Product Description

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, no place burned more brightly in the imagination of European geographers––and fortune hunters––than the lost city of Timbuktu. Africa's legendary City of Gold, not visited by Europeans since the Middle Ages, held the promise of wealth and fame for the first explorer to make it there. In 1824, the French Geographical Society offered a cash prize to the first expedition from any nation to visit Timbuktu and return to tell the tale.

One of the contenders was Major Alexander Gordon Laing, a thirty–year–old army officer. Handsome and confident, Laing was convinced that Timbuktu was his destiny, and his ticket to glory. In July 1825, after a whirlwind romance with Emma Warrington, daughter of the British consul at Tripoli, Laing left the Mediterranean coast to cross the Sahara. His 2,000–mile journey took on an added urgency when Hugh Clapperton, a more experienced explorer, set out to beat him. Apprised of each other's mission by overseers in London who hoped the two would cooperate, Clapperton instead became Laing's rival, spurring him on across a hostile wilderness.

An emotionally charged, action–packed, utterly gripping read, The Race for Timbuktu offers a close, personal look at the extraordinary people and pivotal events of nineteenth–century African exploration that changed the course of history and the shape of the modern world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #721278 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-01
• Released on: 2006-12-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Kryza recreates the bold journeys through the unknown Africa of early 19th-century British explorers Alexander Gordon Laing and Hugh Clapperton, competing to find the fabled city of Timbuktu. Kryza's meticulous research of letters, diaries and official records forms the basis for affecting descriptions of the hazards and horrors the two explorers faced. Kryza, who lived in Africa for 11 years and traveled Laing's route, writes evocatively of the beauty of the African landscape and provides chilling glimpses of the barbarism of the slave trade. He also exposes the unbridgeable cultural gap between 19th-century Muslims in North Africa and the Christian explorers. But what most impresses are the sheer number of ways there were to die in Africa, known as the "White Man's grave"—malaria, dysentery, drowning, parasitic infections and heat stroke were a few of the natural threats, which paled beside the likelihood of being killed by fellow travelers, slavers, bandits or capricious rulers. Kryza (The Power of Light) starts slowly, but when the focus settles on Laing and Clapperton, readers will be eager to find out their fates. 20 b&w illus.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
The golden city of Timbuktu, like the lost city of Atlantis, occupies a large place in the world's mythology, but resemblances pretty much end there. Atlantis was Plato's metaphor for the ideal society that began to deteriorate as idealism was corrupted by greed, and its disappearance into the sea was punishment for its sins; but even though people have sought for centuries to recover it (and some have claimed to have done so), Atlantis was almost certainly a figment of Plato's imagination -- a glorious myth and a powerful symbol, but nothing more.

Timbuktu, by contrast, was and is a real place, as Frank T. Kryza writes, "easily located on any modern map of Mali, near the center of the country, on the southern edge of the Sahara, about eight miles north of the river Niger." It is "an insignificant place, a village that festers, foul-smelling and intractable," with "a population of less than 19,000." Two centuries ago, though, "no place burned more brightly in the imagination of European geographers -- and fortune hunters." It was believed to be "a city paved with gold," an "opulent city boasting real infrastructure -- markets, mosques, and important Islamic libraries and schools." Finding it, and laying claim to its vast wealth, became an obsession in Europe and, in particular, in England, where, in 1788, a small group of influential men, led by the celebrated botanist Sir Joseph Banks, founded the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior of Africa, a continent almost entirely unknown to the Age of Enlightenment.

Beginning soon thereafter, the African Association began sponsoring expeditions into Africa, often with the ultimate aim of crossing the Sahara and establishing a British foothold in Timbuktu. One explorer, Mungo Park, in June 1796 became "the first European on record to lay eyes on the river Niger," and upon his return to London immediately became what would now be called a celebrity, the first of "a new and glorious calling . . . the lone, brave African explorer."

Gradually the leadership behind African exploration shifted from the association and Sir Joseph (who by the early 1800s "had become ill and was confined to a wheelchair") to the Colonial Office and the Admiralty, the latter under the leadership of the vigorous and farsighted Sir John Barrow. With the establishment of the Colonial Office in 1812, Lord Henry Bathurst, its "real creator," became a similarly important and influential figure in the drive to Africa, so it mattered greatly to Alexander Gordon Laing, a young company commander in the Royal Africa Corps, that Bathurst liked him and became his "powerful mentor and protector." It was Bathurst who came to Laing's rescue after an indiscretion threatened his career, and it was Bathurst who authorized the African expedition that Laing began in the summer of 1825.

The story of that expedition is at the center of The Race for Timbuktu, a lively and informative, if somewhat disorganized, history by a former newspaper reporter and energy specialist. Kryza has spent a lot of time in Africa (he first went there in 1963, when he was in junior high school) and knows it well; he also obviously has spent a lot of time in libraries, researching the copious literature of African exploration. The "race" to Timbuktu he describes seems more a storytelling device than a matter of historical fact, and he does a good deal of hemming and hawing before finally bringing Laing onto center stage, but these narrative shortcomings can be forgiven.

Alexander Gordon Laing was in his early thirties when he set out for Timbuktu. A Scotsman of respectable but modest background, he read adventure tales as a boy and "felt," he later wrote, "an ambition to signalize myself by some important discovery." He was ambitious, "good-looking and well-liked," with "the air (if not the pedigree) of a gentleman." He joined the Prince of Wales Edinburgh Volunteers at 17 and rose rapidly, though he "sometimes displayed a mocking contempt for rank and social hierarchies." He impressed Bathurst with "his command of the facts, the acuity of his intellect, his courage, and his poise."

Bathurst was "a proponent of finding Timbuktu and tracing the definitive course of the Niger." Though it was commonly assumed that Timbuktu should be approached in a straight line from Marrakesh, he believed that Tripoli was the best launching point for Laing's expedition because, though it entailed a longer route through exceedingly difficult terrain, it reduced the risk of intervention by bandits or others with unfriendly purposes. So off to Tripoli Laing went.

He found more than he'd expected. The British consul there, Hanmer Warrington, was a forceful personality with a large family. Warrington was "a fanatical patriot convinced of English superiority . . . blustering and insufferable to all who crossed him." His initial response to Laing was favorable (he was, Warrington told Bathurst, a "well set-up man, of fine physique, highly gifted in many ways"), but admiration turned to skepticism after Laing fell madly in love with Emma, the second of Warrington's three daughters, and she with him. Talk of marriage soon began, and though Warrington resisted strenuously, the ceremony took place on July 14, 1825, but "Laing (so far as we know) was not allowed to consummate the marriage." Instead, four days later he set off for Timbuktu, leaving behind an ardent, heartbroken and presumably frustrated bride.

Six weeks later, another young military officer, Capt. Hugh Clapperton of His Majesty's Royal Navy, set sail from England for the West African coast. He too had ambitions for Timbuktu, and he seems to have been jealous of the head start that Laing had on him. To make up time, he planned to approach from the west, a shorter but more dangerous route. Each of the two men had guides, servants and beasts of burden -- all the usual appurtenances of empire on the march -- and each suffered grievous losses along the way. The challenge faced by Laing, for example, was daunting: "To reach Timbuktu, the golden city of the Sudan, he would have to cross two thousand miles of the harshest desert in Africa, territories where [Tripoli's] jurisdiction did not extend. Conditions could be unimaginably harsh in these lands, where human life was held more cheaply than a good pair of boots. Lawless [Bedouin] bands made their living off the plunder of caravans."

By the time it was completed, the journey across the Sahara, which Laing "had estimated would take, at most, a few weeks had in fact taken 399 days -- he had counted every one -- fifty-seven weeks of loneliness, suffering, privation, and bloodshed, fourteen months of solitude, without the companionship of a native of his own land, without the woman he loved. . . ." Not merely was the Sahara cruel, but in February 1826 he was betrayed by the sheikh to whose guidance he had entrusted himself and brutally attacked by bandits; he was left with two dozen wounds, 18 of which were so severe that "he feared he would be disfigured for life and dreaded Emma's reaction when she saw him again, if he survived."

He did, at least long enough to reach Timbuktu. Clapperton's mission had failed, leaving the chase to him, but his triumph was muted, at best: "Laing was surely disappointed to discover in Timbuktu not even the palest shadow of the city abounding in wealth and architectural wonders that he -- and all Europe -- had imagined. The metropolis was quite obviously caught in a spiral of decay and war. . . . A thousand years old, it had a look of irreversible decrepitude. Unprepossessing even from a distance, up close Timbuktu was dirty and falling apart, stinking horribly of unwashed people and sick animals . . . . Inertia gripped everyone and everything."

Laing did find consolation in the rich collection of Arabic manuscripts at the Sankore Mosque and "stayed in Timbuktu for thirty-five days, gathering research, studying Arab manuscripts, copying city records, and talking to scholars." Whatever pleasure that afforded him did not last long. On his way out of Timbuktu, he was again betrayed, and this time murdered. His papers, which could have provided invaluable evidence for future explorers and students of Africa, were stolen or destroyed or simply left to the wind and the sand. He never again saw his beloved Emma, who lived out the brief time remaining to her in a state of bottomless grief. All the treasures he had sought were gone, as evanescent as the treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Timbuktu is in the center of Mali on the southern edge of the Sahara. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, it held the promise of wealth and fame for the first explorer to make it there and back alive. As Kryza sees it, Timbuktu assumed the quality of a mythic dream, a city paved in gold. He chronicles the 2,000-mile journey of Major Alexander Gordon Laing, an army officer with the Royal Africa Corps, in 1825. The trip across the Sahara from Tripoli to Timbuktu took more than a year, Laing's caravan facing suffocating heat and foul-smelling food. Distances were measured in days, never in miles, and at night he and his men wrapped themselves in blankets and slept on the sand. Laing was the first European to visit Timbuktu and was received by its governor in a small mud house, and Kryza himself spent 11 years in Africa traveling much of this route. His narration of Laing's perilous journey is electrifying. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Fun read but
The Race For Timbuktu is a fun and interesting read. It does a good job of covering the voyages of Alexander Laing and those who proceeded him. The writing is generally good and the story well told.

In short, Timbuktu was a legendary city of gold and wealth in the middle of Africa. A sort of Shangri-La that really existed, even if not in the wealth imagined. Given the importance of Africa to the European powers at the start of the 19th century, France and England raced to find the fabled city and the source of the Niger River. The book focuses on England's explorers such as Denham, Chapperton and Oudney. Followed by a solid biography of Alexander Laing, who eventually discovered Timbuktu. In the process a good glimpse of European affairs in the Sahara is provided.

So why only three stars? First this book needs maps-- desperately. I am amazed how many books I have read lately lack them. How hard is it for a publisher to get a map, draw the routes taken by multiple explorers on them and publish them in the book? Somehow it seems obvious and yet where are they? Second some pictures might be nice so one can see, or glimpse the regions described. Third, the author often repeats himself. How many times do we need to know Emma Warrington took unescorted walks with the son of the French Ambassador?

Fourth and most important, the author does little to provide African context for the events. Cities, empires, and rulers appear in the narrative, but little is said about them. This especially hurts when a people, the Taureg tribe, appear over and over with very little context. I recommend reading this book with one's internet link to Wikipedia or Encylcopedia Britannica open to answer obvious questions.

One last little thing, on P. 149 the author refers to Herodotus documenting a Roman garrison. Herodotus pre-dates roman times by a few centuries and did not write on Rome but on Greece and Persia. He also places a city in the Sudan which is clearly in Nigeria. Other mistakes may be present.

Great Read
If you enjoyed Rice's Sir Richard Burton, you will enjoy this book. It a fun read for a airplane ride. Kryza weaves an excellent tale in the search for the mythical city. You feel the stress and challenges of the early 19th century African explorers and marvel that the human body could accomplish the feat of these individuals under those circumstance. It is worth the price because it takes you back in time to a period where individual performance is truly measured.

High Adventure!

These expeditions make Lewis and Clark's look like a walk in the park. Where did these explorers get their grit, stamina, inspiration? ... especially those who had an idea of the hardships ahead. Thirsty, malnourished and wounded, they walk distances in 110 degrees that have killed their camels only to spend days digging a well that may or may not yield water. If you hit water, you fight with your entire caravan (man and beast) to have a crack at the sludge.

Kryza is at his best when he describes, be it a person, a relationship, dynamic or a place. His descriptions of Warrington, the Laing-Emma romance, Clapperton and Denham add dimension to the tale as do the discussions of the strange diplomacy in this Tripoli outpost.

Intriguing pictures are placed very nicely with the text they relate to. Kryza loves his material, and he gets us to love it too.

Whether you try the desert route or the Niger, the environment and the unpredictable people take toll on life itself. Fortunately, Kryza restrains description here so that this is pallatable for a general audience. While we might flinch from the page, we can read on.

I did wish for an earlier map than p. 88, and one that encompassed all routes described. Also, I didn't check the table of contents, so I wasn't aware what the race was. I kind of thought it was something that would emerge with Clapperton and Denham. The race actually begins half way through the book. The descriptions of the earlier expeditions are merely prologue. Perhaps a different title is needed, since the book is much wider than the "race".

I like having an afterward. (I've put down many books with long forwards, probably because I wasn't steeped enough in the story to appreciate the author's comments.) I also like the narrative chapter notes.