The Storied City by Charlie English

Author:Charlie English
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-04-13T13:10:54+00:00

Sometimes a student would come to his door asking for a book, and he would give it to him without even knowing who the student was. In this matter he was truly astonishing, doing this for the sake of God Most High, despite his love for books and [his zeal in] acquiring them, whether by purchase or copying.

In this way, Baba recorded, Baghayogho gave away a large portion of his library of books.

• • •

IT IS A CLICHÉ that the traveler makes unexpected friends abroad and finds unexpected hostility at home, but this was precisely the situation in which Barth now found himself. Yes, he had twice navigated the great Sahara; he had talked his way out of a dozen lethal scrapes and even come back from the dead, but he would prove poor at plotting a course through the smoke-filled rooms of nineteenth-century European society. In a just world, his heroic voyage would immediately have sealed his reputation as a great scientist-explorer, his name ranked with that of Humboldt. In this, as in so many ways, he would be disappointed. The prickly twenty-eight-year-old who had left for Africa had returned with a proud, almost haughty demeanor, and his native mistrust now reached alarming levels. “Everywhere he went,” his brother-in-law Schubert wrote, “he sensed deliberate and calculated attempts being made to exploit him.”

He was initially well received in Germany. He was lauded by Humboldt and dined with the king of Prussia. He was given a gold medal by the city of Hamburg, offered honorary doctorates and decorations, and invited to speak at the Geographical Society in Berlin. Even in England, his achievements were recognized: the RGS awarded him its prestigious Patron’s Gold Medal, and he was nominated for the Companion of the Order of the Bath. But Britain liked its heroes British, and as Hanmer Warrington had demonstrated three decades before, the doings of foreign gentlemen such as Barth were subject to a skepticism that bordered on paranoia. Even when he was traveling, officials in London had harbored suspicions about his loyalty. Why, the Foreign Office wondered, had he sent his infrequent dispatches to the Prussian ambassador in London and not to the government that was paying for the expedition? Why did his reports end up in German journals before they reached the RGS?

At the end of October, Barth received a poorly phrased letter from the RGS secretary, Norton Shaw, asking him to dine with some of the society’s members before the speech he would give there. Shaw’s presumption angered Barth, who fired back a letter saying that he had no such engagement and—forgetting his lecture to the Geographical Society in Berlin—would not address any scientific institution until he was ready to publish the narrative of his journey. Shaw became openly hostile after that, and an embarrassing feud ensued that lasted into the new year, when the explorer had returned to London. This was not Barth’s only problem: despite the fact that his expedition had for years been short of money, several British newspapers ran stories about his alleged excessive spending.

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