musa and the kings of Timbuktu had exploited are exhausted. Whatâs more, the great empires they supported have recently been torn apart by a reforming Islamic jihad. The great cities of Sudan have been reduced and their kings left in fear of their lives, while the internal trade has shrunk to a shadow of its former glory. All this, Beaufoy and the other members of the Association have yet to discover.
The lure of gold, the campaign to abolish slavery, the need to find new trading partners all add to the keenly felt desire to know what lies at the heart of Africa. By the end of the eighteenth century, breathtaking scientific advances have forced Europeans to reconsider their relationship with the world. The past is being uncovered â classical sites such as Pompeii are even now being excavated â the natural world is being classified by the likes of Linnaeus, while Cookâs voyages have shown that the physical world can also be known. In such a rampant intellectual climate, can the secrets of the African interior remain hidden for much longer?
Africa is a large continent, too large even for the ambitions of the Association: they must choose an area of interest within it. It is now beyond the bounds of possibility to resurrect their discussions or determine the way in which they reached this decision, but it is possible to look at the ideas that have informed their choices.
Beaufoy gives some pointers when he explains in the Plan of the Association how much of the rest of the world has been explored and recorded. Even parts of Africa are well known â he notes that the Swedish traveller Dr André Sparrman, a member of Cookâs second trans-global expedition, has travelled some way inland from Cape Colony in the south of the continent; the English translation of his Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, towards the Antarctic Polar Circle and round the World; hut chiefly into the Country of the Hottentots and Caffres, from the Year 1772, to 1776 appeared two years earlier, in 1786. Colonel Gordon, in charge of the Dutch garrison at the Cape, has since travelled inland as far as the Orange River, and perhaps his account will appear before long. In East Africa, James Bruceâs long-awaited, five-volume Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile is expected at any moment, although in the event it is not published until 1790. But little progress has been made in the inland parts of West Africa since early in the eighteenth century, when an Englishman by the name of Francis Moore and a Frenchman, André Brue, sailed up the Senegal and Gambia rivers. Of the interior of sub-Saharan Africa, the area loosely called Sudan (not to be confused with the present country further to the east), almost nothing new has been learned since the sixteenth-century descriptions of Leo Africanus.
Leoâs work on the interior stands out from earlier accounts, from the twelfth-century Nubian al-Idrissi for instance, from the Roman and Greek maps, even from the second-century Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy, because he actually visited many of the places he described. Born into a wealthy Moorish family in Granada in the 1490s and brought up in Fez after the fall of the Moorish kingdoms in Spain, he was taken travelling at an early age. By the time he was twenty he had already visited Tabriz in Persia and had crossed to Timbuktu on the southern side of the Sahara. Later, though it is not clear in which year, he returned south, revisited Timbuktu and then made a tour of the countries or territories of central North Africa. From Djenne and Gao in Mali, he travelled through Agadez, Kano and Burnu before making his way to Egypt. Then in 1518, on his way back to Morocco from Egypt, Italian pirates took him prisoner and his life changed. There was a chance that he might have been killed or sold as a slave, but his captors seem to have recognised that he was a man of learning and presented him to the Medici Pope Leo X. Leo, a shrewd judge of character and a notable patron of the arts, recognised the value of the tale the Moor had to tell. He went to great lengths to keep him in Rome, cosseting him with luxury and privilege, and going so far as to adopt him as his own godson. Renamed after his benefactor, baptised in the Christian faith and given the distinguishing name of Africanus, Leo the Moor sat down to write an account of the things he had seen and heard on his travels. His Descrittione dellâAfrica, published in 1550 and translated into English as A Geographical Historie of Africa in 1600, became the authority on African geography.
âI saw 15 kingdoms of the Negroes myself,â Leo writes of the interior of the continent, âbut there are several others which I never saw, but the Negroes know them well.â
(#litres_trial_promo) Of the geography of the region to the south of the Sahara, he has this to say:
In the Country of the Negroes, there is a noble river called Niger, which beginneth Eastward from a Desart, named by the Natives Seu. Others affirm that the Niger springs out of a Lake, and so goeth on Westward till it empties itself into the Sea. Our Cosmographers say that it comes out of Nilus, and that for some Space it is hid in the Earth, and afterwards pours forth in such a Lake as is before mentioned. Some other people think that the Beginning of this River is to the Westward, and so running East formeth that great Lake: But that is not probable, because they go with the Stream in Boats Westward from Tombuto [Timbuktu] to Ghinea [Ghana], and Melli [Mali], for those Kingdoms are situated to the West of Tombuto.
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Banks and his circle recognise that Leo offers no certainties. Even though he visited the region and sailed along the Niger, he still cannot place the riverâs source with any certainty. Nor has he correctly remembered the direction of its flow. But he has provided them with their challenge: they need to clarify, verify or find an alternative to Leoâs account of the interior. And so the Committee agrees to direct its first geographical mission south of the Sahara to Bambuk, where they will look for the Niger River and sail along it to Timbuktu, Borno and the other places associated with the legendary and now exhausted goldfields. Their plan is typical of the imagination of an age of genius, breathtaking in both scope and ambition. It calls for two travellers to be commissioned. One is to sail to Tripoli on the North African coast and travel south across the Sahara. The other is to approach from the east, through what is now the state of Sudan, and cross to the west coast.
By slicing through the northern part of the continent, top to bottom and side to side, Banks and Beaufoy hope to find answers to the questions that have puzzled geographers for millennia. Where do the two great rivers rise? Where does the Niger end? Where are the mighty empires of central Africa? And where are their goldfields? As Banks watches his fellow Committee members leave Soho Square on Tuesday, 16 June 1788, he is confident that it is now only a matter of time before they fill in those blanks on Samuel Boultonâs map.
(#ulink_af8fd009-a9f1-5143-9cd0-dc93f258bf57) Sancho was born on a slave ship, soon orphaned and handed to three âmaidensâ in Greenwich who were happy to keep him in a state of ignorance. He came to the attention of the Duke and Duchess of Montagu, who employed him as their butler, educated him and, when he was too old to serve, set him up as a grocer. Sanchoâs son William worked for a time as Sir Joseph Banksâ librarian before setting himself up as a bookseller.
â (#ulink_af8fd009-a9f1-5143-9cd0-dc93f258bf57) Equiano was enslaved and shipped to the West Indies, but ended up as an educated, Christ-loving author pleading in London for the abolition of slavery.
(#ulink_955581e2-067a-529d-b2b1-5b0184153008) Senna, a leaf grown south of the Sahara and Timbuktu, among other places, was in great demand in pre-fibre Europe for its laxative properties.
3 (#ulink_740004d4-a8d6-5539-bfa1-1c6f5a658456)
A Friend to Mankind (#ulink_740004d4-a8d6-5539-bfa1-1c6f5a658456)
âIn furtherance of their designs, they employed able and ingenious travellers to penetrate into the interior, and collect information upon all subjects interesting to the philosopher or the philanthropist.â
Rev. John Sinclair, Memoir of the Life and Works of Sir John Sinclair
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London, May 1788
THERE WAS A PRICE to pay for success, particularly for achieving it so young. Joseph Banks was twenty-seven when he came home from the round-the-world voyage with Captain Cook to find he was famous, and just thirty-five when he followed Isaac Newton and a line of other remarkable men into the Presidentâs chair at the Royal Society. The darling of salon and club, he was also a favourite of cartoonists and satirists, who coined a number of ripe nicknames for him, among them the Fly Catching Macaroni, the Great South Sea Caterpillar, the Intellectual Flea and the President of Frogs and Flies.
(#litres_trial_promo) There were many others. The lampooner John Wolcot, writing under the name of Peter Pindar, filled page after page with insulting verse along the lines of: âA nutshell might with perfect ease enclose/Three-quarters of his sense, and all his learning.â
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Banks took this in his stride. He never replied to, nor even commented on any of these attacks, at least not in public. Perhaps he found them amusing. Perhaps he recognised that criticism confirmed his significance in the run of things: the Grub Street hacks didnât waste their poison on just anybody. And even Pindar, a man whose pen was more poisoned than most, had to salute Banksâ legendary hospitality:
To give a breakfast in Soho,
Sir Josephâs very bitterest foe
Must certainly allow him peerless merit;
Where, on a wag-tail, and tom-tit,
He shines, and sometimes on a nit,
Displaying powârs few Gentlemen inherit.
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With the notable exception of a brothel known as Hooperâs Hotel that counted the Prince of Wales among its patrons, Sir Josephâs townhouse was the busiest in Soho Square. It was one of the largest, too, and certainly ought to have been more than adequate to contain his household; but it is a golden rule that collectors never have enough space.
The forty-five-year-old knight had been married for nine years to Dorothea Hugessen,
(#ulink_4ec94b0b-b529-5845-97b8-4196c9aabe90) a woman described as âcomely and modestâ â in a portrait painted by the Royal Academician John Russell in 1788 she appears as a dark-haired, round-faced, gentle-looking woman in frills and flounces. She was also an heiress. Not that Banks needed the money â he was in his own right among the three or four hundred richest men in the country. Perhaps more important for him was her readiness to accommodate his many interests. She liked to collect porcelain, so will have understood his obsessive hoarding instincts. She was also prepared to accommodate his sister, Sarah Sophia, a tall, âhandsomeâ and above all forceful woman who indulged plenty of her own eccentricities, passions and obsessive urges, among them a desire to collect coins. It was clearly a happy arrangement: as late as 1818, Dorothea wrote of her husband and sister-in-law that âno two people ever contributed more to the happiness of others than they both have to mine. They are everything to me.â
(#litres_trial_promo) In considerable harmony and happiness, then, they filled the house with cupboards and chests and boxes, with porcelain and coins, plants and seeds, dried creatures and pinned insects, rocks, antiquities, exotica of all sorts and souvenirs from Sir Josephâs travels, not just around the world with Cook, but an earlier journey to Labrador and Newfoundland and a later one to Iceland. But the thing that took up most room in the house was his library, which he built into one of the finest in the country. The catalogue alone ran to 2464 pages.
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These collections, particularly the library, were unique resources and not ones that Banks thought of keeping to himself.
(#ulink_86d0b821-76fe-536c-9463-8839f42c72bb) As a result of this and because of his range of connections and interests, his house became one of the social and intellectual hubs of the city. A steady stream of people passed through his door, among them regular visitors who had access whenever they wanted and scholars and intellectuals from around the country and across Europe. Many of these people were also welcome at the breakfasts that Banks held each Thursday morning during the Royal Societyâs season. As Felthamâs Picture of London noted in 1805:
Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, Receives his friends, members of the society and gentlemen introduced by them, at a public breakfast, at his house in Soho-square. The literary, and much more, the scientific news of the day, are the topics of the conversations which then take place. New and curious specimens of subjects in antiquities, in natural history, &c., are often produced for the inspection of the persons who then assemble. On every Sunday evening, too, during the meetings of the Royal Society, the same gentleman opens his house for the reception of a conversation-assembly of his literary and philosophical friends, and of all gentlemen, whether natives of the country or foreigners, whom his friends introduce.
Historians tend to portray Banks as gout-ridden and cantankerous, a massive, brooding presence with great influence but increasingly outdated views. All that was to come later, when he was in his seventies and had become jowly, swept his grey hair off his face and packed a considerable belly in his dark frock-coat. But in 1788, when we first meet him, he is in middle age. Convivial and connected, he is also up-to-date in his thinking, good-humoured, quick-witted and still physically active, equally enthusiastic about riding his horses and fishing on the Thames. At this stage, he looks like a man who has a great deal more to accomplish.
In manners, Banks can be somewhat brusque â he is more a country squire than a courtier, and small talk is not his forte, as Fanny Burney, the novelist and Second Keeper of the Queenâs Robes, discovered. Meeting him at a Windsor tea party she complained that he was âso exceedingly shy that we made no acquaintance at all. If, instead of going round the world, he had fallen from the moon, he could not appear less versed in the usual modes of a tea-drinking party. But what, you will say, has a tea-party to do with a botanist, a man of science, and the President of the Royal Society?â
(#litres_trial_promo) Not that his lack of tea-party manners deterred Fanny, for she was still happy to join friends and relations, the great and the good, petitioners, porters carrying packages fresh off the mail coach, retainers bringing food, papers and news from his country estate in Yorkshire and all the other visitors who knocked at the door of his house in Soho Square.
Standing out from this crowd one day in May 1788 was a tall, fit, fair-haired man who, according to one account, was dressed in rags. In spite of his appearance he was not begging and, contrary to what might have been expected, he had no trouble in getting past the doorman. The visitor was John Ledyard, a young American explorer whom Banks had met several years earlier and for whom he had provided both money and influence. Ledyard had just returned from a gruelling overland journey to Siberia, and with no one else to turn to, he had come to Banks for help. The godfather of exploration explained that he hoped to have a proposition for him soon enough.
A month after Ledyardâs arrival, on 17 June, Lord Rawdon, Henry Beaufoy and the lawyer Andrew Stuart met at Banksâ house to select the African Associationâs first geographical missionary. Several offers had been received during the previous weeks, even before the Association had been created, but they were no match for Ledyard once Banks talked up his proposal and past achievements. The Committee took their Treasurerâs advice and concluded that âthe employment of Mr. Ledyard may be eminently useful to the purposes of the Associationâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) Nine days later, his selection was confirmed and Beaufoy and Banks drafted a more precise resolution.
Ledyard was to travel overland to Marseilles and from there sail to Egypt, make his way over the desert to Suez, cross the Red Sea to Mecca in present-day Saudi Arabia and then cross back again to Nubia. Such an itinerary would have been enough to convince most people that they were dealing with madmen. But whatever Ledyard might suffer getting to Nubia, it was only then that the mission â and the dangers â would really start. From the Red Sea coast, he was to cut inland across the withering Nubian Desert, ford the Nile, negotiate the southern Libyan Desert and prepare to face the Sahara. He was then instructed to continue westward âas nearly as possible in the direction of the Niger, with which River, and with the Towns and Countries on its borders, he shall endeavour to make himself acquaintedâ. After that? Well, it was up to him: he was free to find his own way to the Atlantic coast and then sail back to England.
It was a tall order, more than two thousand miles over some of the worldâs most challenging terrain, and it was fraught with difficulties. Perhaps the biggest challenge would be to locate the River Niger, since no one could be quite certain where it lay. Happily Ledyardâs employers were aware of the difficulty. âIf the abovementioned Plan should be found altogether impracticable, he shall proceed to the discovery of the Inland parts of Africa, by the rout [sic] which may appear to him the best suited to the purpose.â
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Sailing from England to Egypt could hardly be called exploration in the eighteenth century â there was regular traffic across the Mediterranean, though the going was often far from easy. European interests in India and further east meant that frequent caravans crossed the desert between Cairo and Suez (the Suez Canal was still eighty years away). Although there was a risk of attack by Bedouin tribes, whom the Pasha in Cairo was powerless to control, Ledyard could be confident of passing that barrier. Assuming that he got this far, his problems would just be beginning. For one thing, Christians had long been banned from sailing on the Red Sea. The official explanation for this was the desire to protect the purity of the Muslim holy places at Mecca and Medina, although there was certainly an equally strong desire to keep European traders away from the lucrative Red Sea trade. James Bruce claimed to have persuaded the Egyptian Pasha, Muhammad Bey Abu Dahab, to allow British ships to sail to Suez. And as Bruce had been in touch with Banks since his return to Britain, it is likely that Ledyard also knew about this agreement. What he perhaps did not know was that since Bruceâs visit to Egypt, the Ottoman authorities had issued a Hatti Sharif, an instruction to the Pasha, judges, imams and indeed just about anyone else with any authority over the Egyptian Red Sea coast: âThe Sea of Suez is destined for the noble pilgrimage to Mecca,â it began unequivocally. âTo suffer Frank [European] ships to navigate therein, or to neglect opposing it, is betraying your Sovereign (the Ottoman Emperor), your religion, and every Mahometan.â
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It was going to be an achievement just to reach the Nubian shore. A quick look at the map of Africa will help to point up some of the hazards of the proposed journey: Ledyardâs route lay through the Nubian Desert, over the Nile and then thousands of miles across the entire breadth of the Sahara, through countries whose political situation was completely unknown to the Association and, indeed, to just about anyone else outside Africa. To guide himself through all this, Ledyard had a map drawn using speculation, hearsay and wishful thinking. What sort of man would agree to a mission of this sort, which others might have regarded as an elaborate form of suicide?
Ledyard in Cairo on his way to Suakin, Lucas in Tripoli: a grand plan to bisect the northern half of Africa in 1788
Connecticut-born John Ledyard was already famous as independent Americaâs first explorer, but then travel was in his blood: his father was a sea captain who traded between Boston and the West Indies. After his fatherâs early death in 1762, Ledyardâs upbringing was as unsettled as the times, and there was something inevitable about his signing up with one of his fatherâs friends and sailing out of New England.
(#ulink_76013988-994d-5ca3-ad4f-be5b59775382) In 1775, now twenty-four years old, he crossed to England in the hope of making his way in the world, which he did, though not as he had expected.
In England Ledyard heard of Captain Cookâs preparations for his third voyage to the Pacific. Cook, already a legend as a navigator and explorer, was going in search of a northern passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and Ledyard decided to join him. Marine Corporal Ledyard sailed out of Plymouth on Cookâs ship the Resolution in July 1776, and sailed back in the autumn of 1780. He had been on the beach on Hawaii when Cook was murdered, opened negotiations with Russian fur traders in the north-west Pacific, been promoted to sergeant and made a name for himself as a solid and reliable member of the expedition. He had also discovered his path in life. He was, he explained, not a philosopher but âa traveller and a friend to mankindâ.
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âMy ambition,â Ledyard wrote to his mother in his usual convoluted style after the Resolution voyage, âis to do every thing, which my disposition as a man, and my relative character as a citizen, and, more tenderly, as the leading descendant of a broken and distressed family, should prompt me to do ⦠My prospects at present are a voyage to the East Indies, and eventually round the world. It will be of two or three yearsâ duration. If I am successful, I shall not have occasion to absent myself any more from my friends; but, above all, I hope to have it in my power to minister to the wants of a beloved parent ⦠Tell [my sisters] I long to strew roses in their laps, and branches of palms beneath their feet.â He would be a sybarite, a poet, a man of means. First he wanted a share of the âastonishing profitâ to be had buying furs in the American north-west. But how was he to get there?
At that time, neither Europeans nor members of the newly united states of America had found an overland route across the American continent to the Pacific. Ledyard first looked for an American backer to help him sail south around the Americas to the west coast. When that plan was unsuccessful he moved to Europe, looking for backers first in Spain and then in France. By the time he reached Paris, it was becoming clear, even to a man of his irrepressible optimism, that no one was going to provide him with a ship to go and trade in furs.
Before leaving the States Ledyard had written a book, A Journal of Captain Cookâs Last Voyage. Its publication had established him as a celebrity, even in Europe, where he was fêted as the first American explorer. Marooned in Paris, he at least had the consolation of becoming part of the cityâs American community and enjoying the patronage of the American Consul, Thomas Jefferson. The Consul clearly liked the young man, whom he described as having âgenius, an education better than the common, and a talent for useful & interesting observationâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps it was Jeffersonâs patriotic influence that began to rub off on Ledyard during this period. Still determined to reach the American north-west, he wrote to his family with more enthusiasm than clarity that âthe American Revolution invites to a thourough [sic] discovery of the Continent. But a Native only could feel the pleasure of the Atchievement [sic]. It was necessary that an European should discover the Existance [sic] of that Continent, but in the name of Amor Patria. Let a Native of it Explore its Boundary. It is my wish to be the Man.â
Ledyard now changed his plans, and in the autumn of 1786, with a little money provided by Banks, to whom he had been recommended, he left Paris. His plan was to travel overland through Europe to Russia, although the Russian Empress Catherine the Great had already refused him permission to travel through her lands, assuming he was a threat to the Russian monopoly on the fur trade. In this she was right, because from Russia he intended to sail to the American north-west and make contact with the fur traders he had met when travelling with Captain Cook. At this point Ledyard confessed to an even greater ambition: Siberia was not the goal but a step on the way. He wanted to be the first person to circumnavigate the world by land.
If desire alone were enough he would have succeeded, but weather and politics conspired against him. During the winter of 1786 he crossed from Stockholm to St Petersburg and in June 1787 left for Siberia. Three months and six thousand miles later, having travelled much of the way on foot, he reached the Okhotsk Sea, but was unable to cross to Kamchatka, where he intended to join the fur traders, because the sea had frozen. He travelled back to Yakutsk to sit out the winter as best he could on meagre resources. He probably would have survived until the thaw. But in March 1788 his luck ran out: the Empressâs agents caught up with him and he was arrested, accused of being a French spy, marched back across Russia to the Polish frontier and warned that he would be executed if he dared to enter Russian territory again without Imperial permission. He used the last of his money to reach Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad), where he found someone prepared to lend him £5 on Sir Joseph Banksâ credit. From there, he headed for Soho Square.
The day he reached Yakutsk â it was 18 September 1787 â Ledyard had felt the profits from fur dealing, and the possibilities they would create, to be within his reach. In pensive mood, thinking of the journeys ahead, he confided to his journal, âI have but two long frozen Stages more [from Yakutsk to the coast and then across the Pacific] and I shall be beyond the want or aid of money, until emerging from her deep deserts I gain the American Atlantic States and then thy glow[i]ng Climates, Africa explored, I lay me down and claim a little portion of the Globe Iâve viewed.â
(#litres_trial_promo) The American journey was not to be, but there was something prophetic about the mention of Africa.
When Ledyard appeared in Soho Square, Banks scribbled a note of introduction in his spidery hand and sent him around to Henry Beaufoyâs house in Great George Street. Beaufoy was impressed. âBefore I had learned from the note the name and business of my visitor,â he wrote later, describing that meeting for the Associationâs subscribers, âI was struck with the manliness of his person, the breadth of his chest, the openness of his countenance, and the inquietude of his eye.â
(#litres_trial_promo) Elsewhere he described Ledyard as being of âmiddling sizeâ, though âremarkably expressive of activity and strength. His manners, though unpolished, were neither uncivil nor unpleasing.â You can hear the affectionate patronage with which the Englishman viewed the brash American.
âI spread the map of Africa before him,â Beaufoy went on, âand tracing a line from Cairo to Sennar [he had clearly forgotten about the deviation to Mecca], and from thence westward in the latitude and supposed direction of the Niger, I told him that was the route, by which I was anxious that Africa might, if possible, be explored.â
Thinking that at last things were going his way, Ledyard admitted that he felt âsingularly fortunate to be entrusted with the adventureâ.
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âWhen will you set out?â Beaufoy asked.
Led on by breezy optimism, the American told Beaufoy he would be ready to leave in the morning.
The Association, however, required more time to prepare for the adventure. Letters of recommendation and credit needed to be arranged and, most important, money had to be raised to pay for the journey. At the inaugural meeting on 9 June the dozen founding Saturdayâs Club members had each committed themselves to paying an annual subscription of five guineas. Within a fortnight, membership had more than doubled: among the new members were Lord Rawdonâs uncle the Earl of Huntingdon, Baron Loughborough, Richard Neave, the Governor of the Bank of England and Chairman of the West India Merchants, the Prince of Walesâ friend the Duke of Northumberland and two more anti-slavery campaigners. But even if they all paid their subscriptions when asked, which was unlikely, the Association could still only call on £136.10S., and although that may have paid the annual salaries of the servants who ran Banksâ house, it clearly was not going to be enough to fund two separate expeditions into Africa.
Banks had anticipated the problem. On 17 June he had suggested that each of the five Committee members should advance the Association £50 on top of their annual subscriptions. Even then there were not sufficient funds, so the Committee â principally Banks â now agreed to advance the Association a total of £453. Once the money was in place, a number of instructions had to be issued to people such as Mr Baldwin, the British Consul in Alexandria, asking him to act as banker and to honour Ledyardâs letter of credit.
While the practicalities were being sorted out, the traveller was busy preparing for his departure and attending a round of meetings, briefings and dinners. Among them is likely to have been a dinner at the Royal Society Club â the Societyâs social arm â similar to this one described by a passing Frenchman called Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond:
The dishes were of the solid kind, such as roast beef, boiled beef and mutton prepared in various ways, with abundance of potatoes and other vegetables, which each person seasoned as he pleased with the different sauces which were placed on the table in bottles of different shapes. The beefsteaks and the roast beef were at first drenched with copious bumpers of strong beer, casked porter, drunk out of cylindrical pewter pots, which are much preferred to glasses, because one can swallow a whole pint at a draught.
This prelude being finished, the cloth was removed and a handsome and well-polished table was covered, as if it were by magic, with a number of fine crystal decanters filled with the best port, madeira and claret; this last is the wine of Bordeaux. Several glasses, as brilliant in lustre as fine in shape, were distributed to each person and the libations began on a grand scale, in the midst of different kinds of cheese, which rolling in mahogany boxes from one end of the table to the other, provoked the thirst of the drinkers.
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After the cheese, Saint-Fond relates with a sneaking sense of admiration, the serious drinking began.
Ledyard enjoyed all these preparations and revelled in the attention he received in London, some of which clearly touched his vanity. In a letter to his family, he mentions that his portrait had been painted by the Swedish artist Breda and was now hanging at Somerset House, home to both the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Art: the catalogue for the Academyâs annual exhibition that summer lists the portrait and notes that Ledyard âhas undertaken to travel round the world on footâ. In a letter to his cousin, Ledyard described the Association as âa Society of Noblemen & Gentlemen who had for some time been fruitlessly enquiring for somebody that would undertake to travel through the continent of Africa. My arrival,â he added pompously, âhas made it a reality.â
(#litres_trial_promo) He seemed to have had an equally inflated opinion of the Associationâs immediate importance, claiming that it already had a membership of two hundred. âIt is a growing thing,â he wrote, â& the King privately promoting & encouraging it will make its objects more extensive than at first thought of. The king has told them that no expense should be spared.â
(#litres_trial_promo) There is no evidence that the King ever even mentioned it, but Ledyard clearly believed that money should be forthcoming.
In Paris hoping for a ship to take him to the American north-west, Ledyard had equipped himself with two big dogs and a hatchet, but he had very different plans for Africa. Beaufoy had advanced him thirty guineas as soon as he accepted the mission. Two guineas were spent on his lodgings, the rest going to pay for his wardrobe, which included â6 fine Shirts, 1 Suit of Cloaths [sic], 1 Hat [which cost him a guinea], 1 Pocket Book, 1 Shaving case, 2 pair silk stockings, 2 pair ditto, 1 pair shoes, 1 pair Buckles, 1 pair bag, 1 pair Boots, 1 Watch, Waistcoat & breeches, Ditto ditto black silk, 1 pair black silk stockings, 2 white cravats, 1 Silk Handkerchief. By 17 June he had run up another bill, this time of some £16, and was the proud owner of â2 pair leather pantaloons, new black stock & razor strap, a dozen shirts, 4 hatchets, pair of boots, umbrella, 2 silk handkerchiefsâ.
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Perhaps sensing that Ledyardâs spending was getting out of hand, Banks and Beaufoy met on 26 June to settle his financial arrangements. In all, they were prepared to allow him one hundred guineas to buy clothes and equipment and to get himself to Cairo. In Cairo, Consul Baldwin was authorised to advance £50. This was supposed to be enough to get Ledyard across Africa, although, if Baldwin thought it necessary, he could draw a further £30. The Committee had two reasons for wanting Ledyard to keep his spending to a minimum. For one thing they were short of funds. But more important, they were convinced âthat in such an Undertaking Poverty is a better protection than Wealth, and that Mr. Ledyardâs address [appearance and manner] will be more effectual than money, to open to him a passage to the Interior of Africaâ.
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Around this time, Ledyard wrote to his mother in Connecticut explaining his new commission. âI have trampled the world under my feet, laughed at fear, and derided danger. Through millions of fierce savages, over parching deserts, the freezing north, the everlasting ice, and stormy seas, have I passed without harm. How good is my God ⦠I am going away into Africa to examine that continent. I expect to be absent three years. I shall be in Egypt as soon as I can get there, and after that go into unknown parts.â
(#litres_trial_promo) Ledyard was due to leave London on the Dover coach on 30 June. Not being one to let a dramatic moment pass unexploited, that morning he left Beaufoy with a speech guaranteed to stir his sponsors:
I am accustomed to hardships. I have known both hunger and nakedness to the utmost extremity of human suffering. I have known what it is to have food given me as a charity to a madman; and I have at times been obliged to shelter myself under the miseries of that character to avoid a heavier calamity. My distresses have been greater than I have ever owned, or ever will own to any man. Such evils are terrible to bear; but they never yet had power to turn me from my purpose. If l live, I will faithfully perform, in its utmost extent, my engagement to the Society; and if I perish in the attempt, my honour will still be safe, for death cancels all bonds.
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It was a momentous occasion. For Ledyard, this was the fulfilment of his hopes and ambitions, a dangerous journey backed by some of the most important people in Britain and providing an opportunity for him to return to fame and, he hoped, some fortune. For members of the Association, just three weeks to the day after that first meeting in the St Albanâs Tavern they watched their first explorer set off on a geographical mission that they hoped would reveal to them the mysteries of the interior of Africa. Men of science, men of experience whatâs more, they should have known better than to have let their enthusiasm run away with them. The approach they had chosen, bisecting the continent, was hugely ambitious and carried no guarantee of success. Yet they viewed this departure with excitement and imagination, and with a rare humanity: âMuch, undoubtedly, we shall have to communicate [to people in Africa],â Beaufoy was to write, âand something we may have to learn.â
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Ledyard was in Paris by 4 July, for he-sent his compliments to his former patron, the American Consul Thomas Jefferson. Writing from the Hôtel dâAligre on the rue dâOrléans, he explained in a formal note that âhe is now on his way to Africa to see what he can do with that continentâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) Jefferson, it seems, was unimpressed that Ledyard had signed up with a British organisation; Ledyard in turn was stung by his mentorâs criticism. This, rather than the cold that Ledyard claimed, may explain why the two men did not meet to celebrate the anniversary of American independence during the week the traveller spent in the French capital. Sailing from Marseilles some days later, Ledyard arrived in Alexandria early in August.
Alexandria looms large in the imagination. Its ancient glory, the reputation that clings to the extravagance of Cleopatra, the plight of its library and the brilliance of its scholars â the geographer Claudius Ptolemy among them â have inspired historians, poets and adventurers. But the port Ledyard sailed into displayed few obvious traces of this glorious past beyond a standing pillar wrongly ascribed to Caesarâs friend Pompey and a fallen obelisk credited to Cleopatra (since removed to London). Alexandria had been the Egyptian capital in the seventh century when conquering Arab armies crossed the Nile, but it had been left to rot in favour of a new settlement at Cairo and its ancient buildings were now buried beneath rubble, used as foundations for meaner houses. What European travellers called âthe Turkish townâ, huddled over the formerly glorious seafront quarter of Alexanderâs city, now contained a mere four thousand people.
The Sultanâs palace stood a little way off from the Turkish town, as did the houses of the few European residents. The only lively part of town was the port, where goods were landed en route to the Red Sea. The size of this transit trade had increased throughout the eighteenth century as British and French interests developed in India and the East. Trade was one of the main reasons why the British Consul, George Baldwin, and his beautiful wife were installed in Alexandria when Ledyard arrived. Another reason was a matter of health. Spring was the season of plague in Egypt, but Alexandria seemed to suffer less severely than Cairo and to rid itself of the disease sooner. In the summer, the season of Ledyardâs arrival, Cairo bubbled under a relentless sun, but in Alexandria one could find relief from the cooling sea breezes.
Baldwin offered the traveller hospitality and accommodation, but Alexandria was not to the Americanâs taste. He described it as a place of âpoverty, rapine, murder, tumult, blind bigotry, cruel persecution, pestilence! A small town built in the ruins of antiquity, as remarkable for its miserable architecture, as I suppose the place once was for its good and great works of that kind.â
(#litres_trial_promo) He visited the sights, recovered from his journey and moved on. Seven weeks after leaving England, he was in Cairo.
Carlo Rossetti, the fifty-two-year-old Venetian Consul, was a long-time resident of Egypt. He had made a fortune from assisting cargo being shipped along the overland route between Alexandria and Suez and now wielded great influence, both with Egyptians and foreign governments: among the many posts he held at the time of Ledyardâs arrival was that of British Chargé dâAffaires. Rossetti greeted the new arrival warmly enough, but gave âno very pressing invitationâ for Ledyard to stay with him, so the American settled in one of the cityâs convents, which were usually open to passing Europeans. Rossetti proved to be more generous with his introductions than he had been with his house, and took Ledyard to meet Aga Muhammad, one of Egyptâs power-brokers. This meeting was crucial, for although the entire region as far south as Nubia was officially under the control of Istanbul, it was the Egyptian Pasha who wielded real authority in the south.
Fifteen years earlier, the previous ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Bey Abu Dahab, had expressed surprise, wonder even, at James Bruce wanting to travel up the Nile. When the Pasha asked why he wanted to make the journey, Bruce had answered that he was travelling merely for the pleasure of seeing where the river began. For the Pasha this simply did not make sense. To make the pilgrimage to Mecca or to undertake a journey to trade were things he could understand. But to travel just to look â¦
âYou are not an India merchant?â Bruce reported the Bey as having asked him.
I said, âNo.â
âHave you no other trade nor occupation but that of travelling?â
I said, âThat was my occupation. â
âAli Bey, my father-in-law,â replied he, âoften observed there never was such a people as the English; no other nation on earth could be compared to them, and none had so many great men in all professions, by sea and land: I never understood this till now; that I see it must be so when your king cannot find other employment for such a man as you, but sending him to perish by hunger and thirst in the sands, or to have his throat cut by the lawless barbarians of the desert.â
And all that just to see where the river began.
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. âYou must have been very young,â the King observed, some of his harem behind him, âto have committed so many sins, and so early; they must all have been with women?â Bruce, with unusual modesty, explained that only some of them were.
Seventy years later the traveller Alexander Kinglake met with a similar response: âThe 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.â
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The Associationâs first geographical missionary appears to have had no such grilling, and reported to his masters in London that Aga Muhammad âgave me his hand to kiss, and with it the promise of letters, protection, and support, through Turkish Nubia, and also to some chiefs far inlandâ.
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 Agaâs credulity and replied that the prospect of meeting these bizarre people ârendered me more anxious to be on my voyageâ.
(#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. âI told him, with vocabularies.â
(#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, âOld Cairoâ upstream from the port around the Roman and Arab settlements, and âGrand Cairoâ, the medieval city at its heart, overlooked by the citadel, the home of the countryâs 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 cityâs life was thriving: the international transit trade. Thanks to Europeâs growing need to move people and cargo quickly to the East â thanks, too, to men such as Baldwin and Rossetti â 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. âI 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.â But there was one source of geographical information he was able to tap. These were people whom Ledyard calls âJelabsâ, 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, âI 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.â
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By 25 October, more than two months after his arrival in Cairo, Ledyard appeared to be set; with Rossettiâs 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. âThe King of Sennar,â he wrote, âis 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.â
(#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, Ledyardâs early-nineteenth-century biographer, states that by this time the American had adopted âa dress suited to the character he was to assumeâ. 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 ârudely treatedâ by some Turks, who recognised him as a âFrankâ. Around this time he also âbegan in earnest to study the manners of the people around him, and particularly of the traders in the caravans, which were then at Cairoâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) From them he collected plenty of information that he thought worth sending back to London. âA 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.â 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 Ledyardâs calculation for Sennar is woefully short â 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 sistersâ 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 ârashnessâ. Around this time he wrote to Beaufoy that âA 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) â 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.â
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 â his first letter from Alexandria, sent in early August, didnât 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, âdoing up my baggage for the journeyâ. 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 â 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 âgenerous friendshipâ,
(#litres_trial_promo) as were Cairoâs finest doctors. But nothing they could suggest was effective against the damage done by the chemicals and exacerbated, in Beaufoyâs view, by the anxiety Ledyard felt at his failure to leave Cairo. By the end of November, according to Sparks â on 17 January, according to an announcement in the Gentlemanâs Magazine â 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 Associationâs first geographical missionary was dead. âHe was decently interred,â Beaufoy assured the Associationâs members, âin the neighbourhood of such of the English as had ended their days in the capital of Egypt.â
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Beaufoy, in writing of Ledyardâs end, stressed the Americanâs suitability for his mission â âhe appeared to be formed by Nature for achievements of hardihood and perilâ.
(#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 Associationâs 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: âhad 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 Banksâ assistants on the Cook voyage, he later became his librarian and keeper of the natural history collection at the British Museum.
â (#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 travellerâs 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.
4 (#ulink_8416ce62-78be-5085-a51d-6732d7dc092f)
The Oriental Interpreter (#ulink_8416ce62-78be-5085-a51d-6732d7dc092f)
âMR 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.â
Undated and unsigned note in the African Associationâs papers, possibly written by Henry Beaufoy
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SIMON LUCAS, King George Illâs 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 Kingâs 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 Lucasâ 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, Lucasâ father had been a London wine merchant. While Lucas was still in his teens â the dates are vague and some accounts refer to his still being a boy â 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 âSallee Roversâ. Of the many corsairs who operated along the Barbary Coast, the pirates from Moroccoâs 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 Sultanâs 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 Sultanâs 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 didnât 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 â 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 Muhammadâs court as British Vice-Consul and Chargé dâAffaires. 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 Emperorâs 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, âthe life of a solitary fugitiveâ,
(#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.
Matraâs opinion on the viability of travellers heading south from Morocco was unequivocal. âAll investigation of the interiour [sic] part of Africa,â he wrote to Banks in 1788, âas far as this Empire is concerned, is an absolute impossibility.,â
(#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. âTo 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.â
(#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 â a total of £250 if he needed it â 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 Lucasâ ship tied up in the cityâs 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 âif 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 decayâ.
(#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 â âthe whole of the town appears in a semicircle, some time before reaching the harbourâs mouthâ, according to a visitor of Lucasâ time. âThe extreme whiteness of square flat buildings covered with lime, which in this climate encounters the sunâs fiercest rays, is very striking.â
(#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 Consulâs sister, he âbears here so excellent a character that he is universally beloved by Christians, as well as Moors, and is adored by his familyâ.
(#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 âa mouldering ruinâ, 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 Bashawâs 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 Bashawâs permission; yet Ali was bound to be suspicious of the foreignerâs 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 â that he wanted to follow the trade routes across the Sahara to Timbuktu â because he doubted whether the Bashaw would believe that the African Association was interested only in Africaâs geography. The Bashawâs government still depended to some extent on the revenue earned from taxing trade caravans that passed through his lands. Whatever the Associationâs motives, it was clearly not in the Bashawâs 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 Bashawâs 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 Lucasâ 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 Bashawâs 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 Fezzanâs 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 sharifsâ 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 Englishmanâs rigorous journey. Encouraged by this, Lucas laid in supplies, dressed himself in Turkish clothes â he would obviously not be able to travel as an Englishman â 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, Lucasâ 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 Associationâs missionary now wore his hair so long that he looked, in his own words, âlike a London Jew in deep mourningâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) Dressed in his Turkish robes and riding the Bashawâs 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 Bashawâs 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 Bashawâs 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.
âWearied by fruitless expectations of a peace,â Beaufoy explained to the members of the Association, âdisappointed 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.â
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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 âa London Jew in deep mourningâ 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 sharifsâ cargo â they reckoned they needed another 130 â 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 Associationâs 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 â and remember, as far as he knew, no white man had ever been so far into the great desert in any season â 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 Associationâs Proceedings, âMr. 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.â
(#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. Imhammadâs 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 Moorsâ Tales (#ulink_765e18c3-3b98-56a5-bad0-8645b731f9bb)
âThe 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.â
Edward Gibbon, Of the Position of the Meridional Line (1790â91)
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London, May 1789
CAREFUL READERS of the Gentlemanâs Magazine of May 1789 will have spotted the following announcement, tucked away between a list of His Royal Highness, the Duke of Clarenceâs 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. Albanâs 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 âevery doubt is removed of the practicabilityâ 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 Ledyardâs meagre report was the most important of the Associationâs discoveries to date, then little had been achieved. But if the Committee took liberties in their announcement in the Gentlemanâs 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 Saturdayâs 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 Gentlemanâs 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 âThe Improvement of Geographical knowledge is not unworthy the attention, or undeserving the Encouragement of the Ladies of Great Britain.â
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 Londonâs wealthiest bankers. Thomas Coutts, founder of the financial house that still bears his name, was also attracted to the project and became the Associationâs 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 â he had just published the final volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire â 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 Associationâs first missions, of Ledyardâs unfortunate death in Cairo and Lucasâ lame approach to the Sahara, they might have disagreed with Beaufoyâs claim that âevery doubt has been removedâ. Some might have gone so far as to suggest that the Associationâs 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 âin the opinion of the committee, may, without endangering the object of their Association, be made publicâ.
(#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 Tripoliâs 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 Lucasâ 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 Tullyâs 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 Kingâs ill health sparked a constitutional crisis as his son, George, Prince of Wales, was made Regent. The monarchy crisis touched each of the Associationâs 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 Paulâs Cathedral and a series of grand dinners and balls thrown at Windsor and across London to celebrate Georgeâs 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 Kingâs 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. Guillotineâs monstrous contraption.
To a man of Banksâ 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 Banksâ view.
In this year of revolution, 1789, over two hundred ships left Englandâs 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 worldâs greatest city. Among them was a Moroccan named Ben Ali.
It is a measure of the Associationâs 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 Moroccoâs trans-Saharan trade, and he believed he could help the Associationâs 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. Whatâs 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 Banksâ house, some of the worldâs 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 Aliâs 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. âWe place Confidence in you,â Ben Ali was told. âYou should place some Confidence in us.â
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 â whatever the reason, on Wednesday, 10 June, Rawdon received a letter from a Dr W. Thomson. âAt 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.â Thomson was clearly reluctant to be writing the letter. âI endeavoured to explain to him,â he continued, âthat it was not for me to determine, either how far your Lâp 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.â
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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 âan allowanceâ
(#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.
The notes of Ben Aliâs 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. Ledyardâs mission had cost just over £237 and Lucasâ account, although the Committee didnât know it at this point, had topped £400, so Ben Aliâs mission costs were not unexpected. But neither of the Associationâs previous missionaries had received a salary or the promise of a pension. Apart from the money, there were concerns about the Moorâs 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 Associationâs founders; through Fordyce, Swediaur heard of Ben Ali. The Moorâs 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 Associationâs 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 Associationâs money, convinced there was a real possibility â a probability, even â that they would never hear from him again. If that were to happen, the Associationâs 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 Moorâs 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 doctorâs satisfaction, âthat 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 Journeyâ.
(#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 Swediaurâs role, Beaufoy continued to raise objections, arguing that risking some £300 of the Associationâs money in this way was âequally inconsistent with the state of our funds and with the common maxims of Mercantile prudenceâ.
(#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 â he didnât sign up until 1791 â 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 Committeeâs minutes, ran as follows: Swediaur and Hollen Vergen, âbeing animated by an earnest desire of promoting the great object of the Association for the discovery of the Interior parts of Africaâ, were to sail to the Gambia with Ben Ali as their guide and interpreter. While they made the much-longed-for journey to Timbuktu, Sansomâs 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 Sansomâs 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: âThe Moor is missing.â
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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 âfrom his uneasiness of mindâ.
(#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 Moorâs â and therefore the Associationâs â 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. âHow,â he demanded to know, âis this Consonant with an intention of travelling in our service?â
(#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 Boultonâs 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 âabsolute impossibilityâ of exploring Africa through Morocco, now repeated his reservations in a letter from Gibraltar, explaining that, âAfter 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 â I have Paper in abundance, but not to the purpose â¦â
(#litres_trial_promo) If he wasnât able to deliver new intelligence, Matra could at least offer general encouragement: âBy what I hear of Tombucktoo [sic], called by the Moors Timkitoo, it seems a Country well worth examining.â
(#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 Banksâ 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 Lordshipâs request, but Matra sent in a lengthy report from Tangier, which included this overview: âThe 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 â¦â 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 â cloths, beads, spices, brassware and needles â 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 âof a Country called Bambaraâ,
(#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 âby 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 â¦â
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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 âthe Land of the Blacksâ). 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 â âthree miles in the hourâ for âseldom more than seven or eight [hours] in a dayâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) Here too was confirmation of the existence of the great kingdoms of Katsina and Borno, of cities and towns â Murzuq, Domboo, Kanem, Ganatt, Assouda and Weddan â 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 âvales fertile in corn and pasturage for cattle, of which they have numerous herdsâ.
(#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, Lucasâ claim that âtravelling 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 Christiansâ.
(#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 âthe 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 lostâ.
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Perhaps the most significant information concerns the Niger, and on this, as on much else, Imhammad and Ben Ali concur. âOf this river,â Beaufoy wrote, âwhich 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.â 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 Lucasâ 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 â and there is no further mention of Lucasâ mission in the Committeeâs minute books â the Proceedings put a positive spin on the journey and generously explained that it had ended because he was âdeprived of all prospect of arriving this year at Fezzanâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) That may have been the end of Lucas, at least in our story, had not fortune brought to Beaufoyâs attention another North African with a story to sell.
Asseed El Hage Abd Salam Shabeeny (As Sayyid al Hajj Abd Salam Shabeni) â Shabeni for short â 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 Banksâ and Beaufoyâs 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 Beaufoyâs 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 âsufficiently strong to defend the town against the wild Arabsâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) There were three gates, lined with camel skin and âso full of nails that no hatchet can penetrate them; the front appears like one piece of ironâ.
(#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 hoursâ 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 Kingâs 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, âas the Housaeens think they ought to be encouragedâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) Even without any direct income from the foreigners, the royal revenue âis supposed to be immenseâ. 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 â 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 âthe English dâAnvilleâ. 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 Associationâs 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 Companyâs 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 â in 1770, he wrote to a friend, âI 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.â Six years later, with huge areas of âHindostanâ 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 âdiffidentâ, âunassumingâ, âcandidâ and âgrave yet sweetâ crop up in descriptions of his character. He had returned from India with the rank of major and a pension â when the East India Company finally deigned to pay it â 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 geographerâs 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 Beaufoyâs Proceedings. He began by noting that dâAnville 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 âmore to natural causes, than to any absolute want of attention on the part of Geographersâ:
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Africa stands alone in a geographical view! Penetrated by no inland seas, like the Mediterranean, Baltic, or Hudsonâs 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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Rennellâs new map of Africa used the latest intelligence collected by the Association. He still took dâAnville, 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 â the run-off into the desert â with a dotted one. But he then went on to assert that âthe 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.â
(#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 dayâs 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 âin using materials of so coarse a kindâ, he apologised, âtrifles must not be regardedâ.
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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 âconclusions of an important and interesting natureâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) Having summed up the Associationâs 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 âexchanging the usual excursion from Calais to Naples, for a Tour more extended and importantâ.
(#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.
Rennellâs 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 Ledyardâs 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 Associationâs first resolution, drafted by Beaufoy that summer day back in 1788, stated that âno species of information is more ardently desired, or more generally useful, than that which improves the science of Geographyâ.
(#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 â west trans-continental caravan routes and the whereabouts of Timbuktu. But Beaufoy now extended the bounds of the Associationâs 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 Associationâs researches had exposed. âOf 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 Britainâ,
(#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. âAssociations 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.â 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 peopleâ.
(#litres_trial_promo) âThe gain would be such as few commercial adventures have ever been found to yield.â
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After all these exhortations, it comes as no surprise that the Associationâs next missionary was sent to find a route between the Gambia River, the Niger and âluxuriousâ, gold-plated Timbuktu.
(#ulink_e110790a-80d7-501e-a10a-8a04eb9cb390) Lettson studied medicine under Sir William Fordyce, one of the Associationâs 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)
âOn Saturday the African Club [the Committee] dined at the St Albanâs 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.â
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. Priceâs 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 didnât 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 Shabeniâs 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 âgold is ⦠so plentiful as to adorn even the slavesâ, 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 â Banksâ archive is littered with applications â 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: âI am afraid,â he wrote from his family seat in Kinnaird, Scotland, âyour 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.â
(#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 âgeniusâ, while the opinion-making Gentlemanâs Magazine, considering his mission in its issue of July 1790, thought that âSuch 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.â But then in January 1792, W.G. Browne, a traveller we shall meet in the field in the next chapter, wrote that âLedyard, the Man employed by the society on the Sennar expedition, was a very unfit person; and, thoâ he had lived, would not have advanced many leagues on the way, if the judgement of people in Egypt concerning him be credited.â
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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, âI am sorry for Lucasâ 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.â
(#litres_trial_promo) Another of the Associationâs missionaries, meeting Lucas several years later, wrote, âI donât 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 â¦â
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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 Lucasâ strength, or travel experience, which had recommended Ledyard, were needed to crack open the African shell. But then, consider the problems the Associationâs 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 â 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 manâs 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 Associationâs 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 âservicesâ from someone who seemed to possess just about all of the experience and qualities they now knew they wanted. In July 1788, Banksâ 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 Associationâs progress, and when two years later he heard that the Committee were planning a new expedition, he was quick to repeat his offer.
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