Joseph Banks might have been dead and the African Association in decline, but in the early 1820s a new European competitor was about to join the race for Timbuktu. On December 3, 1824, the central committee of the newly formed Société de Géographie in Paris was given a curious piece of information by one of its founding officers, the cartographer Edme-François Jomard. According to the society’s minutes:
M. Jomard announced that an anonymous member had donated a thousand francs … to recompense the first traveller who has penetrated as far as the city of Timbuktu via Senegal, and who has procured (1) positive and accurate observations on the position of this city, on the course of rivers that run in its vicinity, and the trade of which it is the hub; (2) the most satisfactory information about the country between Timbuktu and Lake Chad, as well as the direction and height of the mountains that form the Sudan basin.
The idea of a Timbuktu prize evidently caught the imagination of the 217 savants who had established the Société de Géographie, since its value immediately began to snowball. A thousand-franc donation for “geographical discoveries” from Count Grigory Orlov, a Russian senator living in France, was immediately added to it, doubling the prize pot, whereupon the minister of the French navy doubled it again. Not to be outdone, the minister of foreign affairs added another two thousand, and the minister of the interior a further one thousand. Several other members came forward with more, so that by early 1825 it was worth a very healthy 10,000 francs, to which the society itself—which would judge the winner—added the promise of a prestigious Great Gold Medal of Exploration and Journeys of Discovery to go with the cash.
Still, it would not be easy to claim this substantial sum. As well as being “fortunate enough to surmount all perils attached to reaching Timbuktu,” the society’s Bulletin stated that the victorious contender would have to procure illuminating facts about the geography, produce, and trade of the country. In particular, the society required a map based on celestial observations, and a handwritten report containing information about the nature of the terrain, the depths of the wells and the water in them, the width and speed of streams and rivers, their color and clarity, and the produce of the land they served, the climate, the declination and inclination of the magnetic needle, and the breeds of animals that lived there. They should also return with specimens of fossils, shells, and plants, and a detailed study of the region’s inhabitants:
By observing the people, [the explorer] will take care to examine their habits, their ceremonies, their costumes, their weapons, their laws, their worship, the manner in which they feed, their diseases, their skin colour, the shape of their face, the nature of their hair, and also different objects of their trade.
For anyone who lived in the Sudan, this would have made uneasy reading. Although, as with that of the African Association, the research was undertaken in the name of geography—it was “an immense field to cultivate for the knowledge of the human races,” the Bulletin trumpeted, “for the history of civilizations, for their language, their customs and their religious ideas!”—this was also just the sort of information an imperial power would require. The relish with which ministers poured in government money would have been doubly suspicious. In fact, the “Prize for the Encouragement of a Journey to Timbuktu” looked very much like a late entrant’s attempt to buy her way into the Africa exploration game begun by her long-standing rival. The Bulletin admitted as much: it was a British government mission to Central Africa in 1823 that had drawn European attention once again to the continent, and it was only natural that the three-year-old Société de Géographie also should turn its eyes in this direction. It would be to France’s commercial advantage to find a route into the interior that followed Mungo Park, which would conveniently link up with long-established French settlements in Senegal.
As word of the prize spread, a half-dozen adventurers were rumored to be gearing up for attempts on the city, but there were two who became especially synonymous with the newly incentivized race for Timbuktu: René Caillié and Major Alexander Gordon Laing.
It was Laing who would send the “first letter ever written from that place by any Christian,” as the British consul in Tripoli, Hanmer Warrington, put it. The son of an Edinburgh schoolmaster, Laing worked briefly as a teacher himself before escaping into the army and postings to the exotic territories of Barbados, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone, where he was sent in 1819. In West Africa he led a number of missions into the interior, demonstrating the courage, physical robustness, and talent for self-promotion that would be essential to the attempt on Timbuktu already taking shape in his head. “I have had for many years a strong desire to penetrate into the interior of Africa,” he wrote to friends in 1821, “and that desire has been greatly increased by my arrival on the Coast [of West Africa].”
In 1824, in poor health, he was sent home to report the disastrous British defeat by the Ashanti at Nsamanko to the secretary of state for war and the colonies, Lord Bathurst. To the great irritation of his commanding officer in Sierra Leone, Sir Charles Turner—who complained that Laing was “unwize, unofficerlike, and unmanly” and that his “military exploits were [even] worse than his poetry”—the forty-year-old major ingratiated himself with Bathurst and was appointed to lead a “Timbuktu Mission.” In May 1825 he arrived in Tripoli, where he was greeted by Warrington, a hard-drinking patriot who was rumored to be an illegitimate son of George III, and immediately embarked on a whirlwind romance with the consul’s daughter, Emma. They were married at her father’s large estate on the outskirts of the city on July 14, four days before the groom set out for Timbuktu. Warrington had seen too many explorers ride off to their doom in the desert and refused to let the couple consummate their partnership until his return. “I will take good care my Daughter remains as pure & chaste as snow,” he wrote to Bathurst, in one of the more eccentric communications received at the War and Colonial Office.
Laing engaged a merchant, Shaykh Babani, to take him to Timbuktu for the sum of $2,500, a thousand of which was paid up front. Both the explorer and the consul formed a positive view of Babani, who was said to have lived in the mysterious city for many years. He was a man “of the most sterling worth,” Laing noted, “quiet, harmless, and inoffensive,” while Warrington judged him to be “one of the finest fellows [he] ever saw, with the best tempered & most prepossessing Countenance [he] ever beheld.” The shaykh would take Laing to Timbuktu in two and a half months, it was agreed, at the end of which he would pass Laing into the care of his particular friend, the “Great Sheikh, and Cheif Maraboot Mouckta,” who was powerful enough to ensure the explorer’s safe onward passage to the coast. Apart from Babani’s caravan, the expedition included two West African sailors, who Laing hoped would one day build a boat to sail the Niger; a Jewish interpreter; and a much-traveled Caribbean-born army trumpeter named Jack le Bore who acted as the explorer’s manservant. There was little subtlety to Laing’s approach: they would travel in Muslim robes, but lest anyone mistake their true identity, he would read Christian prayers to his attendants every Sunday, when they would all appear together “dressed as Englishmen.”
The expedition set out into the desert at the height of summer, when the thermometer regularly hit 120 degrees and the land was so arid that, according to Laing, “as little herbage was to be found as in the bottom of a tin mine in Cornwall.” It took almost two months to reach the ancient oasis town of Ghadames, less than three hundred miles from Tripoli, after Babani led the caravan on a roundabout route of a thousand miles. Seven camels went lame on this first part of the journey, while the men ran out of food and were down to their last rations of water. Most of Laing’s scientific equipment was also broken, as was his only rifle, which had been trodden on by a camel’s “great gouty foot.”
But it was Laing’s romantic soul that provided the most significant early threat to the expedition. In Ghadames he received a packet of letters from his new bride, including a pallid portrait of her that had been commissioned in Tripoli. His sweetheart’s consumptive appearance put Laing into a paroxysm. The following morning he wrote to Warrington, threatening to abandon his mission altogether as Emma was evidently pining for him:
My Emma is ill, is melancholy, is unhappy—her sunken eye, her pale cheek, and colourless lip haunt my imagination, and adieu to resolution—Was I within a day’s march of Tombuctoo, & to hear My Emma was ill—I wou’d turn about, and retrace my steps to Tripoli—What is Tombuctoo? What the Niger? what, the world to me? without my Emma?
By six p.m., though, he had recovered and was writing again, asking to be excused his “agitation of the morning.” The following day he was pledging once again to perform his duty “like a Trojan.”
After staying six weeks at Ghadames, Shaykh Babani’s caravan left for the southwest, reaching In Salah, in the district of Tuat, on December 2. Here, far beyond the reach of the Tripolitanian authorities, Babani was changing: he was now “needy and avaricious in the extreme,” wrote Laing. On January 9 they set out again. The caravan was jumpy. Every distant bush was taken for a mob of Tuareg marauders, and at one point Laing was mistaken for Mungo Park, but he paid little heed to the danger that implied. In the great arid plain of the Tanezrouft, which was “as flat as a bowling green, and as destitute of verdure as Melville Island [in the Arctic Circle] in the depth of winter,” a group of heavily armed Ahaggar Tuareg on fast camels joined them, riding side by side with the caravan. A few days later, after what Laing described as an act of “base treachery” by Babani, the Tuareg silently surrounded his tent at three a.m. and fell on him. The translator tried to run away but was caught and killed, as was one of the African sailors. The other was wounded in the leg, while Jack le Bore managed to escape. Laing, meanwhile, was shot and stabbed twenty-four times and left for dead.
Somehow, the gravely injured explorer managed to climb onto a camel that morning. He was carried a further four hundred miles to the territory of the powerful shaykh of the Kunta Arabs, Sidi Muhammad, where on May 10, 1826, he wrote to his father-in-law with his mangled left hand, detailing his appalling injuries. Even as Laing was convalescing, Sidi Muhammad’s desert camp was overwhelmed with a catastrophe of its own. On July 1, Laing wrote again to Warrington with news, this time datelining his letter “Azoad”:
With a mind sadly depressed with sickness, sorrow, and disappointment, I lift an unwilling pen to acquaint you that I am no further on my Journey than when I last addressed you.
A sickness, “something similar to yellow fever,” had swept through the camp and killed half the population, including Babani, Sidi Muhammad himself, and Jack le Bore. Laing had caught the fever too, but had recovered, and he was now the only one of his original party left alive. He was still suffering from “dreadful pains” in his head, arising from the severity of his wounds. Nevertheless, driven by a sense of destiny that bordered on madness, he determined to push on.
He was now only a few days’ ride from Timbuktu, but the timing of his arrival in the region could hardly have been worse: the city was falling under the control of the Muslim ruler of the Fulani empire of Masina, Ahmad Lobbo. Lobbo had recently been warned by the sultan of the powerful Sokoto caliphate not to let Europeans visit the Sudan on account of the abuses and corruptions they had committed in Egypt and elsewhere, and now he wrote to the governor of Timbuktu, telling him ominously to “take from [Laing] all hope of returning to our dominions.” The new Kunta shaykh, Sidi Muhammad’s eldest son, al-Mukhtar al-Saghir, repeatedly warned the explorer not to continue, but Laing insisted. Shaykh al-Mukhtar did what he could: he provided an escort to Timbuktu and wrote to the town’s governor, asking him to protect Laing.
Laing reached the city on August 13, 1826, a little over a year after leaving Tripoli, and five weeks later wrote his only letter from Timbuktu, to Warrington. He was not, strictly speaking, the first European ever to reach Timbuktu—Leo Africanus, after all, had been born in Europe and lived in Italy, and European mercenaries and renegades fought with the Moroccan army that invaded in 1591—but he was the first explorer to get there and send an account home, brief and cryptic though it was. If the city was a letdown, Laing was not going to say so now. It is likely that he spent weeks in Timbuktu filling his journals with observations he one day hoped to publish, but he didn’t want to share these with the British government just yet, and suddenly there was no time: a party of Fulani was expected and he had been urged to leave immediately. He couldn’t entirely disappoint his reader, however, so he stated simply that “the great Capital of central Africa” had “completely met [his] expectations” in every respect except size, and promised to write more fully from Segu, though the road ahead was “a vile one,” and he knew his perils were not at an end.
Laing left Timbuktu around three p.m. the following day, September 22, accompanied by a freed slave, Bungola, and an Arab boy. He set out north into the desert, toward Arawan, on a roundabout route designed to avoid Lobbo’s men. Then, like so many before, he disappeared.
THE SAHARA KEPT FEW SECRETS. Despite its immense size and small population, rumors traveled fast. Caravans picked up the gossip of every settlement they passed through, from the great markets to the smallest oases, and carried it with them to their destinations. It was always a surprise to students of the Sahara, the historian E. W. Bovill noted, that “in this tremendous desert everyone seemed to know what everyone else was doing.” In the early nineteenth century, few pieces of information moved more quickly than news of an intruding European.
The first echoes of Laing’s troubles reached Warrington in Tripoli in March 1826: there had been a treacherous attack on his party and the explorer had been badly injured. After that, the desert grapevine fell silent. As both consul and the explorer’s father-in-law, Warrington was in a compromised position made worse by his daughter’s distress and his own knowledge of the intrigue in the Tripolitanian court. Laing had traveled with the protection of the powerful pasha of Tripoli, Yusuf Karamanli, and now Warrington put Karamanli under great pressure to deliver news of Laing. In the spring of 1827, the pasha gave Warrington a copy of a report sent from Shaykh al-Mukhtar himself.
The leaders of Timbuktu had been embarrassed by their desire to look after their guest and the demands of their new sovereign, Ahmad Lobbo, the shaykh explained:
In order to reconcile the two interests, they permitted him to remain at Timbuctoo about a month … until he met with the enemy of God and his prophet, Hamed Ben Abayd Ben Rachal El Barbuchy, who persuaded him that he was able to conduct him to Arawan, from thence in order to embark at Sansandyng, and thence to continue his road to the great ocean.
The “enemy of God” was a shaykh of the Barabish (Bérabiche) Arabs who also went by the name Ahmadu Labeida. He and Laing left Timbuktu together, but halfway along the route the guide ordered his servants to seize Laing and kill him. Afterward they searched his baggage, whereupon “every thing of a useless nature, [such] as papers, letters, and books, were torn and thrown to the wind, for fear they should contain some magic, and the articles of value were retained.” This, said Shaykh al-Mukhtar, was the faithful history of the circumstances of Laing’s death.
Warrington forwarded the reports to the War and Colonial Office, without fully believing them. Some months later the British diplomat was aggrieved to hear of a letter sent on April 5 to the French newspaper L’étoile, which stated as fact that Laing was dead. There was no name attached to the letter, but it was datelined Sukkara-Ley-Tripoli, which happened to be the residence of the French consul, Baron Jean-Baptiste Rousseau. Warrington disapproved of the French in general and Rousseau in particular, and now he found a target for his wrath and grief. How could Rousseau know what Warrington did not? He conjured an elaborate plot among the French, Pasha Karamanli, and the pasha’s foreign minister, a debt-ridden Francophile named Hassuna D’Ghies. This man, Warrington believed, had been in cahoots with the treacherous Babani all along, and may even have sponsored Laing’s eventual killer. As Warrington sent back reports hinting at this conspiracy, a Royal Navy frigate was diverted to Tripoli to persuade the pasha to cooperate further with the consul’s investigations. That day, April 22, 1828, the pasha admitted for the first time that Laing was dead. In August, Bungola arrived in Tripoli, where he confirmed that the Barabish shaykh had “killed [the explorer,] being assisted by his black servants by many cuts of sword when asleep.” There was now no doubt about Laing’s fate.
The affair had a catastrophic effect on the already ailing Emma, who remarried and moved to Italy, but died the following year, at the age of twenty-eight, just four years after watching her beau ride out for Timbuktu. Her desperate father, meanwhile, fixated on the explorer’s journals, refusing to believe Shaykh al-Mukhtar’s assertion that they had been destroyed. There was no doubt that they would contain vital information about the interior that would make his son-in-law’s name and, equally important, prop up any future claim Britain might make on the rich African interior. His suspicions once again turned on D’Ghies and the French consul.
Rousseau in the meantime inadvertently fed his rival’s paranoia by declaring he had discovered the existence of a history of Timbuktu, which he hoped would soon be in his possession. The baron’s letters announcing his findings were published in the Société de Géographie’s Bulletin in 1827 and are almost certainly the first mentions in European literature of the Tarikh al-sudan, although he didn’t know it was called that. Often misattributed to Ahmad Baba, the Tarikh al-sudan, or “Chronicle of the Sudan,” was written in the 1600s by another Timbuktu scholar, Abd al-Rahman ibn Abd Allah al-Sadi. Once found, it would become the essential text for historians of the region.
In his first letter, Rousseau mused that the capital of the Sudan, “Tin-Buktou,” had always escaped the most persevering investigations. “Everyone speaks of it, and no one has yet seen it.” He hoped that, driven by the Société de Géographie’s “noble and generous competition,” there would come a traveler “who is happy to lift … the mysterious veil which will undress her to the eyes of European scholarship.” In the meantime, the French consul continued, he had managed to collect a few pieces of information on the subject:
It seems there exists a detailed history of this town, which is written by a certain Sidi-Ahmed-Baba, a native of Arawan, a township of the [Kunta] country, a history which only puts its founding at 1116 AD. This is how, in this work, the circumstances which surrounded the foundation of Tin-Buktou are told:
“A woman from the Tuareg tribe, named Buktou, settled on the edge of the Nile of the Negroes, in a cabin sheltered by a bushy tree; she possessed some ewes, and liked to exercise her hospitality on the travelers of her nation who passed that way. Her humble house was not slow in becoming a sacred sanctuary, and a place of rest and of delight for the surrounding tribes, who called it Tin-Buktou, that is to say the property of Buktou (Tin being in their idiom a possessive pronoun for the third person). Next these tribes came from all sides to gather and made a vast camp, which was later transformed into a vast and populous city.” This is, according to Sidi-Ahmed-Baba, the etymology of the name and the origin of the foundation of Tin-Buktou, of which, after all, the fame is perhaps only a chimera, which will vanish once we are able to surmount the many obstacles that prevent access.
More letters from Rousseau, dated March 3 and June 12, 1828, were published in the Societé de Geographie’s Bulletin the following year. This time he or the Bulletin’s editors confused Ahmad Baba’s name with that of the folk hero Ali Baba: “I hope to be soon in possession of the history of Timbuktu by Sidi Ali Baba of Arawan, which I am awaiting from Touat,” Rousseau wrote.
For Warrington, this was further evidence of French dirty tricks. How could Rousseau be in a position to get hold of the “Ali Baba” history of Timbuktu when no Frenchman had reached the city? Was this the volume to which Laing had alluded in his sole letter from that place, in which he had written that he had been “amply rewarded” in his searches of the town’s records? There was a simple explanation for the missing papers: the French had stolen them. The more he pursued this line of investigation, the more witnesses came forward to give him the answer he desired. Bungola told him D’Ghies had taken personal possession of Laing’s papers, while an ex-employee of Rousseau’s said he had seen D’Ghies handing over documents to the French consul in exchange for money. D’Ghies must have found the fruits of Laing’s journey, Warrington surmised, and sold them to the French to help pay his debts.
As Warrington squared up to Rousseau over the missing Laing papers, news was about to break of a second European who had reached Timbuktu. The development was doubly bad for Warrington, since the explorer was French.
RENÉ CAILLIÉ was in many ways Laing’s antithesis. He was modest, the son of a convict, orphaned at eleven, a neglected child with a dreamy, even melancholic character. One of his few pieces of early luck was the appearance in his life of a teacher who encouraged him to read adventure stories. Like Laing’s, Caillié’s imagination was inflamed by Robinson Crusoe, but nothing in the literature excited him as much as the map of Africa. As a child, he had scanned the continent’s mammalian shape, from rounded rump to rhinoceros horn, and pored over its fantastical annotations. What undiscovered cities lay in those gaps? What unseen creatures? What unknown civilizations? His passion for geography grew into an obsession. He would make his name, he decided, with some important discovery on this little-explored continent. He cut himself off from his friends, renounced sports and other amusements, and devoted his spare time to books and maps. At sixteen—the same tender age as the nineteenth century—he left home with sixty francs, bound for Africa.
The first decade of Caillié’s exploring career was an education in what could go wrong for European adventurers. The vessel on which he worked his passage south, the Loire, sailed from France in company with the frigate Medusa, a ship whose name lives in infamy. The Medusa was wrecked on the notorious shoals of Arguin, an island on the west coast close to Cape Blanco, whereupon her captain and officers took to the boats, consigning 147 lower ranks to a makeshift raft, which they cut adrift. Only fifteen people survived the scenes of drunken fighting, starvation, and cannibalism that broke out on board, which were immortalized by Théodore Géricault in his painting The Raft of the Medusa, a metaphor for the corruption of the French elite.
Caillié would soon find equally significant disasters were unfolding on land. Among these was a large British expedition to the interior and Timbuktu under Major John Peddie, which set out from a swampy malarial region at the mouth of the Nunez River. Peddie died of fever before he had even left the coast, and his expedition penetrated just three hundred miles inland before it was forced to return with half its officers dead. Undeterred, the British tried again, this time starting from the Gambia, but the expedition was so expertly milked by the king of Bondu that its commander, Major William Gray, soon had to send to the coast for more gifts. Caillié joined the resupply caravan, which carried too much baggage and too little water into the desert. The young man’s eyes became hollow with dehydration, and he watched other men grow so desperate they drank their own urine. Later, he caught a fever, and was lucky to make it back to France alive. There he heard that these failed British military expeditions had cost the extraordinary sum of £750,000, worth about $3.4 million at the time.
Still, Caillié persevered. In 1824 he returned to Africa with his own idea for an assault on the interior. Unlike the failures he had witnessed, his mission would be low-cost and low-key. He would disguise himself as a poor Egyptian Arab who had been kidnapped by French troops as a child and was now heading home to Alexandria. He spent three years preparing for this role, studying Arabic and the Islamic texts, perfecting his cover story, learning how to dress, pray, and eat like a Muslim. Neither the French nor the British would sponsor his solo mission, but the Société de Géographie prize would be reward enough. He would give the money to his sister, who was living in poverty in France.
“Dead or alive,” he swore to himself, “it shall be mine.”
Caillié left the coast of Guinea on April 19, 1827, in Arab costume, carrying a Kuran and the essential umbrella. He climbed through the malarial swamps into the Guinea highlands, and struggled over mountain passes and ravines and torrents swollen by tropical storms. He took shade from the sun under spreading bombax trees and ate tamarind fruit to ward off the fever that always threatened to overtake him. In the uplands of Futa Jallon he crossed the Niger—even here, close to its source, it was two hundred yards wide—and at Kankan he survived an attempt by his guide to unmask him as a Christian. His feet broke out in bleeding sores and an attack of scurvy stripped the roof of his mouth to bare bone, but he recovered. He carried on. In March 1828 he reached Jenne, on the Bani River, where he found a boat that would take him north to the Niger, and then 250 miles farther to Kabara, the port of Timbuktu. On April 19, 1828, a year to the day after setting out, he was at last close to his objective.
At one p.m. that day, he was hiding in the bottom of the boat when the crew called down to tell him they were approaching Kabara, and he hurried out on deck. At first he could see nothing but marshland covered with aquatic birds; then the little port town that served Timbuktu appeared, perched above the floodline on a small hill. The water in the river was too low for the boat to get close, so he climbed into a canoe, which was dragged through the shallows by slaves.
It was no Le Havre or Marseilles, but there was a buzz about Kabara. The quay was busy with men and women carrying goods back and forth, while shipwrights worked to repair canoes that had been hauled out to the foreshore. The narrow streets of the town itself were filled with a hubbub of people selling fish, milk, cola nuts, and pistachios, while strings of donkeys and camels passed continually, carrying merchandise to Timbuktu. It was the last day of Ramadan, and at dusk the town celebrated with dancing and festivities.
At half past three the following afternoon, Caillié joined a small caravan assembling on the road to Timbuktu.
The path north was white with shining sand so soft it made walking difficult. It led past unexpected lakes whose banks were overgrown with vegetation, and through a dwarf forest of palms, mimosas, and gum acacias. For much of the journey they were followed by a Tuareg man mounted on a superb horse who eyed him narrowly and asked the caravan drivers where he had come from, but the horseman lost interest after being told Caillié was a poor Egyptian. Two and a half miles along the track, at the halfway point between Kabara and Timbuktu, they reached an infamous murder spot known as “They Hear Not,” since from there cries for help could not be heard at either town. The caravan moved safely through it. The sun was touching the horizon when, two miles farther on, the track climbed a bare dune. From the top, at last, Caillié could see his destination.
The city lay long and low before him, stretched between an immense sky and an immense desert. “Nothing diminishes the vast landscape which is lighted by the throbbing glare of the veritable sun of the desert,” a later traveler wrote of reaching this spot. “Truly she is enthroned upon the horizon with the majesty of a queen. She is indeed the city of imagination, the Timbuctoo of European legend.” Caillié was overcome:
I now saw this capital of the Soudan, to reach which had so long been the object of my wishes. On entering this mysterious city, which is an object of curiosity and research to the civilised nations of Europe, I experienced an indescribable satisfaction. I never before felt a similar emotion and my transport was extreme.
He was unable to share his joy for fear of giving away his identity. Instead he silently gave thanks to his God: the obstacles and dangers had appeared insurmountable, but with the Lord’s protection he had achieved the object of his ambition.
As he approached more closely, however, his excitement began to fade. Timbuktu was not quite as magnificent as he had expected:
The city presented, at first view, nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth. Nothing was to be seen in all directions but immense plains of quicksand of a yellowish white colour. The sky was a pale red as far as the horizon: all nature wore a dreary aspect, and the most profound silence prevailed; not even the warbling of a bird was to be heard.
Its buildings were not tall or especially large; most consisted of a single story. The town had no walls. There wasn’t a breath of wind, and when he lay down to sleep the oppressive heat made him more uncomfortable than ever. The following morning, examining the town in daylight, he found it wasn’t nearly as big or as busy as he had been led to believe. Its vaunted market was a desert compared with that of Jenne. Its atmosphere was soporific. “Everything had a dull appearance,” he noted. “I was surprised at the inactivity, I may even say indolence, displayed in the city.”
As Baron Rousseau had suspected, the great city of gold-roofed houses was a chimera. “Exaggerated notions” of this “object of curiosity for so many ages” had prevailed, Caillié wrote, including its population, civilization, and trade with the Sudan. It was small, three miles in circuit, and roughly triangular in shape, and it had been raised on soil that was “totally unfit for cultivation” and had no vegetation but stunted trees and shrubs.
Still, the city had a few redeeming features that would leaven his disappointment. Its streets were clean, and its inhabitants neat and—contrary to what Park had been told—gentle and obliging to strangers. The women were not veiled like those in Morocco and were allowed to go out when they pleased and visit anyone they chose. There were seven mosques in all, two of which were large, and each was surmounted by a brick minaret. Climbing the tower of the great mosque of Jingere Ber, Caillié could only admire the fact that a town had been built here at all: “I could not help contemplating with astonishment the extraordinary city before me, created solely by the wants of commerce, and destitute of every resource except what its accidental position as a place of exchange affords.”
The ruler of Timbuktu was a merchant named Osman, who had inherited a considerable fortune from his ancestors, and was, gratifyingly, “very rich.” He received Caillié while sitting on a beautiful mat with a luxurious cushion:
The king appeared to be of an exceedingly amiable disposition; his age might be about fifty-five, and his hair was white and curly. He was of the middling height, and his colour was jet black. He had an aquiline nose, thin lips, a grey beard, and large eyes, and his whole countenance was pleasing; his dress, like those of the Moors, was composed of stuff of European manufacture. On his head was a red cap, bound round with a large piece of muslin in the form of a turban. His shoes were of morocco, shaped like our morning slippers, and made in the country. He often visited the mosque.
Trading was the lifeblood of this, “one of the largest cities” Caillié had seen in Africa, and “the principal entrepôt” of this part of the continent. There were many Moroccans here, who stayed for six to eight months to sell their goods and buy more to carry north. In trade, wrote Caillié, the people were industrious and intelligent; and the merchants were generally wealthy, occupying the finest houses in the city and owning many slaves. Merchandise consisted mainly of salt and other goods that reached Timbuktu by caravan or boat. There were even articles from Europe: Caillié found double-barreled guns with the mark of the state-owned French armament factory at Saint-Étienne, as well as European “glass wares, amber, coral, sulphur, paper &c.” “Paper &c” was the closest Caillié came to mentioning manuscripts.
The Frenchman stayed a fortnight. He devoted his last few days to trying to work out what had happened to Laing, whose name he had heard in Jenne, and was shown the spot where he was said to have been murdered. Caillié secretly shed a tear—“the only tribute of regret I could render to the ill-fated traveller.” He left Timbuktu on May 4, 1828, traveling with a caravan carrying ostrich feathers, ivory, gold, and slaves to the markets of Morocco. His host, Sidi Abdallahi Chebir, an “excellent man,” gave him enough merchandise to fund his onward journey and awoke early on the day of departure to accompany him for some distance, before he affectionately pressed Caillié’s hand and wished him well.
The men of the caravan were less hospitable. The drivers showed no mercy to the penniless traveler, and were worse with the slaves. Water was always so short that Caillié felt constantly to be on the verge of death, and the drivers refused to give him more even when he begged. Sandstorms threatened to bury the whole caravan, forming at times into great dust devils. Yet as they trekked beneath the burning sky, he couldn’t help being awed by the immensity of the desert landscape, with its boundless horizons and immense, shining plains.
CAILLIÉ REACHED the French consulate at Tangier on September 7, 507 days after setting out. He was exhausted, ill, and dressed in rags, but was able at last to remove his disguise, put on European clothes, and find a ship bound for Toulon. There he wrote to Jomard at the Société de Géographie, who immediately sent five hundred francs to cover the cost of his journey to the French capital. In Paris, Jomard and his colleagues interrogated the explorer in order to verify his account, which they pronounced to be genuine: he had achieved “every thing possible … more than could have been hoped for with such resources,” and had “completely succeeded.” Despite British objections, Caillié was awarded the prize money and, in 1830, the gold medal, although it was agreed that this should be shared with Laing.
Caillié’s victory was met with triumphalist crowing in France. “Here we have a subject of glory for France, and of jealousy for her eternal rival!” declared one French newspaper. “That which England has not been able to accomplish, with the aid of a whole group of travellers, and at an expense of more than twenty millions, a Frenchman has done with his scanty personal resources alone, and without putting his country to any expense.” The British responded with fury. How could a humble, ill-educated Frenchman reach the goal they had been pursuing for decades? The intensity of Timbuktu fever had produced numerous false claims in recent years; surely Caillié’s account was just another lie. Most likely he had been shipwrecked on the coast of Barbary and heard some vague intelligence about the interior that he had pretended was his own. His Muslim disguise only added to the British outrage: If an explorer was prepared to swap religion willy-nilly, how could his observations possibly be trusted?
“This eternal cant and whining about the ‘jealousy’ and ‘rivalry’ of England” implied only “a constantly-recurring consciousness of the intellectual and physical superiority of our countrymen over theirs,” thundered The Quarterly Review, before going on to do its utmost to discredit Caillié’s “imposture.” Laing was the rightful discoverer of Timbuktu, while Caillié was “illiterate,” and Jomard had been less than scrupulous in verifying his journey. “We shall offer no opinion whether M. Caillié did or did not reach Timbuctoo,” stated the Review’s anonymous critic, “but we do not hesitate to say that, for any information he has brought back, as to the geography of Central Africa, or the course of the Joliba, he might just as well have staid at home.” The diatribe concluded with a long and well-briefed account of the British conspiracy theory that held that Rousseau and D’Ghies had stolen Laing’s papers.
Caillié was deeply wounded by these attacks, which affected him more, he said, than “all the hardships, fatigues and privations” he had encountered in the interior of Africa.
In Tripoli, the fêting of the Frenchman drove Warrington to scour the desert ever harder for Laing’s journals, which now bore the double burden of rescuing his country’s and his son-in-law’s glory. October 1828 found him writing to the War and Colonial Office of the “Miserable Intrigue” in which he had “cause to suspect the French Consul may have purloined the Papers of Major Laing.” By May 1829, he was informing the British government that D’Ghies was expecting not only a copy of the “History of Tomboucto” but also the arrival from Tuat of its author “Sidi Ali Baba d’Arowan.” (This despite the fact that Ahmad Baba had been dead for more than two hundred years.)
At first, Warrington said, he had been inclined to ridicule the idea of a history of Timbuktu being produced in Africa, because he did not believe any African would be interested in his country’s past. “Is it likely,” he asked, “that this Sidi Ali Baba should have examined the Records and written the History of Tinbuctu—Believe me a Bowl of Cuscusou is more an object of Research to any Moor than such a history.” However, he was now convinced that the “Ali Baba” history must have been obtained in Timbuktu by Laing, and was therefore evidence of the French plot. “We are surely justified,” he announced, “in believing that Laing was in possession of the History of Tenbuctu.” It was a short step from this fantasy to the conclusion that whoever possessed a copy of this “History” also possessed Laing’s journals.
To force the pasha to produce the documents, Warrington broke off diplomatic relations in June that year and hauled down his Union Jack. The pasha, whose survival relied on playing British power off against the French, was horrified. On August 5 he let it be known that a group of people were coming from the desert who would indeed testify that Laing’s papers had been given to D’Ghies and the French consul. D’Ghies, reading the political wind, decided to run: three days later he was smuggled out of Tripoli on an American corvette. Shortly afterward, the pasha ordered that the French flag be hauled down from Rousseau’s consulate.
Warrington’s state of mind is revealed in a letter he wrote to the undersecretary of state for the colonies, R. W. Hay, on August 10, 1829, announcing on his honor, “Should you wish to take any steps with the French authorities you may safely do it, as I am apprehensive Mr. Rousseau will fly to America also, as soon as he hears His Infamous Villany is detected. He has not only defrauded the English Government of the journals & manuscripts of Major Laing, but he has stole also Letters to His Wife, to me & my Family.”
It was, concluded Warrington, “really too horrid to continue.”
Two days later, Warrington’s deranged assault on Rousseau culminated in the offer of a duel. The baron had already had enough: fearing for his life, he had appealed to the United States for help in fleeing Tripoli and, like D’Ghies, been smuggled aboard an American ship. With l’affaire Laing now a full-blown diplomatic crisis, the French government appointed a commission to investigate Warrington’s claims. Later that year, it pronounced Rousseau innocent of all charges.
The fallout was not yet over. France had been made to look a fool and needed redress. In 1830, a French squadron arrived in Tripoli harbor and ordered the pasha publicly to retract all charges against their consul and repay debts to his French creditors of 800,000 francs. With his throne room in range of French guns, the pasha had to concede. Short now of both money and credibility, the rule of the Karamanli dynasty was nearing its end: in 1832 the pasha was overthrown and direct Ottoman rule was reinstated soon afterward. The once powerful ruler of Tripoli died in rags in a hovel a short distance from the palace he had occupied for so long.
Rousseau fared little better. No copy of the Tarikh al-sudan, the manuscript that could have made his name, seems to have reached him. After the French intervention, he returned to Tripoli, but suspicions remained in Paris and London about his conduct, and he died soon afterward, in 1831. Caillié’s story ended a little more happily. He was made a member of the Légion d’Honneur and was awarded a pension, and the three-volume account of his travels, published at public expense in 1830, made him a famous man. Though he was unsuccessful in gaining support for further expeditions to Africa, he lived with his wife and children on a farm in western France until May 17, 1838, when he succumbed to tuberculosis. Warrington meanwhile remained in Tripoli until 1846, at which point he was forced to resign after arguing with the consul of Naples over a box of cigars. He moved to Patras, Greece, where he died the following year. Laing’s journals had not been found.
As for the object of European lust: Timbuktu had been attained, but not in the way anyone would have wished. Caillié’s public deflation of the gilded myth that had endured since the Middle Ages did, however, inspire a nineteen-year-old Cambridge undergraduate to verse. In 1829, the year after the French explorer’s return, the young Alfred, Lord Tennyson, entered his poem “Timbuctoo” into the university’s poetry competition. It told the tale of how “Discovery” had punctured the dream of argent streets and tremulous domes that were once thought to have existed in the Saharan city:
O City! O latest Throne! Where I was rais’d
To be a mystery of loveliness
Unto all eyes, the time is well-nigh come
When I must render up this glorious home
To keen Discovery: soon yon brilliant towers
Shall darken with the waving of her wand;
Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts,
Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand,
Low-built, mud-wall’d, Barbarian settlements.
How chang’d from this fair City!
By the end of the poem, “The Moon / had fallen from the night, and all was dark!”