The Mammoth Book of Losers Read online

  In these pages, you will find some of history’s most spectacularly ill-conceived endeavours and gloriously useless pursuits, tales of black comedy, insane foolhardiness, extraordinary bravery, breathtaking stupidity, dashing incompetence and relentless perseverance in the face of inevitable defeat. These are the efforts of those who fell short of their goal, the tragically defunct whose lives ended up on the cutting-room floor, forever assigned a second-tier rating in the chronicles of human achievement. We celebrate the men and women who were made of The Wrong Stuff – we salute you for trying.

  1

  How the West Was Lost: Misadventures in Exploration

  In which some explorers get lost; a man eats his boots and another man eats his crew; an imaginary mountain range is mapped; and a Scottish botanist is crushed to death by a falling bullock.

  Worst Attempt to Make a Name as a Great Explorer

  Timbuktu. For the early nineteenth-century explorer, there was no greater prize. Its location was the most tantalizing geographical riddle of the era. According to legend, the fabled ‘lost city’, hidden somewhere in Africa’s vast uncharted interior, was the seat of great power and learning, home to fabulous palaces and great libraries on which even the roof tiles were made of gold.

  Getting there would take a brutal 2,000-mile journey through some of the most hostile territory on Earth. Many had tried and failed. Whoever got there first was guaranteed international fame and a place among history’s greatest explorers; at least, so everyone thought. In the event, the man who achieved it was a Scot whose name almost nobody remembers.

  Europeans had been vaguely aware of the existence of Timbuktu for hundreds of years but no white man had actually set eyes on it since the Middle Ages. In 1809, an English merchant with a very vivid imagination called James Jackson published a book titled An Accurate and Interesting Account of Timbuktu, the Great Emporium of Central Africa. It made extraordinary claims, not only of great wealth but described a city crawling with beautiful, available women. He wrote:

  The climate of Timbuktu is much extolled as being salutary and extremely invigorating, insomuch that it is impossible for the sexes to exist without intermarriage . . . accordingly it is said that there is no man of the age of eighteen who has not his wives or concubines . . . it is even a disgrace for a man who has reached the age of puberty to be unmarried!

  As it turns out, Jackson’s account was so far from the truth that he was possibly suffering from sunstroke when he wrote it, but no one seems to have questioned it at the time and his book became a bestseller, reprinted ten times. Timbuktu was now the dream destination of every red-blooded adventurer.

  The great Venetian Egyptologist Giovanni Belzoni was among the first to have a go at finding it, setting off for the African interior from Benin in 1823 in typically flamboyant fashion: “God bless you, my fine fellows, and send you a happy sight of your country and friends!” Having covered only ten miles, Belzoni died of dysentery.

  In 1824, the French Geographical Society raised the stakes by offering a generous prize of 10,000 francs for the first person to bring back information about Timbuktu. The race was now on in earnest. The British, of course, were determined to get their man there first. In fact, she had long had her eye on Timbuktu, ever since 1788 when the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa was founded in London. The African Association, as it was more commonly known, comprised a dozen titled gentlemen from London’s upper crust led by the famous botanist and explorer Sir Joseph Banks. Ostensibly, their sole aim was to advance scientific knowledge about the “dark continent”. It was a great failing of the so-called Age of Enlightenment, Banks grumbled, that Europeans had sailed all around the world but knew next to nothing about the interior of Africa. And if they just happened to find some gold along the way, all well and good.

  Each of the members of the African Association pitched in with five guineas a year to recruit and fund expeditions to Africa. The first explorer they selected to lead an expedition to Timbuktu was an American – John Ledyard. He must have given a good interview because he had never been to Africa and didn’t know a single word of Arabic, but his lack of qualifications for this particular trip was apparently outweighed by his “adventurous nature . . . the manliness of his person, the breadth of his chest, the inquietude of his eye”. They might have had second thoughts after the Association’s Secretary Henry Beauvoir gave Ledyard the good news and asked when he might be ready to travel. Ledyard, showing admirable spirit, if not a complete grasp of what he was getting himself into, replied, “Tomorrow morning”. Beauvoir patiently informed him that a little more time would be needed to write up his itinerary.

  Ledyard left England on 30 June 1788. Six weeks later, he arrived in Cairo, which is the nearest he ever got to Timbuktu. The African Association was dismayed to learn that, while attempting to self-medicate for a “bilious complaint”, Ledyard had died vomiting blood after inadvertently swallowing a fatal overdose of sulphuric acid.

  The next to go, an Irishman called Daniel Houghton, got off to a decent start, reaching The Gambia in 1791. There, a fire destroyed most of his supplies and a servant ran off with most of what was left. Then he had a spot of better luck when he was assured by a guide that Timbuktu was just down the road; a man could safely walk there with a stick. Five hundred miles short of his target, Houghton’s stick and everything else he had were stolen by bandits, who also beat him up and left him to die.

  The legendary Scot Mungo Park tried twice. On his first attempt in 1795, he was robbed, imprisoned and tortured, then gave up and returned home. On this occasion, he set had off with just two companions and returned alone. On his second attempt in 1803, he set off with 46 men to find Timbuktu; not one of them survived. Park himself was drowned.

  In 1817, Britain had another go with an expedition led by a 29-year-old Joseph Ritchie, of whom very little is known except that he was a surgeon and a friend of the poet John Keats1. More importantly, he had time on his hands and connections in the Colonial Office, under whose auspices these expeditions now fell (the Government had decided that African exploration was too important to leave to the likes of Joseph Banks, who by now was old and quite ill).

  Ritchie was either too timid or too stupid to point out that the £2,000 allocated to him to fund the entire expedition was pitifully inadequate. It didn’t help either that he had blown all but £75 of the money before he even got to Africa, mostly on useless items. Richie did, however, take the trouble to have himself circumcised, just in case he needed to pass himself off under close inspection as an Arab.

  With nothing left to trade with the locals for food apart from firearms and horses, the loss of either of which would have been suicidal, Richie’s party went without food for several weeks. Ritchie, so emaciated he could barely walk, looked in the mirror and noticed that his tongue had turned black, but put it down to the fact that he had been drinking black coffee. He was dead within the week.

  His starving companions opened a stack of boxes marked “DO NOT OPEN UNTIL TIMBUKTU”, hoping to find something useful to sell and found two large chests full of arsenic, one camel-load of corks for pinning insects, two loads of brown paper, hundreds of books and 600 lbs of lead. No one has yet quite figured out what the last item was for.

  In 1824, Britain decided to try again. This time it fell to the Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs, Lord Henry Bathurst, to find the right man for the job. Bathurst had cultivated some rather odd ideas about how to get to Timbuktu. Nobody actually knew exactly where it was, but the obvious, shortest, most direct and therefore most sensible route into the African interior was to approach it from the west African coast, from where Timbuktu was thought to lie about 500 miles inland.

  Bathurst, however, thought you should start from the north. To do that, you had to cross the Sahara, a total distance of about 3,000 miles across some of the most savage terrain in the world. His plan was simple: you would sail to the North African port of Tripoli,
hire some camels, then head south across the Sahara, hopping from oasis to oasis, until you got to Timbuktu. He made it sound as easy as a weekend hike for a Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.

  Experience suggested otherwise. Africa in general and the road to Timbuktu in particular had already established itself as a graveyard for young explorers. The Sahara was one of the most dangerous places on the planet. So you would think that someone would have to be mad, figuratively speaking, to volunteer. Fortunately, Bathurst found someone who was – figuratively and literally.

  Alexander Gordon Laing was the son of a Scottish schoolteacher. He joined the Army and was posted to the West Indies, but was forced to return home because of problems with his liver. By 1822, he was serving in the Royal African Colonial Corps in Sierra Leone; he had just turned thirty, and was tall, slim and handsome with wavy hair and luxuriant mutton-chop sideburns. He made a bit of a name for himself in Africa, but not for the right reasons. His fellow officers found him smug and insufferably arrogant. He fancied himself as a poet and had a stint as editor of the local English newspaper, whose pages he liked to fill with doggerel, mostly about himself. As for Laing’s army record, his commanding officer wrote, “His military exploits are even worse than his poetry.”

  Laing, however, was very full of himself and driven by ambition to make his name in Africa, no matter what. He had read adventure tales as a boy and was determined, he later wrote, “to signalize myself by some important discovery”. Like most would-be African explorers, he also had his own theory about that other Holy Grail of nineteenth-century exploration, the River Niger, which he had recently published and sent to the Colonial Office.

  When Laing found out that Britain wanted to beat the French to Timbuktu, he quickly offered his services. This was his ticket to glory. Not that Laing was particularly well qualified to lead an expedition to Africa or anywhere else. To start with, his general health was described as “delicate”. His grasp of African geography was also very hazy and he was quite sure that the Niger flowed into the Gulf of Benin – which it definitely didn’t. But Laing was not short of self-confidence and he impressed Bathurst with “his command of the facts, the acuity of his intellect, his courage, and his poise”. More to the point, he was also extraordinarily cheap. He offered to find Timbuktu without taking any salary at all from the Colonial Office and with a proposed outlay of only £640 10s. for expedition set-up costs and annual expenses of £173 7s. 6d. His proposal was accepted on the nail.

  Laing, who was quite annoyed by the fact that his big idea regarding the course of the Niger had been dismissed as nonsense by the Colonial Office, was now extremely full of himself. He bragged that if he didn’t find Timbuktu, no one ever would: “The world will forever remain in ignorance of the place, as I make no vainglorious assertion when I say that it will never be visited by Christian man after me.” And he wasn’t just going to stop there. After locating Timbuktu, he was going to press on and solve the puzzle of the Niger. “I am so wrapt in the success of this enterprise,” he wrote, “that I think of nothing else all day and dream of nothing else all night.”

  In April 1825, Laing set off for Africa on his cut-price expedition via Malta, where he promptly fell ill again and was bedridden for a month. Eventually, he found his way to Tripoli, where his arrival was awaited by the British Consul Hanmer Warrington, whose job it was to expedite Laing’s trip to the African interior. The aristocratic, hard-drinking Warrington was a big man with a forceful personality to match. He had held the position of Consul for eleven years and, during that time, he had seen many young men set off to try to unlock the mysteries of Africa’s interior. Most of them never came back.

  His initial impression of Laing was favourable; he was, Warrington reported to Bathurst, a “well set-up man . . . highly gifted in many ways”. When he got to know Laing a little better, he became sceptical, to say the least, about the young Scot’s chances of success. To begin with, Laing was obviously still not fully recovered from his recent illness. “The state of his health,” Warrington warned the Colonial Office, “will not carry him though his arduous task.” When he heard about the ludicrously small budget with which Laing proposed to fund the expedition, he concluded that he must be stark raving mad.

  The relationship took an unexpected turn for the worse when Laing promptly fell in love with the second of Warrington’s three daughters, Emma. Within a matter of weeks, Laing was down on one knee with a proposal of marriage. Warrington, who was not keen to have a madman as a son-in-law, far less one who was about to set off on a suicide mission, was horrified, especially when the couple announced their intention to tie the knot straight away. He was even more horrified when it dawned on him that, as British Consul, he was the only senior representative of the Church of England in Tripoli and would be expected to perform the marriage service himself.

  Warrington did everything he could to put them off and only relented when his daughter tried to kill herself by poisoning. After some furtive and increasingly frenzied correspondence with London while he searched for a loophole, Warrington reluctantly agreed to officiate, on one condition – Laing had to sign an agreement that the marriage would not be consummated until it had been blessed by an Anglican priest. In other words, not until (and if) the groom had successfully returned from his highly dangerous mission. Laing agreed to his terms and, on 14 July 1825, the couple were married.

  His mission was now driven by a new, even more manic impetus – frustrated desire for his new virgin (as far as we know) bride Emma. “I shall do more than has ever been done before,” he wrote, “and shall show myself to be what I have ever considered myself, a man of enterprise and genius.”

  Four days after his wedding, Laing set off into the Sahara on his death-or-glory mission with a few camels and a handful of assistants, including a black servant called Jack, two African ship’s carpenters (Laing assumed they would come in handy when they reached the Niger) and a couple of camel drivers. Later, they teamed up with a guide called Babani who promised to get them to Timbuktu in ten weeks provided they paid him 4,000 Spanish dollars. Lord Bathurst was horrified when he received the bill, which, at a stroke, had increased the cost of the expedition four-fold.

  Laing kept a journal over the coming months, or at least he claimed he did, because as none of the contents were ever divulged, we will never know for sure. More or less everything we know about his expedition is based on a series of letters Laing wrote back to Tripoli. Unfortunately, these revealed much more about his gradually unravelling mental state than they do about the African countryside. Amid the odd poem about himself and the occasional sketch, they were mostly highly emotional, paranoid and disparaging rants about the efforts of rival African explorers, especially Hugh Clapperton, whom Laing clearly despised, although the two men had never actually met.

  The Colonial Office, having decided that the discovery of Timbuktu was important enough to risk the lives of one expedition, had now decided that it was worth risking the lives of two. Just before leaving Tripoli, Laing received the unwelcome news that Clapperton had set sail from England with ambitions to reach Timbuktu. To make up lost time, he planned to approach with a shorter, more sensible route from the west African coast. Clapperton, who considered himself with some justification to be the most experienced African explorer of the day, was equally offended to hear that the unknown Laing had been engaged to reach Timbuktu.

  Unaware of the resentment they were creating in both camps, the Colonial Office appraised each of the other’s progress and, in the spirit of co-operation, asked them to share notes. Clapperton reluctantly went along with the request, possibly just to needle Laing. It did the trick. When Warrington forwarded some advice from his rival, Laing was livid. There were some random and patronizing tips, such as “adopt native costume at all times” and “do not meddle with the females of the country”. Laing replied, “I care little for any information that Clapperton could communicate . . . I smile at the idea of his reaching Timbuktu before me.
”

  On the subject of clothing, he revealed that, unlike Clapperton, he had adopted “plain Turkish dress” – except on Sundays when he wore his full military uniform. In all his letters to Warrington, Laing’s hatred for Clapperton was never very far from the surface; he was now locked in a bitter personal competition. From now on, getting to Timbuktu first at any cost was more than just a prize for the young Scot: it had become a dangerous obsession.

  Laing regularly wrote back to Tripoli begging his father-in-law to send him a miniature portrait of Emma. Without it, he told Warrington a trifle belatedly, “I might go mad”. When the miniature finally arrived, Laing was shocked to find that the portrait was not flattering to his beloved; Emma appeared suspiciously pale and wan-looking. Was it just a poor portrait? Or was Emma seriously ill? Half out of his mind with worry, he decided to throw in the towel and dashed off another letter to Warrington informing him that he was returning to Tripoli immediately. Warrington, fearful for his son-in-law’s sanity and even more fearful of his early return, tried to reassure him that all was well with Emma and that Laing should press on to Timbuktu.