Kitabı oku: «The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for this Storied City and the Race to Save Its Treasures», sayfa 4

2.
A WIDE EXTENDED BLANK
JUNE–NOVEMBER 1788

The quest for Timbuktu began, as such things sometimes did, in a room above a London pub.

On June 9, 1788, a group of nine powerful men gathered at the St. Alban’s Tavern, a rifle shot from the king’s official residence at St. James’s Palace, and settled in to discuss the future of exploration. This meeting of the exclusive Saturday’s Club—it did not seem to matter that today was a Monday—included a former secretary of state, a future governor-general of India, and a lord of the king’s bedchamber, as well as a smattering of knights of the realm. Eight of the club’s full complement of twelve sat in Parliament; six were fellows of the elite scientific institution the Royal Society. One—the key player in this gathering of key players—was the society’s president, Sir Joseph Banks.

Banks was forty-five then, bibulous, running to fat. Unlike his most famous predecessor, Isaac Newton, he was well liked: James Boswell described him as “an elephant, quite placid and gentle,” who allowed you to “get upon his back or play with his proboscis.” He had been educated at Harrow and Eton, where he discovered a hatred of the classics and a love of botany, and soon after leaving Oxford had embarked on his first scientific adventure, traveling as a naturalist on a Royal Navy frigate bound for Newfoundland and Labrador. This was a mere dress rehearsal, however, for the journey that would make his name: James Cook’s first circumnavigation. He returned from that three-year voyage in 1771 with a staggering thirty thousand plant specimens and a fame that surpassed even that of Cook. He became a close friend of George III, developing his Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew into a major center of research, and by the age of thirty-five was leading the world’s foremost scientific institution, the Royal Society. He would remain the society’s president for the next four decades, building up a network of friends and acquaintances that included the most illustrious natural philosophers of the time—Benjamin Franklin, Carl Linnaeus—as well as creative thinkers and statesmen from Thomas Paine to Henri Christophe, the king of Haiti. From his house at 32 Soho Square he fired off thousands of letters dispensing patronage and advice to the projects that caught his enthusiasm. What a lot of enthusiasms there were.

Toward the end of the Age of Enlightenment, giant steps were being taken in every field of human endeavor, from geography and music to animal husbandry and rhubarb cultivation. It was a time of revolution in politics—in 1783, America had won independence from one monarch; in 1789, France would execute another—and in science too. Banks’s contributions to the latter were immense. He would support William Roy, the founder of the Ordnance Survey; William Smith, the creator of the world’s first geological chart; and William Herschel, the first person in history to discover a planet of the solar system, Uranus. From his seats on the Board of Agriculture and the Board of Longitude, Banks would help modernize grain production and navigation, while as a trustee of the British Museum he would develop collections that would form the basis of the Natural History Museum and the British Library. Overseas ventures especially caught Banks’s interest: he was behind HMS Bounty’s ill-fated mission to transplant breadfruit from Tahiti to feed slaves in the Caribbean, and promoted the establishment of a penal colony in Australia. Only that January, the first fleet of convicts had arrived on a shore he had once searched for new plant species, which Cook had christened Botany Bay.

In the summer of 1788, Banks and his friends were about to turn their attention in a new direction. Africa at that time was an obscure continent to Western geography, and Banks was unusual in having set foot on it, when Cook’s ship Endeavour dropped anchor in the bay of Cape Town in 1771. Explorers might have crossed the Antarctic Circle, but what they knew of nearby Africa was a joke, as a satirical ditty penned half a century earlier by the satirist Jonathan Swift made clear:

So Geographers in Afric-maps,

With Savage-Pictures fill their gaps;

And o’er unhabitable downs

Place Elephants for want of towns.

Interest in this neglected continent had been sparked in the mid-1770s by James Bruce, a Scottish squire who had set out to discover the source of the Nile and ended up living in Ethiopia for two years. “Africa is indeed coming into fashion,” Horace Walpole wrote in 1774. “There is just returned a Mr. Bruce, who has lived three years in the Court of Abyssinia, and breakfasted every morning with the maids of honour on live oxen.” As a result, Banks’s own exploits, Walpole noted cattily, were “quite forgotten.”

If Africa was indeed in fashion in London, it was also the subject of a looming moral crisis that would shape British foreign policy for the next half century. By the late 1700s, trade on the Guinea coasts—which had been named for their principal commodities of ivory, gold, slave, and grain—had become a key plank of the British economy. In the half century to 1772, the value of the African trade had increased sevenfold, to almost a million pounds a year. “How vast is the importance of our trade to Africa,” wrote an anonymous English merchant that year, “which is the first principle and foundation of all the rest; the main spring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion.” Much of the trade was in humans: sea captains based in London, Liverpool, and Bristol swapped guns made in Birmingham and East Anglian cloth for slaves, who were shipped to the West Indian tobacco and sugar plantations that kept the British economy afloat. In the 1760s British vessels had carried forty-two thousand slaves a year across the Atlantic, more than any other European nation.

Now, though, Britain’s conscience was beginning to be pricked, as people came into contact with the victims of slavery for the first time. There were ten thousand black people working as domestic servants in England in 1770, and by the 1780s a small spate of popular books appeared that set out the trade’s evils, including The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, which became a classic text for the Quaker antislavery activists who would found the abolitionist movement. For Saturday’s Club members such as Henry Beaufoy, the finding of alternative African commodities held the prospect of bringing the trade to an end. Others, including Banks, sniffed new commercial opportunities that could be good for Britain.

These motives were not spelled out in the club’s literature. The reason put forward for the new push into Africa, laid down by Beaufoy and approved by Banks, was the pure, age-old call of discovery:

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.

Such was the success of British seafaring, and of Cook’s voyages in particular, that “nothing worthy of research by Sea, the Poles themselves excepted, remains to be examined,” Beaufoy continued. The future of exploration now lay onshore: at least a third of the habitable surface of the earth remained uncharted, including much of Asia and America, and almost the whole of Africa. Thanks to the efforts of George Forster, an East India Company employee who had traveled from Bengal to England through Afghanistan, Persia, and Russia, knowledge of Asia was likely to “advance towards perfection.” The fur traders of Montreal could meanwhile be relied upon to deal with the problem of western Canada. The African interior, however, was still “but a wide extended blank” on which geographers had traced, with hesitating hand, “a few names of unexplored rivers and of uncertain nations.”

Such ignorance, Beaufoy noted, “must be considered as a degree of reproach upon the present age.” To remedy this geographical stigma, the Saturday’s Club would establish a new body, the African Association, devoted to promoting the exploration of the continent:

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 a conviction of 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.

The society’s rules were quickly hammered out: a membership subscription of five guineas a year was agreed on, and a committee of five was chosen. Banks would be treasurer and Beaufoy secretary, while Lord Rawdon, the bishop of Llandaff, and the lawyer Andrew Stuart were appointed assisting members. It would be the task of these men to recruit “geographical missionaries” to undertake the first journeys of discovery.

The remaining question, then, was where on that great uncharted landmass they should be sent.

TIM-BUK-TOO. The toponymy of these three short syllables is disputed. Do they refer to the “wall” or “well” of Buktu, a slave woman who lived in this storied place, five miles beyond the northernmost bend of the Niger River? Or are they Songhay, meaning “the camp of a woman with a large navel”? Or do they signify simply a low-lying place, hidden among dunes? There are many theories, many pronunciations, and many spellings of this word, which Bruce Chatwin described as a “ritual formula, once heard never forgotten.” What seems clear is that a settlement was established here around 1100, and it grew into an influential town thanks to its position at the juncture of the world’s largest hot desert and West Africa’s longest river.

The Sahara extends over 3.6 million sun-blasted square miles, stretching from the Atlantic to the Red Sea and from the Mediterranean to the Sahel. It covers more of the earth’s surface than the contiguous United States, China, or the continent of Australia. In popular imagination it consists of an ocean of dunes, and although these sand seas do exist, they account for less than a sixth of the whole. The Tuareg call the Sahara tinariwen, meaning “deserts,” plural, to reflect its many different personalities. There are skyscraping mountains 11,000 feet tall and salt flats the size of Lake Ontario where the quicksand can swallow a car. Mostly, there are hundreds of thousands of square miles of flat, bare rock.

Six thousand years ago, the Sahara was green; it was roamed by elephants, giraffes, and rhinoceros that drank from its lakes and ate its vegetation. Now much of it sees no rain for years at a time. When rain does fall, roaring torrents appear that scour deep trenches in the land before vanishing moments later. It is by some measures the earth’s hottest place, where shade temperatures can approach 140 degrees, but on winter nights, without the blankets of cloud cover, soil, and plant life, the desert can freeze white. Above this naked expanse, colliding layers of hot and cold air create violent winds that blow for fifty days at a time, stirring a suffocating dust that blocks out the sun and kicking up sand spouts that kill animals and uproot trees.