The Gates of Africa: Death, Discovery and the Search for Timbuktu

Seventy years later the traveller Alexander Kinglake met with a similar response: ‘The theory is that the English traveller has committed some sin against God and his conscience, and that for this the Evil Spirit has hold of him, and drives him from his home like a victim of the old Greek Furies, and forces him to travel over countries far and strange, and most chiefly over deserts and desolate places, and to stand upon the sites of cities that once were, and are no more, and to grope among the tombs of dead men.’25

The Association’s first geographical missionary appears to have had no such grilling, and reported to his masters in London that Aga Muhammad ‘gave me his hand to kiss, and with it the promise of letters, protection, and support, through Turkish Nubia, and also to some chiefs far inland’.

The Aga had never travelled as far south as Ledyard was intending to go. Nevertheless, he had very definite ideas about who and what he would meet on his way. Among them would be people who had the power to turn into strange animals. Ledyard tried to hide his amusement at the Aga’s credulity and replied that the prospect of meeting these bizarre people ‘rendered me more anxious to be on my voyage’.26 The Aga was also curious to know how Ledyard was going to communicate with the people he would meet on his journey. ‘I told him, with vocabularies.’27 Which means that he was travelling with books as well as the leather pantaloons, hatchets and the rest of the paraphernalia he had bought in England. The Aga looked stunned. This was not the sort of foreigner he was used to seeing in Cairo.

Not that there was a shortage of foreigners in the city. Estimates vary like the population itself, which was frequently ravaged by plague, but Cairo at the end of the eighteenth century had a native population in the region of 250,000. The city was divided into three distinct areas, the Nile port of Boulak, ‘Old Cairo’ upstream from the port around the Roman and Arab settlements, and ‘Grand Cairo’, the medieval city at its heart, overlooked by the citadel, the home of the country’s rulers. Some European visitors described it as being as large in area as Paris. But unlike European cities, Cairo was reaching the low point of a long decline. It could boast fewer palaces, and fewer schools, than three or four hundred years earlier, and what had survived was mostly in a state of decrepitude. Only one aspect of the city’s life was thriving: the international transit trade. Thanks to Europe’s growing need to move people and cargo quickly to the East – thanks, too, to men such as Baldwin and Rossetti – there was considerable traffic between Alexandria and Suez. And Cairo was still also one of the hubs of the North African trade, with caravans arriving from Nubia and Abyssinia in the south, Fezzan and Tripoli in the west and, less common, from the heart of the continent. It was from these people that Ledyard hoped to glean some news of his intended final destination.

Ledyard was far from idle in his first week in the Egyptian capital, as he was quick to point out in his letters to Banks and Beaufoy. He had made various social calls to important Cairenes and had wandered the souks in search of traders from the south. ‘I have made the best inquiries I have been able … of the nature of the country before me; of Sennar, Darfoor, Wangara, of Nubia, Abyssinia, of those named, or unknown by name. I should have been happy to have sent you better information of those places than I am yet able to do. It will appear very singular to you in England, that we in Egypt are so ignorant of countries which we annually visit: the Egyptians know as little of geography as the generality of the French; and, like them, sing, dance, and traffic, without it.’ But there was one source of geographical information he was able to tap. These were people whom Ledyard calls ‘Jelabs’, and they were traders who had come from the interior to sell slaves in Cairo. He was clearly pleased with what they had to tell him and boasted, ‘I have a better idea of the people of Africa, of its trade, of the position of places, the nature of the country, manner of travelling, &c. than ever I had by any other means; and, I believe, better than any other means would afford me.’28

By 25 October, more than two months after his arrival in Cairo, Ledyard appeared to be set; with Rossetti’s help he had made arrangements to travel with a caravan heading south to Sennar. There is an irony in a man sent by a group clearly opposed to the slave trade preparing to travel with a slave caravan, but it is one that escaped the traveller himself. ‘The King of Sennar,’ he wrote, ‘is himself a merchant, and concerned in the Sennar caravans. The merchant here who contracts to convey me to Sennar, is Procurer at Cairo to the King of Sennar; this is a good circumstance, and one that I knew not of till to-day. Mr. Rossetti informed me of it. He informed me also, that this year the importation of Negro slaves into Egypt will amount to 20,00o.’29 As well as slaves, the traders brought camels, ostrich feathers, elephant teeth and gum Sennar, which, like gum Arabic, was tapped from acacia trees. The southbound caravan that Ledyard was going to join would be carrying a shipment of soap, antimony, red linen, razors, scissors, mirrors and beads.

Jared Sparks, Ledyard’s early-nineteenth-century biographer, states that by this time the American had adopted ‘a dress suited to the character he was to assume’. In other words, he was dressed as a Levantine traveller. But his disguise was clearly far from perfect, because on a visit to the slave market he was ‘rudely treated’ by some Turks, who recognised him as a ‘Frank’. Around this time he also ‘began in earnest to study the manners of the people around him, and particularly of the traders in the caravans, which were then at Cairo’.30 From them he collected plenty of information that he thought worth sending back to London. ‘A caravan goes from here to Fezzan, which they call a journey of fifty days; and from Fezzan to Tombuctou [Timbuktu], which they call a journey of ninety days. The caravans travel about twenty miles a day, which makes the distance on the road from here to Fezzan, one thousand miles; and from Fezzan to Tombuctou, one thousand eight hundred miles. From here to Sennar is reckoned six hundred miles.’ Some of this information was almost accurate: it is around 1200 miles in a straight line from Cairo to Fezzan, and twice that to Timbuktu. But Ledyard’s calculation for Sennar is woefully short – it is more like 1200 miles south of Cairo.

The prospect of the journey from Cairo must have seemed easy to the man who had crossed Russia with little money and without Imperial permission; Ledyard should be forgiven for thinking that the interior of Africa was within his reach, that fame was at hand and with it the means to settle back home in Connecticut and throw roses in his sisters’ laps. But although he had learned many things on his travels, he had not acquired the essential Oriental quality of patience. The Sennar caravan delayed its departure, and then again. And then again. As time passed, Ledyard became increasingly desperate to begin his African journey. Some of this is understandable: the man who had wanted to leave London the day after meeting Beaufoy had now been held up for some three months in the Egyptian capital. The false starts, delayed departures and repeated disappointments began to eat away at him; his letters and reports, entrusted to European sea captains, are full of warnings to himself that he must resist any urge towards ‘rashness’. Around this time he wrote to Beaufoy that ‘A Turkish sopha has no charms for me: if it had, I could soon obtain one here. I could to-morrow take the command of the best armament of Ishmael Bey* – I should be sure of success, and its consequential honours. Believe me, a single well-done from your Association has more worth in it to me, than all the trappings of the East.’

At the end of October, Ledyard was sufficiently confident of his departure to assure Beaufoy that his next letter would be from Sennar or somewhere further into the continent. If his calculation of the distance between Cairo and Sennar was right, and if the caravan really did manage to cover twenty miles a day, then the journey might take around thirty days. To this would need to be added at least another month for his letter to reach London from Cairo – his first letter from Alexandria, sent in early August, didn’t reach Beaufoy until 18 October. The members of the Association might therefore have to wait until late January before receiving his news from Sennar. But some time early in January, before the Committee had received word from either Ledyard, Rossetti or Baldwin, rumours began to circulate in London that Ledyard was dead. Certainly he had not left Cairo when he intended, for he had written another farewell letter on 15 November, this time to Thomas Jefferson in Paris. He was, he said, ‘doing up my baggage for the journey’. But again he did not leave. Instead he became sick.

Late in November 1788, Ledyard began to suffer from what Beaufoy described as a bilious complaint – most likely some sort of gastric infection, so common among visitors to Egypt now as then. To speed up his recovery, he treated himself with what was, at the time, a common remedy, vitriolic or sulphuric acid. In his eagerness to be cured, he seems to have taken an overdose. Realising from the chronic burning pains in his gut that he had made a mistake, he tried to counteract the acid with tartar emetic, a toxic and irritating salt which, he must have hoped, would force him to vomit out the acid. But the damage was already done, as was clear from his continued internal bleeding.

Rossetti was there and offered what Beaufoy called ‘generous friendship’,31 as were Cairo’s finest doctors. But nothing they could suggest was effective against the damage done by the chemicals and exacerbated, in Beaufoy’s view, by the anxiety Ledyard felt at his failure to leave Cairo. By the end of November, according to Sparks – on 17 January, according to an announcement in the Gentleman’s Magazine – the great American survivor, the man who had returned home unharmed when Captain Cook had fallen, who had crossed Russia in defiance of a ban from the Empress Catherine, the African Association’s first geographical missionary was dead. ‘He was decently interred,’ Beaufoy assured the Association’s members, ‘in the neighbourhood of such of the English as had ended their days in the capital of Egypt.’32

Beaufoy, in writing of Ledyard’s end, stressed the American’s suitability for his mission – ‘he appeared to be formed by Nature for achievements of hardihood and peril’.33 Yet privately he could be forgiven for wondering whether Ledyard had been properly prepared for his mission. He might also have wondered what else the Association’s travellers would have to learn before they would be able to reveal the mysteries of the African interior. Neither Beaufoy nor Banks seemed to have reached the point, yet, when they would question their choice of route into the interior or the practicability of their ambitious plan to bisect the northern half of the continent. But then, at this stage they did not need to, because their second traveller was already in the court of the Bashaw (Pasha) of Tripoli, arranging permission and protection for his journey into the interior.

* There were rumours that Banks had become engaged to a young woman named Harriet Blosset before sailing with Cook. She certainly believed they were betrothed, and spent the years of his absence embroidering waistcoats for him. He had other ideas, as is indicated by a comment he made at the time about the women of South Africa: ‘had I been inclined for a wife I think this is the place of all others I have seen where I could have best suited myself (Lyte, p.141).

* Until his death at the house in 1782, Daniel Solander also lived at Soho Square. One of Banks’ assistants on the Cook voyage, he later became his librarian and keeper of the natural history collection at the British Museum.

† Banks would bequeath the majority of his library, herbarium, manuscripts, drawings, engravings and all his other significant collections to the British Museum.

* In 1999, the John Ledyard Scholarship Foundation was created in the US to honour students who follow the traveller’s example by dropping out of college and travelling more than two thousand miles from home at least three times.

* Ishmael, or more correctly Ismail, Bey was at that time the Shaykh al-Balad, the most powerful of the beys or nobles who wielded power in Egypt.

4

The Oriental Interpreter

‘MR LUCAS, ORIENTAL INTERPRETER, whose salary is £80 per ann, offers to proceed, by the way of Gibralter [sic] & Tripoli to Fezan, provided his Salary is continued to him during his Absense.’

Undated and unsigned note in the African Association’s papers, possibly written by Henry Beaufoy1

SIMON LUCAS, King George Ill’s Arabic interpreter, volunteered his services as soon as the Association was created, convinced that he was uniquely qualified to be a geographical missionary. The Committee seemed to agree. They discussed his proposal at their first meeting and noted his obvious qualities. It was proposed that Banks would ask Viscount Sydney, the Secretary of State for the Home Department, to obtain the King’s permission for Lucas to travel. His Majesty, it appears, had no objections to his interpreter going absent, nor to paying his salary while he was away, and so Lucas’ proposition was accepted. Banks and Beaufoy, fired with enthusiasm for their new project, felt they had made a great catch in securing his services, for his knowledge of north-west Africa was unrivalled in England. How he came by this knowledge was an oft-repeated story.

Like Beaufoy, Lucas’ father had been a London wine merchant. While Lucas was still in his teens – the dates are vague and some accounts refer to his still being a boy – his father sent him to Cadiz to learn the wine trade first-hand. Everything passed off well until he was on his way home at the end of this apprenticeship, when calamity struck: the ship in which he was sailing was attacked by the infamous ‘Sallee Rovers’. Of the many corsairs who operated along the Barbary Coast, the pirates from Morocco’s Atlantic port of Sali had a reputation for being the most ruthless and the most savage. But they were also businessmen and, when they could, would rather sell their captives as slaves than torment or torture them. This is exactly what they did with the young Englishman they hauled off the London-bound ship: Lucas was sold to the Emperor of Morocco, Sultan Sidi Muhammad.*

Lucas spent three years in the Sultan’s service. The great Imperial court at Meknes was more of a royal city than a palace, a labyrinth of enclosures, courtyards and chambers, the large harem at its centre protected by the Sultan’s feared Negro bodyguard. In this environment, surrounded by officials and functionaries, the young Englishman found that the only way to survive was to learn the language and adapt to the ways of the Moors. When he was finally able to leave, he didn’t get very far. On his release, he quickly made the short hop from the so-called Pillars of Hercules to Gibraltar, already held by the British. There he came to the attention of General Cornwallis, who recognised the value of his Moroccan experience and asked him to go back – not as a slave, this time, but in the service of his own King. The offer of so dramatic a reversal of fortune was too sweet for Lucas to resist and so, instead of sailing home to London, he returned to the Moroccan Emperor Sidi Muhammad’s court as British Vice-Consul and Chargé d’Affaires. Clearly the place and his position in it agreed with him, as he stayed for some sixteen years. When he finally returned to London, his knowledge of Arabic, of the manners and customs of the Moroccans, of the layout of their country and the functioning of their court was unrivalled in England and helped him to secure the post of Oriental Interpreter to King George III. Given his expertise, it would have made more sense for the African Association to have sent Lucas to Tangier or to the Atlantic port of Mogador (now known as Essaouira) and asked him to travel inland from there. But Lucas knew that Morocco was not safe to travel through, as did Banks, thanks to his correspondence with the current British Consul to the Emperor’s court, James Matra.

Matra had sailed with Banks and Captain Cook. While Banks returned to fame in London and the presidency of the Royal Society, Matra, who could count on neither contacts nor fortune, secured a posting as a secretary at the British Embassy in Constantinople. Eight years later, he asked Banks to help him find other employment, although without result. Back in London and living, as he wrote to Banks, ‘the life of a solitary fugitive’,2 various avenues were explored, several proposals suggested, but again without success. Then, in 1787, the post of British Consul in Morocco became free and Banks pulled strings to secure the appointment for Matra.

Matra’s opinion on the viability of travellers heading south from Morocco was unequivocal. ‘All investigation of the interiour [sic] part of Africa,’ he wrote to Banks in 1788, ‘as far as this Empire is concerned, is an absolute impossibility.,’3 The situation was unfortunate, but north-west Africa was out. In the meantime another option presented itself.

In 1786, Hajj Abd ar-Rahman, Foreign Minister to Ali Karamanli, Bashaw of Tripoli, arrived in London on an official mission that was to last fifteen months. During this time, he relied on Lucas both to help him on court matters and to assist him around the city. Lucas was hoping that Abd ar-Rahman would remember their friendship and cooperation and return the favour by ensuring his welcome in Tripoli. He was also counting on the Minister to persuade the Bashaw to offer his protection for the journey to the Fezzan, a place over which the Bashaw claimed nominal sovereignty. In The Proceedings of the Association, Beaufoy explained the plan. ‘To Mr. Lucas, in consideration of the knowledge which he possessed of the Language and Manners of the Arabs, they [the Committee] allotted the passage of the Desert of Zahara, from Tripoli to Fezzan; for they had learned from various information, that with this kingdom, which in some measures is dependent on Tripoli, the traders of Agadez and Tombuctou, and of other towns in the Interior of Africa, had established a frequent and regular intercourse.’4 Accordingly, Lucas was instructed to sail to Tripoli, cross the Sahara to the Fezzan and from there continue to the Gambia or the coast of Guinea. To get him there, in addition to his salary of £80, which the King had agreed to continue paying, the Association voted £100 to cover equipment, transport to Tripoli and to buy presents as sweeteners for the Bashaw and others at his court, the most popular of which turned out to be pairs of double-barrelled pistols. In addition, he was provided with letters of credit, to be drawn against Sir Joseph Banks. This credit – a total of £250 if he needed it – was to provide funds for his journey into the interior.

Unlike Ledyard, Lucas took time to prepare for his departure. He kitted himself out easily enough, packing a pocket compass, a thermometer, a pair of brass-mounted pistols and a silver watch. He also charged the Association for a scarlet kerseymere shawl, a crimson waistcoat with blue lining and gold lace trim and a matching skullcap, a crimson and blue sash, yellow slippers and white robes. But court obligations and illness delayed him, and it was not until 25 October that Lucas sailed from Marseilles.

Like Cairo and Damascus, Tripoli owed nominal allegiance to the Turkish sultans. But in 1711 the Tripolitan Viceroy Ahmed Karamanli had declared his independence and established a dynasty that was in its third generation by the time Simon Lucas’ ship tied up in the city’s fortified harbour. For this reason, Tripoli offered a warmer welcome to foreigners than many other ports along the turbulent North African coast. Its harbour was busy with sailing ships from around the Mediterranean, while its souks and caravanserais were crowded with Moorish traders who had brought their cargoes of spices, slaves, ivory and other exotica so much in demand in Europe.

Although it claimed control over vast territory stretching deep into the continent, whatever power and splendour Tripoli had once enjoyed had long since faded, and Ali Karamanli, the present Bashaw, had trouble maintaining the loyalty of his subjects. Beaufoy, always quick to point up a moral, wrote that ‘if he [the traveller] reflects on the nature of a despotic government, ever incompatible with permanent prosperity, he will not be surprised when he finds, on a nearer view, that the city … exhibits through all its extent, the marks of a rapid decay’.5 Moral decay, he insisted, was mirrored in physical decay.

Tripoli was unlike the Cairo Ledyard had visited or the ports of Morocco with which Lucas was familiar. Where Cairo could rely on its position on the increasingly busy trade route between Europe and the East, and Morocco dominated the west Saharan trade, as it had once controlled the golden city of Timbuktu, Tripoli depended for its survival on the spoils of the Barbary corsairs and on profits from caravan trading between the Mediterranean and central Africa.

Two thousand years earlier, the North African coast around Tripoli had flourished under Roman supervision, the coastal plains made fertile, the ports of Tripolitania kept busy. Under the loosening grip of the Bashaw Ali, however, the country was both unproductive and unstable, while the city was increasingly decrepit. It looked its best from the sea – ‘the whole of the town appears in a semicircle, some time before reaching the harbour’s mouth’, according to a visitor of Lucas’ time. ‘The extreme whiteness of square flat buildings covered with lime, which in this climate encounters the sun’s fiercest rays, is very striking.’6 The European consulates all looked out to sea, which helped consuls monitor the arrival of ships and also gave them the luxury of relieving sea breezes in the summer.

Beyond the port, consulates, palace and state mosque, the city was a jumble. The treasures of Africa were displayed in the covered bazaar: stacks of ostrich feathers, sacks of gums, lines of elephant tusks and hoards of gold. Once a week, in a long vaulted enclosure, there was also the pitiful sight of the slave market: European captives were stood on small platforms, while Africans, who had already been marched across the Sahara, now walked up and down to catch the eye of buyers who sat drinking coffee. Further inland, the city turned in on itself, a series of long unbroken walls hiding houses, the occasional square offering relief in the shape of a mosque or public bath. Beyond this, seasonal pastures provided grazing for goats and camels, and then gave way to the dust, shrub, rock and sand of the desert.

Lucas arrived in Tripoli knowing he could count on Richard Tully, the British Consul, and Hajj Abd ar-Rahman, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Abd ar-Rahman had returned to his city the previous year, and was still Foreign Minister. According to Miss Tully, the Consul’s sister, he ‘bears here so excellent a character that he is universally beloved by Christians, as well as Moors, and is adored by his family’.7 He also seems to have been a notable exception to the rule that everyone involved in North African court business was obliged to spin a web of intrigue and deceit.

The following morning the Minister took Lucas to meet the Bashaw, Ali Karamanli. Beaufoy had exaggerated when he called the palace ‘a mouldering ruin’, although it paled in comparison with the palaces of Sicily or Naples. Its forty-foot walls were pierced only by a few windows and a heavily guarded gate; its Chinese-tiled rooms were linked by dark, rank passages which exuded the stink of decay and an aura of gloom. Lucas was anxious as he passed through the outer public chambers and along these passages into the Bashaw’s audience hall. The coming interview was crucial to the success of his mission, for there was no chance of leaving for the south without the Bashaw’s permission; yet Ali was bound to be suspicious of the foreigner’s motives for wanting to make the journey.