12

THE MADMAN OF TIMBUCTOO

Even before Denham and Clapperton returned, Barrow was angling for another bite at Africa. In 1823 he had pushed a plan to cross the Sahara not via Murzouk but via Ghadames, a major oasis on the alternative caravan route to the west. The expedition's destination was Timbuctoo and its leader was Lyon – ‘If the government will give him £1,000 he will ask for nothing more.’1 The government would not give him £1,000 and so Lyon was sent to the Arctic again. But Barrow was persistent. ‘I am very much for encouraging this spirit of adventure,’ he told Bathurst, ‘and I am sure the public feeling is for it.’² Bathurst thought differently, and jotted down a brief minute: ‘Mr. Barrow is very impertinent.’³

Impertinent or not, Barrow got his way, thus solving forever the question of Timbuctoo and sealing the fate of a neglected army officer called Gordon Laing. Laing was an ambitious, impatient, fanatical and very brave young friend of Sabine's who was obsessed with Africa. He had served with the Royal African Colonial Corps in Sierra Leone, where he had caused a degree of resentment as editor of the local newspaper by filling its pages with ‘the most fulsome panegyrics upon himself in prose and rhyme’.⁴ He was considered ‘unwise, unofficerlike and unmanly’,5 and his commanding officer wrote that ‘his military exploits were worse than his poetry’⁶ – which is saying a great deal. Nevertheless, during his time there he had come to some inescapable conclusions regarding the Niger. On one foray inland he had come across the source of the Niger, and on measuring its altitude had found that it was lower than the highest known point of the Nile. ‘The question of the Niger uniting with the Nile must therefore be forever at rest, the elevation of its source not being sufficient to carry it half that distance,’⁷ he wrote. He pressed for the recall of the Denham-Oudney-Clapperton mission. ‘It is now very clear that nothing in the way of discovery can be effected from that quarter, and that the attempt is only attended with expense, disappointment and perhaps the loss of valuable lives.’⁸

This did not endear Laing to Barrow. Still less did his assertion that the Niger flowed into the Gulf of Benin. But time was pressing. The French were showing an unpardonable interest in the area and had had the effrontery to offer a prize of 10,000 francs for the first person to bring back information about Timbuctoo. Even the Italian archaeologist Belzoni, fresh from trampling through Egypt's catacombs, had his eyes on the fabled city.^* Barrow wanted a Briton to get there first. When Laing offered to go, not being ‘influenced by the most distant view to emolument of any kind … I shall be perfectly happy to undertake the journey without any salary’,⁹ and with a proposed outlay of £640 10s for set-up costs plus an annual expenditure of £173 7s 6d, he was not only accepted, but was promoted from captain to major.

Laing remained unrepentant about the Niger. ‘The information of Sultan Bello now, in my opinion, sets the matter entirely at rest,’ he wrote, ‘or as nearly so as can be until the river is absolutely navigated to its embouchure, but I rather apprehend that it will not satisfy Mr. Barrow, who is determined that the Yeou or the Schad shall be the Niger.’10

It did not satisfy Mr Barrow. When Laing's journal was published describing his time in Sierra Leone and his opinions regarding the Niger, Barrow penned a disdainful review. ‘I fully expected that he would object to my having seen the source of the Niger,’ Laing wrote crossly to a friend in the Foreign Office. ‘It would completely interfere with that theory upon which he has completely staked his reputation, and which is just on the point of being overturned.’¹¹

On hearing that Barrow was sending Clapperton out again, Laing vented his competitive spleen: ‘Clapperton may as well have stayed at home, if the termination of the Niger is his object – It is destined for me, and [nobody] can interfere with me – Timbuctoo shall be visited, and the Niger explored within a very few months.’¹² In yet more strident tone he declared that, ‘If I do not visit [Timbuctoo] the world will forever remain in ignorance of the place, as I make no vainglorious assertion when I say that it will never be visited by Christian man after me.’¹³ Off he went to Malta, his stop-off en route to Africa, utterly obsessed with the mission. ‘I am so wrapt up in the success of this enterprise,’ he wrote, ‘that I think of nothing else all day and dream of nothing else all night.’¹⁴

Laing arrived in Tripoli in May 1825, where the crews of two British ships swarmed the rigging and gave him three cheers. ‘There are moments in a man's life,’ he sighed, ‘which he would not exchange for living years.’¹⁵ Then he made his way to the British consulate primed with all the urgency of his mission and promptly fell in love with, and proposed to, Warrington's daughter.

Warrington was horrified. Expediting explorers to the interior was one thing, but becoming familially entangled with them was another. Laing was not the best choice of son-in-law. Not only was he slightly mad but he was also sick. Even before he arrived in Tripoli he had spent a month bedridden in Malta. ‘I much fear the delicate state of his health will not carry him through his arduous task,’¹⁶ Warrington wrote home. When it came to Laing's cut-price budget, the Consul could only shake his head. The Pasha's manner was ‘cool and hesitating’ towards Laing, and as Warrington divined from his glances and the rubbing together of his finger and thumb, he was unwilling to let him proceed without a substantial ‘pecuniary douceur’.17

Laing was equal to the Pasha. On being informed ‘in the most unequivocal language, that the door was shut to me unless I opened it with money’,¹⁸ he ordered £2,000 to be issued immediately with the promise of a slightly larger sum to be paid by instalments as he neared his goal. In a single stroke he increased the cost of his mission sixfold. It did not worry him. ‘I have, I assure your Lordship, done everything for the best,’¹⁹ he wrote blithely to Bathurst.

Warrington supported the extra expenditure. But he was less than happy about the romance. While he wished his daughter every happiness, he did not wish her to marry a lunatic who would in all likelihood never come back alive. As he told Bathurst, ‘every argument and every feeling of disapprobation was resorted to by me to prevent even an engagement under the existing circumstances, the disadvantages so evidently appearing to attach to my daughter’.²⁰ More galling still, as senior representative of the Church of England in Tripoli, he would be expected to perform the marriage service. Furtively, he inquired whether such a marriage was legally binding.

Laing cared not a farthing. With the calm certainty of the fanatic he sent off for ‘a handsome little cabinet of mineralogical specimens, such a one as will suit a lady of taste and refinement’,²¹ which he could not afford, and commissioned a similarly extravagant miniature portrait of his wife-to-be.

Warrington, the great facilitator, was at a loss. ‘After a voluminous correspondence,’ he wrote to Bathurst, ‘I found my wishes, exertions, entreaties and displeasures quite futile and of no avail.’²² He married the couple on 14 July but made it a condition, signed by all parties, that the marriage was not to be consummated until Laing had reached his target and returned direct to Tripoli.

This did not upset Laing. If anything, he bore it like a badge of honour. He had already set himself an apparently impossible task. Now he had the impetus of frustrated desire; he was a latterday medieval knight, striving to impress his unobtainable love – whose name was Emma – with acts of heroism and suffering. ‘I shall do more than has ever been done before,’ he wrote, ‘and shall show myself to be what I have ever considered myself, a man of enterprise and genius.’23

This strange, frenzied man, who had descended so abruptly on Warrington's life, hurried into the desert amid a cloud of delusions. Down through the Sahara he plodded, with a few servants, in a caravan largely composed of his own camels. He kept a journal – or said he did – but sent few of its contents back to Tripoli. All that survives is a brief ode to himself written in February 1825 and a few pages describing the countryside written the same August. Instead he charted his course with letters that revealed little of his journey and much about his mental state. He castigated the people he met for their greed; he dwelt darkly on the character of Clapperton, whom he saw as his arch rival in the quest for Timbuctoo – ‘I am not over anxious to meet [him],’ he sniffed, ‘particularly after what my friend Sabine has said of him';²⁴ he ranted about the rewards he should receive and the sacrifices he had made; he disparaged the efforts of previous explorers such as Lyon – ‘Master George never troubled himself much with observations';²⁵ and although he never wrote to her directly, he included in each letter to Warrington an effusion to ‘my dear, dear Emma’.

Now and then his despatches included the occasional sketch or map. Sometimes they included horrendous bills – 2,500 dollars in one instance, for a guide. Laing apologized for the cost. But what was money compared to the glory of reaching Timbuctoo? ‘I am sanguine in my hopes of accomplishing a visit to the far-famed capital of Central Africa,’ he told Warrington in August 1825, ‘[and to] the spot where the adventurous Park lost his life, and the problematic termination of the Niger, within the space of six months.’²⁶ As he explained, ‘You shall find that I shall do everything in the Mission which you and the rest of my friends expect from me.’²⁷

When Warrington forwarded some advice from Clapperton, Laing rose in fury. ‘I care little for any information that Clapperton could communicate,’ he wrote. ‘I smile at the idea of his reaching Timbuctoo before me. How can he expect it? Has he not already had the power? Has he not already thrown away the chance? … He amuses me by saying you must not eat or drink before a Turk – if so, how is it that I hear how the Turks speak constantly of the quantities of wine Abdullah (his country name) used to drink – four bottles of port wine before dinner whenever he could get it – I am not surprised Mr. C. should not wish to drink before them.’ Clapperton's advice was ‘worth nothing’.28

One of the matters Clapperton had raised was the question of clothes. While Denham had relished the opportunity to display his buttons, braid and jackets, Clapperton seems – in retrospect, at least -to have sided with Lyon in advocating native costumes and customs. Laing had adopted local dress from the start – except on Sundays -and took the suggestion as an affront. ‘"I must wear a plain Turkish dress”, just as “I must be kind and patient with the natives”,’ came Laing's retort. ‘'Tis not my nature to be otherwise. “I must not take observations secretly.” The sun does not shine in sly corners. “I must not speak disrespectfully of the women.” I wonder how he found this out – I might have been a century in Africa and never have made such a discovery. “I must not meddle with the females of the country.” Prodigious! “I must have presents to give away.” We need not ghosts to rise from their graves to tell us this.’²⁹

Laing sent huffy letters to the Colonial Office informing Lord Bathurst of his opinions. To his mind, Clapperton's ‘only object seems to be to forestall me in discovery’.³⁰ At the same time, he pestered Warrington for Emma's miniature. Without it he feared he might go mad and that, as he told Warrington unnecessarily, would not be good: ‘The state of my mind may prove much more prejudicial to the state of my health than the climate of Africa.’³¹ Again, he was plagued by the spectre of Clapperton. ‘Clapperton may as well have stayed at home if the termination of the Niger is his object. It is destined for me. It is due me, and [no] Clapperton can interfere with me,’ he wrote to Warrington. ‘Only take care of my dearest Emma, and Timbuctoo shall be visited and the Niger explored within a very few months.’32 ‘I, as I always thought I should, shall be the man,’³³ he wrote. He would perform his journey ‘like a Trojan’.³⁴

But was Warrington taking care of Emma? When the miniature finally caught up with him, Laing was aghast. Could he have made a mistake in choosing the Spanish Consul-General as artist? Or did his beloved really look like that? Those sunken eyes, those pale cheeks, those colourless lips, that melancholy expression … she must be ill and dying. Laing immediately prepared to return to Tripoli. ‘What is Timbuctoo? What the Niger? What the world to me without my Emma?’ he raved to Warrington. ‘Should anything befall my Emma, which God forbid, I no more wish to see the face of man; my course will be run – a few short days of misery and I should follow her to heaven … Bear with my weakness, my brain is troubled – I must lay down my pen awhile – oh that picture.’³⁵

Warrington was seriously worried – both for the expedition and for his son-in-law's sanity. ‘For Heavens sake do not let your powerful feelings operate on you so,’³⁶ he replied with asperity, assuring Laing that Emma was perfectly well and that he was on no account to turn back. Tentatively, he inquired if Laing would like a doctor to be sent out. Laing had the bit between his teeth. ‘It is the mind that will see Laing through,’ he retorted. ‘Should it fail me, what doctor could strengthen it? Really, this world is made up of such commonplace matter that it is painful for a purpose of mind to exist in it. I have not yet decided whether I shall proceed or return to Tripoli.’³⁷

Warrington was getting angry. ‘I can hardly keep my temper or patience,’ he wrote. ‘So help me God she is alive and well.’³⁸

Laing's mind was finally made up not by Warrington's assurances but by a letter from Denham – ‘who writes in a handsome, gentlemanlike style’³⁹ – describing Clapperton's departure for the west coast. ‘I feel assured he will never go beyond Benin! – mark my words. He … will arrive at the worst season of the year,’ Laing told Warrington. ‘I cannot help expressing a hope that he may be prudent enough to return if he finds the bad effects of the climate lay hold of his constitution, which they undoubtedly will.’⁴⁰

Competitiveness, combined with a sudden, paranoid belief that the world was watching and waiting for him to fail, drove Laing forward: ‘I had a long argument with myself last night, and I felt too keenly the triumph which my enemies (for I have my share of those miscreants who are jealous of the little reputation I have so hardly earned) would have over me … Government may find fault with me if they please; let us go on with our labour with diminished enthusiasm, and if we can not command, let us at least deserve commendation.’41 Confidence restored, he asked for a warship to patrol the Gulf of Benin ready to pick him up because he had no wish to be kept hanging around once he had traced the Niger to its mouth. He punctured the bluster, however, with a plaintive inquiry as to the pre-nuptial agreement. Would he still be allowed to consummate his marriage, he asked, if he returned to Tripoli by a more circuitous route than planned?

Although sickly, Laing prided himself on his strength. He mentioned fleetingly that he had gone without food for a week en route to Ghadames and that the thermometer sometimes reached 120 °F in the shade, during which time he had sustained ‘privations and exposure to a degree of heat which I am inclined to believe few European constitutions could stand’.⁴² With this in mind, he set out over a desert ‘as flat as a bowling green’⁴³ for Timbuctoo.

The route he had chosen had always been dangerous. Caravans travelling from Ghadames faced the prospect of raids from marauding Tuareg tribesmen who controlled the western desert from Morocco to sub-Saharan Africa. Normally, travellers paid them protection money for a safe passage; Laing either omitted to pay or paid too little. His small caravan was easier meat than most. At 5 a.m. on a January morning in 1826, while the group was three-quarters of the way to Timbuctoo, the Tuaregs struck in a flurry of slashing swords and blazing muskets, killing everybody who did not flee and leaving Laing for dead after they had taken all his possessions.

When the caravan reassembled and picked up the pieces, it departed immediately for its next stop, the oasis of Sidi el Muktar, abandoning Laing where he lay. Luckily, however, it also abandoned a wounded camel driver and a few redundant camels. The two men followed in its wake, Laing strapped onto the back of one camel while the injured driver led the way on another. Laing covered 400 miles in this fashion, suffering pains which can only be described by the following account which eventually reached Warrington in Tripoli. ‘To begin from the top: I have five sabre cuts on the crown of the head and three on the left temple, all fractures from which much bone has come away; one on my left cheek which fractured the jaw bone and has divided the ear, forming a very unsightly wound; one over the right temple and a dreadful gash on the back of the neck, which slightly grazed the windpipe; a musket ball in the hip, which made its way through my back, slightly grazing the backbone; five sabre cuts on my right arm and hand, three of the fingers broken, the hand cut three-fourths across, and the wrist bones cut through; three cuts on the left arm, the bone of which has been broken but is again uniting; one slight wound on the right leg and two with one dreadful gash on the left, to say nothing of a cut across the fingers of my left hand, now healed up.’44

Almost as an afterthought he added that on arrival in Sidi el Muktar he had caught the plague – ‘a dreadful malady somewhat similar to yellow fever in its symptoms’⁴⁵ – and had spent nine days ‘so ill with fever that it was presumed, expected and hoped that I should die’.⁴⁶ While he was sick most of his possessions, including his gun, had been stolen and sent to be sold in the Timbuctoo market. ‘I am nevertheless doing well,’ he concluded, writing with only the thumb and middle finger of his left hand, ‘and hope yet to return to England with much important geographical information.’⁴⁷

Warrington wrote to Clapperton asking him ‘for God's sake’ to find out what was going on. Meanwhile, Laing entered Timbuctoo on 13 August 1826, a withered but blazing ghost, having travelled 2,650 miles across unmapped, inhospitable desert to reach his goal. He was the first white man ever to see this fabled city It was a sordid, mud-brick town with nothing to recommend it whatsoever. Laing searched in vain for the universities, red-uniformed armies, palaces and gold of which he had heard. They did not exist. Indeed, Timbuctoo barely had a government of its own. Nominally it fell within the jurisdiction of Jenne, which was an outpost of Sultan Bello's empire. Order of some sort existed within the four-mile circumference of the city walls, but the surrounding region was controlled entirely by Tuareg bandits. Timbuctoo was not a glittering capital; it was a frontier town – poor, dangerous and lawless.

Rather oddly, therefore, Laing told Warrington that the place ‘has completely met my expectations’.48 It is uncertain what he meant by this – he was so unbalanced that any expectation could have formed in his mind – but a possible explanation is that he was trying to drum up a bit of pre-publication interest in his journal. To date, he had conjured an air of mystery over proceedings, his letters containing little of substance and much froth. Perhaps he was biding his time until he could reveal to the world the full grandeur of his struggle.

Laing stayed in Timbuctoo for five and a half weeks, and wrote just one letter during his stay, dated the day before his departure. It was a short missive that contained little solid information but made tantalizing reference to the ‘abundant’⁴⁹ records he had found. It is hard to decipher truth from fantasy, but there were probably no records. More likely it was just another attempt to keep people wondering at the contents of his journal.

If reports are to be believed, Laing became more deranged in Timbuctoo than ever before. He strutted through the streets in full European dress, announcing himself as the King of England's representative, drawing money on the Pasha's account and sneering at any who tried to help him. He rented a small, mud house from which he cantered out at night on horseback, accompanied only by his personal demons, to investigate the city's outskirts and its port on the Niger.

He had previously envisaged a stay in Timbuctoo of about six months but it soon became clear that he did not have that time. Sultan Bello wanted him out. Fearing further penetration of the region by a nation whose ‘abuses and corruptions’ around the globe he had heard about and whose emissaries might destabilize his already precarious fringe territories – Clapperton was at the moment in Sokoto and was proving most troublesome – Bello sent a message to the ruler of Jenne, instructing him to order the Sultan of Timbuctoo not to admit a European to the town. All at once, through no fault of its own and for the first time in its history, Timbuctoo had achieved a measure of importance.

Laing was not sure what to do. The Sultan ‘trembles for my safety and strongly urges my immediate departure’,50 he told Warrington. Clearly, he had to leave town. But where was he to go? Barrow had suggested he travel east from Timbuctoo ‘and make for Bornou as a point d'appui’.⁵¹ But this might entail meeting Clapperton, and was therefore untenable. Earlier he had written to Sabine that he intended to explore the whole region to the south of Timbuctoo before following the Niger to its termination. Now he decided to go south-west to Sierra Leone. Then, for some unfathomable reason, he changed his mind and headed north. ‘My father used often to accuse me of want of common sense,’ he once confided to his sister. ‘'Tis true, I never possessed any, nor ever shall.’⁵²

Laing's plan may have been to make for Morocco. Alternatively he might have decided that a detour north was necessary on the way to Sierra Leone to avoid troubles in the immediate vicinity of Timbuctoo. In either case, he never reached his destination. He left Timbuctoo on a northward-bound caravan on 22 September 1826 and was killed by Tuaregs three days later. If the account of an eyewitness is to be believed, Laing died a particularly awful death, throttled by two men hauling on either end of a turban that had been wrapped around his neck. He was then decapitated and left for the vultures. The only survivor was a black servant, who had been badly wounded and had feigned death. He found his way back to Timbuctoo and from there brought the news to Tripoli in August 1828.

Overnight, Laing became another Mungo Park. Where was his body? Where was his journal? What had he discovered? The answer to the first question, and in part to the last, was revealed by René Caillée – a Frenchman. Caillée was a very brave man who rode and walked to Timbuctoo without any consular or governmental support in 1828. Enduring relentless hardship – at one point, suffering from scurvy, the roof of his mouth exfoliated and little bits of hard palate crumbled onto his tongue – he reached his goal disguised as a Muslim. He confirmed the few solid facts Laing had reported of Timbuctoo, visited the house in which he had lived, and discovered that his body was buried under a tree to the north of the town. Of Laing's possessions he found only a sextant, which he did not dare buy lest he spoil his cover by showing undue interest in the infidel. He discovered no papers or journal.

Unlike Laing, Caillée lived to tell his tale, and returned to publish the story of his epic voyage in 1830. For many people he became the man who had discovered Timbuctoo, and the French took a very public delight in the fact that ‘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 [of francs], a Frenchman has done with his scanty personal resources alone and without putting his country to any expense’.53 Predictably, rumours began to circulate in London that the whole business was a hoax: Caillée had never been to Timbuctoo and his journal had been drawn up from Laing's papers which had somehow found their way into the hands of the French Consul in Tripoli. Writing in the Quarterly Review Barrow lost no time in damning Caillée's book as a complete fabrication: his descriptions of Timbuctoo were ‘so obvious an imposture’ and his other observations were quite ‘unworthy of notice’.⁵⁴ ‘The ostentatious display which the French attach to the most trifling thing is strongly manifested,’ Barrow noted. As to their unseemly crowing, it was merely a manifestation of ‘a constantly-recurring consciousness of the intellectual and physical superiority of our countrymen over theirs’.⁵⁵

The rumours were nonsense from start to finish – at least, inasmuch as they concerned Caillée. But when it came to Laing's papers they contained a kernel of truth. As soon as the news came in of Laing's death, Warrington had despatched an Arab private investigator to find the whereabouts of the missing journal. The man returned in 1829 with the news that Laing had been warned of the dangers of his route and had therefore left his journal in Timbuctoo. If he reached his first stop safely the papers were to be sent after him. If anything happened to him, however, they were to be carried back to Tripoli by the same messenger to whom he had entrusted his last letter to Warrington. From his inquiries, the investigator learned that the messenger had carried two parcels as far as Ghadames and had handed them over to agents representing the Pasha's Prime Minister, Hassuna D'Ghies. D'Ghies had then passed them to the French Consul, Baron Rousseau, in return for a 40 per cent reduction in various debts he had run up in France. It was stated by several witnesses that Rousseau, an amateur Africanist, wanted the material for a book he was currently writing on Timbuctoo.

Warrington had previously warned Laing to ‘be cautious … to whom you communicate, as every Consul here is a sort of spy ready to suck the sweets & to transmit the honey of your industry to his or their Govt’.56 Now his fears were confirmed. He immediately filed his protests at the theft, and threatened that unless something was done he would call in British gunships to reduce Tripoli to rubble. Greatly alarmed, the Pasha leaned on a number of ‘witnesses’ and came up with the news that D'Ghies and Rousseau had not only stolen the journal but had been responsible for Laing's death.

The accusations were given further weight when Rousseau promptly fled to the United States and D'Ghies took refuge in the American Consulate from where he was later smuggled to Spain. Both men declared their innocence, a statement that was believed by a French commission set up to investigate what threatened to become an international incident, but disbelieved by a British officer sent out to Tripoli for the same purpose. The matter rumbled on for a few years and finally, in the absence of any conclusive evidence, it was dropped.

Possibly the two men were guilty. Equally likely, the whole affair had been conjured up by Warrington to discredit the French in Tripoli – he had already taken to intercepting his rival's mail. But a third interpretation, which was not considered at the time, was that the journal did not exist. Laing had never possessed the methodical instincts of an Oudney, say, or even a Denham. What place had detailed records in the fantastical world he inhabited? The journal may have been merely a product of Laing's imagination.

If anyone wanted to get to the bottom of Laing's expedition they would have been better advised to ignore the journal and study the progress of Clapperton. For it was his arrival at Sokoto that had largely engendered Laing's predicament.

*The great Belzoni – Egyptologist, engineer and showman – was a fascinating man who wrote vivid descriptions of being suffocated by clouds of mummy dust. He did have a go at Timbuctoo. He was landed at Benin by a Royal Navy vessel and bade it farewell in inimitable style: ‘God bless you, my fine fellows, and send you a happy sight of your country and friends!’ He died on 3 December 1823 of dysentery, having covered only ten miles.