Alexander Gordon Laing's Second Expedition to Timbuktu: Route and Mission — Part I
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In January 1825, Alexander Gordon Laing was granted the rank of "Major in Africa." It was precisely at this moment that the question of the second expedition of Alexander Laing into the interior of Africa was finally settled. This expedition received the official name "the mission to Timbuktu."
Who was Alexander Gordon Laing
Alexander Gordon Laing was a British army officer and explorer whose career became bound up with the great age of European exploration of Africa. His promotion to "Major in Africa" in January 1825 marked the moment when the British government committed to sending him deep into West Africa to reach Timbuktu, the fabled trading city on the fringe of the Sahara. Laing belonged to the same generation of geographers who pursued the last great riddles of African geography — the course of the Niger River, the sources of the Nile River, and the reach of trans-Saharan trade routes.
The first expedition of Laing into the interior (1822)
Laing's first expedition into the interior of Africa set out at the beginning of 1822 from Sierra Leone, giving him direct experience of the routes leading inland toward the Niger and of the local rulers along the way. During this earlier journey he approached the sources of the Niger River and made a rough estimate of their elevation. That experience shaped every argument he would later make about how to reach Timbuktu, and it convinced him that the western approaches from the Atlantic coast were the ones he understood best.
The plan for the next African expedition
When Laing returned to London in October 1824 after a brief rest in Scotland, the Colonial Office was weighing a plan for the next African expedition, one intended to reach Timbuktu, the most important trading city in the interior of West Africa. The city had loomed in European imagination for centuries as a centre of gold, salt, and scholarship, and reaching it had become a prize comparable in prestige to charting the Niger itself.
Laing's candidacy struck the Colonial Secretary, Lord Bathurst, as the most suitable, so the captain was invited to set out, in preliminary form, his views on the route such an expedition should take. Lord Bathurst's backing carried great weight: at a time when the British ministries were passing through one of their periodic bouts of financial economy, the authority of a powerful Colonial Secretary meant a great deal to a traveller trying to place orders for equipment and secure funds.
Why Timbuktu mattered as a trading hub of West Africa
Timbuktu mattered to the British because it stood at the junction of the trans-Saharan trade routes and the Niger River commerce, funnelling gold, salt, and other goods between North Africa and the interior of West Africa. Reaching and describing the city promised both commercial advantage and geographical glory, which is why the Colonial Office was prepared to fund an expedition aimed squarely at it. The trans-Saharan network had linked the Mediterranean coast with the Niger valley for centuries, and Timbuktu was one of its most storied endpoints.
The western route proposed by Laing
Laing argued firmly for the western variant of the route. He set out the following advantages of that choice:
- he was well acquainted with the road from Sierra Leone to the Niger and with many of the local chiefs;
- his sufficient command of the Mandingo language would allow him to manage without an interpreter;
- this route would deliver immediate and direct benefit to British merchants on the Atlantic coast.
The advantages of the western route through Sierra Leone
The western route through Sierra Leone appealed to Laing because it built on knowledge he had already gained on his first journey, reducing his dependence on unknown guides and unfamiliar languages. Having reached Timbuktu, he intended to push on downstream along the Niger to Katsina, one of the chief towns of the Hausa country, and from there to move toward Lake Wangara (Lake Chad; "Wangara" was the name given in West Africa to the merchants who brought gold from the interior into the trading towns). Laing proposed to skirt the lake to learn whether it had an outlet; if none existed, the expedition was to ascend the "Chad River" — the main tributary of the Niger, the Benue.
Laing's hypothesis linking the Niger and the Benue
Laing's hypothesis that the Niger and the Benue belonged to a single river system was, as it turned out, a correct guess, even though in the 1820s the connection between the Benue and Lake Chad had still to be established. In fact the Benue is in no way connected to Lake Chad, but this remained to be worked out at the time. Should his supposition prove wrong, Laing intended to descend the Niger all the way to its mouth. From the very outset he considered attempts to reach the Niger from the north to be unpromising.
The riddle of the Niger: where it begins and where it flows
The riddle of the Niger — where the river rose and where it ultimately emptied — was the true object of Laing's ambition throughout his career. Later explorers such as Hugh Clapperton, Richard Lander and John Lander would settle the question by tracing the river to its delta on the Gulf of Guinea, while Heinrich Barth would map vast stretches of the same country a generation afterward. For readers who want the fuller story, see Where the Niger River begins and where it flows.
The northern route across the Sahara: Lord Bathurst's position
Lord Bathurst, on whom the fate of the future expedition — and indeed of Laing himself — depended, held a different view and favoured the northern route across the Sahara. He had solid grounds for this: until that time every attempt to reach the Niger from the direction of the Atlantic coast had ended in failure. Even when travellers managed to reach the river, not one of those who did so managed to return.
The fate of predecessors: Houghton, Park and Peddie
The fate of Houghton, Mungo Park and Peddie was compelling proof of the dangers of the Atlantic approach, since each of these earlier explorers perished or vanished in the attempt to reach or descend the Niger. Their deaths weighed heavily on the Colonial Office when it weighed the safety of any new route into the interior.
North Africa's trade links with the Niger valley
North Africa had for centuries maintained steady trading connections with the Niger valley, and this was well known to everyone in London who considered the problem. Caravans crossed the Sahara Desert between the Mediterranean towns and the great markets of the interior, so the northern road was, in a commercial sense, already a proven artery rather than an unexplored void.
The Denham expedition and the desert crossing
The experience of recent years, and especially the Denham expedition, showed that Europeans could use the same desert paths as Africans. That precedent reassured Lord Bathurst: where Denham's party had passed on the road toward Bornu and Lake Chad, a determined officer might pass again. Of course, choosing the northern route made Laing's West African experience of little use, if not entirely useless — a problem that surfaced at the very earliest stage of preparation, in drawing up the expedition's budget.
Tripoli as the starting point for British expeditions
Bathurst disregarded such particulars, believing that the situation in Tripoli — the starting point of all British expeditions heading south — was especially favourable to the English. There was no French influence there, and the standing of the British consul was considerable enough to smooth the way.
The role of the British consul Warrington and the local pasha
The authority of the British consul Warrington in Tripoli was so great, in Bathurst's estimation, that the local pasha would gladly support any undertaking he proposed. This confidence in Warrington's influence, as later events would show, proved dangerously optimistic, but at the moment of planning it made Tripoli seem the ideal gateway to the Sahara.
Competition for command of the expedition: Major Lyon
Laing, however, had no choice at that moment: his desire to reach the mysterious city on the Niger and to solve the riddle of the Niger was so strong that he would have agreed to any route so long as he was permitted to set out. He also understood that arguing with the minister was pointless, since his lordship had no shortage of volunteers should he need to replace an unruly captain. Major Lyon, who had already tried to cross the desert in 1818, was again approaching Bathurst with a request to be allowed an expedition to Timbuktu. Thus the route across the Sahara was chosen.
The final choice of the route across the Sahara
The route across the Sahara was settled once Bathurst's preference prevailed over Laing's own inclination. The decision committed the expedition to the long southward march from Tripoli through the desert oases rather than the coastal approach from Sierra Leone, and it defined every hardship that would follow.
Preparing the expedition
Preparation for the expedition proceeded very quickly. As early as December, Laing submitted an expenditure estimate to the Colonial Office. By his reckoning the total was to come to a little more than 1,300 pounds — a sizeable sum by the standards of the day, but, as soon became clear, still insufficient.
Drawing up the budget and outfitting
Laing's very detailed budget had one serious flaw: it was drawn up without the slightest acquaintance with the country he had to pass through. Laing did not know the situation around Timbuktu and, in his estimate, provided for gifts to the Moroccan ruler of the city — yet by that time Moroccan power in Timbuktu had not existed for two hundred years. In Tripoli, knowledge of the Western Sudan was probably not much greater; at any rate, no one at the British consulate dispelled Laing's misconception. Preparation was completed in January 1825, and Bathurst's support did much to help Laing overcome the difficulties that arose in placing orders for the expedition's equipment.
Laing's party consisted of four men: himself, Jack le Bore, and two ship's carpenters (Rogers and Harris) — Africans from the Atlantic coast; the plan was for them to build a boat at Timbuktu on which the expedition would continue its journey down the Niger. On 6 February 1825 Laing sailed with his men from Falmouth, and on 3 March he landed at Malta. Here he had to linger: it was necessary to replenish the expedition's stores of equipment, and, moreover, the old liver ailment he had suffered from in the West Indies made itself felt again.
Laing in Tripoli
On 9 May 1825 Laing was in Tripoli, arriving at the house of the British consul Warrington.
The guides, without whom the expedition could not begin, had not yet arrived, and along the route Laing had chosen for himself — straight to Ghadames — the nomads had risen up, unwilling to acknowledge the pasha's authority, so it was possible to advance only by the roundabout way through Fezzan. There were problems enough, and solving them took time.
And so Laing had to wait again. While in Tripoli he became acquainted with the daughter of the consul-general, Warrington. Emma Warrington and Laing fell in love, and on 14 July 1825 her father, by his consular authority, married them. This took place two days before Alexander Laing's expedition set out from Tripoli.
Laing's travelling companion, Sheikh Babani
By the end of June it had become clear that Laing would have to travel not by the direct road through Fezzan to Timbuktu, but by way of Ghadames. This ran counter to Bathurst's instructions, according to which the expedition was to pass through Murzuk: the minister reasonably supposed that where the Denham expedition had passed, Laing too could pass (a known road improved the chances of success).
Warrington recommended a different route to Laing, and he had fairly weighty motives for doing so. He intended to give Laing a travelling companion, Sheikh Babani. A certain merchant from Ghadames, named Sheikh Babani, who had lived in Timbuktu for many years, undertook to bring Laing to that city. Understandably, Laing considered it no small advantage to have as his companion a man with extensive connections among those who lived along the road, and especially in Timbuktu.
Warrington supported Babani's candidacy as Laing's companion very zealously. After Laing's caravan set out, he described in a letter to Bathurst, in enthusiastic terms, both Babani himself (whom he had met only two days earlier) and the advantages he would bring to the expedition: having delivered Laing to Timbuktu, the merchant would return to Tripoli on his trading business and bring Warrington Laing's letters.
And at Timbuktu, Babani was to entrust Laing to the care of his friend, the chief of the Arab Kunta tribe, Sidi Muhammad al-Mukhtar, who, as the merchant assured the consul, possessed sufficient authority to bring the traveller safe and sound to the shores of the Gulf of Benin. It all looked fairly convincing and, evidently, was meant to appear so to Lord Bathurst, to whom Warrington addressed the letter.
He also most sincerely wished Laing every good thing, all the more so since over these two months he had become his kinsman. Unfortunately, reality was by no means so happy. Above all, Sheikh Babani — as far as one can judge by setting Warrington's optimistic letters against the actual conditions of the Sahara — brazenly lied to the consul about everything concerning the real distances and the length of the journey.
He claimed he would bring Laing from Ghadames to Timbuktu in about forty days, and Laing's letters to Tripoli within the same span. To Laing himself, the Ghadames merchant did speak of sixty-six days for the journey from Ghadames to the expedition's main goal. But even this figure assumed an utterly impossible speed of travel for the caravan: after all, more than two thousand kilometres of the hardest road lay between those cities. No caravan could advance at a rate of 30–35 km a day, and for more than two months at that. To top it all, Babani himself, as later became clear, was far from the "fine fellow" Warrington had made him out to be in his letter to the minister. But all this Laing established through his own bitter experience much later.
For now he thought of one thing only: to set out as soon as possible. Reading now the optimistic — one might even say reckless — assessments of people, situations, and circumstances of the journey that Warrington gave, one is sometimes simply astonished at the incredible frivolity that breathes from the consul-general's judgments.
Laing sets out on the expedition
Laing left his camp in the village of Tajura (about 18 km east of Tripoli) on 16 July 1825 and set out on the expedition alone, since his companion, Sheikh Babani, who had promised to show him the road to Timbuktu, still had business in Tripoli and was to catch up with Laing on the way a few days later. Laing's mood was elevated, and his letters from the first stopping places are full of optimism and a certain self-assurance.
It must be admitted that he had sufficient grounds for such optimism: the tales of Sheikh Babani. Two days after setting out from Tripoli, Laing reported enthusiastically in a letter to Bathurst what a splendid companion he would have as far as Timbuktu.
The man was highly respected all along the trade road and had lived in Timbuktu for about thirty years (curiously, from letter to letter the length of this period of Babani's life grew: at first it was nine years, then twenty-two, and now it had reached thirty). He was well acquainted with Jenne and Segu-Sikoro, major trading cities on the Niger, and even with Fouta Djallon.
Babani assured the traveller that he would be well received in Timbuktu, and that from there he would reach the town of Yauri on the Niger (the river's lower course) in twenty-five days. Whether Babani was really acquainted with all these cities is hard to judge. But he surely knew that no regular navigation existed between Timbuktu and Yauri, and he was certainly deliberately misleading Laing.
Babani was by no means working for free. For delivering the expedition to Timbuktu he was to be paid two and a half thousand thalers, not counting rewards for smaller services. It is no accident that in the letter to Bathurst of 18 July 1825 mentioned above, Laing once again asks to be excused for the unforeseen large expenses.
But in the end he was certain that the victors are not judged — if only he could reach the goal, then no one would remember the economy the Colonial Office demanded of him. In any case, at the beginning of the journey the money matters seemed to Laing minor annoyances. For the first few weeks all went well; he was not much troubled even by the rather persistent attachment of his companion Babani and of those he met at the stopping places to other people's money.
After all, Laing reasons in one of his letters to Warrington, where he reports the attempts at extortion by the sheikh of the village of Bir-Serhet, the money belongs to the king, not to me. But he immediately adds that he had never had to deal with such "greedy vagrants," and that if he gave in to them his funds would soon be exhausted. It was assumed, moreover, that the payment for the goodwill of the sheikhs of the villages along the way would be borne by the pasha Yusuf Karamanli. True, where money was concerned, relying on the pasha was rather risky.
Difficulties on the road
Laing met with no small difficulties on the road. The sheikh of Bir-Serhet nevertheless made Laing seriously doubt the assessments of the route's safety he had heard from his father-in-law. After the sheikh was refused a payment of a hundred and fifty thalers, it suddenly turned out that further travel was impossible without additional camels and water skins.
It began with the sheikh trying once more to extract a fairly large sum from Laing on the pretext that the camels had been sold to him at too low a price. Laing replied that he would discuss any additional money only on arrival at Ghadames. After this, the sheikh and his men spent considerable effort trying to provoke a brawl during which they might profit somehow. When even this failed, they suddenly vanished.
The caravan spent an anxious night expecting an attack, but the "escort" appeared only the following morning — and in such a way that Laing and his men recognised their "guards" only at the very last moment, so the affair passed without shots being fired, which was in fact exactly what the resourceful sheikh of Bir-Serhet had been after in staging a false attack on the camp. When at last the travellers parted from him, everyone felt relief:
"Today,
Laing records,
thank God, he has left me."
And further on in the letter Laing asks that his displeasure be conveyed to the pasha over having had to travel to Ghadames by the roundabout way. And yet this man was not so easily frightened or forced to abandon his plans: the letter ends on a very optimistic note.
"I am convinced, dear consul, that I shall complete my mission so as to secure immortal fame for your labours and your persistence in preparing it, as well as for me in carrying it out."
The letter is dated 13 August 1825; it was written at a stopping place on the northern edge of Fezzan.
Solving the problem of the Niger
The mishaps and troubles of the road distracted Laing only briefly from reflecting on the main goal of the journey. And that goal, for him, was always the solution of the problem of the Niger, even though officially his expedition was called "the mission to Timbuktu."
In 1822, being near the sources of the Niger and having determined its approximate elevation, Laing concluded that this elevation was insufficient for the Niger to flow into Lake Chad. He therefore accepted at that time Reichard's hypothesis: that the Niger empties into the Gulf of Benin.
As his chief proof of the latter, Laing cites the presence of hippopotamuses in the Volta: they are characteristic of the Niger, and the Volta is the only river on the Guinea coast in which they are found.
The route followed
When Laing's caravan approached Ghadames on 13 September 1825, the major already had a fair idea of the difficulties awaiting anyone who chose the route he was following: heat, shortage of food and water (during the last three days before Ghadames the men ate nothing and made do with a very meagre water ration), and the constant threat of attack (already at Ghadames Laing learned that more than a hundred horsemen had lain in wait for his caravan a few days earlier at the expected stopping place).
And worse still lay ahead.
"...Few would dare undertake the journey between Tripoli and Ghadames alone,
Laing writes to Warrington on the day the caravan reached Ghadames,
no one would even attempt to go from Ghadames to Tuat, and even twenty men could not feel safe between Tuat and Timbuktu. Everyone tells me that this road is very different from the road to Bornu; the latter is a regular trade route along which, under the pasha's protection, even a child may travel. But on this road there are many mutually conflicting interests, and the pasha's influence ends at Ghadames."
On the way, during transport on camels in the terrible heat, all the barometers were broken, the ether evaporated from the hygrometers, and two days before reaching Ghadames the watches stopped. A sorrowful exclamation bursts from Laing:
"It seems I have been marked with the seal of misfortune from the very beginning of my journey!"
And yet he himself was ready to move on the next day —
"there is little of interest for me here, and I shall hardly find more before I reach Timbuktu."
But the exhausted, weary men needed rest; the camels too had to be given a respite. And Sheikh Babani had no intention of hurrying at all — the people of the desert are not in the habit of rushing. One thing remained — to wait.
During the journey Laing had been able to size up his companions more or less. In his letters to Warrington he still speaks well of Sheikh Babani, and with great warmth of le Bore, Harris, and Rogers, but of Sidi Muhammad Bogol, the second Ghadames merchant recommended to him by his father-in-law, he tries to speak with restraint — though he manages this rather poorly. It is with all the greater joy that he sends this man back to Tripoli with his letters. Money problems at this stage of the journey troubled Laing far more than all the rest. On 26 September he received mail from Tripoli, and in it a rather unpleasant letter from the Colonial Office concerning the expenses that he and Warrington had allowed themselves in preparing the expedition.
Laing in Ghadames
Laing intended to leave Ghadames in the first days of October. But the Chaamba nomads cut off the road to Tuat, and this caused a fresh delay. While the date of the caravan's departure remained uncertain, Laing — who never abandoned his scientific observations in the face of any troubles — acquainted himself with interest with Ghadames: its layout, architecture, history, economy, and the customs of its inhabitants.
His particular attention was drawn to the ruins of a Roman fortification beside the oasis. Laing sketched the ruins and attached them to the "Notes on Ghadames" he compiled and sent to Warrington in Tripoli. It gave Laing no small pleasure to find, among the oasis dwellers, people who spoke well the Bambara language, related to the Malinke language (Laing had learned Malinke during his service in Sierra Leone); this testified to the long-standing connections between the inhabitants of Ghadames and the peoples living along the Niger.
At last, on 3 November, the expedition set out on the road to Tuat. On the advice of Sheikh Babani, Laing greatly reduced the caravan: the sheikh feared, not without reason, that a large caravan would attract excessive attention from the Tuareg. Hatita left Ghadames together with Laing.
He promised to bring the traveller to a place from which, he assured him, it was no more than twenty days' journey to Timbuktu. Once more a triumphant note sounds in the last letter to Warrington from Ghadames:
"At the moment you receive my letters through him (Hatita. — L. K.), you may consider that I am already in that city and shall probably be on the other side of this continent by February."
Reality showed that Laing's optimism was excessive. Indeed, any schoolchild today who has grasped in geography lessons what a map scale is can lay a map of Africa before him and establish that the distance between Ghadames and the shores of the Gulf of Benin is, in a straight line, three thousand kilometres.
And he will hardly even think, as he does so, that the ease with which he can do it now, in the second half of the twentieth century, owes something to those who, a century and a half ago, did not know such things as seem obvious to us now. They did not know — and yet they pressed stubbornly forward, striving to satisfy humanity's eternal drive to know the truth.
The caravan travelled south from Ghadames fairly quickly. By 13 November it was already at Wadi Takuset, about two hundred and fifty kilometres from Ghadames. From here the route turned almost due west, toward Ain Salah. For a long time no opportunities to send letters to Tripoli were expected, so Laing wrote a single letter over the course of several days, producing a kind of travel diary.
By this time his admiration for Sheikh Babani had noticeably cooled: it turned out that the sheikh had deliberately frightened everyone with the Chaamba Arabs in order to avoid going through Tuat, where he would have had to incur certain expenses. It also emerged that the gifts for the Tuareg that Babani was carrying were in fact goods intended for sale in Timbuktu.
The sum of four thousand thalers promised to Babani for his services began to seem to Laing, to put it mildly, not very much in keeping with the sheikh's actual care for the expedition. Moreover, the expedition's finances left much to be desired: that same Sheikh Babani had borrowed a great deal of money from Laing but proved unable to repay it.
True, he returned part of the debt in his goods, but, Laing records not without sadness,
"with these goods in Timbuktu you could not even pay for the servants' dinner."
The significance of Laing's expedition in the history of African exploration
Laing's expedition stands as a landmark in the European exploration of Africa because it was the first serious British attempt to reach Timbuktu across the Sahara Desert and to resolve the geography of the Niger River in a single sustained effort. Although the mission ended tragically, it opened the way for the wave of nineteenth-century exploration literature and travel journals that shaped Western understanding of West Africa, North Africa, and the Sahara for generations. The record Laing left in his letters remains one of the vivid firsthand accounts of the hardships of trans-Saharan travel and the workings of caravan trade.
Comparison with other European explorers of Africa
Compared with other European explorers of Africa, Laing occupies an early and pioneering place in a long line of geographers who pushed into the continent's interior. René Caillié would famously reach Timbuktu and return alive, while Heinrich Barth and Gustav Nachtigal later mapped much of the Sahara, the Niger valley, Bornu, Kano, and Lake Chad in far greater detail. Along the Niger itself, Mungo Park, Hugh Clapperton, Richard Lander, and John Lander traced the river's course, and the missionary and linguist Samuel Crowther worked among the peoples of its banks. Far to the east, the search for the Nile River drew Richard Francis Burton, John Hanning Speke, Samuel White Baker, and later Henry Morton Stanley, whose expeditions through the Congo and East Africa — aided at times by figures such as Tippu Tip — closed the great age of geographical discovery. Set against these later journeys, Laing's mission belongs to the risky, poorly mapped beginnings when the very course of the Niger remained a genuine riddle.
Timeline of the second expedition
- January 1825 — Alexander Gordon Laing is granted the rank of "Major in Africa" and the mission to Timbuktu is confirmed.
- December 1824 — Laing submits an expenditure estimate of a little over 1,300 pounds to the Colonial Office.
- 6 February 1825 — Laing sails from Falmouth with his party of four.
- 3 March 1825 — the expedition lands at Malta.
- 9 May 1825 — Laing arrives in Tripoli at the house of Consul Warrington.
- 14 July 1825 — Laing marries Emma Warrington.
- 16 July 1825 — Laing sets out from the camp at Tajura.
- 13 August 1825 — Laing writes an optimistic letter from the northern edge of Fezzan.
- 13 September 1825 — the caravan approaches Ghadames.
- 3 November 1825 — the expedition departs Ghadames on the road to Tuat.
- 13 November 1825 — the caravan reaches Wadi Takuset, about 250 km from Ghadames.
For the continuation of the second expedition of Alexander Laing into the interior of Africa, read Part II.
