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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At 8.30 on the morning of Sunday, 1 February 1789, with Ledyard already dead and buried in Cairo, Lucas passed through the gates of Tripoli bound for the interior, armed with a recommendation from the Bashaw. With twenty-one camels to carry their cargo and baggage, the caravan consisted of the younger Sharif Fuad and three other merchants on horseback, the older Sharif Imhammad on an ass, Lucas’ black servant on a camel and a dozen men of Fezzan on foot. Walking along with them were three freed slaves and their wives, on their way to their homes across the desert. For his part, the African Association’s missionary now wore his hair so long that he looked, in his own words, ‘like a London Jew in deep mourning’.8 Dressed in his Turkish robes and riding the Bashaw’s fine mule, travelling in the company of descendants of the Prophet and a relative of the King of Fezzan, assured of the protection of the Bashaw of Tripoli and the friendship of his Foreign Minister, Lucas was as secure in his saddle as any eighteenth-century European traveller could be. Another traveller in his place would have been more optimistic about his chances of success. But Lucas was well aware that he was better suited to the rituals and intrigues of the court than the challenge of the desert.

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

‘Wearied by fruitless expectations of a peace,’ Beaufoy explained to the members of the Association, ‘disappointed in their expedients, and warned by the increasing heat, that the season for a journey to Fezzan was already past, the Shereefs [sic] now resolved to proceed to the intended places of their summer residence. The Shereef Fouwad [sic] retired to Wadan, his native town; and the Shereef Imhammed, with tears in his eyes, and an earnest prayer that he might see his friend Mr. Lucas again in November, retired to the mountains, where he had many acquaintance, and could live at small expense.’9

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

Abandoned by the two men who had guaranteed his safety on the journey into the desert, faced with the prospect of being caught in the Sahara during the summer – and remember, as far as he knew, no white man had ever been so far into the great desert in any season – fearful of passing through country in which the Bashaw was conducting a campaign of attrition against rebellious desert tribes, Lucas decided to turn back. On 20 March, as Beaufoy recorded in the Association’s Proceedings, ‘Mr. Lucas took leave of the Governor, to whose civilities he had been much indebted, and having accompanied a small caravan as far as Lebida, embarked on a coasting vessel at the neighbouring village of Legatah, and went by sea to Tripoli.’10 The Bashaw was clearly delighted to have this troublesome foreigner out of the desert, accepted the return of his mule and wished Lucas better luck for another year. Even then Lucas could have spent the summer on the coast. Had he done so, he might have become a celebrated traveller, in spite of himself, for in July the inhabitants of Tripoli were thrilled by the rare appearance of a prince of Borno, an entertaining, well-informed man with a taste for large pearls and jewel-encrusted earrings. This prince might have invited Lucas to visit his country. But Lucas did not stay. On 6 April he sailed out of Tripoli, spent an extended quarantine on Malta (there was a suspicion that there was plague in Mesurata), continued to Marseilles and was back in England by 26 July, some ten months after he had left. Unexpectedly, although he had failed to travel more than a few miles away from the African coast, he was not going home empty-handed.

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

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

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

* 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

The Moors’ Tales

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

Edward Gibbon, Of the Position of the Meridional Line (1790–91)1

London, May 1789

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

A general meeting of the subscribers to the association for promoting the discovery of the interior parts of Africa, was held at the St. Alban’s Tavern, when an account of the proceedings of the committee during the past year, and of the interesting intelligence which had been received in the course of it, particularly from the late Mr. Ledyard, was submitted to their consideration. By this intelligence, every doubt is removed of the practicability of the object for which the society was instituted; and as several persons have offered themselves as candidates to succeed the late Mr. Ledyard in the service of the Association, there is reason to suppose, that the knowledge already obtained will soon be followed by more extensive discoveries.2

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

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

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

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

Had these new recruits discovered the bungling nature of the Association’s first missions, of Ledyard’s unfortunate death in Cairo and Lucas’ lame approach to the Sahara, they might have disagreed with Beaufoy’s claim that ‘every doubt has been removed’. Some might have gone so far as to suggest that the Association’s cause was hopeless. But they had not been given all of the details and neither would they be, at least not for some time, because the Committee had included in their founding charter a resolution to share with the members only that information which ‘in the opinion of the committee, may, without endangering the object of their Association, be made public’.3 But even though they had covered their backs, there was a new urgency about the cause. Results were needed. All eyes turned to the south.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Moroccan, who had also seen something of the world, knew that reassurances and confidences would fill neither his belly nor his pocketbook. But rather than walk away from the Association, he tried a different approach. For reasons that are not clear, he singled out Lord Rawdon. Perhaps because the Irish peer was the youngest member of the Committee, perhaps because he appeared more sympathetic during the Committee hearing, or perhaps because Ben Ali believed he was the most trustworthy, or the most gullible – whatever the reason, on Wednesday, 10 June, Rawdon received a letter from a Dr W. Thomson. ‘At the desire of Said Aben Ali I write this … He talks of making with your Lp [Lordship] personally, a Covenant before God with Bread and Salt.’ Thomson was clearly reluctant to be writing the letter. ‘I endeavoured to explain to him,’ he continued, ‘that it was not for me to determine, either how far your L’p might be inclined to pledge your Honour as an Individual, considered apart from the Society, or to submit to any other Rites in giving your Word than what was usual with a British Nobleman.’4