Born 1821,
Hamburg, Germany
Died November 24, 1865,
Berlin, Germany
Heinrich Barth, a German explorer, made a five-year expedition to Africa on behalf of the British government. He crossed the Sahara Desert to Lake Chad and went from there to Timbuktu. He completed his remarkable journey in spite of many dangers and the deaths of his companions, yet he never felt adequately recognized for his accomplishments.
Barth’s father was a wealthy merchant in Hamburg, a port city in northern Germany. As a boy, Heinrich was sent to the best private schools, where he displayed exceptionally high intelligence; by the age of 11 he could read Latin and Greek and was studying Arabic on his own. Later at the University of Berlin he studied archaeology and geography, writing his thesis on the commercial history of the city of Corinth in ancient Greece.
Following his graduation from college, Barth traveled for three years in the eastern Mediterranean, going to North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor, and Greece. While he was in North Africa, he met a Hausa (black African Muslim) slave from the great city of Kano, now in northern Nigeria, who read his palm.
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