René Caillié, Surviving Timbuktu
We are going to put René Caillié in the fourth spot, because he was the first European explorer to enter the legendary African city of Timbuktu, and make it out alive.
European exploration in its heyday in the 19th century was premised on ‘discovery’. This, of course, was a misnomer. Apart from the poles, and the summits of the great mountains, there were few places that Europeans ever went that had no been visited before by indigenous people of the various societies whose lands they were. Timbuktu was certainly such a place. For there to be a claim of its ‘discovery’, when it had been a seat of Islamic learning for centuries, is manifestly absurd, but nonetheless, that was the basis of René Caillié’s 1827 expedition.
René Caillié did not come from a wealthy family, and he did not enjoy the status and education that was often necessary to win sponsorship for expeditions of exploration. He was an orphaned merchant mariner who first landed on African shores in the French colony of Saint Louis, attached to what would later be Senegal. Here, at the junction of North and West Africa, he was captivated by what he experience. What he lacked in education he made up for in raw intelligence, and with an aptitude for languages, he quickly mastered several local dialects. This is important, because it allowed him to travel widely in a region of Muslim exclusivity, disguised as a Muslim, and sufficiently conversant in local languages and cultures to pull it off.
Like a modern day backpacker, he worked his way around Africa, doing odd jobs here and there, slowly building up credibility and resources to mount an expedition that had been incubating in his mind for some time. The legendary city of Timbuktu, a one-time trade depot, and later the seat of an Islamic scholastic culture, was then the home of the Sankoré Madrasah, or the University of Sankoré, an Islamic campus with its origins traceable to the first millennium. It existed as an African Camelot in the European imagination, and even its exact location was obscure.
René Caillié began his journey on the coast of what is today Guinea, traveling north through the tropical reaches of West Africa, before encountering the headwaters of the Niger and Senegal Rivers,. From there he struck northeast in the direction of Djenné, a trade depot on the inland Niger delta, in modern day Mali. Thereafter, he made his way relatively easily to Timbuktu, remaining in the city for five days before resuming his journey north by caravan to the Mediterranean coast, and then back to France. There he picked up a reward of 10,000 francs for the first, first-hand description of the mythic city, as well as an award of the Gold Medal of the Société de Géographie of France.
His claim, however, was the first European to enter Timbuktu and leave alive. Surving the experience wa shis claim to fame. A year earlier, British explorer Gordon Laing beat him to it, but he did not manage to get out alive.