A rare bank of fog drifted across western Libya on the morning of March 31, 1850, signaling the likelihood of rain. It had been a wet spring, and as Heinrich Barth and his Prussian colleague Adolf Overweg waited for their expedition leader at the rendezvous south of Tripoli, they were surprised by the greenery of the desert, which looked like a prairie; it was filled with cornfields, pasture, flocks of sheep, and a rich array of blue wildflowers. As the sky began to unburden itself, James Richardson’s party arrived, and Barth looked on skeptically as his servants set about pitching a tent the size of a field hospital. It rained so heavily for the next twenty-four hours that their plans to depart were postponed, but if Barth was frustrated, he didn’t confide it to his journal. He was finally on the brink of the journey that would define him, a five-year odyssey that would solve the conundrum of Africa’s missing golden heart.
Few men were so suited to a task as Barth was to exploration. A lithograph depicting him as a young man reveals a skeptical, mustachioed figure with a ramrod-straight back. The ramrod was instilled by his parents, Johann and Charlotte Barth of Hamburg, Lutherans who raised their offspring according to strict principles of morality, duty, and industry. Heinrich was the third of four children, born in 1821, and was sent at the age of eleven to the elite Johanneum academy, where he had few friends and displayed what one contemporary described as an “aristocratic aloofness.” He was a driven pupil, however, who filled his spare time reading classical history and geography in the original Greek and Latin. In his teens, believing himself to be physically weak, he adopted a routine of exercises and cold baths, even in winter, to toughen himself up.
Two weeks after leaving the Johanneum in 1839 he enrolled at Berlin University, one of the most vibrant educational institutions of the time, where fellow students included Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Søren Kierkegaard. Barth was taught by two titans of nineteenth-century science: Carl Ritter, the father of modern geography, and Alexander von Humboldt, the naturalist whose epic five-year exploration of Latin America had hoovered up sixty thousand species of plants and thirty-five crates of insects, birds, rocks, and other specimens. This fine education alone would set Barth apart from the adventurers who had gone before. He carried Cooley’s Negroland with him, and his journals reveal a detailed knowledge of the Arab geographers, as well as the findings of his predecessors Park, Caillié, and the Scottish naval officer Hugh Clapperton, who visited Central Africa in the 1820s. To the old hands at the Royal Geographic Society he must have seemed overeducated, but he could also point to hard experience in the field. A year after graduating from university he had embarked on a solo three-year expedition from Tangiers through Barbary and the Middle East. Between Tripoli and Egypt he was attacked in the night by Bedouin bandits, shot in both legs and knocked unconscious. By the time he returned home, he was, according to his brother-in-law and future biographer, Gustav von Schubert, “silent and withdrawn,” a hard man to get to know:
It took a long time before I was able to thaw the ice around his heart and experience the depths of his character. In his first letter to me, he wrote, “If you make my sister unhappy, I will shoot you dead,” which was clear enough.
Beneath this carapace lay a man who needed to be needed: his only goal, he once wrote, was “to be useful to humanity, to encourage them toward common enlightenment, to feed their spirits and give them strength.” Sadly for Barth, his account of his North African journey left humanity underwhelmed. The Athenœum’s anonymous reviewer wrote of Wanderings Along the Punic and Cyrenaic Shores of the Mediterranean that “a more perplexing specimen … of some of the worst faults of German prose has rarely fallen in our way,” and plans for a second volume were scrapped. More hurtful even than the professional slights he received at this time was the rejection of a marriage proposal. “The experience was a great blow to Barth’s self-esteem,” Schubert wrote, without recording the woman’s name. “His bitter fear of romantic relationships lasted for a long time after that, and even in later years he could not bring himself to enter in marriage.”
No matter. Barth would deploy his passion in foreign parts, where he always seemed more comfortable.
In 1849, he found his opportunity, on James Richardson’s British expedition to the African interior. The evangelical Richardson had joined the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society on its establishment in 1839 and developed a special interest in the part of the trade that crossed the Sahara. In 1845, his investigations led him as far as the oasis of Ghat, in Fezzan, and on his return he floated the idea of an expedition to Lake Chad to the foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, with the aim of supplanting the slave trade with trade in British manufactured goods. Palmerston agreed. Since Richardson was no expert at geographical observations, he turned to his Prussian contacts for a scientist, and on Ritter’s recommendation recruited Barth and Overweg. They would travel at Britain’s expense on what Richardson called a “Journey of Discovery and Philanthropy to Central Africa via the Great Desert of the Sahara.”
Unusually, and perhaps ominously, the three men drew up a contract before their departure to establish their roles. Richardson, as leader, would determine the choice of route and the method of advance, but he was also obliged to help them in their scientific work. If they reached Lake Chad alive, he would retire, leaving the Germans whatever instruments they needed to carry out their observations.
Tensions between Barth and his leader were evident from the start. “Mr. Richardson was waiting in Paris for dispatches when Mr. Overweg and I reached Tunis,” was how Barth would choose, years later, to open his five-volume account of the journey; it would be a further six weeks before the dithering Richardson reached Tripoli. Barth used the time to take Overweg on a substantial tour of the coastal regions, a digression the Briton took as a sign of “European impetuosity.” After Richardson’s arrival, the delays only escalated as he waited for prodigious quantities of equipment to be shipped in from Malta. The biggest holdup was the boat. Although the first 1,500 miles of the expedition’s route led them across the desert, they would carry a heavy rowing wherry in which they hoped one day to survey Lake Chad. They also needed a sailor to work it: Richardson had recruited a nephew to this task, but he was so difficult he would be sent home when they were halfway across the desert.
This sort of bungling was typical of Richardson, according to the British consul in Tripoli, G. W. Crowe, who expressed great surprise to the Foreign Office that such a man should have been chosen to lead an expedition into the interior: “I fear his wretched mismanagement will lower the reputation hitherto enjoyed by the English nation in Central Africa.”
While Richardson organized the sawing of the boat into pieces that could be slung between eight large camels, the impatient Prussians rode south, promising to wait forty miles farther on at Wadi Mejenin. At last, on the morning of April 2, 1850, with the weather clear, the expedition was preparing to depart. The scene that greeted a visitor to the wadi would have been worthy of a Barnum & Bailey circus.
Sixty-two camels filled the dried-up riverbed, while tens of drivers, servants, and hangers-on fussed and argued around them. Richardson had employed an alcoholic dragoman named Yusuf Moknee, the son of a former governor of Fezzan, who had been forced to sign a sobriety contract, and two Arab janissaries who spent the first weeks threatening to kill each other. Next came a handful of freed slaves, returning with their families from Tunis to their homeland in sub-Saharan Africa, and a marabout from Fezzan. Most remarkable of all were two hangers-on Richardson described as “a couple of insane fellows,” who he suspected were there solely to satirize the expedition. One of these men, who claimed the status of sharif, had “an unpleasant habit of threatening to cut everybody’s throat.” As soon as he arrived, he upset the caravan by starting fights and telling people he was going to stab or shoot them. “He fawned, however, on us Europeans,” Richardson noted, “whilst he had a large knife concealed under his clothes ready to strike.” A group of diplomats and expats had also come to the wadi to wave them off: the American consul, a Mr. Gaines; the British vice-consul, Mr. Reade; and Frederick Warrington, Alexander Gordon Laing’s brother-in-law and Barth’s friend, a man the Prussian described as “perhaps the most amiable possible specimen of an Arabized European.”
Once the “insane fellows” had been sent back to Tripoli, the sharif under guard, the expedition set off. Warrington rode with them the first few days to the mountaintop town of Gharyan. They camped there among acacia bushes and looked out over the volcanic cone of Mount Tekut while Warrington had an immense bowl of couscous prepared. The following morning, April 5, he watched them ride away toward the southern horizon, much as his father had watched Alexander Gordon Laing depart twenty-five years before.
“We separated from Mr. Warrington,” Barth wrote some years later, “and of the three travellers I was the only one whom he was ever to see again.”
RICHARDSON PROVED to be as poor a leader as everyone had suspected, and their journey across the desert was almost as tortuous as Laing’s. The caravan was milked by its own guides and stalked by Tuareg freebooters. By September 1850, when they reached the safety of Tintalous in the Air Mountains, Richardson was exhausted. While Barth set out on a side expedition to Agadez, where he heard of the existence of the great Sudanese empire of Songhay, Richardson rested in his tent. He couldn’t stand the heat, and tried weakly to return to Tripoli but couldn’t find a guide. He died in March the following year without the least struggle. Barth now took charge of the expedition, and together with his Prussian colleague made an extensive survey of Lake Chad, but repeated bouts of fever destroyed Overweg’s health, and by late September 1852 he too was dead. Barth laid him in a grave on the shore of the lake, next to the boat.
Barth was deeply upset by Overweg’s passing. “Thus died my sole friend and companion,” he confided to his journal, “in the thirtieth year of his age, and in the prime of his youth.” Lake Chad was now “intolerable” for him, and there was only one thing to do: move forward. Palmerston left the expedition’s future direction entirely to his discretion, writing that he would be “perfectly satisfied” with a westerly course if Barth chose it, and that was what the explorer now did. “I determined to set out as soon as possible on my journey toward the Niger,” he wrote, “to new countries and new people.” On November 25, he embarked on the dangerous road to Timbuktu, adopting a Muslim disguise, as Caillié had done. He was “Abdel Karim,” a Turkish-speaking Syrian who was traveling to the city with books for the shaykh of Timbuktu, a man Barth had heard about on his travels named Ahmad al-Bakkai.
The route west was an arduous journey, into “almost unknown regions, never trodden by European foot,” which involved crossing many minor kingdoms as well as terrain made dangerous by rain. Yet long before he reached the city, Barth began to make momentous discoveries relating to the history of Songhay, a subject of growing fascination for the explorer.
In April 1853, almost halfway along his 1,500-mile journey to Timbuktu, he reached Wurno in Sokoto, where he met an educated man named Abdel Kader dan Taffa, who had much of the history of the Songhay dynasties “perfectly in his head,” as Barth put it, information which was “of the greatest importance” in giving the explorer insight into the region’s past. More exciting still, this man told him of the existence of a great chronicle of the Songhay empire, written, he said, by the scholar Ahmad Baba.
Barth began to seek manuscripts wherever he went. That month, he found at least two, the Tazyin al-waraqat, a chronicle written by Abdullahi dan Fodio, and Muhammad Bello’s Infaq al-maysur, of which an extract had been brought back by Clapperton in 1825, but this had since been lost. Both works told of the early-nineteenth-century Fulani jihad, which resulted in the founding of the Sokoto caliphate, yet these were small reward compared with the document he would find farther west. In June, as violent rains set in, Barth reached Gando, on the border of the modern state of Niger, where he was loaned a copy of “that most valuable historical work of Ahmad Baba,” the history of the Sudan that Abdel Kader dan Taffa had told him about. Barth sat with the “respectable quarto volume” of the chronicle for three or four days, using his fluent Arabic to extract the more important passages. These, he wrote,
opened to me quite a new insight into the history of the regions on the middle course of the Niger, whither I was bending my steps, exciting in me a far more lively interest than I had previously felt in a kingdom the great power of which, in former times, I here found set forth in very clear and distinct outlines.
Barth copied out as much of the chronicle as time allowed, focusing on the historical data, but he couldn’t properly digest what he was reading before he had to move on toward Timbuktu.
On June 20, at Say, he was elated to see the Niger for the first time, “a noble unbroken stream” about seven hundred yards across. The great river slid in a south-southwesterly direction with a moderate current of about three miles an hour. His little party crossed on two boats made of hollowed-out tree trunks sewn together, and Barth was “filled with delight when floating on the waters of this celebrated stream, the exploration of which had cost the sacrifice of so many noble lives.” He was soon struggling west again, along tracks that had been turned into bog by rain, and across dangerously swollen rivers. Guinea worm infected one of his servants, and mosquitoes and biting flies penetrated their clothing and made him feverish, but in late August he reached Sareyamou, in the inland delta, where he was able to hire a riverboat to take him almost to his destination. As they worked, the boatmen sang about the deeds of a notable ruler of Songhay, Askiya the Great.
On September 5, Barth was at Kabara and riding now in the footsteps of that “very meritorious French traveller,” René Caillié. He was alarmed to learn there that Shaykh al-Bakkai, the man on whom he was relying for protection, was not in Timbuktu. He sent his guide ahead to the city to ask the shaykh’s brother, Sidi Alawate, for protection, and passed a tense day, harassed by Tuareg, awaiting a response. He had felt obliged to confidentially tell Alawate that he was a Christian, and say that he was under the protection of the sultan of Istanbul. At last, around midnight, Alawate arrived. He was suspicious and asked to see Barth’s letter of protection from the Ottomans, a document the explorer had requested from the Foreign Office but had never received. Barth was embarrassed by the lack of written evidence for his claim, which left him in a dangerous position, but Alawate nevertheless agreed to protect him.
At ten o’clock on the morning of September 7, 1853, Barth and his party set out on the infamous eight-mile track north. Beyond the murderous halfway point, he saw a mass of people coming from the city to greet their important visitor, Abdel Karim. Realizing he must brazen out the situation or risk being killed, he galloped forward, gun in hand, to receive their many salaams. His fake identity was almost uncovered by a man who addressed him in Turkish, which Barth had forgotten, but he pushed past the throng to avoid further questions and get into the safety of the town. He walked through the narrow streets and lanes to the “populous and wealthy” quarter of Sane-gungu, where he was offered a house opposite that of Shaykh al-Bakkai.
There, he was seized by a severe attack of fever and collapsed.
TIMBUKTU WAS JUST AS DANGEROUS for a Christian in 1853 as it had been in the mid-1820s. It was still under the sway of the Fulani empire of Masina, now ruled by Lobbo’s young grandson Ahmad III, though he was beginning to lose his grip on the city to the Tuareg. Shaykh al-Bakkai, the town’s spiritual and political ruler, was performing a delicate balancing act, playing one group against another to maintain a degree of independence: he had arranged a system of two qadis to adjudicate in disputes between the Fulani and the Tuareg, but it was an uneasy peace, and the city was filled with agents waiting for the right moment to strike and win Ahmad’s favor. This febrile atmosphere would keep Barth in Timbuktu for almost a year.
Having shed his disguise, the explorer spent his first three weeks in the city barricaded inside the house, convinced Alawate was conspiring with his treacherous guide to rob him before his inevitable murder, but at three a.m. on September 26 he heard music strike up outside his window: a group of women were celebrating the arrival of al-Bakkai. Barth’s excitement at the appearance of the man on whom his safety depended sent him into a new paroxysm of fever, and he was unable to pay his respects the next day, but the shaykh, demonstrating his famous good manners, sent a message begging the explorer to rest, while presenting him with a gift of two oxen, two sheep, two vessels of butter, a camel-load each of rice and corn, and a warning not to eat anything that did not come from his house. It was an auspicious beginning for the relationship between the explorer and the man he would call “my friend” and “my Protector,” and whose influence he would compare to that of the pope. No other character in Barth’s monumental account of his expedition—not Overweg, nor even the rulers of the Central African states he visited—received the adoration the explorer lavished on al-Bakkai, the first Timbuktu scholar to have prolonged, documented contact with a European.
The next morning—a blustery day, the anniversary of Overweg’s death, as Barth reminded himself—the explorer had recovered enough to pay a courtesy visit to al-Bakkai’s house. He found the shaykh in a small upper room that looked onto a roof terrace, in the company of two of his students and a young nephew. The man who rose to greet Barth was about fifty years old, tall and “full proportioned,” with gray-flecked whiskers and dressed all in black. Barth immediately noted his cheerful, intelligent countenance and “straightforward and manly character”: he had gambled his life on this man, and now, he was certain, he would be safe. After he had paid his compliments and presented al-Bakkai with the gift of a six-shooter, they fell into a long and deep exchange. Laing, the only Christian anyone in Timbuktu had knowingly encountered, was their first topic of conversation, and Barth learned that al-Bakkai was the son of Sidi Muhammad al-Kunti, the shaykh who had helped Laing before succumbing to an epidemic.
The pistol … with which I presented him, soon directed our conversation to the subject of the superiority of Europeans in manufacturing skill … and one of the first questions which my host put to me was whether it was true, as [Major Laing] had informed his father, Sidi [Muhammad], during his stay in Azawad, that the capital of the British empire contained twenty times 100,000 people.
Al-Bakkai expressed “admiration of the major’s bodily strength, as well as his noble and chivalrous character,” but when Barth inquired after Laing’s papers, he was told they no longer existed, even though the shaykh was aware that Laing had drawn up a map of the whole northerly part of the desert while staying in Azawad.
After their meeting, Barth sent more presents across the street, but al-Bakkai begged him to stop, asking only that he should not forget him when he returned to England, and that he “request Her Majesty’s Government to send him some good fire-arms and some Arabic books.” Literature was highly esteemed by the Timbnktu elite. While he was in the city, Barth heard rumors of large, ancient libraries, some of which had been destroyed by the Fulani, others of which had been hidden, and although al-Bakkai did not show Barth a manuscript collection, he did reveal a small collection of treasured works, including a copy of Hippocrates in Arabic that Clapperton had given the sultan of Sokoto as a present, which the sultan had passed on to al-Bakkai. There was such great demand for the written word here and in the Western Sudan as a whole, Barth noted, that
I may assert, with full confidence, that those few books taken by the gallant Scotch captain [Clapperton] into Central Africa have had a greater effect in reconciling the men of authority in Africa to the character of Europeans than the most costly present ever made to them.
As Barth observed the shaykh over the following weeks and months, the Timbuktien’s gentle, scholarly nature became ever more evident. Al-Bakkai was often attended by pupils, some of whom had come great distances to study with him. He had established a place of prayer in the small square in front of his house where the students could spend the night, and late in the evenings he would tell them stories with religious themes, or open theocratic discussions, demonstrating “unmistakable proofs of an enlightened and elevated mind.” Among his favorite subjects were the lives of the prophets, each of whom, he said, possessed a character trait that set them apart: “He dwelt particularly on the distinguished qualities of Moses, or Musa, who was a great favourite with him,” Barth noted. On one occasion the explorer was deeply moved by the way al-Bakkai led his students in recitations of the Islamic texts:
Part of the day the sheikh read and recited to his pupils chapters from the hadith of Bokhari, while his young son repeated his lesson aloud from the Kuran, and in the evening several surat, or chapters, of the holy book were beautifully chanted by the pupils to a late hour of the night. There was nothing more charming to me than to hear these beautiful verses chanted by sonorous voices in this open desert country.
Al-Bakkai was not simply a scholar and holy man; he was a political force in the region who used his influence for the good of Timbuktu. Sometimes he would resolve conflicts between warring clans, try to reopen trading routes that had been closed by the tribes, or plot the liberation of the city from its oppressor, Ahmad III. Barth’s presence was a huge political headache for al-Bakkai, but one the shaykh seemed to relish. For eight months he skillfully maneuvered the explorer in and out of the city, summoning his allies to protect Barth when necessary. He was no doubt motivated by regret at what had happened to Laing and the hope that Britain could be an ally against the French, who were already making aggressive military thrusts into the Sahara, but his main reason for protecting the Christian, according to Barth, was to show the Fulani who ruled Timbuktu.
In late 1853, after al-Bakkai had frustrated several attempts to seize Barth, Sultan Ahmad sent a message ordering that the Christian and his property be handed over. The shaykh was almost as enraged by the ignoble birth of the messenger as he was by the letter’s content, and he penned an offensive poem in response, attacking the sultan for plotting to kill his friend, a man who was better versed in religion than the Fulani ruler himself. “My guest is my honour,” he asserted, after producing a list of his long and noble ancestry. Had the slave really been sent by Ahmad to take Barth into custody, “that [Ahmad] might plunder him, and fetter him?” If the sultan persisted, al-Bakkai would be fully justified before God in calling on his followers in Masina to overthrow the sultan’s rule:
I have among the tribe of the Fullan a body of men in the land who run and hasten to defend the religion of Allah. Dearer to them than their house, and family, and souls is the religion of Allah, who is mighty! Whenever they see infidelity and rebellion against their Lord, they resist, and go aside from every impious person. And I have some of the men of Allah in the land, and also of the angels, as an auxiliary and a scattering host … He is God, who is great! He redoubles His aid against every oppressor who is violent and exorbitant.
Ahmad’s courtiers sent numerous other emissaries to Timbuktu to try to capture Barth, but the Fulani were too weak there, and al-Bakkai was relentless in his defense. One evening, when the threat against Barth was especially great, the German went to al-Bakkai’s house around midnight and “found the holy man himself, armed with a double-barreled gun.” He spent the night with al-Bakkai and his men, waiting for an attack that never came. To pass the time, the shaykh, seated on the raised platform of clay that occupied a corner of the parlor, “entertained the sleepy assembly with stories of the prophets, especially Musa [Moses] and Mohammed, and the victories achieved by the latter, in the beginning of his career, over his numerous adversaries.”
ALTHOUGH OFTEN CONFINED to his house, Barth was at times able to roam the city, and during his lengthy stay he was able to make the most extensive European observations yet of Timbuktu life. He didn’t contradict the findings of Caillié, who had visited the city for just thirteen days and was hampered by his false identity, but with his much greater knowledge of the region, and with far better contacts and resources, the Prussian portrayed Timbuktu in a different light.
He drew a detailed ground plan, noting the separate quarters of town and describing the nature of each. The city’s most significant buildings were its three large mosques, and the stately Jingere Ber made a lasting impression on him. Timbuktu’s defenses—including a wall which “seems never to have been of great magnitude”—had been destroyed during the Fulani conquest in 1826, Barth wrote. He counted 980 clay houses and a couple hundred huts, which led him to estimate that the town had a permanent population at that time of about 13,000, but during the trading season, from November to January, it grew by 5,000 to 10,000, and it had probably at one time been twice as large, extending a thousand yards farther north to include the mausoleum of Sidi Mahmud, which was now in the desert.
Timbuktu’s shrines had a special role to play in the spiritual lives of the people. When al-Bakkai’s mother-in-law died, the shaykh went to pray for her soul at the sepulcher of Sidi al-Mukhtar, on the east side of town. This was an indication of the reverence in which women were held, Barth noted, adding, “There are … several women famed for the holiness of their life, and even authoresses of well-digested religious tracts, among the tribe of the Kunta.” Later, he witnessed another role for the saint: as a peacemaker. Al-Bakkai, his brothers, and the sons of Barth’s guard “attempted to bring about a friendly understanding among themselves,” and the explorer was surprised to be told this would take place at “the venerated cemetery a few hundred yards east of the town, where Sidi Mukhtar lies buried.” Barth inspected Sidi al-Mukhtar’s mausoleum closely and found it to be “a spacious clay apartment, surrounded by several smaller tombs of people who were desirous of placing themselves under the protection of the spirit of this holy man, even in the other world.”
Barth’s portrait of the economic life of the historic city, meanwhile, would not be bettered. The richest area was the one in which he was staying, Sane-gungu, where the most expensive houses were owned by merchants. The only goods made in Timbuktu were leatherwork and the products of the blacksmith, he noted, and the city’s wealth was based on foreign commerce, which found this “the most favoured spot for intercourse.” Goods flowed into the city along three great trade routes: two led across the desert, one to Morocco and the other to Ghadames, in Libya; the third ran southwest on the river. On Christmas Day 1853, Barth witnessed the Niger’s inundations reach right up to Timbuktu, flooding the southern and southwestern part of the city, and noted that “small boats very nearly approached the town.” Gold, produced in the famous mines of Bambuk, in what is now western Mali, was the principal traded material, although by this time it did not exceed £20,000 in value a year. It was brought to the town in rings, but must have been traded in dust form too. A mithqal of gold in Timbuktu weighed the same as twenty-four grains of the carob tree, and was worth three or four thousand cowrie shells.
Timbuktu’s other main commodity was salt, brought from the mines at Taoudenni. The salt here formed in five layers, each of which carried a different value, and was dug out in slabs weighing up to sixty-five pounds. A midsize slab would be worth three to six thousand cowrie shells, the highest prices being paid toward spring, when the caravans became scarce because of the blood-sucking flies that infested the region. The salt was exchanged principally for cloth manufactured in Kano, the Sokoto caliphate. Kano was such a significant producer of textiles that Barth called it the “Manchester of Africa.” The third most valuable commodity was the kola nut, a luxury item of which there were many different varieties. Slaves, as far as he could ascertain, were not exported in “any considerable amount.” The chief agricultural products in the market were rice, sorghum, and millet, as well as vegetable butter, which was used for cooking and lighting. As Caillié had, he also found European merchandise, including cloth, looking-glasses, cutlery, tobacco, and swords of German manufacture, imported across the desert. Barth saw calico printed with the name of a Manchester firm in Arabic letters, and noted that “all the cutlery in Timbuktu is of English workmanship.”
Recognizing that the city was no longer what it had been, he concluded that there was an immense opportunity for Europe to revive the trade that had formerly animated this quarter of the globe. After all, the situation in Timbuktu was still “of the highest commercial importance,” lying as it did between the great river of West Africa and the north.
During his prolonged stay, Barth also returned to his study of the manuscript of the Tarikh al-sudan he had found in Gando. On December 15, 1853, he sent his notes, via caravan, to Professor Emil Rödiger at the German Oriental Society in Leipzig. The chronicle, he wrote, had apparently been completed by the scholar Ahmad Baba in 1653/1654, and it threw a “completely unsuspected light” on the history of a region that had been totally neglected, while his account of the Songhay emperor made Leo Africanus’s description look “hollow and empty.” Time pressure meant he had been forced to leave out an infinite number of details—“naturally a traveler in these regions does not have the peace of a scholar in his study,” Barth noted—but he had little doubt that someone would bring an entire copy of the book to Europe in the near future.
“You will have heard about my circumstances in this peculiar city from other sources,” he told Rödiger. “They are not entirely pleasant, but God the Merciful will protect my life and lead me home, happy and unharmed, to develop to his glory what I began here.”
Barth was finally able to leave Timbuktu in the spring of 1854. Al-Bakkai accompanied him to Gao, the once splendid capital of the Songhay empire, which Barth found was now a disappointment. There, on July 8, they parted company. “Although I felt sincerely attached to my protector,” Barth wrote, “I could not but feel greatly satisfied at being at length enabled to retrace my steps homeward.”
ON LEARNING OF THE DEATH of Richardson, the British government had appointed a new assistant for Barth, a young German named Eduard Vogel, who had set out from Tripoli in the summer of 1853 with instructions to find the explorer. A year later, Vogel was told that Barth had died one hundred miles from Sokoto, and he wrote to the consul in Tripoli to relay the bad news. The letter was forwarded to the Foreign Office, and Barth’s siblings and parents in Hamburg were informed. They were “thrown into the deepest grief,” Barth wrote, and held a funeral during which, lacking a body, they buried all the explorer’s possessions.
On December 1, 1854, Barth was traveling through an inhospitable stretch of forest toward Kukawa, the capital of Bornu, when he met the source of the false report. He saw a small group advancing toward him, led by a man of “strange aspect—a young man of very fair complexion, dressed in a tobe [a simple cloth garment] like the one I wore myself, and with a white turban wound thickly round his head.” Barth recognized one of the travelers as his servant, Madi, whom he had left to guard a house he had taken in Kukawa two years before. Madi told the pale young man it was “Abdel Karim,” at which point the stranger rushed forward.
Seventeen years later, Henry Morton Stanley would greet another lost African explorer on the banks of Lake Tanganyika with the premeditated line “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” and create one of the most celebrated encounters in history. The chance meeting of the two Prussians is rather less famous. Where Stanley wrote a book, Barth devoted less than two pages of his published journal to this, his first contact with a European in two years. They were both surprised, he noted. They gave each other a hearty greeting, then dismounted and sat down. Barth had some coffee boiled, “so that we were quite at home,” whereupon Vogel told Barth—to the older man’s “great amazement”—that he had used all the expedition’s supplies, including the stores that had been carefully placed at Kukawa and Zinder. If this was not grievous enough, Vogel had also failed to bring any alcohol:
The news of the want of pecuniary supplies did not cause me so much surprise as the report which I received from him that he did not possess a single bottle of wine; for, having now been for more than three years without a drop of any stimulant except coffee … I had an insuperable longing for the juice of the grape, of which former experience had taught me the benefit.
It had taken Vogel eighteen months to find Barth. After two hours, the pair decided to separate, Vogel to continue to Zinder, and Barth to Kukawa.
“I hastened,” Barth wrote, “to overtake my people.”