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

In this year of 1788 he is forty-five years old and has already been President of the Royal Society, the home of England’s finest scientists, for ten years. During this time, dissenters have complained that a heavy-drinking, adventure-loving botaniser is a far from worthy successor to a chair once occupied by the likes of Isaac Newton. But he has weathered their protests as he will weather others, with stoicism, confident that he can shrug them off.

The Royal Society met in its new quarters at Somerset House in the Strand, as usual, the previous evening and, as usual before the meeting, Sir Joseph opened his home both to members of the Society and to members of society. Three rooms in Soho Square were filled with scientists and philosophers, adventurers, businessmen and foreigners, all of them bearing seeds, whether physical or metaphorical, botanical or philosophical.^* There are letters to write on this Monday morning as a result of the Society’s meeting: among others, to the botanist Johann Hedwig, Professor of Medicine at Leipzig, whom he wants to congratulate for having been elected ‘a foreign member of our Royal Society’. There is always too much correspondence to deal with, too many other tasks to be done, but now he puts them aside, or instructs others to continue with them, for he has a meeting to attend that will help to shape the future of Africa.

^* Eighteenth-century man, for all his advances, has yet to discover that the good Lord has given mosquitoes the ability to carry a virus by the name of malaria.

^* Walpole went on: ‘Mr Blake I suppose will order a live sheep for supper at Almack’s, and ask whom he shall help to a piece of the shoulder. Oh yes, we shall have negro butchers, and French cooks shall be laid aside. My Lady Townsend, after the rebellion, said, everybody was so bloodthirsty, that she did not dare to dine abroad, for fear of meeting with a rebel pie – now one shall be asked to come and eat a bit of raw mutton. In truth, I do think we are ripe for any extravagance.’

^* Banks bequeathed the house to his librarian, Robert Brown, who rented part of it to the Linnaean Society. It was demolished in 1936 and the site is now covered by the London offices of 20th Century-Fox.

^* As T.J. Mathias put it in The Pursuits of Literature (1812), ‘Sir Joseph Banks has instituted a meeting at his house in Soho Square, every Sunday evening, at which the literati and men of rank and consequence, and men of no consequence at all, find equally a polite and pleasing reception from that justly distinguished man’.

2
The Charge of Ignorance

‘No other part of the world abounds with gold and silver in greater degree … and it is surprising that neither the ancient or modern Europeans notwithstanding their extraordinary and insatiable thirst after gold and silver, should have endeavoured to establish themselves effectively in a country much nearer to them than either America or the East Indies and where the object of their desires are to be found in equal, if not greater plenty.’

Encyclopaedia Britannica, second edition (1788)

London, 9 June 1788

THE CAPITAL is a mad, crowded jumble, its inhabitants gripped by a fever of activity. While Sir Joseph is on his way to his rendezvous in St Alban’s Street, Their Most Britannic (and still quite Germanic) Majesties King George III and Queen Charlotte Sophia are reviewing a troop of Dragoons. Mr Pitt the Younger, the twenty-eight-year-old Prime Minister, is immersed in the cares and affairs of State, turning over the debates in Parliament and deliberating on tensions in Europe. The Lord Chancellor is in his office appointing a new Lord Chief Justice – it isn’t something he has done before: the previous incumbent, the Earl of Mansfield, held the post for thirty-two years. Like His Lordship, the new Chief Justice will have no trouble filling the prisons. Sir Joseph Banks knows all about this problem of overcrowding. The three female cells in London’s Newgate Jail are crammed with many more than the seventy prisoners they were intended to hold, as convicts sentenced to ‘Transportation to Parts Beyond the Seas’ wait for the arrival of ships to take them to Botany Bay, Sir Joseph’s Australian project.

The Times has just called London ‘an emporium of all the world and the wonder of foreigners’. Plenty of these ‘wondering’ foreigners appear to be installed in the capital. ‘London abounds with an incredible number of these black men,’ one commentator notes this year of 1788,¹ while to the poet William Wordsworth’s eyes:

Among the crowd all specimens of man,

Through all the colours which the sun bestows,

And every character of form and face:

The Swede, the Russian; from the genial south,

The Frenchman and the Spaniard; from remote

America, the Hunter-Indian; Moors,

Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese,

And Negro Ladies in white muslin Gowns.²

The world’s largest city reaches out beyond the shores of Albion with more than just prison ships. There is plenty of movement through the port during these early days of June as ships arrive from Norway, Cadiz, Nantes, Venice and several tropical ports. ‘Just landed,’ trills an advert for Young’s Italian Warehouse on the front page of the paper this day, 9 June, ‘a large quantity of very curious Salad Oil, from Provence, Lucca, and Florence; Olives, Anchovies, Capers; Parmesan, Gruyer, and other foreign Cheese; Macaroni …’ Some Londoners clearly have a taste for the finer things in life. There is foreign intelligence, too: news just in that the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey and Georgia – British colonies until eleven years ago – have agreed to join something called the United States of America. It is more salt in the festering wound of the mother nation. There is no appetite now for colonies if this is how the successful ones behave.

One other snippet of foreign intelligence reported this day has a bearing on our story: there is early news of an insurrection in France as demands grow for the King to make sweeping concessions and share power. A revolution is in the making.

Parliament, keen to break for summer recess as soon as its work is done, has its sights on matters abroad as well as near at hand. On this day, as Sir Joseph heads for his meeting, Honourable Members hear about the plight of American Loyalists, the problems in Scottish boroughs and the dilemma of the English Episcopal Church in Amsterdam. But the main debate concerns evidence given to support a ‘Bill for regulating the transportation of Slaves from Africa to America’. Here is a topic guaranteed to split the House as it is splitting the country, or at least that part of the country with moral, economic or political interest in such matters. The Times in its editorial has taken the side of Sir William Dolben, the politician who has sponsored the Bill, thundering that, ‘For Englishmen to chain their innocent fellow-creatures together, and keep them in bondage for life, is much more repugnant to Christianity, than cutting off the ears of the enemy is barbarity, in the followers of Mahomet.’³ That afternoon, however, had the Honourable Members looked out of their windows they would have seen a very different sort of fleet sailing upstream past the Houses of Parliament as pleasure boats massed to contest the Annual Silver Cup and Cover.

Across the river in Croydon, a well-known boxer from Birmingham by the name of Futerel is failing to live up to his reputation as a destroyer of men. The contest, held in an impromptu ring, lasts an hour and ten minutes, which sounds reasonable enough, but according to reports Futerel spends much of this time ‘lying for a few minutes’ or pretending to be ‘a lump of doe in a sack’. The Prince of Wales and his attendant Major Hanger happen to be among the disgusted audience. Suspicions of a fix are rife.

Nor is London lacking in artistic endeavour these bright days of June. At the Poet’s Gallery in Fleet Street, Mr Macklin is showing new work by a range of artists, among them Sir Joshua Reynolds and his rival, Thomas Gainsborough, now fighting a losing battle against cancer. The Theatre Royal in Covent Garden is spreading out the dust sheets as its audience flees to their country estates to escape the coming hot weather, but Sadler’s Wells, which attracts a different sort of public and has only just opened for the summer season, is staging performances by a ten-year-old boy known as the Infant Hercules, while another character known as the Little Devil dances across a tightrope. Meanwhile, down at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane, the actor Mr Smith is pulling down the final curtain on a glorious thirty-five-year stage career by performing in Sheridan’s School for Scandal. After the performance, the socialite Lady Lucan is heard to say to Mrs Sheridan, the playwright’s wife: ‘You must certainly be a happy woman, Madam, who have the felicity of pleasing the man that pleases all the world.’ The comment is worthy of one of Sheridan’s characters, because it is common knowledge that for some time the playwright has been looking elsewhere for his sexual pleasures.

Later, after the lights have gone out on anyone who has laid their head in a palace, a mansion, a house, an apartment, a lodging or a share of a bed in a doss-house, after the homeless have collapsed into a gin-induced haze in the city’s parks or beneath its bridges, just as the clocks are striking midnight, an athletic man by the name of Foster Powell is seen leaving the capital for the northern city of York, hoping to get there and back by Saturday midnight, five full days. He is accompanied by two men on horseback and one on foot, presumably to ensure that he is not held up along the way – robbery on the King’s highway remains a common complaint. Powell intends to travel from midnight until eleven the next morning, rest until 5 p.m. and then walk through the night. To succeed, he needs to walk just over sixty-six miles a day. Long before the clock chimes and Powell sets out on his adventure, Sir Joseph Banks has embarked upon one of his own.

Mr Hunt, the obsequious proprietor of the St Alban’s Tavern, is an old hand at greeting the rich and famous at his establishment, for his rooms are a popular venue for political meetings and fashionable dinners, among them the regular though far from frequent meetings of the Saturday’s Club. Little is known of the Club before this memorable day, not even whether it usually meets on a Saturday: after all, this is a Monday. But there is nothing unusual about its existence, for we are in the great age of clubs and societies. An active man about town can expect to belong to several of them, although perhaps not so many as Sir Joseph Banks, who is an esteemed member of the Royal Society Club, the Society of Dilettanti, the Society of Arts, the Society of Antiquaries, the Engineers’ Society, the Society for the Improvement of Naval Architecture and others. Most of these provide a good excuse for a social gathering of sometimes learned, usually entertaining, often heavy-drinking and invariably like-minded men. In this, the Saturday’s Club is unexceptional; until this day, when something of immense and long-lasting consequence happens.

Banks turns off Pall Mall, enters the St Alban’s Tavern, is shown up the stairs and into a room rented for the occasion for a guinea. Only nine of the Club’s dozen members are able to attend. After the greetings and an exchange of news, glasses are filled and a good dinner served.

Banks’ companions are all wealthy men with significant political and intellectual influence. Henry Beaufoy is a Quaker and Member of Parliament. The son of a vinegar manufacturer, he has shown more interest in politics than commerce and published his first paper, The Effects of Civilisation on the Real Improvement and Happiness of Mankind, before his twentieth birthday. When Gainsborough painted him, he chose to portray him as a romantic, a dandified English gentleman, his hair a little wild and swept back, left hand hidden in the breast of a blue, big-buttoned frock-coat, breeches tucked into riding boots, right hand resting on a cane. He possesses formidable debating skills, as one would expect of a founder of the Dissenting Academy, and is preparing to make a thundering speech in Parliament damning the captains of slaving vessels for mistreating their human cargoes and damning their defenders in Parliament with what he will call ‘the stigma of everlasting dishonour’.⁴ It will be one more step, he hopes, on the road to the abolition of slavery.

Alongside him is General Conway. At seventy, the General is the oldest of the group, a former Secretary of State, a retired army top brass, an amateur botanist and, like Banks and Beaufoy, an improver – he commissioned the bridge over the Thames at Henley. Surprisingly, he is also a linguist: a performance is announced for this very evening of a French play he has translated.

One of the youngest members of the Saturday’s Club is the Irish aristocrat Francis Rawdon. Soon he will inherit the title Earl of Moira, and then earn that of Marquis of Hastings, will become an intimate of the Prince of Wales and be appointed Governor-General of India. But at this stage, at thirty-three years of age, he is merely a rising star, a tall man with a commanding manner who has come home from the American War of Independence with a reputation for being a reliable officer and with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

The other members are no less remarkable. William Pulteney is one of the richest men in the country, and Sir William Fordyce a doctor who has published works on subjects as varied as venereal diseases and the medical properties of rhubarb. Friends describe Fordyce as an unassuming, convivial man who seldom dines alone. The Earl of Galloway, on the other hand, is joyfully outspoken, particularly about his twin passions of agriculture and the abolition of slavery. Here too is the Commissioner for Trade and Plantations, Sir Adam Ferguson, and Andrew Stuart, a lawyer and sometime Member of Parliament, both government advisers. Of the three members who are unable to attend, Sir John Sinclair has been called ‘the most indefatigable man in England’ – he will go on to create the Board of Agriculture and sit on the Privy Council – the Earl of Carysfort is a scholarly evangelist, while the most unusual man among them, Richard Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, has had the honour of occupying the chairs of both Divinity and Chemistry at Cambridge University. Between them, these dozen men wield great influence in many spheres of life, from government to commerce and science. Seven are members of the elevated Royal Society, eight have seats in Parliament and most own significant estates or control extensive business interests.

The records of this meeting are of a general nature, and although they tell us what is decided upon, they do not reveal who says what or in which order. It seems certain that mention is made of the Slavery Bill currently being discussed in Parliament, and from slavery conversation will naturally enough have turned to Africa.

Banks is the only member of the Saturday’s Club who has been to Africa. Since his return he has funded several botanical expeditions to examine the continent’s rich flora. He has also received several proposals from people interested in making journeys into the interior and a suggestion that an Arabic-speaking slave from the West Indies be shipped back to Africa to travel inland. But he is not the only one to be interested in Africa, as is suggested by the fact that 1200 people subscribed to the first edition of The Letters of Ignatius Sancho,^* a freed slave. Another account of slavery, written by Olaudah Equiano,† the son of a West African chief, is just now being prepared for the printers, backed among others by General Conway and Lord Rawdon, both now present in this upstairs room at the tavern.

If Banks has provided the original idea, Henry Beaufoy now pushes it forward. The geographer James Rennell, who is not present but who knows most of the members, will write later that Beaufoy smoothed the way for the Association, ‘a path which, more than any other person, he had contributed to open, and render smooth’.⁵ Sir John Sinclair seems to have been the other key player – his son will later claim that he took ‘a leading part’ – although he is not present now as matters come to a head and the following resolution is made:

At an adjourned Meeting of the Saturday’s Club, at the St. Alban’s Tavern, on the 9^th of June, 1788.

PRESENT

ABSENT MEMBERS

Resolved, That as no species of information is more ardently desired, or more generally useful, than that which improves the science of Geography; and as the vast continent of Africa, notwithstanding the efforts of the ancients, and the wishes of the moderns, is still in a great measure unexplored, the members of this Club do form themselves into an Association for promoting the discovery of the inland parts of that quarter of the world.⁶

The resolution oozes optimism, as does a four-page brochure the members publish soon after. This serves as a statement of intent, a sales document in which the full Plan of the Association is laid out. Both the minutes and the Plan are written by Henry Beaufoy, Secretary of the new Association; Banks, who has been appointed Treasurer, approves the text before it goes to the printers. In the Plan, Beaufoy explains the geographical attractions of Africa: ‘Of the objects of inquiry which engage our attention the most, there are none, perhaps, that so much excite continued curiosity, from childhood to age; none that the learned and unlearned so equally wish to investigate, as the nature and history of those parts of the world, which have not, to our knowledge, been hitherto explored.’

So far, so good. There follows something of an over-simplification: ‘To this desire the Voyages of the late Captain Cook have so far afforded gratification, that nothing worthy of research by Sea, the Poles themselves excepted, remains to be examined.’ Then Beaufoy gets to the point of the Association: much of Asia and America has recently been explored, as has the area north of Cape Town, while traders have made inroads up the rivers of West Africa. ‘But not-withstanding the progress of discovery on the coasts and borders of that vast continent, the map of its interior is still but a wide extended blank.’ He ends his introduction thus: ‘Desirous of rescuing the age from a charge of ignorance, which, in other respects, belongs so little to its character, a few individuals, strongly impressed with the practicability and utility of thus enlarging the fund of human knowledge, have formed the plan of an Association for promoting the discovery of the interior parts of Africa.’⁷

Being British, they have also drawn up rules to regulate function and behaviour. They have committed themselves to paying a subscription of five guineas a year each for three years. During the Association’s first year, they are invited to put forward the names of people they think will make suitable members – they clearly want the Association to grow, but they are not going to let in just anybody. And before they leave the tavern, they hold a ballot to choose a Committee: Banks and Beaufoy are elected along with Rawdon, Stuart and the Bishop of Llandaff. The Committee is then given responsibility for ‘the choice of the persons who are to be sent on the discovery of the interior parts of Africa, together with the Society’s correspondence, and the management of its funds’.⁸ With that, the meeting is adjourned, the room empties, the friends part, perhaps unaware of the significance of their resolution.

London is awash with Associations – there is one ‘for preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers’ and another ‘for reducing the exorbitant Price of Butcher’s Meat’.⁹ But this one is different. Until now, exploration has relied on the patronage of kings or governments, on trading companies and on the occasional enlightened, wealthy or speculative individual. This organisation is to be funded by a group of friends whose purpose is neither political nor commercial, although they will not deny that they have interests in both. The African Association has been created to mount expeditions and collect information that will lead to geographical advances and open up the continent. It is the start of a new era.

At this point it is worth pausing to consider to what purpose any new findings might be put. Sir John Sinclair’s son provided a blunt but also a neat answer. ‘Hitherto,’ he observed, ‘Europeans had visited Africa to plunder, to oppress, and to enslave;- the object of this society was to promote the cause of science and humanity; to explore the mysterious geography, to ascertain the resources, and to improve the condition of that ill-fated continent.’¹⁰

Promoting the cause of science and humanity encapsulates a large number of possibilities. Take the slave trade, for instance. Several members of the Association are active in the campaign to end slavery; those who are not are at least aware of predictions for the future of Britain’s trans-Atlantic trade. This trade depends on three points of contact. Britain exports cloth, metal (including guns) and other products of its growing industries to the West African coast. Trade between Britain and West Africa is clearly profitable: between 1720 and 1772 it grew from sixty-five ships carrying £130,000 worth of cargo (now roughly equivalent to £6.5 million) to 175 ships – a departure every two days – carrying £866,000 worth of goods (£43.3 million).¹¹

By 1788 these figures are considerably higher, and West Africa has become one of Europe’s major trading partners. But there is a limit to how much trade can grow between the two continents, as Africa has only a limited ability to pay for European goods. Gold dust, ivory, animal skins and senna^* are all accepted as objects of barter, but the vast and growing majority of European goods are paid for in Africa with slaves. These are then shipped across the Atlantic, where they are traded for sugar, rum and the other good things of the Caribbean, which are then brought back and sold in England. The development of Britain’s growing industries as well as the wealth of the West Indies depend on this triangular trade. If the sale of slaves is to be outlawed, how will West Africans pay for cloth and guns? The answer is obvious to anyone, such as Banks or Rennell, who knows their history, and it has a direct bearing on the Association’s activities.

In 1324, Mansa Kankan Musa, the Emperor of Mali, decided to fulfil his articles of faith by making a pilgrimage to Mecca. He and his considerable entourage crossed the dessert and were treated royally by the Sultan when they arrived in Cairo. Horses and camels, food and water were then provided to smooth their way to Mecca and back to Egypt. The Emperor was so pleased with this treatment that, in the words of one observer, when he returned to the Nile he spread ‘upon Cairo the flood of his generosity: there was no person, officer of the court or holder of any office of the sultanate who did not receive a sum of gold from him. The people of Cairo earned incalculable sums from him, whether by buying and selling or by gifts. So much gold was current in Cairo that it ruined the value of money …’¹² While it took a generation for the price of gold to recover in Cairo, the legend of Mali’s immense gold reserves lasted at least until the summer of 1788.

Mansa Musa’s extravagance (in the end, he spent so much that he was obliged to borrow money to get home) is not the only African story to have reached the Saturday’s Club’s eyes and ears. To them as to many in Europe at this time, West Africa, and particularly Mali, is a land of golden promise, another El Dorado. Al-Idrissi, the twelfth-century geographer, has described many civilised cities of central Africa, among them Kaugha, ‘a populous City, without Walls, famous for Business and useful for Arts for the Advantage of its People’; Kuku, where ‘the Governors and Nobility are covered with Sattin’; and Ghana, where the King, for decoration, had ‘an Lump of Gold, not cast, nor wrought by any other Instruments, but perfectly formed by the Divine Providence only, of thirty Pounds Weight’. Leo Africanus, four hundred years later, had this to say of Timbuktu: ‘The Inhabitants, and especially the Strangers that reside there, are very rich, insomuch that the present King gave both his Daughters in Marriage to two rich Merchants … The rich King of Tombuto has in his Possession many golden Plates and Scepters, some whereof are 1300 Ounces in Weight, and he keeps a splendid and well-furnished Court … The King at his own Expense liberally maintaineth here great Numbers of Doctors, Judges, Priests, and other learned Men. There are Manuscripts, or written Books, brought hither out of Barbary, which are sold for more Money than any other Merchandize. Instead of Money, they use Barrs of Gold …’¹³ Instead of slaves, so the thinking goes, they could pay for imported European goods with these ‘Barrs of Gold’.

All this has made an impression on the imaginations of members of the Saturday’s Club, as is clear from Beaufoy’s prediction that ‘Their mines of gold (the improvable possession of many of the inland states) will furnish, to an unknown, and probably boundless extent, an article that commands, in all the markets of the civilized world, a constant and unlimited scale.’¹⁴ This might have been true several centuries ago, but by the end of the eighteenth century the gold reserves which Mansa Musa and the kings of Timbuktu had exploited are exhausted. What’s more, the great empires they supported have recently been torn apart by a reforming Islamic jihad. The great cities of Sudan have been reduced and their kings left in fear of their lives, while the internal trade has shrunk to a shadow of its former glory. All this, Beaufoy and the other members of the Association have yet to discover.

The lure of gold, the campaign to abolish slavery, the need to find new trading partners all add to the keenly felt desire to know what lies at the heart of Africa. By the end of the eighteenth century, breathtaking scientific advances have forced Europeans to reconsider their relationship with the world. The past is being uncovered – classical sites such as Pompeii are even now being excavated – the natural world is being classified by the likes of Linnaeus, while Cook’s voyages have shown that the physical world can also be known. In such a rampant intellectual climate, can the secrets of the African interior remain hidden for much longer?

Africa is a large continent, too large even for the ambitions of the Association: they must choose an area of interest within it. It is now beyond the bounds of possibility to resurrect their discussions or determine the way in which they reached this decision, but it is possible to look at the ideas that have informed their choices.

Beaufoy gives some pointers when he explains in the Plan of the Association how much of the rest of the world has been explored and recorded. Even parts of Africa are well known – he notes that the Swedish traveller Dr André Sparrman, a member of Cook’s second trans-global expedition, has travelled some way inland from Cape Colony in the south of the continent; the English translation of his Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, towards the Antarctic Polar Circle and round the World; hut chiefly into the Country of the Hottentots and Caffres, from the Year 1772, to 1776 appeared two years earlier, in 1786. Colonel Gordon, in charge of the Dutch garrison at the Cape, has since travelled inland as far as the Orange River, and perhaps his account will appear before long. In East Africa, James Bruce’s long-awaited, five-volume Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile is expected at any moment, although in the event it is not published until 1790. But little progress has been made in the inland parts of West Africa since early in the eighteenth century, when an Englishman by the name of Francis Moore and a Frenchman, André Brue, sailed up the Senegal and Gambia rivers. Of the interior of sub-Saharan Africa, the area loosely called Sudan (not to be confused with the present country further to the east), almost nothing new has been learned since the sixteenth-century descriptions of Leo Africanus.