Alexander Laing's Journey to Timbuktu: The Perilous Sahara Expedition of 1825
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The second expedition of Alexander Gordon Laing into the interior of Africa had already been underway for four months when it reached the Saharan oasis of Ain Salah in December 1825. For the opening leg of the journey, read Part I. This account follows Laing across the trans-Saharan caravan routes toward Timbuktu, drawing on his surviving correspondence to reconstruct one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of European exploration of Africa.
From Ghadames to Tuat: the dangers of the route
Laing failed to bypass Tuat despite the assurances of Sheikh Babani, the caravan leader he now sarcastically called "the valiant one." The desert road between Ghadames and Tuat was among the most perilous stretches of the trans-Saharan network, patrolled by raiding parties who preyed on the merchant caravans carrying gold, salt, and slaves across the Sahara.
The Tuareg-Ahaggar attack on a trading caravan
On 18 November 1825, halting at one of the oases, the travelers learned that a trading caravan that had left Ghadames on the same day as their own had been plundered by Tuareg-Ahaggar raiders just twelve miles — about twenty kilometres — ahead of them. After several detours, Laing's party was forced back onto the Tuat road. Such raids were a constant hazard of nineteenth-century Saharan travel, where nomadic confederations controlled the wells and passes that every caravan depended upon.
Laing's dissatisfaction with the organization and escort of the expedition
Laing again voiced his displeasure at how poorly the expedition had been protected, complaining in his correspondence:
"For four thousand thalers I ought not to have had to travel by this road."
It emerged that instead of hiring a proper guard — for four hundred thalers an escort of some twenty horsemen could have been engaged — Babani had brought along only two slaves to load and unload his camels. As Laing indignantly noted, "in the event of an attack I can rely only on my own men." Even so, on this occasion the party reached safety without incident.
Arrival at Ain Salah on 3 December 1825
Laing's caravan entered Ain Salah on 3 December 1825, placing him directly north of Timbuktu with only thirty to forty days of travel remaining. The stop was intended to last a week, allowing the camels to rest and the loads to be reorganized. A large caravan bound for Timbuktu had already gathered there, waiting for Sheikh Babani's arrival before setting out. Laing warned his correspondents that his next letters might reach them only after a long delay, since no return opportunities were expected before Timbuktu itself.
The first European in the oasis: meeting the local population
Laing was the first European to reach Ain Salah, and the whole population of the oasis was eager to see him. In the first days he had no rest from visitors. The moment was significant in the wider story of European exploration of Africa: unlike coastal encounters shaped by earlier Portuguese exploration and later British colonial expansion, this was a deep-desert meeting on entirely local terms, with Laing wholly dependent on the goodwill of Saharan communities.
Laing's percussion-cap rifle as a marvel of Ain Salah
Beyond Laing himself, his firearm drew particular fascination, because the people of Ain Salah had never before encountered a percussion-cap rifle, and word of this unheard-of weapon had raced ahead of the caravan. Aside from the crowds of visitors, matters ran smoothly, and Laing no longer doubted that he would soon reach Timbuktu. On 4 December, the day after his caravan arrived, he opened a letter to Bandinel with the words: "I am not yet at Timbuctoo, but I am gradually advancing towards it."
Laing's correspondence: letters to Bandinel, Warrington and Horton
Laing's letters from Ain Salah are the primary source through which historians reconstruct this leg of the expedition, addressed variously to the official Bandinel, to Consul Warrington in Tripoli, and to the colonial under-secretary Horton. Such archival correspondence — like the manuscript letters and journals of later travelers preserved in institutions from the National Library of Scotland to the Wellcome Library — forms the backbone of the documentary record of African exploration.
The financial difficulties of the expedition
Laing's money troubles surfaced repeatedly in these letters. On 7 December, informing Consul Warrington of his departure from Ain Salah, he remarked in passing that his finances were in a deplorable state. The day before, writing to Horton, he insisted that the fifteen hundred thalers already paid to Sheikh Babani at the start of the journey were more than enough for the services rendered, and assured the vice-minister that Lord Bathurst would hear no further requests for money, though Laing would submit quarterly financial reports to the ministry.
The deception of Sheikh Babani and the missing money
The calm of Laing's first days at Ain Salah passed quickly once the true state of the expedition became clear. On 13 December he learned, through a chance conversation with Babani's son, that he had been shamelessly deceived: all the money he had paid Babani was gone, and the sheikh could not even hire a guard for the caravan.
"He has not a farthing, and no one can imagine what has become of the money he received,"
Laing wrote. It was obvious that little reliance could be placed on Babani's protection, though Laing, sparing the pride of Warrington — who had, after all, foisted this travelling companion upon him — tried to soften the impression by reasoning that Babani was not, after all, such a bad man.
Patience as a virtue: the tragic letter to his father-in-law
The exposure of Babani's fraud triggered what is perhaps the most tragic of all Laing's surviving letters, written to his father-in-law on 13 December, opening with the observation that he had always held patience to be the first and greatest of virtues. The disappointment seems less to have crushed him than to have sharpened a long-accumulating sense of loneliness:
"Do not think that I am downhearted — I remain an explorer of Africa and long more than ever for discoveries; but I now grudge every minute I devote to this work... All my life I believed that the greatest pleasure in the world is to be alone, and so the seven months of the expedition to Falaba were the happiest time of my life."
He continued that times had changed, that he now almost feared to trust himself to free thought, and for the first time in his life wished for a companion at his side — a comrade such as his friend George Warrington, who would sadly not share the glory that must follow the accomplishment of his enterprise.
The route of Laing's second journey
Laing's second journey traced the classic trans-Saharan corridor from Tripoli through Ghadames and Ain Salah toward Timbuktu, one of the great termini of the caravan trade linking North Africa with the Niger River basin. Departure from Ain Salah kept being postponed because the road to Timbuktu was infested by the Ulad Delim nomads, who had plundered several caravans in the preceding months. Only after the Tuareg-Ahaggar inflicted a defeat on them did the path seem safer.
Cartography: corrections to the map of Africa
Laing regarded his own contribution to the cartography of Africa as the expedition's real prize, writing on the day of his arrival at Ain Salah:
"My journey is becoming interesting, and I take no small pleasure when I look at the great corrections I have already made to the map of Africa, and contemplate those I have yet to make."
He reported to Horton that he considered himself partly compensated for the delay, since it had let him survey Tuat and the surrounding oases in more detail and place them on the map — adding at once that he could not show this map to his superiors before reaching Timbuktu. Filling in the blank interior of the continent was the shared ambition of the generation of explorers who followed, from Hugh Clapperton and the Lander brothers on the Niger River to Heinrich Barth, whose own Saharan surveys a generation later would build directly on such work.
On the road to Timbuktu: thirty to forty days of travel
The final stage to Timbuktu began on 9 January 1826, when a caravan of three hundred laden camels and a hundred and fifty well-armed men left Ain Salah. Laing had earlier resolved to press on alone if necessary, writing to Sabine on 1 January: "For a day or two I did not know what to do, but at last I decided to set out alone in four days. Come what may!" Shamed by the courage of one man, the Ghadames merchants who had thought of abandoning the venture finally joined him.
On the day of departure Laing wrote to Bandinel, condemning the second expedition of Mungo Park, whose men had "distinguished themselves" by firing on the inhabitants of the Niger's banks as they descended the river. Heavy forebodings pressed upon him:
"A seemingly absurd rumour has spread here that I am none other than Mungo Park, the Christian who brought war to the people living along the banks of the Niger, who killed some of the Tuareg and wounded many of them. What am I to answer to the question I shall be asked more than once: 'What right had you — or if it was not you, what right had your countryman — to fire on our people and kill them?' I think that once I leave Timbuctoo I shall have trouble..."
Laing's indignation at the "exploits" of Park and his companions was entirely sincere, reflecting his own conviction that African peoples had every right to resent armed European intrusion — an early instance of an explorer reckoning honestly with African responses to European contact. Yet he could no longer undo the damage, and he refused to abandon his own companions however much trouble they caused him.
On 27 January, sending a report to Horton from the Tanezrouft plateau, Laing noted with satisfaction that he was roughly twenty days from Timbuktu, but warned that the Ulad Delim were now unmistakably hunting his caravan: "It cost me great effort to make the merchants continue. Only my resolve to go alone prevented the caravan from turning back to Tuat." After this dispatch, all news of him ceased for a long time.
Rumours of an attack reached Tripoli in March 1826, and Consul Warrington, unwilling to believe bad news, reported that the reports were doubted. Two months later the pasha Yusuf conveyed a letter from Ghadames stating that Laing had been attacked; two of his African companions and the Jewish interpreter had been killed, Sheikh Babani wounded and later dead, while the traveler himself had recovered from his wounds under the protection of a nomad sheikh. In late September, Emma Laing received a letter from her husband noting in passing: "I write only with my thumb and middle finger — my forefinger is badly injured."
On 3 November a camel driver named Muhammad, who had served Laing, arrived in Tripoli and clarified the picture. The attack had been carried out by the very Tuareg who had joined the caravan a few days earlier, thought to be protectors against the Ulad Delim. It took place at Wadi Ahnet on the Ahnet plateau, roughly fifteen hundred kilometres north-east of Timbuktu, and was so sudden that Laing could not even reach for his weapon before being cut down. Believing him dead, the raiders left him; Rogers was killed, Harris gravely wounded, and only Jack le Bore escaped unharmed. The wounded Laing was carried for three weeks until the caravan reached the camps of the powerful Sheikh Sidi Muhammad al-Mukhtar.
Babani's betrayal of Laing
One detail of the camel driver's account stood out: the Tuareg surrounded only the camp of Laing and his men, touching neither Babani nor anyone else in the caravan. Moreover, on the eve of the attack Babani had taken the cartridge belts and powder flasks from Muhammad and from Bongola — a freed slave whom Laing had ransomed — and handed them to the Tuareg. That same day Babani had dissuaded Laing from loading his rifle, claiming there was no danger. It is not hard to conclude that Babani had simply betrayed Laing to the Tuareg, the Ghadames merchants apparently buying off their dangerous protectors at the price of the traveler's life and property — and perhaps punishing the stubborn Christian who had twice shamed them for their cowardice.
Laing understood he had been the victim of treachery, yet in the letters he sent to Tripoli after his recovery he remained restrained, remarking only: "Some blame rests on the old sheikh, but since he is no longer, I will not blame him... he has this time answered for everything." He mentioned Babani again unkindly at the letter's end, but only in connection with the debts the sheikh had never repaid.
Laing's wounds
Sidi Muhammad al-Mukhtar received the traveler warmly, and Laing lingered among the nomads to heal wounds too severe to travel with. In a letter dated 10 May 1826, written in a dry, matter-of-fact register, Laing catalogued his injuries:
"I will acquaint you with the number and nature of my wounds — twenty-four in all, eighteen of them very serious. To begin at the top: I have five sabre cuts on the crown of my head and three on my left temple, all with fractures, and many pieces of bone have come away from the wounds. One blow to the left cheek that split the jaw and divided the ear in two, leaving a very ugly scar. One blow to the right temple and a terrible wound at the back of the neck, slightly grazing the spine. A musket ball in the thigh, which passed out through the back, just touching the spinal column. Five sabre wounds on the right hand and forearm — three fingers broken, the hand three-quarters severed and the wrist bones cut through. Three wounds on the left arm — the bone was broken but is knitting. One slight wound on the right leg, two on the left (one of them deep), not counting the healed wound on the fingers of the left hand."
To endure all this and then travel more than three weeks on camelback demanded superhuman endurance. Yet Laing closed the letter: "Nevertheless I feel well, and still hope to return to England with a great deal of geographical information."
Laing with the prince of the nomads
Laing pinned his hopes on the protection of the powerful nomad prince Sidi Muhammad al-Mukhtar, who not only promised to bring him to Timbuktu but wished to help him cross the Niger into the country of the Mossi people. Sidi Muhammad was strong and respected enough to guarantee his guest complete safety in Timbuktu and for several hundred kilometres around. Laing had once written that this expedition had been marked by misfortune from the outset — beginning with the overturned mail coach on his way from London to Falmouth — and misfortune struck again when an epidemic of dysentery broke out among the sheikh's camps.
Laing's constitution carried him through, but half of Sidi Muhammad's people died of the disease, along with the sheikh himself and all Laing's remaining companions — Jack le Bore, Harris, and the ill-fated Sheikh Babani. Sidi Muhammad's son, though bearing Laing no hostility, had neither the inclination nor the means to carry out his father's plans for the strange foreigner. Recalling the dead sheikh's promise to bring him to the Mossi country, Laing noted bitterly: "...to this his son has neither disposition nor ability."
Comparing Laing with other explorers of Africa
Alexander Gordon Laing became, in 1826, the first European known to have reached Timbuktu overland from the north, a feat that places him at the head of the long line of nineteenth-century explorers of Africa. His achievement is best understood alongside the men who competed with, followed, or eclipsed him:
- Mungo Park — the Scottish surgeon who traced the Niger River and died on it during his violent second expedition, the very conduct Laing condemned.
- Hugh Clapperton — Laing's rival, who worked toward the mouth of the Niger from Kano and Bornu near Lake Chad.
- Richard Lander and John Lander — the brothers who finally proved that the Niger emptied into the Atlantic.
- René Caillié — the Frenchman who reached Timbuktu two years after Laing and, disguised as a Muslim, returned alive to claim the prize.
- Heinrich Barth — whose meticulous later surveys of the central Sahara, Bornu and the Niger set the scientific standard for the field.
- David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, Richard Francis Burton and Samuel White Baker — who carried European exploration into East Africa, the Congo, and the sources of the Nile River a generation later.
Where Livingstone framed his travels as missionary and anti-slavery work and Stanley as journalistic conquest, Laing belonged to an earlier, thinner-resourced generation dispatched under the sponsorship of bodies such as the African Association, dependent on local rulers and caravan merchants for survival rather than on armed columns.
The historical significance of Laing's expedition
Laing's expedition matters because it opened the reliable European cartography of the western Sahara and confirmed the overland approach to Timbuktu at a moment when the city held near-mythic status in Europe as the golden terminus of trans-Saharan trade. His detailed letters, preserved in colonial and consular archives, remain a primary source for the geography of Tuat, the Tanezrouft, and the Azawad, and for the workings of the caravan economy on the eve of intensified British colonial expansion into Africa.
Trans-Saharan trade caravans in the nineteenth century
The trans-Saharan caravans that Laing joined were vast, organized commercial enterprises rather than mere travel parties — his final caravan numbered three hundred laden camels and a hundred and fifty armed men. These caravans linked the Mediterranean ports of North Africa with the West African markets of Timbuktu, Kano, and the Niger bend, carrying salt, textiles, firearms, gold, and enslaved people along fixed corridors anchored on oases such as Ghadames and Ain Salah. Control of the wells and the levying of protection from Tuareg confederations shaped every journey, and the slave trade remained a grim staple of this commerce — the same traffic that later humanitarian and abolitionist campaigns, and explorers like Livingstone, sought to document and end.
African responses to European expeditions
African communities met Laing's expedition with a full spectrum of responses, from the eager curiosity of the people of Ain Salah, to the shrewd hospitality of Sidi Muhammad al-Mukhtar, to the lethal calculation of the merchants and Tuareg who arranged his betrayal. The rumour that Laing was Mungo Park returned — a Christian who had fired on the Niger peoples — shows that memory of earlier European violence circulated widely and shaped how later travelers were received. These reactions complicate any simple narrative of "discovery" and belong to the growing scholarship on African agency during the era of European contact and colonization.
Timeline of the expedition's events
- 18 November 1825 — News reaches Laing that a caravan from Ghadames was plundered by Tuareg-Ahaggar raiders twelve miles ahead.
- 3 December 1825 — Laing's caravan enters Ain Salah, the first European to do so.
- 4 December 1825 — Laing writes to Bandinel: "I am not yet at Timbuctoo, but I am gradually advancing towards it."
- 13 December 1825 — Laing learns of Babani's deception and writes the tragic letter to his father-in-law.
- 9 January 1826 — The caravan of 300 camels and 150 men leaves Ain Salah for Timbuktu.
- 27 January 1826 — Last dispatch to Horton from the Tanezrouft plateau, warning of the Ulad Delim.
- Early 1826 — Ambush at Wadi Ahnet; Laing suffers twenty-four wounds and is betrayed by Babani.
- 10 May 1826 — From Sidi Muhammad al-Mukhtar's camp, Laing catalogues his injuries.
- 1 July 1826 — Writing from Azawad, some 200 km north of Timbuktu.
- 13 August 1826 — Laing enters Timbuktu.
The final stage: nearing Timbuktu
By the end, only one of the men who had left Tripoli with Laing remained — Bongola, an African who had first served Sheikh Babani, then been hired by Laing at Ghadames, and who stayed with him to the last. In Timbuktu Laing hoped to raise money for the return journey, since the trade ties between the city and Tripoli were old and firm enough that local merchants might lend him funds. He now wrote calmly of Clapperton, even hoping his rival had already fixed the Niger's outlet into the Atlantic, and declaring with strange finality: "I know well that if I do not visit this city, the world will forever remain in ignorance of it, and I do not boast in saying that the city will never be visited by any Christian after me."
To crown his misfortunes, the camel driver Muhammad — the very man who had brought the first true news of the ambush to Tripoli — robbed Laing before departing, and the angry letter Laing wrote demanding the thief's punishment reached its addressee only two years later, when its author had long been dead. The young sheikh, son of Sidi Muhammad, kept delaying Laing's departure under various pretexts, so alarmed was he by reports that the Tuareg and Fulbe were fighting for control of Timbuktu; Laing described his situation as captivity. At last Babani's nephew arrived from the city to conduct him — the sole survivor of the original British "Mission to Timbuktu" — to his goal.
In the last days of July 1826 Laing began the penultimate stage of his journey; the camel driver Muhammad later claimed the distance was a mere five days by racing camel. Such speeds were beyond a traveler barely recovered from his wounds, but one way or another, on 13 August 1826 Laing entered the city of Timbuktu, of which he had dreamed for so many years.
Read also: Part I of Alexander Laing's expedition
The opening leg of the journey — Laing's departure from Tripoli, his crossing to Ghadames, and the origins of the "Mission to Timbuctoo" — is told in Part I. For related accounts of exploration, empire, and discovery, browse the history and travel collections.
