The Great Journeys in History by Robin Hanbury-Tenison

Author:Robin Hanbury-Tenison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

ANTHONY SATTIN

JEAN LOUIS BURCKHARDT

1812–15

The dangers that await me are not so innumerable as the name Africa may perhaps already seem to you to imply … countries such as these are the subject of many stories.

Jean Louis Burckhardt in a letter to his family

In March 1809 a young merchant, Shaykh Ibrahim ibn Abdallah, arrived in the harbour of Valletta, Malta. He said he was returning home to India. In fact he was a Swiss gentleman, Jean Louis Burckhardt, and was on his way to Aleppo in Syria. But his ultimate goal lay across the Sahara, in northern Africa – the fabled city of Timbuktu.

Burckhardt was the latest traveller to be set in motion by the African Association, the world’s first geographical society. The Association was made up of some of the most powerful and influential people in Britain, and their stated motives were scientific – to fill in the blanks on the map – and humanitarian, for they hoped exploration would help bring an end to the slave trade. They were also patriotic, reasoning that discoveries in Africa would bring benefits to Britain. Their sights were set on the River Niger, and on Timbuktu in particular, which they believed was the key to the markets of central Africa.

In the 21 years of its existence, the Association had sent out seven previous travellers – Burckhardt, who had studied Arabic at Cambridge University, was the eighth. Twelve years earlier, Mungo Park (p. 188) had returned to London having reached the Niger, but without seeing Timbuktu. Park and several others had since died attempting to reach it. Burckhardt was going the long way in, not via the Gambia River, but by crossing the Sahara from Cairo with a caravan of West African Muslims. Caravan traders were known to be fanatical Muslims: Burckhardt would only make it across the desert if he could pass as one of them.

To perfect his disguise, he intended to spend two years in Syria, but once there he realized there was no need to hurry to reach Cairo: trouble in the Hejaz (modern Saudi Arabia) had brought the trans-Saharan caravans to a temporary halt. In the end, he stayed three years in Syria, studying Arabic and travelling widely in the region, making particularly impressive journeys to Palmyra and to the Jebel Druse. Then, on 18 June 1812, he left Damascus for Cairo.

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