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

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 ‘an allowance’5 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 Ali’s interviews have not survived, but the Committee were clearly convinced by him, for they now tentatively agreed to his offer to take two of their missionaries into the interior. The proposed route was another departure for them: Ben Ali did not want to approach Africa by way of Cairo, Tripoli or even his native Morocco. Instead, he suggested that they abandoned their planned bisection of northern Africa and approached from the west, sailing up the River Gambia and then continuing overland to Timbuktu. For the Committee, this was a radical change in their approach to the continent, but it was less of a problem than the terms Ben Ali demanded. For his part in the adventure, he wanted the Association to provide him with £300 in cash or gold. With this, he would buy goods to trade in the interior, which would serve two crucial purposes: proceeds from the sale of these goods would pay for their travel deeper into the interior and, just as important, would also give credibility to their disguise as merchants. There was one other demand: if the mission was successful, if he and the two travellers reached Timbuktu and made it back to London, he wanted the Association to provide him with a pension of £200 a year.

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

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

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

Beaufoy still had his doubts. On 23 July he wrote to Banks that he had seen Swediaur and had told him, much to the doctor’s satisfaction, ‘that you seem inclined to place him at the head of the Gambia adventure and to give him the aid of the Moor, as a useful but subordinate partner in the business of the Journey’.6 Beaufoy was happy for Swediaur and Hollen Vergen to represent the Association, though like Banks he mistrusted Dodsworth and Ben Ali. As the success of the mission depended on Ben Ali, whatever Swediaur’s role, Beaufoy continued to raise objections, arguing that risking some £300 of the Association’s money in this way was ‘equally inconsistent with the state of our funds and with the common maxims of Mercantile prudence’.7 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.* At this stage, in the summer of 1789, Sansom was not a member of the Association – he didn’t sign up until 1791 – but Banks knew him well enough to make an approach, and Sansom appeared to be happy to help: together with several business colleagues he offered to send out a cargo of £500 worth of goods in the care of one of his own men. When they reached Timbuktu, Swediaur would be allowed to trade with these goods. Presumably Sansom and his partners thought it was worth risking £500 on a venture that might give them a toehold in the Timbuktu trade.

Banks was delighted. The plan, as laid out in the Committee’s minutes, ran as follows: Swediaur and Hollen Vergen, ‘being animated by an earnest desire of promoting the great object of the Association for the discovery of the Interior parts of Africa’, were to sail to the Gambia with Ben Ali as their guide and interpreter. While they made the much-longed-for journey to Timbuktu, Sansom’s cargo would remain on the Atlantic coast. Once the missionaries reached Timbuktu, the cargo would be sent on and Swediaur and Hollen Vergen would sell the goods. The financial arrangements had also fallen neatly into place: the Association would pay £300 travelling expenses for the three men, £125 to equip Swediaur and Hollen Vergen, £50 a year (for a maximum of three years) to Hollen Vergen and £100 to Swediaur if he reached Timbuktu and lived to tell the tale. Swediaur would also earn a commission on the sale of Sansom’s cargo. The only person who might possibly have been unhappy with the deal was Ben Ali, who had both a greater role and a greater reward in mind when he first approached the Association. But that kind of concern quickly became irrelevant on 6 August, when Sir Joseph scribbled a hasty note to Beaufoy: ‘The Moor is missing.’8

Dodsworth, who was still translating and, to some extent, chaperoning Ben Ali, had brought the bad news to Soho Square, announcing that the Moor had simply vanished, leaving his rooms and taking nothing with him. Not knowing of any other motive, Dodsworth assumed that he had killed himself ‘from his uneasiness of mind’.9 But Beaufoy quickly made enquiries and heard otherwise. Ben Ali, it seems, was lying low in Hampstead, forced into hiding by the appearance of an angry pregnant woman pressing paternity claims on him. She was not the first, and perhaps, like the others, she would not have managed to disrupt the Moor’s – and therefore the Association’s – plans had she not brought the police along with her. Dodsworth had already posted bail to keep Ben Ali out of jail on one occasion, but could see no way to help him now.

When Banks heard the news, he suffered one of his periodic eruptions of moral outrage. ‘How,’ he demanded to know, ‘is this Consonant with an intention of travelling in our service?’10 The answer was obvious: it was not.

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

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

Among the many people Banks contacted was James Matra in Morocco. Matra, who had already warned of the ‘absolute impossibility’ of exploring Africa through Morocco, now repeated his reservations in a letter from Gibraltar, explaining that, ‘After all my hopes [of providing new information] I am obliged to tell you my expectations of procuring you intelligence of the route thro [sic] the interior of this Country are wonderfully disappointed – I have Paper in abundance, but not to the purpose …’11 If he wasn’t able to deliver new intelligence, Matra could at least offer general encouragement: ‘By what I hear of Tombucktoo [sic], called by the Moors Timkitoo, it seems a Country well worth examining.’12 But at the same time as he was insisting that he had nothing new to tell Banks, Matra was writing a detailed account of the trade through Morocco for Lord Sydney, the Secretary of State for the Home Department and for the Barbary States of North Africa.

The previous October, most likely at Banks’ suggestion, Sydney had written to the British consuls in the Barbary States asking them to report on trade and trading routes into the Sahara and central Africa. Neither Tully in Tripoli nor Consul Logie in Algiers replied to His Lordship’s request, but Matra sent in a lengthy report from Tangier, which included this overview: ‘The Caravan Trade from Morocco to Guinea proceeds no further South than to Tambuctoo, the Capital of Negroland. This Town, I believe, is a general Rendezvous not only for the people of this Country [Morocco] but likewise for the Traders of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli …’ He then offered the sort of details he had told Banks were unavailable. The meat of it was this: caravans of up to three hundred people carried European products – cloths, beads, spices, brassware and needles – to the interior and brought tobacco and salt, gold dust, ivory, slaves and gum back to the north. As far as he could tell, as many as four thousand slaves were being marched across the desert to Morocco each year, among them eunuchs ‘of a Country called Bambara’,13 whose king was said to be happy to exchange some twenty of them for a good horse. Perhaps most tantalising for the African Association was news that the region of Timbuktu was inhabited ‘by a civilized and quiet People and abounds with large unfortified Towns … The Country is fruitful and produces much Corn and Rice near the Rivers or Lakes, I suppose, for I am informed it never rains there: It abounds likewise with Cattle and Sheep …’14

Much of this new information was published in The Proceedings of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, a report written by Beaufoy and published in 1790. Running to 115 quarto pages, it contains a remarkable amount of detail on the country previously marked on maps as Nigritia or Bilad as-Sudan (both terms refer to ‘the Land of the Blacks’). In the margin, beside each statement, Beaufoy identified the principal source of information, either Imhammad or Ben Ali. Here, at last, were men of the south describing their lands, the season for Saharan travel, the measures to be taken when travelling by camel, the distances that could reasonably be covered in a day – ‘three miles in the hour’ for ‘seldom more than seven or eight [hours] in a day’.15 Here too was confirmation of the existence of the great kingdoms of Katsina and Borno, of cities and towns – Murzuq, Domboo, Kanem, Ganatt, Assouda and Weddan – that had previously been known only by hearsay, and lists of hitherto unknown tribes, the Kardee, the Serrowah, the Showva, Battah, Mulgui and others. And here too was the first mention in any account of North Africa of a place called Tibesti, several hundred miles across the desert and described as mountainous, home to a wild tribe and to ‘vales fertile in corn and pasturage for cattle, of which they have numerous herds’.16 Their camels were said to be the finest in Africa.

There was much here to reassure the Committee, such as, for instance, Lucas’ claim that ‘travelling through all this part of Africa is considered as so secure, that the Shereef Imhammed, with the utmost chearfulness [sic] and confidence of safety, proposed to accompany and conduct Mr. Lucas, by the way of Fezzan and Cashna [Katsina], across the Niger, to Assenté [Ashanti], which borders on the Coast of the Christians’.17 Wishful thinking, but perhaps not impossible. Everything the Association had learned from its sources suggested that once a way into the interior was found, their problems would be over because, according to these accounts at least, food and water were abundant so long as you knew where to look for them. At the heart of these reports, unsurprisingly considering the informants were merchants, were descriptions of a lucrative trade in gold, salt, cotton, senna, ivory, ostrich feathers and a host of other commodities. Mention was also made of firearms: according to Imhammad, they were unknown in the inland states south of the Niger for the simple reason that ‘the Kings in the neighbourhood of the coast, [are] persuaded that if these powerful instruments of war should reach the possession of the populous inland States, their own independence would be lost’.18

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

The Committee were clearly disappointed at Lucas’ lack of endeavour, but equally they were delighted that he had returned and brought with him such corroboration. Whatever the cooling off between the missionary and his masters – and there is no further mention of Lucas’ mission in the Committee’s minute books – the Proceedings put a positive spin on the journey and generously explained that it had ended because he was ‘deprived of all prospect of arriving this year at Fezzan’.19 That may have been the end of Lucas, at least in our story, had not fortune brought to Beaufoy’s attention another North African with a story to sell.

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

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

Early in the spring of 1790, Beaufoy put aside his parliamentary duties to interview Shabeni and one of his companions. As with Ben Ali, Beaufoy offered Shabeni a deal: the Association would pay him twenty-five guineas in return for all he could tell them about the interior. As Shabeni spoke little or no English and Beaufoy knew even less Arabic, an interpreter was needed; Lucas was the obvious choice. Whatever Beaufoy had heard from Imhammad and Ben Ali now paled into insignificance as Shabeni described to his eager audience the great city of Timbuktu. It is easy to imagine the scene at Beaufoy’s house on Great George Street, the royal residences on one side and the Palace of Westminster, home of Parliament, on the other. When Shabeni started to talk, he transported them out of the room crowded with carved furniture, large oil paintings and knotted rugs and into the legendary African city. He began by describing its defences, a wide trench some twelve feet deep and a mud wall ‘sufficiently strong to defend the town against the wild Arabs’.20 There were three gates, lined with camel skin and ‘so full of nails that no hatchet can penetrate them; the front appears like one piece of iron’.21 Inside the walls, the Sultan lived in his considerable palace with an equally considerable harem. He was secure and wealthy, protected by a standing army of five thousand men and with such a store of wealth that he handed out gold dust to all and sundry, even his slaves. If this was good to hear, what came next was even better.

South-east of Timbuktu, eight or ten days downstream as he remembered it and around twelve hours’ journey inland from the river, Shabeni had entered a city that no one in Europe had ever even heard of. Hausa, he explained to the startled Beaufoy, was nearly as large as London. In fact it was so big that although he had lived there for two years, he never managed to see all of it. The King’s palace was equally imposing, hidden behind an eight-mile wall and protected by an army of 180,000 soldiers. Gold was found nearby, not by mining, for there were no mountains to excavate, but simply by digging up and refining the sand. There was a just government, conditions were stable, trade was profitable (caravans came from as far afield as India) and, perhaps most encouraging of all, unlike in many other places foreign merchants were required to pay neither tax nor duty to the Sultan, ‘as the Housaeens think they ought to be encouraged’.22 Even without any direct income from the foreigners, the royal revenue ‘is supposed to be immense’. Beaufoy suspended his disbelief and listened to this story with all the wonder of a child hearing a fairy tale. It was everything he and the Association had hoped for – civilisation, wealth and an enlightened ruler deep in the heart of Africa.

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

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

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

Rennell published his interpretations of the new information, his Construction of the Map of Africa, in 1790 as a companion piece to Beaufoy’s Proceedings. He began by noting that d’Anville used second- and twelfth-century geographers to fill in the centre of Africa and questioned why it had proved so difficult to obtain fresh information about the continent. The reason, he concluded, owed ‘more to natural causes, than to any absolute want of attention on the part of Geographers’:23

Africa stands alone in a geographical view! Penetrated by no inland seas, like the Mediterranean, Baltic, or Hudson’s Bay; nor overspread with extensive lakes, like those of North America; nor having in common with the other Continents, rivers running from the center to the extremities: but, on the contrary, its regions separated from each other by the least practicable of all boundaries, arid Desarts [sic] of such formidable extent, as to threaten those who traverse them, with the most horrible of all deaths, that arising from thirst! Placed in such circumstances, can we be surprised at our ignorance of its Interior Parts?24

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