Ackman - WSJ - Timbuktu

February 1, 2006

Guts Without Glory

By DAN ACKMAN

As a guy who routinely gets lost trying to find the New Jersey Turnpike, I stand in awe of the African explorers. Park, Livingstone, Stanley, Burton and Kingsley are names that ring down through history, and with good reason. To travel without a map in lands with unknown diseases, unfathomable natural hazards and possibly homicidal inhabitants takes physical courage, bottomless aptitude and real flair, if not a charming kind of insanity. In "The Race for Timbuktu," Frank T. Kryza petitions to add Alexander Gordon Laing to this storied list. It's a tough sell.

First, while Laing did make it to Timbuktu in 1826, he had barely left before being killed. (He was probably murdered by his own guide.) Thus Laing violated Rules 1 and 1A of African-exploration fame: Get out alive and get to your publisher. True immortality requires heeding Rules 2 and 3 as well: Return to Africa and repeat Rules 1 and 1A.

Another rule worth heeding: "Discover" something at least worth discovering. Though Laing did reach the remote Timbuktu (on the southern edge of the Sahara in the modern-day West African nation of Mali), it was hardly the lost city of gold that he envisioned when he took up a challenge from the British Colonial Office to mount the first successful expedition there. Timbuktu, it turned out, was actually a bit of a dump.

Laing "despaired," writes Mr. Kryza, "at having to announce to a disbelieving world, in the book he hoped would make him famous, that Timbuktu was little more than a poor collection of mud shanties with no wealth, much less gold." It's as if an Eskimo had traveled overland from Alaska thinking San Francisco but finding Fresno.

Whether Laing actually "despaired" seems a bit of conjecture on the author's part. In his final dispatch from the object of his quest, Laing informed the British consul in Tripoli (who was also his father-in-law) that he had no time to describe the city in detail but added that "it has completely met my expectations." Had Laing returned to Britain, he might have pursued this line -- and hardly would have been the first explorer to gild the lily for the folks back home. Since Laing perished before he published, we'll never know.

Laing had studied with the intention of becoming a teacher but at 17 volunteered for the British army. As a soldier he traveled to Jamaica and then West Africa, "a rougher place," Mr. Kryza writes, but one where "an ambitious British officer could truly make his mark." Laing fought in a jungle war that turned out to be a disaster for Britain, but he advanced when he was selected to report on the defeat to Henry Bathurst, secretary of state for war and the colonies.

"Impressed by his command of the facts, the acuity of his intellect, his courage, and his poise," Mr. Kryza writes, Earl Bathurst -- a proponent of exploring the African interior -- became Laing's most important patron. Another champion was Hanmer Warrington, the British envoy in Tripoli, whose daughter Laing married just a week before embarking on his quest for Timbuktu. The trip, if successful, would cover a total of 3,000 miles across some of the planet's harshest terrain. And it would involve beating a handful of competitors chasing the 10,000-franc prize.

Mr. Kryza, a former newspaper reporter and the son of a U.S. Foreign Service officer, does a good job of placing Laing in context. The explorer followed others in West Africa who searched and often died, including Mungo Park, who was celebrated for reaching the Niger River in 1796 (and drowned on a later expedition), and Hugh Clapperton, Walter Oudney and Dixon Denham, who roamed separately and together in the region.

Oudney died of illness in 1824. When Denham returned to England the next year, he wrote an account of his adventures so self-aggrandizing that a British naval official endeavored to edit it lest the contributions of his co-explorers be lost to history. Meanwhile, Clapperton remained in Africa. Laing was mightily upset when his father-in-law sanctioned an exploration by Clapperton to compete with his own.

Laing was of the opinion that the lost city was his to find. But it was not as if the two explorers would be elbowing each other to the finish line; Clapperton headed inland from the West African coast, while Laing set out across the Sahara from the north.

It seems odd, knowing of the tragedies that awaited the continent, to read about Africa as if it were a giant game board where privileged men angled for prizes. It also seems odd to talk of the "discovery" of a city that had been a major trading center in the Malian Empire in the 13th and 14th centuries and once had a population of 100,000 (it had dwindled to about 12,000 by the time Laing arrived). That said, the story of the race between Laing, Clapperton and others to reach Timbuktu makes for a gripping historical tale.

For Laing, the journey was even more arduous than he expected. There was the staggering heat, the impossible terrain, the ever-present marauders, the stinking camels and, perhaps worst of all, the food: In the desert, the explorer and his caravan survived mainly on zummita paste, "a ball of foul-smelling dried fish steeped in camel's milk."

Despite being speared in an attack that killed others in his caravan, Laing reached the fabled city, the first European in Timbuktu -- at least since the Middle Ages, when the occasional merchant is believed to have passed that way. As the area around the city was locked in a nasty war, and his hosts feared him a spy, Laing decided to head west rather than pursue the source of the Niger.

Such caution was for naught; he soon met his violent end. Even worse for posterity, his journals were lost as well. Mr. Kryza has done a commendable job of reclaiming for Laing at least a minor place in Africa's history. As for Laing's British rival, Hugh Clapperton died before reaching Timbuktu. A Frenchman, René Caillié, made it there in 1828 and claimed a 10,000-franc prize.

Mr. Ackman is a writer in Jersey City, N.J.