The quest for Timbuktu began, as such things sometimes did, in a room above a London pub.
On June 9, 1788, a group of nine powerful men gathered at the St. Alban’s Tavern, a rifle shot from the king’s official residence at St. James’s Palace, and settled in to discuss the future of exploration. This meeting of the exclusive Saturday’s Club—it did not seem to matter that today was a Monday—included a former secretary of state, a future governor-general of India, and a lord of the king’s bedchamber, as well as a smattering of knights of the realm. Eight of the club’s full complement of twelve sat in Parliament; six were fellows of the elite scientific institution the Royal Society. One—the key player in this gathering of key players—was the society’s president, Sir Joseph Banks.
Banks was forty-five then, bibulous, running to fat. Unlike his most famous predecessor, Isaac Newton, he was well liked: James Boswell described him as “an elephant, quite placid and gentle,” who allowed you to “get upon his back or play with his proboscis.” He had been educated at Harrow and Eton, where he discovered a hatred of the classics and a love of botany, and soon after leaving Oxford had embarked on his first scientific adventure, traveling as a naturalist on a Royal Navy frigate bound for Newfoundland and Labrador. This was a mere dress rehearsal, however, for the journey that would make his name: James Cook’s first circumnavigation. He returned from that three-year voyage in 1771 with a staggering thirty thousand plant specimens and a fame that surpassed even that of Cook. He became a close friend of George III, developing his Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew into a major center of research, and by the age of thirty-five was leading the world’s foremost scientific institution, the Royal Society. He would remain the society’s president for the next four decades, building up a network of friends and acquaintances that included the most illustrious natural philosophers of the time—Benjamin Franklin, Carl Linnaeus—as well as creative thinkers and statesmen from Thomas Paine to Henri Christophe, the king of Haiti. From his house at 32 Soho Square he fired off thousands of letters dispensing patronage and advice to the projects that caught his enthusiasm. What a lot of enthusiasms there were.
Toward the end of the Age of Enlightenment, giant steps were being taken in every field of human endeavor, from geography and music to animal husbandry and rhubarb cultivation. It was a time of revolution in politics—in 1783, America had won independence from one monarch; in 1789, France would execute another—and in science too. Banks’s contributions to the latter were immense. He would support William Roy, the founder of the Ordnance Survey; William Smith, the creator of the world’s first geological chart; and William Herschel, the first person in history to discover a planet of the solar system, Uranus. From his seats on the Board of Agriculture and the Board of Longitude, Banks would help modernize grain production and navigation, while as a trustee of the British Museum he would develop collections that would form the basis of the Natural History Museum and the British Library. Overseas ventures especially caught Banks’s interest: he was behind HMS Bounty’s ill-fated mission to transplant breadfruit from Tahiti to feed slaves in the Caribbean, and promoted the establishment of a penal colony in Australia. Only that January, the first fleet of convicts had arrived on a shore he had once searched for new plant species, which Cook had christened Botany Bay.
In the summer of 1788, Banks and his friends were about to turn their attention in a new direction. Africa at that time was an obscure continent to Western geography, and Banks was unusual in having set foot on it, when Cook’s ship Endeavour dropped anchor in the bay of Cape Town in 1771. Explorers might have crossed the Antarctic Circle, but what they knew of nearby Africa was a joke, as a satirical ditty penned half a century earlier by the satirist Jonathan Swift made clear:
So Geographers in Afric-maps,
With Savage-Pictures fill their gaps;
And o’er unhabitable downs
Place Elephants for want of towns.
Interest in this neglected continent had been sparked in the mid-1770s by James Bruce, a Scottish squire who had set out to discover the source of the Nile and ended up living in Ethiopia for two years. “Africa is indeed coming into fashion,” Horace Walpole wrote in 1774. “There 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.” As a result, Banks’s own exploits, Walpole noted cattily, were “quite forgotten.”
If Africa was indeed in fashion in London, it was also the subject of a looming moral crisis that would shape British foreign policy for the next half century. By the late 1700s, trade on the Guinea coasts—which had been named for their principal commodities of ivory, gold, slave, and grain—had become a key plank of the British economy. In the half century to 1772, the value of the African trade had increased sevenfold, to almost a million pounds a year. “How vast is the importance of our trade to Africa,” wrote an anonymous English merchant that year, “which is the first principle and foundation of all the rest; the main spring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion.” Much of the trade was in humans: sea captains based in London, Liverpool, and Bristol swapped guns made in Birmingham and East Anglian cloth for slaves, who were shipped to the West Indian tobacco and sugar plantations that kept the British economy afloat. In the 1760s British vessels had carried forty-two thousand slaves a year across the Atlantic, more than any other European nation.
Now, though, Britain’s conscience was beginning to be pricked, as people came into contact with the victims of slavery for the first time. There were ten thousand black people working as domestic servants in England in 1770, and by the 1780s a small spate of popular books appeared that set out the trade’s evils, including The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, which became a classic text for the Quaker antislavery activists who would found the abolitionist movement. For Saturday’s Club members such as Henry Beaufoy, the finding of alternative African commodities held the prospect of bringing the trade to an end. Others, including Banks, sniffed new commercial opportunities that could be good for Britain.
These motives were not spelled out in the club’s literature. The reason put forward for the new push into Africa, laid down by Beaufoy and approved by Banks, was the pure, age-old call of discovery:
Of 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.
Such was the success of British seafaring, and of Cook’s voyages in particular, that “nothing worthy of research by Sea, the Poles themselves excepted, remains to be examined,” Beaufoy continued. The future of exploration now lay onshore: at least a third of the habitable surface of the earth remained uncharted, including much of Asia and America, and almost the whole of Africa. Thanks to the efforts of George Forster, an East India Company employee who had traveled from Bengal to England through Afghanistan, Persia, and Russia, knowledge of Asia was likely to “advance towards perfection.” The fur traders of Montreal could meanwhile be relied upon to deal with the problem of western Canada. The African interior, however, was still “but a wide extended blank” on which geographers had traced, with hesitating hand, “a few names of unexplored rivers and of uncertain nations.”
Such ignorance, Beaufoy noted, “must be considered as a degree of reproach upon the present age.” To remedy this geographical stigma, the Saturday’s Club would establish a new body, the African Association, devoted to promoting the exploration of the continent:
Desirous 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 a conviction of 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.
The society’s rules were quickly hammered out: a membership subscription of five guineas a year was agreed on, and a committee of five was chosen. Banks would be treasurer and Beaufoy secretary, while Lord Rawdon, the bishop of Llandaff, and the lawyer Andrew Stuart were appointed assisting members. It would be the task of these men to recruit “geographical missionaries” to undertake the first journeys of discovery.
The remaining question, then, was where on that great uncharted landmass they should be sent.
TIM-BUK-TOO. The toponymy of these three short syllables is disputed. Do they refer to the “wall” or “well” of Buktu, a slave woman who lived in this storied place, five miles beyond the northernmost bend of the Niger River? Or are they Songhay, meaning “the camp of a woman with a large navel”? Or do they signify simply a low-lying place, hidden among dunes? There are many theories, many pronunciations, and many spellings of this word, which Bruce Chatwin described as a “ritual formula, once heard never forgotten.” What seems clear is that a settlement was established here around 1100, and it grew into an influential town thanks to its position at the juncture of the world’s largest hot desert and West Africa’s longest river.
The Sahara extends over 3.6 million sun-blasted square miles, stretching from the Atlantic to the Red Sea and from the Mediterranean to the Sahel. It covers more of the earth’s surface than the contiguous United States, China, or the continent of Australia. In popular imagination it consists of an ocean of dunes, and although these sand seas do exist, they account for less than a sixth of the whole. The Tuareg call the Sahara tinariwen, meaning “deserts,” plural, to reflect its many different personalities. There are skyscraping mountains 11,000 feet tall and salt flats the size of Lake Ontario where the quicksand can swallow a car. Mostly, there are hundreds of thousands of square miles of flat, bare rock.
Six thousand years ago, the Sahara was green; it was roamed by elephants, giraffes, and rhinoceros that drank from its lakes and ate its vegetation. Now much of it sees no rain for years at a time. When rain does fall, roaring torrents appear that scour deep trenches in the land before vanishing moments later. It is by some measures the earth’s hottest place, where shade temperatures can approach 140 degrees, but on winter nights, without the blankets of cloud cover, soil, and plant life, the desert can freeze white. Above this naked expanse, colliding layers of hot and cold air create violent winds that blow for fifty days at a time, stirring a suffocating dust that blocks out the sun and kicking up sand spouts that kill animals and uproot trees.
If the desert abhors life, on its southwestern edge it encounters the vital force of West Africa, a body of water locally called Joliba, the “great river” or “river of rivers,” and known to the rest of the world as the Niger. The Niger is born in a ravine 2,800 feet up in the Guinea highlands of Futa Jallon, one of the wettest places on earth. Futa Jallon is the source of three great West African watercourses, the others being the Gambia and the Senegal. Each of these gives its name to a country, but the mighty Niger gives its name to two. If it followed the shortest route to the Atlantic, this river would be a steep 150-mile torrent; instead it sets out confidently in the wrong direction, wandering northeast to slide miraculously among desert dunes in the great boomerang of the Niger Bend before emptying, 2,600 miles from its source, into the Bight of Benin.
Roughly a third of the way along its epic journey, the Niger becomes lost in a flat, 300-mile-long inland delta. From the air this looks like a stream running out across a beach: the water branches into dozens of shallow channels and creeks. Two-thirds of its flow evaporates here, and by the end of the dry season large tracts of riverbed are dead. In July, when the rain falls again and immense volumes of water pulse their way downstream, the dried-up channels and lakes fill, and life blossoms once more. Floating grasses and wild rice burst forth; fish and insects hatch; egrets and spoonbills arrive, joining hippos, crocodiles, and manatees. Cattle herders drive their animals to the grass that has grown along the river’s edge; farmers harvest rice, sorghum, and millet.
Timbuktu lies at the downstream end of the delta, and at the most northerly part of the bend. It is at the crossroads of the river trade and the desert caravan routes: the meeting place, in the old dictum, “of all who travel by camel or canoe.”
As the annual inundations of the Nile gave birth to the kingdoms of ancient Egypt, the Niger’s fertile inland delta nurtured its own civilizations. Even in classical times, reports of these lands filtered back to Europe. In the fifth century BCE, Herodotus noted the existence of a river on the far side of the desert that abounded in crocodiles, with a city on its banks that was inhabited by black sorcerers. Pliny the Elder, writing five centuries later, described monstrous tribes who lived there, including the Aegipani, who were “half men, half beast”; the Troglodytes, who couldn’t speak except to emit a batlike squeaking noise; and the Blemmyes, who had “no heads, their mouths and their eyes being seated in their breasts.” These malformed humans would survive long into the Middle Ages: the Hereford Mappa Mundi, created around 1300, depicts both Blemmyes and Troglodytes in Africa, while later historians would exaggerate Pliny’s Africans into people with one eye in the center of their forehead, or one giant foot that was large enough to shelter them from the sun.
In the seventh century, Christian Europe’s route to Africa was cut by the Muslim armies that swept west across the Mediterranean’s southern shore to the Atlantic, and for twelve hundred years information from beyond the Sahara was reduced to echoes that filtered back via the merchants who plied the desert. These were often fantastical—several reports reached medieval Europe of giant ants that harvested gold from African riverbeds—but there was substance to the rumors of the region’s wealth. Before the Spanish colonization of the Americas, two-thirds of all gold circulating in the Mediterranean came from the Sudan. The Muslim geographer al-Idrisi, writing in the twelfth century, related that the king of ancient Ghana was so rich he had “a Lump of Gold, not cast, nor wrought by any other Instruments, but perfectly formed by the Divine Providence only, of Thirty Pounds Weight,” while in the fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta—one of the most widely traveled people in history—chronicled the exploits of the Malian emperor Musa I. Musa—sometimes known as Mansa Musa, meaning “King Musa”—was said to have performed the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 with an entourage of sixty thousand soldiers, five hundred slaves, and one ton of gold as spending money, and was so free with his wealth that he depressed the price of the precious metal in Cairo for a generation.
Timbuktu first appeared in European geography fifty years later, on the Catalan Atlas, a 1375 map of the known world prepared by the Mallorcan cartographer Abraham Cresques for the king of Spain. The city’s name was spelled “Tenbuch,” and from the beginning it was associated with riches, since Cresques placed Musa next to it, holding a giant golden scepter and a huge gold nugget and wearing a heavy gold crown. Later reports seemed to confirm Cresques’s information: in 1454, a Venetian captain in the pay of the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator reached Waddan, a trading oasis south of Tripoli, and brought back an account of how camel caravans took rock salt to “Tanbutu” and then to “Melli, the empire of the blacks,” where it was exchanged for large quantities of gold. It wasn’t until the sixteenth century, however, that a firsthand account of Timbuktu was published in Europe that put the seal on the gilded legend.
The traveler’s name was al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Zayyati. Details of his biography are sketchy, but he is thought to have been born in Granada and to have moved when he was young to Fez, where he was well educated. Sometime between 1506 and 1510, at age seventeen, he was said to have accompanied one of his uncles on a diplomatic mission to the Sudan and visited Timbuktu. A decade later he was captured by Christian corsairs, who took him to Rome, where he was freed by Pope Leo X and converted to Christianity, adopting the name Johannis Leo de Medicis, which later became Leo Africanus. Leo settled down in Italy and wrote several books, but it was his Description of Africa, with its account of life in the Sudan, that was met with the greatest excitement: he had discovered a new world for Europeans, it was said, much as Columbus had by finding America.
In Leo’s description, Timbuktu was a wealthy and charming city. Though its houses were made mostly of mud and thatch, in the middle of the town there was “a temple built with masoned stones and limestone mortar by an architect of Béticos [in southern Spain] … and a large palace built by the same master builder, where the king stays.” The town’s several wells provided sweet water, and there was an abundance of cereals, cattle, milk, and butter; salt, however, was very expensive, as it had to be brought five hundred miles from the desert mines. The city’s inhabitants were “very rich,” he noted, and instead of using coined money they used pieces of pure gold. As well as keeping a standing army of three thousand horsemen plus a large number of foot soldiers who shot poisoned arrows, the king of Timbuktu owned “great treasure in coin and gold ingots,” one of which weighed thirteen hundred pounds, and his court was “magnificent”:
When the king goes from one town to another with his courtiers, he rides a camel, and the horses are led by grooms. If it is necessary to fight, the grooms hobble the camels, and the soldiers all mount the horses. When anyone wants to address the king, he kneels before him, takes a handful of dust and sprinkles it over his head and shoulders.
The people of the city had a lighthearted nature: “It is their habit to wander in the town at night between ten p.m. and one a.m. playing musical instruments and dancing,” Leo wrote. There were also many educated people there. This meant there was a great appetite for manuscripts, which were valued more highly in the city’s markets than were other goods:
In Timbuktu there are numerous judges, scholars and priests, all well paid by the king, who greatly honours learned men. Many manuscript books from Barbary are sold. Such sales are more profitable than any other goods.
Leo’s work was widely translated. An English version was published in 1600 that sparked a wave of interest in Africa: it was a probable source for Shakespeare’s Othello, and its account of sub-Saharan wealth would have encouraged English adventurers to pursue the Portuguese farther down the Guinea coast. In 1620, an expedition led by the English gentleman Richard Jobson reached Tenda, on the Gambia; here an African merchant told him of a town farther upstream called Tomboconda, where there were “houses covered with gold.” Jobson’s account of his expedition was republished in 1625 by the anthologist Samuel Purchas, who exhorted his countrymen to further investigate the African continent. “The richest Mynes of Gold in the World are in Africa,” Purchas noted, “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 midst.”
By the late eighteenth century, the legend of golden Timbuktu was fixed in the European imagination. This was the magnet that would draw Europeans into the heart of West Africa.
The African Association committee did not waste time. Four days after the meeting at the St. Alban’s Tavern, they gathered in Banks’s house in Soho Square to discuss dispatching their first recruit “with all expedition” in search of new discoveries. It mattered little that, as one twentieth-century African statesman put it, “there was nothing to discover, we were here all the time.”
WHAT KIND of character would walk out into the extended blanks of the African Association’s maps? Who was brave, desperate, or arrogant enough to bet on the lottery of exploration, to chance his life—and it was always his—in a land whose principal features were unknown, never mind the nature of its inhabitants, its beasts, its climate and diseases? What reward could possibly entice a man to wander out among the Blemmyes and Troglodytes, armed with little more than a pistol and an umbrella? Any well-informed European asked in 1788 to travel into the continent’s interior should have recognized the journey as the death sentence it was and stayed at home. But the African Association’s recruits were not well informed. That, in many ways, was the point.
The geographical barriers were not insurmountable. Yes, the routes across the desert were littered with the skeletons of pack animals and slaves alike, but much like an ocean, the Sahara was crisscrossed with trade routes and had been traversed by caravans for centuries. In the tropics, the explorer could be brought to a halt by torrential rain, but there were no forbidding mountain ranges of the Asian sort, no impenetrable forests such as those in the Amazon basin. A traveler could move from one village to another via a network of established pathways and tracks.
More potentially dangerous was the reception a Christian explorer was likely to meet. After centuries of religious conflict, Muslims in northern Africa knew that Europeans wanted their trade and their land, while wandering infidels were a gift for desert tribesmen seeking legitimate sources of plunder. As the Senegal-based merchant Antoine Pruneau de Pommegorge noted in 1789, “It is impossible to have knowledge of the far interior of the country, because … the white who would be brave enough to attempt such a voyage would have his neck chopped off before he reached it.”
Farther south, people were more tolerant of non-Muslims, but a far greater threat lurked here, as an old slavers’ adage made clear:
Beware, beware the Bight of Benin,
For few come out though many go in!
Disease made West Africa the deadliest place in the world for Europeans. In the early nineteenth century, almost half of any company of soldiers stationed on the West African coast, which became known as the “white man’s grave,” could be expected to die within a year. The interior was reputed to be even more deadly: trade missions inland, which would have meant almost certain death for a European, were subcontracted to African-born merchants.
The region boasted such a rich ecology of burrowing parasites, viruses, bacteria, and insects that no explorer would escape. These included the Guinea worm, whose larvae entered the body in drinking water, then migrated to the tissue beneath the victim’s skin, where they grew, over several months, up to three feet long. If the host survived this agony, intensely painful pus-filled blisters would appear on the lower leg a year later, then rupture as the giant worms forced their way out. The blood-sucking tsetse fly, meanwhile, carried sleeping sickness, whose initial symptoms of fever and weight loss gave way to personality changes and narcolepsy as the disease migrated to the brain, killing its host only after several years. Intestinal infections such as amoebic dysentery could be lethal too.
The most dangerous sickness by some margin, however, was malaria. The commonest form of this parasite in West Africa, Plasmodium falciparum, is also the most deadly: it still kills hundreds of thousands a year. The mosquito that carries it thrives around humans, and its larvae can grow in a puddle as small as an animal’s footprint. Once injected into the body, malarial microorganisms enter the bloodstream and are carried to the liver, where they grow inside cells that pop eight to twelve days later, releasing tens of thousands of offspring, which then start to invade the host’s red blood cells and eat them from inside. When each cell implodes, the parasites move on, until the host’s blood is being eaten on a massive scale. Victims begin to vomit up bile, and their skin, fingernails, and eyes take on a yellow hue. Finally, their stools and urine turn black, by which time death is not far away.
In 1788, neither malaria nor its vector was understood: the disease was blamed on bad air, or “miasma.” Though the bark of the cinchona tree was a known treatment, it wasn’t used effectively and the quinine it contained wasn’t isolated until 1820. West Africans had at least some resistance from being exposed to the disease in childhood; Europeans had none.
Like their explorers, the members of the fledgling African Association in London were largely unaware of these hazards. James Bruce’s sojourn in Ethiopia had proved that African travel did not have to be lethal, while Cook and others had shown that the world was open to the right sort of cautious investigation: Why should traveling in Africa prove any more difficult than, say, navigating the Great Barrier Reef? For the right sort of character, with the right sort of constitution, blessed with faith and good luck, anything was surely possible.
They were not short of volunteers. Within days of their first meeting, the African Association committee had found two highly suitable recruits.
Simon Lucas, the son of a London wine merchant, had been sent to Cádiz as a boy to learn his trade, but was captured by a mob of Barbary pirates, the Salé Rovers, who sold him as a slave to the imperial court of Morocco. He remained there for three years, and after his release went back to serve for sixteen years as a British diplomat, before finally returning in 1785 to England, where he was made Oriental interpreter at the Court of St. James’s. He offered his services to the African Association on condition that the committee secure paid leave for the duration of his mission.
Lucas was sick in June 1788, so the first departure fell to the association’s second recruit, the thirty-seven-year-old American John Ledyard. Ledyard was also highly qualified, though in a very different way. Everyone who encountered this fine physical specimen appears to have been overwhelmed by his steady eye and his open countenance. He was “an extraordinary man,” Beaufoy noted, who “seemed from his youth to have felt an invincible desire to make himself acquainted with the unknown, or imperfectly discovered regions of the globe.”
Ledyard had been raised in Hartford, Connecticut, and showed an early penchant for adventure by escaping from the newly founded Dartmouth College and paddling a forty-foot dugout canoe 150 miles down the Connecticut River. He quit Dartmouth for good after that, joining an Atlantic merchantman that took him to Europe, where, in 1775, he enlisted as a marine in order to secure an introduction to Captain Cook. Cook took Ledyard on his third and final voyage, during which, it is sometimes claimed, Ledyard became the first recorded Euro-American to get a tattoo. On his return, he deserted rather than fight with the Royal Navy against his own country, and settled down to write an account of the circumnavigation that became a bestseller.
The mid-1780s found him in Paris, where he made friends with John Paul Jones and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, then United States ambassador to France, was as impressed with Ledyard as everyone else: he was “a man of genius, of some science, and of fearless courage and enterprise,” Jefferson wrote. He suggested that Ledyard try to find an overland route from Europe to the Americas via Saint Petersburg, Kamchatka, and Nootka Sound, and signed up his friend Joseph Banks as a sponsor. The explorer set out for the Siberian wastes and reached Yakutsk before being arrested as a spy, on Catherine the Great’s orders. He was deported, paying for his passage to London with a check drawn on Banks’s name, and showed up at the Royal Society president’s London house in June 1788, dressed in rags. His timing was perfect. Banks immediately suggested “an adventure almost as perilous as the one from which he had returned”—in Africa. The penniless Ledyard was keen, and Banks sent his potential recruit to Beaufoy for a second opinion. Needless to say, Ledyard quickly won him over, as Beaufoy recorded:
I was struck with the manliness of his person, the breadth of his chest, the openness of his countenance, and the inquietude of his eye. I spread the map of Africa before him, and tracing a line from Cairo to Sennar, 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. He said, he should think himself singularly fortunate to be entrusted with the adventure.
Another promoter of exploration, in a different age, might have asked whether a traveler who had just returned in rags from a two-year, 7,000-mile journey was ready for a mission that, if all went well, would last a further three years. Ledyard was required to travel from Marseilles to Cairo, Mecca, and then Nubia, cross the desert lengthways, find the Niger, and make his way home. It meant covering at least 12,500 miles, mostly overland, through some of the most hostile territory on earth. But Beaufoy recorded no qualms. When, he asked the candidate, would he be able to set out?
“Tomorrow morning,” Ledyard responded.
In fact, the association gave him several more days. He left London on June 30, 1788, telling Beaufoy that he was “accustomed to hardships” and evils that were “terrible to bear,” but they had never prevented him from his purpose. To Banks he said, “If I 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.”
RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON, writing sixty years later, described the moment of setting out on a journey of African exploration as one of the gladdest moments in human life: “Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Home, man feels once more happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood.” Ledyard was equally exalted by his departure. “Truly is it written, that the ways of God are past finding out, and his decrees unsearchable,” he wrote to his mother. “Is the Lord thus great? So also is he good. I am an instance of it. I 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! What rich subjects have I for praise, love, and adoration!”
His route south took him through Paris, where he stayed for a week, meeting up with his friend Jefferson, who evidently disapproved of his working for the British but helped make arrangements for the onward journey; Ledyard thereafter sent regular updates to his fellow American. In Marseilles he boarded a ship bound for Egypt, which presented him with immediate difficulties. Alexandria was “more wretched” than anything he had seen, he told Jefferson, filled as it was with “poverty, rapine, murder, tumult, blind bigotry, cruel persecution [and] pestilence!” He reached Cairo in the oppressive heat of mid-August and found it to be “a wretched hole, and a nest of vagabonds,” half the size of Paris, while the mighty Nile was “a mere puddle compared to the accounts we have of it,” no more impressive than the Connecticut River:
Sweet are the songs of Egypt on paper … Who is not ravished with gums, balms, dates, figs, pomegranates, circassia, and sycamores, without recollecting that amidst these are dust, hot and fainting winds, bugs, musquitoes, spiders, flies, leprosy, fevers and almost universal blindness?
He spent three months in Cairo, preparing for his role as a Muslim traveler dressed in a “common Turkish habit” and gleaning what he could about the route ahead. He abandoned his plan to go to Mecca and instead began researching the route west via Sennar, a sultanate in the north of the modern state of Sudan. His greatest source of information was the slave market. Twenty thousand slaves would be imported to Egypt that year, he was told, and it was from these people that he began to get an idea of the scale and danger of his journey. “A caravan goes from here [Cairo] to Fezzan,” he discovered, “which they call a journey of fifty days; and from Fezzan to Tombouctou, 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 Tombouctou, one thousand eight hundred miles. From here to Sennar is reckoned six hundred miles.” If he were to remain healthy and unmolested and to travel nonstop—three enormous suppositions—it would take at least six months to reach Timbuktu.
There was great promise in the countries along his route, however: “Wangara is talked of here as a place producing much gold,” he noted. “The King of Wangara (whom I hope to see in about three months after leaving this) is said to dispose of just what quantity he pleases of his gold; sometimes a great deal, and sometimes little or none; and this, it is said, he does to prevent strangers knowing how rich he is, and that he may live in peace.” Nevertheless, the strain of the Cairene environment and the task ahead was apparent as he prepared to leave the city on November 15. By the time of his final letter to Jefferson he was in a very different mood from the one in which he had set out:
I have passed my time disagreeably here … I assure myself, that even your curiosity and love of antiquity would not detain you in Egypt three months … From Cairo I am to travel southwest, about three hundred leagues, to a black king. Then my present conductors will leave me to my fate. Beyond this, I suppose I shall go alone … I shall not forget you; indeed, it will be a consolation to think of you in my last moments. Be happy.
Ledyard never reached the black king. He was still in Cairo when he fell ill with a “bilious complaint,” probably stomach cramps caused by dysentery or food poisoning, later that month. The sickness didn’t kill him, but the treatment did: he took the common remedy of vitriolic acid, but consumed so much that it produced “violent burning pains” that threatened to be fatal. He tried to cure these with tartar emetic, a potassium salt that was intended to induce vomiting but instead made him much worse. “All was in vain,” recorded his biographer, Jared Sparks. “The best medical skill in Cairo was called to his aid without effect.” Three days later, Ledyard was dead.
A correspondence ensued among Banks and Beaufoy, Jefferson, and Banks’s acquaintance Thomas Paine. The men of the African Association told Paine that the caravan with which Ledyard intended to travel had been continually delayed, and at last he was thrown “into a violent rage with his conductors which deranged something in his system.” Several years later, Banks reflected that they had been unlucky with this first mission, “for it failed by the death of Our Traveller Ledyard, whose health when he left England appeared to promise a long life, and whose strength of Body to overcome the fatigues of Travel … had been before fully tried.”
In a eulogy, Beaufoy noted that Ledyard had been “adventurous beyond the conception of ordinary men, yet wary and considerate, and attentive to all precautions.” He appeared, Beaufoy wrote, “to be formed by Nature for achievements of hardihood and peril.” It was impossible to gloss over the truth, however: the African Association’s first wandering hero had died by accident, in extreme pain, without getting farther than Cairo.