The Gates of Africa by Anthony Sattin

Author:Anthony Sattin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

12

Juset ben Abdallah

‘To have accomplished so great a journey across so vast and unexplored a region without a companion to support him was one of the great achievements in the history of geographical discovery.’

E.W. Bovill, Missions to the Niger, I, p.38

Cairo, 1797

WITHIN A FEW HOURS of arriving in Cairo, Hornemann had disobeyed his instructions. And with this unpromising start began one of the great African journeys.

The crossing of the Mediterranean proved troublesome. At Marseilles there were ships for Livorno, Cyprus, Smyrna even, but nothing for Alexandria. The young explorer waited, and then began to fret. ‘I think very often,’ he complained, watching boats sail for other ports on the Mediterranean, ‘that it perhaps may be easier for me to go in the Interior of Africa than to Egypt.’1 Little did he know of what was to come.

On 11 August he gave up hope of finding a direct passage and booked a berth on a ship bound for Larnaca in Cyprus and from there to Egypt, which he finally reached on 9 September. He had good reason to be frustrated: Ledyard, ten years earlier, had travelled the whole way from Paris to Alexandria in the time Hornemann had taken to cross the Mediterranean. But there were good reasons for the disruption of sea traffic between France and Egypt, which he was soon to discover.

In Alexandria the new geographical missionary made contact with George Baldwin, the British Consul in Egypt. The Committee had advised him to take a room in one of Alexandria’s convents and had instructed him on no account to discuss his mission with Europeans, not even with ‘the English Resident’, Baldwin. But a week after arriving in the Egyptian port, Hornemann wrote to London that Baldwin ‘shewd [sic] me the greatest civility, and invited me to live with him. I sayd [sic] that I had the intention to stay in a convent, but he invited me again, and because I think to set off for Cairo after morrow, I accepted his invitation, and I don’t repent it.’

There is a surprising naivety about the letter. ‘Is it by my conduct, or is it in his character?’ he wonders regarding Baldwin’s hospitality. ‘He has shewd me so many services, and given me so many advises, as I could ever ask of him, if he was a member of your Association.’2 But Baldwin was not a member of the Association, nor, in spite of his many fine qualities, was he simply a good man. Alexandria, where much of Cairo’s elite settled for the summer to escape the heat of the capital, was awash with rumours, among them an expectation of imminent foreign intervention. Two years earlier, Baldwin had sent London news of a Frenchman named Tinville who had arrived ‘to inveigle the Beys of Egypt into the designs of the French, and particularly to obtain consent to their project of passing an army through Egypt, to the East Indies [India], by the Red Sea, in order … finally to annihilate the British Dominion in the East Indies’.

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