Libya: Archaeology and Civilisation (Part 29)

The report by Captain Hugh Clapperton and Major Dixon Debham was immensely comprehensive, and it continued to shed further light on the customs of Africa at that time, particularly in relation to local traditions.

However, by the time the two survivors of the London African Society’s expedition were retracing their steps back to Tripoli, another adventurer was already setting forth towards the African continent.

He was Gordon Alexander Laing who, early in the year 1824, left the city of Tripoli on a journey that was to take him in a different direction to that which had been pursued by the members of the London African Society.

Major Alexander Gordon Laing (1793–1826) was a Scottish explorer, born at Edinburgh is considered as the first European to reach Timbuktu.

After his education he spent years in various regiments until 1922 when he was transferred into the Royal African Colonial Corps as a Captain. In 1824 he was granted the local rank of Major in Africa only.

Captain Laing was instructed by Henry, 3rd Earl Bathurst, then secretary for the colonies, to undertake a journey, via Tripoli and Timbuktu, to further elucidate the hydrography of the Niger basin.

He left England in February 1825. He got married on the 14th of July in Tripoli and two days later left his bride behind and started to cross the Sahara accompanied by a sheikh, opting to travel immediately to the south, in the direction of the oasis of Ghadames. He reached it by an indirect route, in October 1825, and in December he was in the Tuat territory, where he was well received by the Tuareg.

Laing was apparently more determined than any of his predecessors and although he had already been travelling for two years, on October 10, 1926 he left Ein Salah in the direction of the hitherto inviolate, and then still mysterious, Saharan city of Timbuktu across the desert of Tanezroft.

Letters from him written in May and July told of sufferings from fever and the plundering of his caravan. He was wounded in the fighting.

JOSEPH CUTAJAR

(to be continued)