Alexander Gordon Laing, Not Surviving Timbuktu
What René Caillié brought to the field of exploration was something the British were very rarely able to achieve, which is acculturation, and a willingness to adapt and learn from native culture. Alexander Gordon Laing made it to Timbuktu a year before René Caillié, but presenting himself as an Englishmen, with all the airs of superiority that this implied at the time, in the end got him killed.
Laing bore the pedigree of a British military officer, and the experience of various colonial regiments, including the Royal African Colonial Corps, based in the British colony of Sierra Leone. In various anti-slaving expeditions to the north of the territory, on the borders of the Sahel, he began to develop an interest in exploration. He was involved in the Ashanti War of 1823-24, the British campaign to pacify the region of the Gold Coast, later Ghana, after which he returned to England. There he presented the findings of his minor expeditions to date to the Royal Geographic Society.
By this, one can deduce that Laing was well connected in the exploration establishment, and the Royal Geographic Society sponsorship that was granted him guaranteed funding, publicity and a great deal of official and unofficial support. He was now an accredited explorer, and his next expedition, ostensibly to track the hydrography of the Niger River, was in fact a thinly disguised effort to discover the whereabouts of Timbuktu, and to be the first European to visit it.
On July 16, 1825, in what must have been an absolutely superb adventure, Laing left Tripoli and struck out overland across the Sahara Desert in the company of a local sheik. By various means, and over the course of the next six months, he made his way south across the great expanses of desert. On the way he fell victim to numerous ailments, suffered violence and looting, and generally reporting back the usual trials difficulties that a British expedition would be incomplete without. He described being wounded in 24 places in skirmish with hostile Tuareg, losing his right hand in the battle, but with the expected gumption of a British officer, he pressed on.
A letter dated September 22, 1826,carries the announcement of his arrival in Timbuktu, and his feat as the first European ever to cross the Sahara from north to south. In anybody’s language, this was the real stuff, and Gordon Laing without doubt deserves his accolades. However, sadly, nothing more was ever heard from him. It was later revealed that he was waylaid and arroted by a pair of Tuareg, his death tentatively placed at September 26, 1826. The motive for his murder was probably simply because he was an outsider.