13

THE ROAD FROM BADAGRY

The hot-tempered, red-bearded, pipe-smoking Clapperton had left Chatham docks in a naval sloop on 27 August 1825 bound for the port of Badagry, a few miles to the west of Lagos in present-day Nigeria. From there he hoped to make his way overland to Sokoto, crossing en route the Niger, ascertaining precisely what had happened to Park, and then finding both Timbuctoo and with a bit of luck the Niger's termination. With him he took Captain Pearce of the Royal Navy, whom Barrow described as an ‘active and accomplished officer, and a most excellent draughtsman’,1 Dr Morrison, a naval surgeon with a smattering of natural history, about whom Barrow had no opinion, and Dr Dickson, a hot-headed trainee lawyer who had served as a surgeon in the West Indies and whom Barrow did not like, referring to him as ‘this person’.² Clapperton also hired a Cornish manservant called Richard Lemon Lander, who had spent his childhood in the West Indies.

They departed under a cloud of disapproval for having spent too much. The Colonial Office pointed out sternly that Clapperton had wildly exceeded his budget and drew Barrow's attention to the individually inscribed watches with which each man had been issued. Barrow was furious and insisted the price of the watches be deducted from the officers’ pay. As for the quantity of instruments which Clapperton had purchased, he ordered most of them to be sent back. ‘I told Clapperton over and over again that we do not want the longitude of places to the last second nor within a handful of seconds,’ he said, drawing a line through a list of ‘utterly superfluous’ barometers and telescopes. Anyone would think they were going ‘to watch the Satellites of Jupiter’, he expostulated. ‘I have travelled 2,000 miles in Africa with a pocket compass that cost me 5/- and these gentry must have them at £3 a piece.’3 He advised Hay at the Colonial Office to rake Clapperton over the coals. Give him ‘one of those strong doses which all at the Admiralty know so well how to administer and which after all are sometimes called for to keep men in order when armed with a little “brief authority"’,⁴ he counselled.

Thus chastened, Clapperton's party reached the Gulf of Benin on 26 November. Dickson landed at Dahomey and struck off on his own to meet up with the others at Jenna, a town in Yoruba territory, a few weeks’ travel inland from Badagry – ‘for what reason it does not appear’,⁵ Barrow wrote acidly in the introduction to Clapperton's journal, although the very evident reason was to explore more territory.

Dickson was nervous about his solo trip. He had a feeling that he would never see his companions again. Clapperton consoled him with gruff but sensible advice. ‘Study the character of the natives well,’ he said, ‘respect their institutions and be kind to them on all occasions.’⁶ Above all, Dickson was to ‘set a guard’ on his temper lest it lead him into trouble.

‘We meet at Jenna, then,’ Dickson said, in an anxious, doubtful voice.

‘We meet at Jenna,’ Clapperton replied. ‘May God bless and protect you.’

With that, Dickson ‘tore himself from the deck’ and they never saw him again.⁷

Dickson's departure left a gloom which intensified as they made their way to Badagry. Gusts of hot, tropical air carried to them the feverish exhalations of the coast on which they were to land. They had all heard of the deadly effects the climate had on a man and they became increasingly loath to leave the security of their ship. They reached Badagry on 29 November, where African canoes splashed out to meet them. Their baggage was taken ashore and they bade an emotional farewell to the officers before themselves taking to the canoes. To cheer their departure Richard Lander produced a little bugle and blew ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’, to which the sailors responded with hearty cheers. Then they were on their own.

Badagry was not such a bad place after all. The air was healthy, they were able to hire horses and asses to carry their goods and the local chief, Adele, let them go their way after only a minimum of face-saving obstruction.

By the time they set off for the interior, their spirits had risen considerably and their company had swelled to include a local British merchant called Houtson with his servant George Dawson, a multilingual West Indian interpreter called Columbus – he signed himself A. A. Simpkins – who had accompanied Clapperton and Denham on their previous mission plus an African interpreter by the name of Pasko who had previously been employed on an ill-fated expedition under Belzoni. They travelled at first on foot, but Clapperton had unwisely taken delivery of a new pair of boots before leaving England. The boots did not fit. His feet blistered and bleeding, he put on a pair of slippers and took first to a horse and then to a hammock. He did not walk again for the rest of his journey.

By 14 December they were all sick with a fever that would stay with them forever. But Clapperton mustered the strength to write a glowing tribute to the country and its people: ‘I cannot omit bearing testimony to the singular and perhaps unprecedented fact, that we have already travelled sixty miles in eight days, with a numerous and heavy baggage, and about ten different relays of carriers, without losing so much as the value of a shilling public or private; a circumstance evincing not only somewhat more than common honesty in the inhabitants, but a degree of subordination and regular government which could not have been supposed to exist amongst a people hitherto considered barbarians.’8 They came to Jenna and left it, not having seen nor heard anything of Dickson.

Their health was now worsening. The first to die was George Dawson. Morrison, a ‘walking spectre’,9 went on 27 January and Pearce followed the same day while conducting a long and delirious conversation with his distant mother. Houtson fled to the healthier climate of the coast where he too died after a brief illness. Columbus, who had earlier told the others that he was the only man among them who would survive, was next. Dickson, though they would not know this for several months, had been killed in a quarrel long before he even approached Jenna. He had failed to guard his temper, offering to throttle a man for disobedience, and the man had reciprocated.

In a matter of weeks Clapperton's party had shrunk from nine to three – himself, Lander and Pasko. When the news reached Barrow, along with Clapperton's report, a few boxes of specimens and the dead officers’ effects, the Second Secretary was coldly furious. ‘There never was anything so stupid as to send home such rubbish as Clapperton has done,’ he wrote to Hay at the Colonial Office. ‘What you have forwarded me consists of nothing but blank papers, blank journals, and, with one exception, blank memorandum books.’¹⁰ Noticeably, he showed not a shred of regret for the deaths. What concerned him was the absence of news concerning the Niger. It was very unsatisfactory – you didn't get Parry running up huge bills, losing most of his men and then sending home incomplete reports.

Unaware of Barrow's displeasure, Clapperton swayed in his hammock through Yoruba country. Once again, he was filled with enthusiasm for the people. He wrote that ‘the Yorribas appear to be a mild and kind people, kind to their wives and children and to one another and that the government, although absolute, is conducted with the greatest mildness’.¹¹ Lander was equally impressed. The local carvings, he wrote, ‘rival, in point of delicacy, any of a similar kind I have seen in Europe’.¹²

Many of the people Clapperton encountered had never seen a white man before – which explains in part their friendliness – and though one chief ‘kept his hand wrapped up in the sleeve of his [robe], for fear the touch of a white kaffir should kill him’,¹³ they greeted Clapperton's party with genuine warmth and cheerful acquisitiveness. Guns and ammunition were in demand by the chiefs, as were rolls of silk, gaudy uniforms, and the cheap swords specially made in London for the African market. Lesser people were happy with beads, imitation gold chains and needles. English porcelain was valued by all. Clapperton had already witnessed the appeal of solid enamelware: in Kano he had been served his meals in a handbasin. But he was patriotically pleased when asked to toast a chief with beer from a Toby jug, and, on an earlier occasion, to drink water from a chamberpot – though Houtson, who was with him at the time, was dismayed to recognize it as an old one of his own, which he had sold at market only a year before.

Clapperton handed out gifts generously, perhaps too generously. At Katunga, the Yoruban capital, for example, they were kept waiting for seven weeks while the Sultan dickered for more presents. This happened with increasing frequency as they travelled north and Clapperton soon developed a brusque line in ultimatums. The reason typically given for any delay was that the route ahead was blocked by warfare and that the local sultan wished to ensure his guests’ security. The danger was not entirely exaggerated. The Yoruba were a relatively peaceful people, as yet untouched by the hard-bitten trading ethos of the coastal nations and too far south to be ravaged by the likes of Sheik El Kanemi and Sultan Bello. However, the Yoruba's northern neighbours were a different matter. Some had formed alliances with Bello, others with El Kanemi, and those who were not currently at war expected to be so soon.

Clapperton explained repeatedly that their wars were not his concern, that he was a messenger of the King of England, the dispenser of great wealth, and that if they knew which side their bread was buttered they would let him through to Sokoto. Those who were unsettled by his apparent alliance with Bello were informed peremptorily that he carried gifts and letters for Bello and El Kanemi alike. Luckily for Clapperton, the concept of neutrality was well understood, as was the need to keep the King of England happy, and so he was passed gently from ruler to ruler, his only difficulty being the need to juggle gifts according to the superiority of the chiefs he met along the way.

Everyone in this area of Africa had a friend. So the Sultan of Katunga sent Clapperton to his friend the Sultan of Kaiami, who sent him to his friend the Sultan of Wawa, who forwarded him to his friend the King of Bussa, who decided that the newly appointed Sultan of Nyffee ought to be his friend and directed Clapperton to him, and he in turn sent word via Bulla Bulla and Zeg Zeg to Kano that a white man had arrived with gifts and letters for his very good friend and revered ally Sultan Bello who might, therefore, postpone his plans to ransack the region.

Clapperton went where he was sent, each stop scoring its impression in his journal. At Kaiami the sultan toured the city accompanied by a bodyguard of six naked girls who flitted alongside him carrying three spears in each hand and wearing nothing but a white cloth around their heads. When the sultan entered Clapperton's tent the escort followed him, wrapping a blue cloth about their waists to save the white man's embarrassment. When the Sultan left, they threw aside the cloths and flew after their master, springing like shadows alongside his curvetting horse, the white tails of their bandeaux fluttering in the wind.

At Wawa they encountered the mighty widow Zuma, the richest person in town, who conserved her position by renting out her 1,000 slaves as prostitutes. She was a vast thirty-something – or maybe a twenty-something, accounts differ – who was the daughter of an Arab trader and desperately wanted to marry a white man. Clapperton encouraged Lander's suit with glee, pointing out his servant's charms while lying back, arms folded on his chest, with thick volumes of smoke rolling from his pipe, looking ‘as happy and as much at home as if he had been seated by his friends in northern Scotland’.14 Lander was ‘a novice in the art of courtship’¹⁵ and diverted her attentions to Clapperton, who became rather alarmed, put down his pipe and demanded an escort out of town at once. Zuma vowed to follow him to his death.

At Bussa, on the Niger, where Clapperton hoped to find a clue to Park's fate, the widow Zuma caught up with him and he was forced to take her home on the instructions of the Sultan of Wawa. She returned in grand style, entering Wawa preceded by a drummer, a body of armed men, and wearing a stupendous headdress of ostrich feathers on a white turban, set off by a gold silk cloak, red silk pantaloons, red leather boots and riding a horse decked out in scarlet with brass emblems and little pieces of red, yellow and green leather on which were written various charms. The Sultan of Wawa wrung his hands in apology. What could he do? he asked. The widow Zuma was a very powerful person who had enough money and men to displace him. It was very important that she be where he could keep an eye on her. ‘I was now let into their politics with a vengeance,’16 Clapperton wrote. He divested himself of Zuma with as much tact as he could muster and returned to Bussa to pursue the destiny of Park.

As he had made his way inland Clapperton had been deluged by rumours of Park's death which, trickling through generations and across tribal boundaries, had retained a remarkable consistency. They stated that a strange vessel had approached Bussa, comprising two strapped-together canoes with an awning – ‘a house’ – sitting at its stern in which two white men dwelt. On reaching Bussa's rock-strewn stretch of the Quorra, the vessel had become stuck. At this point there were men lining either bank. Some said the white men fired first, others that they were pelted with arrows from the bank. The outcome in either case was that two white men leaped overboard arm in arm and were never seen again. They left behind them in the canoe a number of treasures – a cloak, a double-barrelled gun, books with writing in them – and a quantity of dried meat. The treasures were taken and the meat was eaten. And in the best tradition of all legends, whoever partook of the meat died a slow and lingering death. The canoe, meanwhile, reappeared on the rocks every Sunday to remind the world of what had happened.

The unravelling of this tale, as far as Clapperton could make out, was that Park had arrived when Bussa was in the middle of a war with the Hausas, under Sultan Bello's father. The people of Bussa had taken his canoe for a Hausa vanguard and had waited until it was stuck on the rocks before opening fire. Park and his companion had either been hit by arrows or had drowned in an attempt to escape them. As if by divine vengeance, the area had then been struck by an epidemic which left thousands dead. The two occurrences became entangled, Park's dried meat being diagnosed as the causative agent, and gave rise to a common saying, ‘prevalent amongst all ranks and conditions: Do not hurt the white men; for if you do you will perish like the people of Boussa.’*¹⁷

When Clapperton returned to Bussa he was shown the scene of the murder. His guides led him willingly but cautiously ‘and as if by stealth’¹⁹ to the banks of the Niger. Clapperton looked on it with feeling. On 19 March he had written a blurred and almost illegible entry in his notebook: ‘I am so near crossing that I am like a gamester desperate I would stake all.’²⁰ Now the mighty river was before him, sluicing powerfully over rapids on either side of a central island.

Before he could cross the Niger, however, he had to make further inquiries about Park's belongings – particularly his journal. The Sultan of Bussa quivered when questioned on the matter and developed a stammer. He knew nothing about the journals, he said, nor the other objects which may or may not have been found in the canoe. But if they did exist they were almost certainly in the hands of the Sultan of Yauri who lived upstream from Bussa.

The Sultan of Yauri shortly sent notice that he did, indeed, have a few Park memorabilia, including two books, and that Clapperton could have them for the exorbitant sum of 170 mitgalls of gold. Clapperton countered with the offer of a gun, to which the Sultan cheerily agreed but only on condition that Clapperton collect the goods himself. Alas, Clapperton did not have the time. He needed to be in the healthier climates of either Sokoto or Bornu before the rains came. He told the Sultan to keep the books for now, and crossed the Niger on 10 April in a precarious canoe that was only two feet wide and ten times as long. Then he struck out for Sokoto through a landscape where massive ant hills towered above him like ‘so many Gothic cathedrals in miniature’.21 He reached his destination on 19 October.

He could hardly have arrived at a worse time. While Sultan Bello's forces were rampaging to the south and west, Sheikh El Kanemi of Bornu had seized the opportunity to declare war on the Hausa. His army was expected any week, and some of the more easterly towns had drawn up evacuation procedures. Sokoto itself was in a state of emergency, and paranoia was in the air. The sudden appearance of a white man bearing, as he admitted, letters and gifts for El Kanemi, sent rumours flying. One day Clapperton was a spy, the next he was a smuggler. Was he supplying El Kanemi with guns? Undoubtedly, and he was probably scouting the area for a possible invasion, too. ‘The common conversation of the town now, is that the English intend to take Hausa,’²² Clapperton recorded wearily.

The source of the gossip was Sultan Bello, whose nerves were in a highly strung state. He revealed his fears in an open lie, when he told Clapperton that on his last visit to Sokoto El Kanemi had advised that he be killed, ‘as, if the English should meet with too great encouragement, they would … seize on the country and dispossess him, as they had done with regard to India’.²³ Clapperton responded hotly, pointing out that he had hauled an enormous quantity of gifts halfway across Africa precisely to prove Britain's goodwill. ‘At no time am I possessed of a sweet and passive temper,’ he admitted, ‘and when the ague is coming on me it is a little worse.’²⁴

Clapperton in a rage must have been an impressive sight. Clad in a robe and turban, his broad leather belt studded with pistols and knives, and with his beard down to his waist, he looked by this stage ‘more like a mountain robber … than a British naval officer’.²⁵ Bello, nevertheless, ignored Clapperton's temper. He confiscated the gifts and letters for El Kanemi, despite a torrent of oaths, and for good measure shortly afterwards took Clapperton's spare guns and ammunition. Bello also sent word to Timbuctoo that Laing was to be refused entry – though Clapperton had no idea of this. He would decide in due course whether the white men would be allowed to proceed, Bello announced.

Seething, Clapperton threw his energy into hunting, leaving early in the morning and returning only at dusk to the house in which he and Lander had been quartered – an ‘immense bee hive’,26 thirty yards in circumference, windowless and with a door so small they had to crouch to get through it. Here, in temperatures that were a good 10 °F higher than outside, Lander played tunes on his bugle, while Clapperton smoked sullen cigars, pacing about in a striped dressing gown that he had adopted to go with his slippers. Clapperton was desperate with frustration. ‘If the road to Bornu be denied me,’ he told Lander, ‘I really can't tell what we shall do, or how we shall get home. It is certain that if we pursue a different route, my business will be incomplete, and of all things, this lies nearest my heart, the trip down the Niger.’²⁷

On 12 March Clapperton received good news. Sultan Bello, flush from a recent victory over Sheikh El Kanemi, summoned him to an audience. The white man could leave, he announced. But when Clapperton asked in which direction he could leave Bello was suddenly swamped by congratulatory courtiers. Clapperton must make another appointment, Bello called over the throng. This frustrating development was the last event Clapperton recorded in his journal. That evening he fell ill with dysentery. ‘I believe I shall never recover,’²⁸ he told Lander. His prognostication was correct. For almost a month he drifted in and out of delirium, in his lucid spells giving Lander precise instructions on what to do once he was dead. He was to sell what he could and abandon everything else except the journals and papers which he was to hand personally to the Colonial Secretary. On his way home, which would probably be across the Sahara, he was to write up his experiences as best he could, so that the record would be complete. ‘Remark what towns and villages you come to,’ Clapperton advised paternally, ‘pay attention to whatever the chiefs may say to you, and put it on paper.’²⁹

On 9 April Clapperton tried a native remedy of boiled bark, which seemed to do no good. ‘I feel myself dying,’³⁰ he muttered despondently. That night in his sleep he distinctly heard the tolling of a funeral bell. Yet by the next day he was feeling much better and on the 11th was convinced he would pull through. On 12 April he was able to force down solid food for the first time since falling ill. On the 13th he sat up in bed, not having been able to move a limb for weeks. Then, spasmodically, he began to shudder. Lander, seeing his ‘pale and altered features’,31 rushed to his side. Clapperton tried to speak: ‘some indistinct expressions quivered on his lips; he strove, but ineffectually, to give them utterance, and expired without a struggle or a sigh’.³²

Lander washed the body, prepared it for burial and, when Sultan Bello finally gave permission for Clapperton to be buried in a village called Jungavie, slightly to the south of Sokoto, Lander organized the grave-diggers and read the funeral service. Then he was on his own. ‘I could not help being deeply affected with my lonesome and dangerous situation,’ he wrote, ‘a hundred and fifteen days journey from the nearest sea-coast, surrounded by a selfish and cruel race of strangers, my only friend and protector mouldering in his grave, and myself suffering dreadfully from fever.’³³

Lander's position was outwardly hopeless. He was a servant, a cross between a batman and a travelling housekeeper, not an explorer. He carried no authority, could sign no bills, could draw no money, could command no men, was in a strange land and had no skills with a compass or sextant. Yet he somehow had to extricate himself and his master's journals from Africa.

He took control with complete and astonishing assurance. He parlayed Sultan Bello into letting him leave town, demanded payment for the goods that had been seized – and, remarkably, received part of the sum – then, in defiance of Clapperton's instructions, he set off south instead of north. He was not only going to get home, he was going to follow the Niger to its termination. As he explained airily, he had developed ‘an earnest desire, which I could not repress’³⁴ to ride a canoe down the great river.

His desire was unattainable. As he retraced his steps southward, following the path he and Clapperton had previously taken, he learned that the middle stretches of the Niger were in such a state of war that he would be mad to go there. Disappointed, he continued his journey across country. He scraped up a bit of money by selling Clapperton's clothes, bartered his way here and there with some of the trade goods – by now reduced to cloth and needles, all the more glittering gifts having been disposed of- sold in extremis his sword and pistol, gratefully received the hospitality of chiefs he had met before, was fed to the gills by widow Zuma, and finally, having rejected an offer to marry Zuma and take over Wawa, and having regretfully declined another chief who offered him four of his daughters if he would stay behind to act as his prime minister, he reached the safety of Badagry on 21 November, with nothing to his name but Clapperton's trunk of papers, a few bolts of damask and twenty-four pairs of silk stockings.

Hitherto, Lander's experience of slavery had been limited to the relatively benign domestic version which prevailed in the African-ruled interior. In theory it was as brutal and degrading as any form of enslavement. In practice, however, it usually comprised a degree of servitude very similar to the system which existed in England but with greater social leeway: slaves were often treated as part of the family; they shared meals with their masters; and they were frequently granted their liberty. African slavery was no less reprehensible but far more humane than that practised in the West. As Clapperton wrote, the African slave's greatest fear was being taken abroad: ‘They are much afraid of being sold to the sea-coast, as it is the universal belief that all these who are sold to the whites are eaten; retorting back on us the accusation of cannibalism, of which perhaps they have the greatest right to blame us.’35 This was not to say that the process of collecting and transporting slaves for the Western market did not occur. But it was conducted almost invisibly and with some discretion. When a slave train passed it did so quietly, camping a good way from town behind a screen of trees.

Lander had gone along with it, acquiring two female slaves, Aboudah and Jowdie, whom he considered more dependable than hired servants and whom he intended to free once they reached the coast. Aboudah had been given to him as a wife and Jowdie he had purchased for a quantity of needles. Now in Badagry, he encountered the system head-on. The place was teeming; its five ‘factories’ were crammed with more than 1,000 slaves and a fleet of Portuguese slavers stood at anchor ready to take delivery. When Lander arrived, 400 unfortunates, shackled together by the neck and separated by only nine inches of chain, were being herded into a tiny ship of little more than eighty tons.

Lander was appalled. He had become very fond of Africans, if in a patronizing fashion. He wrote of his ‘high admiration of the amiable conduct of African females’,36 likening them wistfully to the West Indian nurses of his childhood. ‘In sickness and in health; in prosperity and adversity – their kindness and affection were ever the same. They have danced and sung with me in health, grieved with me in sorrow, and shed tears at the recital of my misfortunes.’³⁷

Rather than blame Europeans for the sights he saw, he put it all down to the Badagrians who now became ‘without comparison the most rude and barbarous … of any of the people in the whole of Africa’.³⁸ He heard horrible stories of the way they treated their slaves. The elderly and infirm were weighted and dropped into deep water. Others were condemned to human sacrifice, being slaughtered in front of the king who would then eat the victim's heart before consigning the body to be hung on a fetish tree. Lander stumbled across the tree by accident and was almost sick. He described ‘the huge branches of the fetish tree, groaning beneath their burden of human flesh and bones, and sluggishly waving in consequence of the hasty retreat of birds of prey; … the intolerable odour of the corrupt corpses; the heaps of human heads, many of them apparently staring at me from hollows which had once sparkled with living eyes’.³⁹ Next to the tree stood the King of Badagry's fetish hut, a court of ordeal, in which the King gave final judgement by means of a poisoned drink. If the offender lived he was innocent, if he died he was guilty. Very few lived, as Lander learned when he peeked inside the hut and saw that it was lined with skulls. He fled in horror.

Putting the Badagrians to one side, he appealed to the Portuguese ships for help. He was thrust away. Not only was he a servant, but a British servant at that. Who could tell what treachery he planned? A Brazilian captain kept him well provisioned for a while but his ulterior motive was to buy Pasko and the two African slaves. When Lander refused his offer of 100 Spanish dollars apiece, the Brazilian withdrew his largesse.

Lander was stuck. And as if that was not enough, the slavers spread word that he was a spy. The rumour caught fire. It reached the King's ears and within a matter of hours Richard Lander was hauled off for judgement. With great dignity, Adele, King of Badagry, decreed that he undergo trial by ordeal. Lander could not believe it. He had plodded inland with Clapperton, had plodded back again, had suffered from malaria and amoebic dysentery, had brought his master's journal to the nearest known coastline, and now he was being asked to drink poison. It was appalling, he raged, ‘when almost within hearing of my countrymen, that my life should be destroyed; that my skull should be preserved as a trophy by heartless savages, and my body devoured … by birds of prey’.40 Having no other option he put on his best clothes and went to Adele's court, ‘the gloomy sanctuary of skulls’.⁴¹ He was handed a bowl of colourless liquid. ‘If you come to do bad it will kill you,’ Lander was comforted by an attendant, ‘but if not, it cannot hurt you.’⁴²

Lander would have liked to run, but outside the hut a crowd 500-600 strong had gathered to watch the white man's death. They were armed and angry and the fetish tree was waiting. Left with no choice, Lander swallowed the draught. It was made of sasswood bark, a definite poison, and tasted ‘bitter and disagreeable’.⁴³ The onlookers surged forward in anticipation of an instant death. It did not come. Lander strode through the crowd and made his way back to his hut, feeling slightly dizzy. When nobody was looking he took an emetic and discharged his stomach's contents. He learned later that the poison was almost always fatal and that he was the only man to survive the trial for many years.

Lander's miraculous survival changed everything at Badagry. He became the man of the moment. He was supplied with all that he could need, and was treated like royalty up to the moment he was able to board a British ship. He freed Aboudah and Jowdie and set off home with Pasko.

Shipboard life did not suit Lander. From being an explorer, he became a hired hand whose job was to wash the eyes of the turtles that the captain was carrying home in his bath tub. ‘But could I,’ Lander wrote, ‘who had recently shaken hands with majesty, and lodged in the palaces of kings; who had been waited on by the Queen of Boussa, and walked delighted with the proud princesses of Nyffee; could I who might have become the master of a thousand slaves, and the lord of the high minded and lovely Zuma … forget all my dignity, and all my laurels and descend to the menial and grovelling occupation of washing the filthy eyes of turtles?’44 No, of course he could not. The turtles all died as a result and Lander stepped onto Portsmouth quay on 30 April 1828 where, with his beard and sunburned, tousled appearance, he was greeted by the Jewish community as a pilgrim from Palestine.

He cajoled the authorities into sending Pasko home, if he so wished (which he did), and made his way to London where, on contacting Clapperton's agents and relatives, he handed over to Barrow every item of the expedition's stores that remained, which included a trunkful of papers as well as the watches of Clapperton and Captain Pearce.

Barrow would later be scathing about Lander's achievements, but for the moment he was astounded by the servant's solo journey. He was even more astounded when Richard Lander produced a journal that fitted seamlessly alongside Clapperton's. He was ‘a very intelligent young man’,⁴⁵ Barrow told the world.

On the subject of Clapperton, however, Barrow displayed a breathtaking depth of animosity. Having edited the expedition's journal, he wrote that Clapperton was ‘evidently a man of no education; he nowhere disturbs the narrative by any reflections of his own, but contents himself with noticing objects as they appear before him, and conversations just as they were held; setting down both in his Journal without order, or any kind of arrangement … There is no theory, no speculation, scarcely an opinion advanced.’⁴⁶ Had Clapperton survived to complete his journal, he would probably have furnished the theories and speculations Barrow required. And had he done so Barrow would probably have castigated him for not sticking to the facts. It was impossible to please the man. ‘It may be necessary to observe,’ Barrow wrote crossly, ‘that it is written throughout in the most loose and careless manner; all orthography and grammar equally disregarded.’47 As for Clapperton's handwriting, he continued schoolmarmishly, it was almost illegible. ‘Much, therefore, has been left out, in sending it to the press, but nothing whatever is omitted that could be considered of the least importance.’⁴⁸ Of course, Barrow had said almost exactly the same of Clapperton's previous journal which he had edited with a vengeance.

Having ground Clapperton to dust, Barrow added a perfunctory few words of praise lest it seem he was speaking ill of the dead: ‘Clapperton was, in fact, a kind-hearted and benevolent man, of a cheerful disposition, not easily put out of temper, and patient under disappointment.’⁴⁹ He even summoned a grudging epitaph for Clapperton's expeditions. ‘It may now be said of him, what will probably never be said of any other person, that he has traversed the whole of that country, from the Mediterranean to the Bight of Benin.’⁵⁰ Then he spoiled it all by adding, ‘but he has not contributed much to general science’.⁵¹

This lay at the heart of Barrow's grievances. The contribution to general science for which he had hoped was the news that the Niger flowed into Lake Chad. Clapperton's discoveries, however, had suggested the awful likelihood that it flowed into the Atlantic. ‘The reports continue to be contradictory,’ Barrow wrote, ‘and the question is still open to conjecture.’⁵² He admitted that the Niger's likely termination was the Bight of Benin. ‘But there is still a considerable distance, and a deep range of granite mountains intervening, between the point to which with any certainty it has been traced and the sea-coast.’⁵³ In a flourish of pique, Barrow concluded that if the river Clapperton had encountered did, indeed, flow into the Gulf of Benin then it was probably not the Niger. Herodotus, Ptolemy, Pliny, and all the other ancients who had written of the Niger could not possibly have travelled that far south. Clapperton therefore must have discovered the wrong river. ‘The name of Quorra, or Cowarra,’ Barrow wrote, ‘ought now, therefore, to be adopted on our charts of Africa.’54

But whether it was the Quorra or the Niger, there still remained the matter of Park's journals. Their recovery was ‘an enterprise of much interest … not only due to the reputation of the lamented traveller, but to the nation to which he belonged’.⁵⁵ Barrow was keeping his options open.

Barrow's attack on Clapperton passed Richard Lander by. Having delivered Clapperton's journal and his own to Whitehall, Lander had been rewarded with a job as weighing porter at the Truro Customs House. It paid £65 per year if all went well, but as the salary was pegged to performance, and as few ships entered Truro, Lander could rely only on a basic £25 retainer. He therefore decided to write his own version of the expedition, in collaboration with his brother John, hoping that he might be able to fluster up some extra money. When the manuscript was complete he sent it off to John Murray who passed it to Barrow for his comments.

Barrow was still in a bad mood. ‘It appears to me that Mr. Lander's wanderings in Africa, which I have attentively read, scarcely justify the expense of a publication,’⁵⁶ he replied. He castigated Lander's brief description of his earlier life as ‘utterly unimportant and uninteresting to any reader’. He condemned him for ‘deficiences of style’ and accused him of ‘the sins of egotism’. The scientific notes were ‘deplorably meagre’. As for the business with widow Zuma, ‘notwithstanding that Mr. Lander himself appears as that it is amusing in the extreme, [it] is written in very bad taste’.⁵⁷

Maybe Lander's description of the fetish rite at Badagry might make a pamphlet, Barrow advised. But even then it would require ‘a great deal of toning before it could be prudently submitted to the public eye’.⁵⁸ All in all, he concluded, Lander's ‘book’ (the inverted commas are Barrow's) was quite unworthy of publication.

The manuscript was wrapped up and posted back to Truro. It says much for Lander's spirit that he did not give up after such a crushing rejection. Instead, he sought and found an alternative publisher, Colburn and Bentley of New Burlington Street, who eventually produced his two-volume narrative in 1830. What he was paid is unknown – it was probably very little. But the satisfaction of being published was the most important thing to Lander. He would have liked to have received a large sum of money, but in its absence he was very happy with the prospect of public recognition.

*Laing had heard similar stories in Timbuctoo of Park's warlike activities. Indeed, he had been mistaken for Park by a man who said he had been wounded by one of Park's gunshots. Laing's response was typically self-centred – ‘How imprudent, how unthinking, I may even say, how selfish was it in Park to attempt making discovery in this land at the expense of the blood of its inhabitants.’¹⁸