Born November 19, 1199,
Mauze, France
Died c. 1838,
La Badere, France
Dead or alive, the prize shall be mine,” so wrote 17-year-old René Caillié in his journal when he heard in 1826 that the French Geographical Society was offering a prize of 10,000 francs for the first European who could travel to the fabled city of Timbuktu. He fulfilled that vow, but skeptics and doubters made it difficult for him to collect his prize. The difficulties Caillié endured to reach his goal were typical of those many explorers encountered, whatever the prize. More often than not, as in Caillié’s case, the personal victory proved to be hollow.
René-Auguste Caillié was the son of a poor Parisian baker. At an early age he started reading travel books, which inspired him to become an explorer. It was a good time to seek adventure because Europe was expanding its territories. The New World was still being explored and fought over, claims were being made in many areas of the Far East, and Africa was being divided up among the European powers. At the age of 16 Caillié got a job as a servant on a French ship sailing to Senegal, West Africa, where he was able to travel some distance inland. He made a return trip in 1824 and lived in Senegal until 1827. While living in Senegal, Caillié began planning his trip to Timbuktu.
Realizing it was dangerous for a French Christian to travel through Arab lands, he disguised himself as an Arab and spent nine months with a Muslim tribe studying the Koran and learning to speak Arabic. In March 1827 he traveled to Freetown, a seaport in Sierra Leone, and then went north in a coastal vessel to the Rio Nunez, where he joined a caravan to the interior. He told his companions he had been born in Cairo and had been taken as a child by the French to Senegal. While the Arabs may have doubted his story, he was so poor that no one robbed him or prevented him from continuing his journey.
When the caravan reached the town of Kouroussa in June, Caillié joined another caravan traveling to the important trading town of Djenné. Along the way he became ill with malaria and scurvy; he rested for five months in the town of Tieme, where a local woman nursed him back to health. In March 1828 he reached Djenné on the shores of the Niger River and took a boat from there to Timbuktu. Because he was so poor, he had to book passage in the slave quarters below deck, where he suffered from the intense heat during the 500-mile journey. At one point the boat was boarded by pirates from the Tuareg tribe, who demanded tribute at every Tuareg camp it passed.
On April 20 Caillié reached Timbuktu, only to find the city did not meet his expectations:
I had formed a totally different idea of the grandeur and wealth of Timbuctoo. The city presented, at first view, nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth. Nothing was to be seen in all directions but immense plains of quicksand of a yellowish white colour. The sky was a pale red as far as the horizon: all nature wore a dreary aspect, and the most profound silence prevailed; not even the warbling of a bird was to be heard. Still, though I cannot account for the impression, there was something imposing in the aspect of a great city, raised in the midst of sands, and the difficulties surmounted by its founders cannot fail to excite admiration.
Some 900 miles northeast from the mouth of the Rio Nunez—the starting point of Caillié’s journey—Timbuktu lies within the present-day country of Mali. Founded in the eleventh century, the city had been a trading hub for the nomads of the Sahara Desert. By the fourteenth century, when Abu Abdallah Ibn Battutah (see entry) wrote about it, Timbuktu had become a capital of Mali culture and was famous for its gold trade. The city later became a center for Muslim learning but had been in a long period of decline by the time Caillié visited in 1828. He stayed for two weeks, living in a house across the street from the former home of Alexander Gordon Laing, the Scottish explorer who was murdered in Timbuktu in 1826. Caillié began to worry that his identity would be discovered and that he would meet the same fate.
In May 1828 Caillié joined a caravan of 1,400 camels and 400 men that was heading north from Timbuktu across the great Sahara Desert. His companions pointed out the place where Laing had been killed; however, it was not the possibility of death by human hands that he needed to worry about. It was the desert itself. Caillié suffered from the intense heat and constant thirst. He wrote: “My throat was on fire and my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth. I thought only of water—rivers, streams, rivulets were the only ideas that presented themselves to my mind.” Caravan travelers were permitted only one drink at the end of the day, so Caillié was always thirsty:
It is difficult to describe with what impatience we longed for this moment. To enhance the pleasure which I expected from my portion, I thrust my head into the vessel and sucked up the water in long draughts. When I had drunk, I had an unpleasant sensation all over me, which was quickly succeeded by fresh thirst.
After the caravan reached the Atlas Mountains in Morocco in mid-June, Caillié journeyed six more weeks to Fez and then to the city of Tangier, located on the Strait of Gibraltar between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. In Tangier he sought help from the French consul in returning to France. Refusing at first to believe Caillié’s story, the consul later smuggled him aboard a ship bound for the French port of Toulon. When Caillié arrived in Toulon, the French Geographical Society sent him a small sum of money for passage to Paris, where a special commission had been formed to examine his claims.
The commission eventually decided Caillié was telling the truth and awarded him the Legion of Honor, a gold medal, and an annual pension. Shortly thereafter he wrote Caillié Travels through Central Africa to Timbuktoo, which was published in three volumes in 1830. Translated from the original French into English that same year, the book became very popular in England.
Doubts remained among the French about Caillié’s honesty, however, and his pension was discontinued in 1833. Suffering from diseases he had contracted on his travels, he died in poverty in 1838. Later the truth of his story was confirmed. Although Caillié’s achievements were questioned during his lifetime, he is remembered for his courage and imagination. His books provide an accurate description of travel conditions for Europeans in Africa during the early 1800s.
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