VICE-CONSULS OF MURZOUK
In the same year that Parry returned from Melville Island, the people of Zeetun, a coastal town in the Regency of Tripoli, had an unexpected surprise. A bearded, sunburned man, dressed in long desert robes and riding a lame camel, slid down the hills towards them singing ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘God Save the King’ at the top of his lungs. This was Lt. George Lyon RN, the only surviving officer of Barrow's latest brainchild: a trans-Saharan expedition to find the Niger.
Barrow was not a man to be thwarted once he had set his mind on an objective. Despite the failure of Tuckey's expedition he was determined to chart the course of the Niger, and if it could not be done by ship then it would have to be done on foot. There was, in fact, a land expedition already in the field. Shortly after Tuckey had sailed for the Congo, one Major Peddie had struck inland from Sierra Leone with 100 soldiers and a small clutch of civilian scientists. But his progress had been blocked by internal African politics. By the time the expedition returned in 1821 almost everybody had died of disease and no new territory had been discovered. It had been a complete failure, and an expensive one to boot: before leaving Sierra Leone Peddie had already run up bills amounting to some £13,000; the sum would later reach £40,000; and accountants would be mulling over his expenses for another eight years.
Although Peddie's expedition had yet to return, Barrow was aware by 1817 that it had cost a great deal and was likely to be unsuccessful. Thus, for his next attempt, he chose a new route and a new method. Instead of sending a large, costly force he would send an inexpensive two- or three-man group which might be able to weave its way through the country with less difficulty. And instead of sending it through the unhealthy zones of West Africa he would land it at Tripoli from where it would travel across the Sahara and hit the Niger from the north. This approach had the advantage that if the Niger flowed east into the Wangara swamps, and thence into the Congo, or ran cross-country to join the Nile – as Barrow was beginning to think it might – the expedition would intercept its course without having to enter the fever-ridden coastal region.
As so often, Barrow's sense of reality failed him. Crossing the Sahara was a terrible ordeal. True, people did it – an estimated 20,000 slaves per annum were brought north on the ancient caravan routes -but they did it at great personal risk. Oases were few and unreliable, and travellers could go up to eighteen days without water. In 1805 a caravan of 2,000 had perished when a strategic waterhole had dried up. In certain areas the routes were plagued by bandits. All in all, the Sahara claimed about 8,000 lives every year. To complete the journey, top to bottom and back again, five times in a lifetime was considered a feat by Arabs. For Europeans to do it at all was unheard of. Yet in Barrow's eyes it was as simple as catching a coach to Harrogate.
From one Captain Smyth, based at Malta, Barrow had learned that the Pasha of Tripoli was willing to safeguard any British expedition to the Niger. To Smyth's questions the Pasha had replied unequivocally that he would send ‘emissaries’ to see it to its goal. At the same time, Barrow heard that caravans left Tripoli for Timbuctoo every year. It would be a simple matter, he reckoned, for his group to hitch a ride on one of the caravans and plod its way to Timbuctoo and thence the Niger under the Pasha's protection.
By no stretch of the imagination could the Sahara have been described as Barrow's domain. Exploring such places came under the jurisdiction of Lord Bathurst, Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs. But in Barrow's eyes the Sahara was an honorary sea. Men who travelled there would have to steer by the stars, there being no obvious features on which they could take bearings, and it was well known that military men could not do such a thing. So it was that Barrow, in collusion with Bathurst and the Under-Secretary Henry Goulbourne, set the expedition in motion, directed its course and chose its leader.
The man Barrow picked to discover both the Niger and Timbuctoo was a twenty-nine-year-old civilian named Joseph Ritchie. Little is known of Ritchie save that he had trained as a surgeon, was a keen natural historian, was a close friend of Keats (and had written a few poems himself), was private secretary to Sir Charles Stuart, the British Ambassador in Paris, and was, in 1817, willing to go.
Ritchie was ordered to find a single naval officer plus one other seaman to accompany him. He was given permission to draw on the Treasury to the extent of £2,000, from which he was to fund the entire trip, including scientific equipment, trade goods, necessary bribes, and the salaries of whomever he chose to take with him. Ritchie did his best. In Paris, he located one Captain Marryat, the Victorian thriller writer, whom he considered ideal for the purpose. But Marryat, on second thoughts, refused the job because he would not be guaranteed promotion. Somewhat nervously, Ritchie hired a Parisian gardener by the name of Dupont, who would collect specimens ‘if the difficulties presented by the Prejudices of the Inhabitants can be surmounted’. But, he hurriedly assured London, he would not allow the advancement of science to ‘compromise the Success of the principal object of the Mission, the determination of the leading geographical features of the Interior of Africa’.1
Poor Ritchie was too cowed by his responsibilities to question the imprecise nature of his mission. He did, however, realize that he hadn't enough money to do the job properly. As he told Bathurst, he wished his instructions ‘had been more explicit upon the subject of pecuniary affairs’.2 And as he pointed out to Barrow, if he reached his goal he would need extra funds ‘in order to prevent my being reduced to an unpleasant Situation from the necessary difficulty of communicating with Tripoli at a distance of 1200 miles’.3 He continued: ‘The present opportunity seems infinitely more favourable than any of those which have hitherto presented themselves for getting into the interior of Africa & it is but fair that it has as good a chance as preceding ones.’4
The money was not immediately forthcoming. Ritchie, who seems from his letters to have been overwhelmed by the mere fact of communicating with such powerful figures, mentioned finance no more. At Marseilles he and Dupont boarded a British ship bound for the port of Valetta, Malta, from which Rear-Admiral Sir Charles Penrose commanded the Mediterranean station. He still had not found the naval men who were to make up his team. But Barrow did him a favour. In an official Admiralty order, he instructed Penrose to furnish Ritchie with whatever two persons were willing to go on the expedition.
Into the breach bounded Lt. Lyon. A moustachioed extrovert aged twenty-two, George Francis Lyon was not, on the face of it, suited to African exploration. He had no fondness for hot places or even warm ones – the Mediterranean ‘does not quite agree with me’,5 he once wrote. And his main interests in life were ‘balls, riding, dining & making a fool of myself’.6 But he would do anything to advance his career. At the close of the Napoleonic War he had procured a statement from Lord Melville that he would be promoted as soon as a chance to serve his country availed itself. He clung to this promise like a leech, even though Melville had probably said the same thing to a hundred others. Ritchie's expedition, pitiful as it was, was the opportunity he had been waiting for.
There was one obstacle. In paternal fashion, Sir Charles Penrose -who maybe knew his man – refused to let Lyon go to Africa until he had cleared it with his friends and family in England. Ritchie was disappointed. ‘Lieutenant Lyon, of the Albion, [is] an excellent Draftsman,’ he reported. But alas, ‘I cannot hope to have the advantage of his assistance for the present.’7 Instead Ritchie was given a carpenter called Belford from the Valetta dockyards, ‘who is likely to prove a very useful man’,8 and was all the more useful for accepting 100 guineas for the first year out and £120 for the second – ‘something less than his regular wages in the Dockyard’,9 Ritchie wrote with pride.
Thus, with a carpenter and the hope of an officer, Ritchie sailed for Tripoli on 30 September 1818 aboard a man-of-war – it would create the right impression, he was assured. Tripoli, a rotting outpost of a rotting Ottoman Empire, ruled by a disinterested Ottoman pasha, Yussuf Karamanli, was not naturally friendly to Britain. However, since Britain's Mediterranean fleet had recently crushed a pirate's nest on the nearby Barbary Coast and could, if it wanted, swat Tripoli like a fly, the Pasha was perfectly willing to receive Ritchie's little group, especially as Ritchie carried a letter of introduction from Sir Charles Penrose warning the Pasha that Britain had no interest in conquering his country, ‘while we have possession of Malta and the Ionian Isles, and with their ports and the British Navy to sally from then, what need we more to command in the vicinity should we be at war, though in peace liberal and just persuasion are the only arms we wish to use’.10
When Ritchie landed at Tripoli in October 1818 he soon learned how weak his situation was. The idea of a scheduled caravan service to Timbuctoo was laughable. True, caravans did go there occasionally, but the route was long and hazardous, passing through deserts which were ruled by predatory Tuareg tribesmen. The only caravans which left for the interior at even remotely regular intervals were those organized by the Pasha's vassal to the south, the Bey of Fezzan, who gathered an annual levy of slaves from Bornu, an African kingdom some 1,000 miles east of Timbuctoo.
What was more, the Pasha had no intention of fulfilling his offer of support. The promises he had given Captain Smyth became a denial of any help beyond his own borders and those of Fezzan. But if Ritchie wished – and bearing in mind Admiral Penrose's letter – he and his fellow officer, if he turned up, could term themselves Vice-Consuls to Murzouk, the capital of Fezzan.
This behaviour was only to be expected, according to one member of the Foreign Office. On learning that Ritchie was putting his trust in the Pasha, he reminded Barrow and Bathurst that the Pasha had murdered his eldest brother to get the throne and that if Ritchie's ‘success depends on the agency of the Pasha of Tripoli he is desperate, as from my knowledge of the man, so far back as 1793, a greater villain never infested the earth’.11
Fortunately for Ritchie, the British Consul at Tripoli was Hanmer Warrington. This energetic, capable and opinionated man, who would facilitate most of Barrow's African expeditions, is long forgotten. But during his residency from 1814 to 1846 he did a great deal to extend British influence in the Sahara. He was so close to the Pasha that he virtually became his foreign secretary. By 1825 he was acting Consul for Austria, Hanover, the Netherlands, Portugal, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and Tuscany; in addition to this he mediated for the unsatisfactory Consuls of Sweden and Denmark. Under his influence British Vice-Consuls were despatched to the most unlikely of places, and his home became a semi-official asylum for political refugees and runaway slaves.
Warrington's one weakness was the King of Sardinia, whom he could not abide. The King of Sardinia reciprocated and, throughout Warrington's tenure, the two men enjoyed a covert vendetta of insults and petty intrigues. At the time of Ritchie's arrival, Warrington was deeply involved in the case of a Sardinian spy who had attempted to cash a draft for several hundred Spanish dollars – the currency of North Africa – using Warrington's forged signature. In retaliation he was planning a sweep of Malta, whose scurrilous population he considered to be a hotbed of pro-Sardinian agitators.
Magnanimously, Warrington put his quarrel aside. By mid-November Lyon had been given clearance to join the expedition, and he and Ritchie, with Warrington, held an audience with the Pasha, taking great care to have the meeting minuted and signed by all parties lest any promises on the Pasha's behalf went the same way as those made to Smyth. Lyon, in anticipation of his promotion and not wishing to diminish the expedition's importance, announced himself as captain.
The Pasha, for all his bad reputation, was reasonableness itself. He regretted his inability to help them as fully as he had previously wished, but the interior kingdoms were in a state of ‘anarchy and confusion';12 his only friend had been the King of Bornu but he was now dead and ‘no mission of His to any part of Soudan would be respected’.13 Helpfully, he advised Ritchie and Lyon to grow beards, wear native clothing and travel as converts to Islam. And in parting, he told them that the Bey of Fezzan was due shortly in Tripoli to raise funds for a slave-gathering expedition. Their best bet was to join his caravan.
Ritchie floundered. ‘It will be evident,’ he wrote to the Colonial Office, ‘that the position in which I am placed is not the one which I anticipated on leaving Europe …’14 He had envisaged an arduous but organized passage to the Niger. Tagging onto a slave train of uncertain destination was not the same thing. As the days of preparation passed, Ritchie grew more and more silent. He roused himself on occasion, to report snippets of news such as Dupont's hasty return to Paris thanks to ‘an unpleasant affair occasioned by the son of the French Consul’.15 He also managed to record an interview with a sixty-year-old schoolmaster born in Timbuctoo of Tripoline parents who described his home town as a drab place whose houses were built of mud, sometimes two storeys high, around a central palace. The royal troops wore red, the main articles of trade were cotton cloth and gold ornaments, market-days were Tuesday and Thursday, and the surrounding countryside was flat. Half a day's journey to the south was a river, full of boats and so wide that a gun could not carry to the other side. The schoolmaster called this river the Nile, a name that was given to any large river in that part of Africa; according to him, looking at it from the north, ‘the Nile comes from your right hand and flows towards the left’.16 Without a doubt he was describing the Niger. ‘It is commonly supposed,’ Ritchie wrote, ‘to form the Western Branch of the Nile, but this improbable theory is not supported by any evidence.’17
While Ritchie mulled over these disheartening revelations, ‘Captain’ Lyon became increasingly the man on whom the expedition depended. Lyon was irrepressible. He threw himself into his disguise with glee. He learned Arabic, grew a beard and, under the name of Said ben abd Allah, received instruction on Islamic religion. Yussuf el Ritchie and Ali (Belford) trailed resignedly in his wake. When Mohammed el Mukni, the Bey of Fezzan, came into town it was Lyon who took the lead, meeting this fine-looking man – ‘of an insatiable ambition and excessive avarice’18 – with such fellow feeling that the Bey promised to treat them all as if they were his brothers.
The Bey had been in Tripoli only a few weeks before he brought Ritchie more bad news. He had changed his mind about crossing the Sahara, and could take them only as far as his capital, Murzouk. Ritchie listened listlessly. Could anything else go wrong? By the time the Bey of Fezzan departed on 22 March 1819 Ritchie had given up all hope.
Lyon, on the other hand, was revelling in Arab life. He had explored Tripoli's surrounding hills and countryside, had slept in the same defensive towers as had the Pasha and his forefathers, and had learned how to catch a snake or a scorpion without being harmed. He had impressed himself on his Arab companions to a degree that they considered him a fellow Muslim. Wherever Lyon looked he found something of interest. At their first stop he was drawn inexorably to Lilla Fatima, the gigantic widow of a local ruler, whose calves were as big as a man's thigh. Tattooed across her body, Lyon revealed, were the names of God and all her numerous men-friends. Lyon and Fatima entertained themselves with a naked floorshow until Ritchie wandered in, reminding Fatima so depressingly of her late husband that she pulled up her veil and ordered the dancers home.
As the Bey's caravan travelled south, carrying with it the white men on horses, their goods loaded on twenty-two camels, Lyon recorded everything he encountered. Here he saw Roman ruins, whose inscriptions he dutifully took down; there he saw empty water-holes, dug by preceding caravans, whose depth he estimated at more than 200 feet. On entering the Sahara, on 24 April, he was astonished by the detritus of previous caravans. Dead animals lay everywhere, their remains desiccated by the sun. Sometimes they faced sandstorms of up to twelve hours’ duration. Now and then a slave train moaned by; bones, human and otherwise, littered the trail. ‘The road,’ he wrote, ‘was a dreary desert, having but few wells and those of salt water.’19 He gave precise instructions on how to combat the heat: water must be drunk in the morning and from the hand; a wet cloth on the back of the neck would avert sunstroke. Oil yourself down after a long day, he counselled, and be careful with your horses when approaching an oasis.
Thirty-nine days after leaving Tripoli they reached Murzouk where Fatima, who had reached some kind of arrangement with Lyon, marked the occasion by dismounting without assistance. Admirers rushed from every quarter to help her to her feet. Murzouk was a town of 2,500 people, whose windowless homes were enclosed by a fifteen-foot-high-wall. In the centre loomed the Bey's palace, a ninety-foot edifice in which he lived with his guests, courtiers and harem. The ‘Vice-Consuls’ were not among the Bey's guests; instead they were billeted in a windowless, one-roomed house in which a murder had recently been committed.
Lyon was becoming seriously worried as to their chances of success. Earlier he had recorded that ‘I do not think that the funds allowed to Mr. Ritchie are adequate to the purposes of safety or enquiry.’20 Now, to his horror, he found that Ritchie had spent all but £75 of his £2,000 allowance before even landing in Africa, and most of that was gone. The goods he had purchased for trade in the interior were worthless in Murzouk and the only saleable commodities they possessed were their horses and firearms, to part with either of which would spell an end to the expedition and also, quite likely, an end to any hope of returning to Tripoli.
To deepen their gloom further, they were racked by fever. Lyon and Ritchie spent the months of June, July and August confined to bed, waited on only by Belford, who had become deaf during the journey and was himself ‘much reduced’. The Bey, who had been so affable when the white men were healthy and, apparently, wealthy turned a blind eye to their distress.
Ironically, in this relatively bountiful oasis, they found themselves in direr circumstances than Parry's men in the furthest wastes of the Arctic. ‘Our situation was daily becoming more deplorable in all respects,’ Lyon wrote at the end of August. ‘Our rate of living was reduced to one saa, or quart of corn per diem, with occasionally a few dates, amongst [all] of us.’21 Not even a widely believed rumour that Ritchie was married to the King of England's daughter, and Lyon to the King's niece, could help. If anything it only exacerbated the problem as hordes of Murzoukians clamoured at their door demanding money and medicine. Lyon dismissed the money-grubbers but was unable to refuse the sick. However, he ‘took good care to give such doses as were not easily forgotten’,22 and soon they were left alone save for an occasional request to treat the Bey's harem, a duty that Lyon felt he could not ignore.
By September 1819 they had recovered sufficiently to purchase a few pounds of camel flesh, the first meat they had tasted in six weeks. Ritchie responded apathetically, lying on his bed against the wall, saying little. Lyon, however, sallied into town, making friends with Murzouk's lowlife and attending illicit parties where he danced and drank bouza, a date brew, until the small hours. In October, Belford made a ceremonial coach for the Bey, which garnered them an invaluable seven dollars. But no sooner had they been paid than Belford and Lyon fell ill, leaving Ritchie to nurse them. And when they recovered, Ritchie once more went down with fever. He finally rallied in mid-November, but only for the briefest period.
On 17 November, Ritchie looked in the mirror and saw that his tongue was black. Jokingly he remarked to Lyon that, if he did not know this to have been caused by the cup of thick coffee he had just drunk, he would have to assume he had bilious fever in which case they might as well say goodbye to him. He died three days later.
On 21 November, one hour after Lyon had finished reciting the first chapter of the Koran over Ritchie's grave, a message came from Tripoli that the British government had granted them an extra £1,000. Lyon was almost beside himself with frustration. If the news had arrived a few months or even weeks earlier it could have averted great suffering and maybe saved Ritchie's life. Infuriatingly, now that the money was available he could not even spend it; so low had their stock fallen that nobody in Murzouk would offer him credit – whatever his royal connections – and if he wanted the cash he would have to go back to Tripoli to collect it.
Lyon's final despair came when he inspected a stack of boxes which Ritchie had directed were not to be opened until they reached the interior. Envisaging a host of tradable goods, he found only the following: one camel-load of corks for pinning insects, two loads of brown paper for wrapping plants, two chests of scientific instruments, eight hundredweight of books and 600 pounds of lead. These and other non-essentials, such as a magic lantern, amounted to eight camel-loads out of the twenty-two they had started with. Moreover, on searching for Ritchie's journal, Lyon discovered that for a long time he had not bothered to keep one. ‘Much, very much, valuable information has been lost,’23 he stormed.
At this point Lyon would have been justified in packing up and heading home. For some time he had been sleeping with his favourite weapon by his side – a sword with a pistol in its hilt – to protect himself from the would-be assassins who pattered across his roof at night. But instead he sold Ritchie's horse plus a quantity of gunpowder and used the proceeds to pay for an exploratory trip to the south with enough left over to cover his passage back to Tripoli. He would not find the Niger but at least he would map a bit more territory for those who would follow.
On 14 December 1819 he set out on a whistle-stop tour of the land immediately south of Murzouk. Following him came the long-suffering Belford, who was now not only deaf but dizzy and frequently fell off his horse. There was little for them to find save a general hatred of the Bey of Fezzan, whose slave trains campaigned through the land once a year. As Lyon wrote to Bathurst, ‘their little children are taught to curse him as soon as they can speak’.24 By 18 January 1820, with his money running out and Belford barely able to stand, Lyon was back in Murzouk. Five days later he celebrated his birthday with a group of locals; to mark the occasion Fatima performed a dance with much dropping of veils. Shortly afterwards, he, Belford and Fatima left on a slave caravan bound for Tripoli.
Crossing the Sahara once again, in conditions of such dryness that his horse's tail switched sparks of static, Lyon's observant eye went to work. The solitude awed and excited him. ‘In some parts [of the desert],’ he wrote, ‘the only living creature seen for many days is a small insect somewhat resembling a spider.’25 On one occasion he was able to follow the tracks of a single beetle through the sand for a distance of two miles. When he left the campfire at night he was stunned by the clarity of the stars and by the utter silence. All that could be heard was the gentle soughing of the wind – which he later realized was the sound of his own breathing.
Mirages taunted him continually. Lakes abounded, as did forests. Many a time he cantered towards a large tree only to find it was a ‘bush which did not throw a shade sufficient even to shelter one of my hands’.26 His travelling companions found this hilarious, and were forever giving him a nudge and asking him to investigate some illusory landmark. Midway on their journey they stopped at an oasis whose inhabitants made a kind of caviare from tiny mud-worms. Of course, it was nothing like real caviare, Lyon reassured his journal readers, but in the circumstances, once one became used to it, it was very tasty indeed.
Back at Fatima's home town, Sockna, fond farewells were said and a celebratory dinner was held indoors. Lyon recorded that flies fell ‘by the spoonfuls’27 into food and drink alike. He reached Zeetun on 18 March, and on the morning of 26 March 1820, fifty days after having left Murzouk, he re-entered Tripoli. It was exactly one year to the day since he had left the town.
On returning to Britain, Lyon had four matters to discuss with the authorities: slavery, the course of the Niger, the measures to be taken by future explorers who travelled through the Sahara and, most important of all, his promotion.
On the matter of slavery he was outspoken. He had been disgusted by the sights he had seen in the Sahara and recommended a pragmatic approach. Unlike Ritchie, who had suggested unrealistically that Britain pay the Arab nations compensation for stopping the slave trade, Lyon advised a programme of trade and education under which the Africans would become so secure that they would no longer need to deal in human beings, and would be able to defend themselves against predators. There would be no obstacle to this, he argued, because ‘the whole of the negroe country is open to any peaceable man or woman’.28 He backed up his reasoning with sound, if depressing, economics: in Tripoli you paid £20 for an African woman; in the impoverished south you could swap a horse for twenty of them.
As for the Niger, it most certainly did not flow into the swamp of Wangara. ‘It is quite impossible from the varied accounts given of it,’ Lyon wrote of Wangara, ‘to form any idea as to its actual situation, or even existence.’29 In his opinion, Wangara was most likely a generic name for swamps, much as the Nile was a generic term for large rivers. He backed this up with the information that he had heard of many Wangaras, and none of them seemed credible places. One Wangara, for example, was supposed to be inhabited by an invisible tribe which only traded by night. Elsewhere, in another Wangara, there was a circular city whose covered streets were lit twenty-four hours a day by lamps. The city was bisected by a wall, on either side of which pale citizens plotted how to conquer the other half. In the face of such tales it was hard to argue Wangara's existence.
If the Niger went anywhere, it flowed into a lake called Tshad. From what Lyon had been told, this lake (Lake Chad) was a mighty expanse of water that shrank in the dry season to a river which flowed west to east. Nobody knew where the river came from or through which lands it later flowed, but everybody agreed, whatever route it took, that it eventually joined the Nile.
On more solid ground, Lyon asserted that any future expeditions would have to go native if they were to have any chance of success. ‘We found that it was absolutely requisite to conform to all the duties of the Mohammedan religion, as well as to assume their dress.’ Had they not done so, he continued, ‘our lives would have been in constant jeopardy’. ‘I am confident,’ he concluded, ‘that it would never be possible for any man to pass through Africa unless in every respect he qualified himself to appear as a Mohammedan; and should I myself return to that country, I would not be accompanied by any one who would refuse to observe these precautions. It is possible, that as far as Fezzan, a traveller might, by great good chance, escape detection; but the further south he proceeded, the more bigoted would he find the people, and a cruel death would, in such a case, inevitably terminate his journey.’30
Finally, there came the difficult matter of promotion. In vain did Lyon present the argument that he had been serving the nation's interest and so, according to Lord Melville's letter, should be advanced. On every front he was greeted by stony faces. His father, and eventually his mother too, petitioned Lord Bathurst, but to no avail. Only with difficulty could they persuade the government to even pay their son for his troubles, his last salary having been received in 1818.
After much to-ing and fro-ing, Lyon's father let his feelings be known. Having received ‘your most disheartening & studiously evasive letter’, he wrote tipsily to Lord Bathurst with many capitals, underlinings and the odd Latin quote, ‘Do you not think that my son has suffered as much, exerted himself as much, & as much benefited the Country as those many officers who were made Commander for sailing round the Isle of Wight in the Prince Regent's Yacht?’31
Lyon senior was an ‘independent Gentleman’, he informed Bathurst, a position ‘which has ever been supported unsullied by my family, [and] I proudly consider myself the equal of any man however high his temporal Rank’.32
Bathurst directed him wearily to the Admiralty, where Barrow directed him back to the Colonial Office. And so the war of Lyon's promotion went on.
But Lyon had one card to play. Barrow very much wanted him to go on another expedition to Africa. He told him as much within days of his return – ‘not in the most courteous or encouraging manner but with official coldness’,33 wrote Lyon Senior – suggesting that September of 1820 would be a good time to start. Lyon looked him in the eye and announced that ‘when he found his past services properly appreciated, & fairly rewarded, it would then be time enough to talk of the future’.34
Lyon said the same thing to Bathurst's Under-Secretary on 25 August, prompting a frantic note: ‘Dear Barrow, What should under these circs, be done as to our African Mission?’35
Lyon became even more intransigent when he heard of Parry's promotion following his return from the Arctic. No matter that Parry had done the unheard of and that Lyon had survived a trip to a small, dirty town in Africa. No matter that Parry had ‘interest’, or patronage, and that Lyon had none. A principle was at stake. He poured out his complaints to Lord Bathurst on 8 November 1820. ‘His report and explanation have been immediately attended to,’ Lyon wrote of Parry, ’he has been admitted to the presence of his highest employers & by them has been received with favour and distinction, I on the other hand, am denied to your Lordship's presence, have had no opportunity offered me for examination, & have for the period of three months been referred from your Lordship to the Admiralty & from thence back again to your Lordship, without hope or chance of being eventually attended to by one or the other party.’36
Lord Bathurst did not reply. So when Lyon finished his journal – a lively book, illustrated by vibrant prints of his own watercolours – he wrote to tell him so on 13 November, and sent copies of the letter every succeeding day until Bathurst promised to look at it. Simultaneously, Lyon let it be known that he alone held the clue to the Niger. ‘High and dazzling offers were made me in a particular quarter to renew my researches into the Interior,’ he wrote, ‘and I will proudly say that had I accepted them, I would & could have fulfilled the utmost wishes of my employers, by solving in six months from the time of my leaving Europe, the important questions respecting the Niger.’37
Barrow had had enough. Time was pressing and there were scores of men clamouring to be sent to Africa, any of whom who would suit the job. He would have liked to send Lyon back to the Sahara. But as the young man was making such a nuisance of himself and was obviously in need of a lesson, and because Barrow had a sense of humour, he sent him to the Arctic instead.