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

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 Association’s first year, they are invited to put forward the names of people they think will make suitable members – 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 ‘the choice of the persons who are to be sent on the discovery of the interior parts of Africa, together with the Society’s correspondence, and the management of its funds’.8 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 – there is one ‘for preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers’ and another ‘for reducing the exorbitant Price of Butcher’s Meat’.9 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 Sinclair’s son provided a blunt but also a neat answer. ‘Hitherto,’ he observed, ‘Europeans 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.’10

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 Britain’s 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 – a departure every two days – carrying £866,000 worth of goods (£43.3 million).11

By 1788 these figures are considerably higher, and West Africa has become one of Europe’s 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* 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 Britain’s 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 Association’s 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 ‘upon 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 …’12 While it took a generation for the price of gold to recover in Cairo, the legend of Mali’s immense gold reserves lasted at least until the summer of 1788.

Mansa Musa’s 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 Saturday’s Club’s 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, ‘a populous City, without Walls, famous for Business and useful for Arts for the Advantage of its People’; Kuku, where ‘the Governors and Nobility are covered with Sattin’; and Ghana, where the King, for decoration, had ‘an Lump of Gold, not cast, nor wrought by any other Instruments, but perfectly formed by the Divine Providence only, of thirty Pounds Weight’. Leo Africanus, four hundred years later, had this to say of Timbuktu: ‘The 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 …’13 Instead of slaves, so the thinking goes, they could pay for imported European goods with these ‘Barrs of Gold’.

All this has made an impression on the imaginations of members of the Saturday’s Club, as is clear from Beaufoy’s prediction that ‘Their 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.’14 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. What’s 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 – classical sites such as Pompeii are even now being excavated – the natural world is being classified by the likes of Linnaeus, while Cook’s 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 – he notes that the Swedish traveller Dr André Sparrman, a member of Cook’s 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 Bruce’s 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.

Leo’s 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 dell’Africa, published in 1550 and translated into English as A Geographical Historie of Africa in 1600, became the authority on African geography.

‘I saw 15 kingdoms of the Negroes myself,’ Leo writes of the interior of the continent, ‘but there are several others which I never saw, but the Negroes know them well.’15 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.16

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 river’s 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 Leo’s 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 Boulton’s map.

* Sancho was born on a slave ship, soon orphaned and handed to three ‘maidens’ 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. Sancho’s son William worked for a time as Sir Joseph Banks’ librarian before setting himself up as a bookseller.

† 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.

* 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

A Friend to Mankind

‘In 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.’

Rev. John Sinclair, Memoir of the Life and Works of Sir John Sinclair1

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 President’s 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.2 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: ‘A nutshell might with perfect ease enclose/Three-quarters of his sense, and all his learning.’3

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 didn’t waste their poison on just anybody. And even Pindar, a man whose pen was more poisoned than most, had to salute Banks’ legendary hospitality:

To give a breakfast in Soho,

Sir Joseph’s 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 pow’rs few Gentlemen inherit.4

With the notable exception of a brothel known as Hooper’s Hotel that counted the Prince of Wales among its patrons, Sir Joseph’s 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,* a woman described as ‘comely and modest’ – 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 – 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, ‘handsome’ 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 ‘no two people ever contributed more to the happiness of others than they both have to mine. They are everything to me.’5 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 Joseph’s 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.*

These collections, particularly the library, were unique resources and not ones that Banks thought of keeping to himself.† 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 Society’s season. As Feltham’s 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 – 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 Queen’s Robes, discovered. Meeting him at a Windsor tea party she complained that he was ‘so 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?’6 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 Ledyard’s arrival, on 17 June, Lord Rawdon, Henry Beaufoy and the lawyer Andrew Stuart met at Banks’ house to select the African Association’s 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 Treasurer’s advice and concluded that ‘the employment of Mr. Ledyard may be eminently useful to the purposes of the Association’.7 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 – and the dangers – 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 ‘as 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 acquainted’. 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 world’s 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 Ledyard’s employers were aware of the difficulty. ‘If 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.’8