The Mammoth Book of Losers Read online

  In the end, Laing was persuaded to continue, not because of any reassurances from Warrington, but by the appearance of a large comet in the sky. “I regard it as a happy omen,” he wrote. “It beckons me on and binds me to the termination of the Niger and to Timbuktu.” Laing was also cheered by news that the mission of his arch-rival Clapperton might be close to failure.

  Laing and his small band of followers moved steadily south, braving midday temperatures of 49ºC, suffering “privations and exposure to a degree of heat which I am inclined to believe few Europeans’ constitutions could stand”. He also mentioned in passing that at one stage he had gone without food for a whole week.

  Five months after leaving Tripoli, they reached the oasis town of Salah in present-day Algeria. From there, it was a straight run to Timbuktu across a desert “as flat as a bowling green”. The route, however, was notoriously dangerous. The area was ruled by violent, predatory Tuareg tribesmen who demanded payment from travellers to secure a safe passage. Only a madman, local Arab traders told Laing, would try travel to Timbuktu without paying off the Tuaregs; better still, they advised, don’t try to cross the desert at all. Laing ignored them; he knew better and didn’t care much for taking advice from foreigners.2 He had also overlooked the fact the only other Scot to have passed that way, Mungo Park, had an unfortunate reputation for shooting any African he thought looked even slightly menacing, so the presence of one more Scot in the Sahara might not be very welcome. As for this business of bribing the Tuaregs, Laing would hear none of it.

  In January 1826, he and his travelling companions set off for Timbuktu. Several days later, they were savagely attacked by Tuaregs who stole all of their possessions and left the expedition leader for dead. Apart from Laing, all that remained was a wounded camel driver and a couple of camels. The two men resumed their journey with Laing strapped to the back of one camel while the injured driver led the way on the other.

  We can get an idea of the full horror of what he was going through from a letter he sent to his father-in-law. Writing with great difficulty with the thumb and middle finger of his left hand, Laing recorded his injuries:

  To begin from the top, I have five sabre cuts on the crown of the head and three on the left temple, all fractures from which much bone has come away; one on my left cheek which fractured the jaw bone and had divided the ear, forming a very unsightly wound; one over the right temple and a dreadful gash on the back of the neck, which slightly grazed the windpipe; a musket ball in the hip, which made its way though my back, slightly grazing the backbone; five sabre cuts on my right arm and hand, three of the fingers broken, the hand cut three-fourths across, and the wrist bones cut through; three cuts on the left arm, the bone of which has been broken but is again uniting; one slight wound on the right leg and two with one dreadful gash on the left, to say nothing of a cut across the fingers of my left hand, now healed up.

  Almost as an afterthought at the end of the letter, Laing mentions that he had caught the plague and was so ill “that it was presumed, expected and hoped that I would die”.

  Having travelled hundreds of miles of unmapped, hostile desert, with horrific multiple injuries, Laing reached his goal and entered the fabled city of Timbuktu on 13 August 1826. The journey across the Sahara, which Laing had estimated would take a few weeks at most, had in fact taken thirteen months.

  His triumphant entry into Timbuktu must have been a disappointment, to put it mildly. Even from a distance it was quite obvious, even to someone as delusional as Laing, that this was not the shining metropolis abounding in wealth and architectural wonders that he and all Europe had imagined. Timbuktu had seen better days, but not since the time of William Shakespeare. Once a bustling centre of commerce and culture, centuries of warfare and decay had reduced it to a dusty relic of its previous self, a bleak, run-down frontier town made of mud brick.

  He searched everywhere for the glittering palaces and nubile lovelies he had heard of, but found only stinking hovels full of unwashed people and sick animals. Weirdly, Laing wrote home that “the great capital of central Africa . . . has completely met my expectations”. Perhaps he was trying to drum up interest for the publication of his journal; or, just as likely, he was by now completely unhinged.

  If reports are to be believed, his behaviour over the next five weeks was extremely odd. He rented a small mud hut on the edge of town, from which he occasionally emerged to strut through the streets in full dress uniform, announcing himself to everyone he met as the King of England’s emissary, or by night he rode out on a horse to investigate the surrounding area.3

  Laing was planning to stay in Timbuktu for about six months, but it soon became evident that he was not wanted. Word had reached the local Sultan of Bello that a strange interloper was wandering around the town; it’s not surprising, then, that the Sultan wanted him out. So five weeks after his arrival, fearing for his safety, Laing wrote a final letter home announcing that he was leaving Timbuktu “to return to England with much important geographical information”.

  The two golden rules of exploration were: (1) discover something worth discovering; and (2) get out alive and find a publisher. Having broken the first rule, Laing was about to break the second.

  In his final letter, he recorded his intention to set off southbound towards Sierra Leone. On 22 September 1826, Laing did exactly the opposite and headed north. Three days later, he was set upon and killed by Tuaregs. They throttled him with his own turban, then cut his head off and left him for the vultures. An eye-witness, a servant who survived by feigning death, brought news of the murder to Tripoli in August 1828. Laing was thirty-three.

  The missing pieces of Laing’s misadventure were eventually put in place by an incredibly brave Frenchman called René Caillée. In 1828, without any government support or financial backing, Caillée walked unassisted into Timbuktu disguised as a Muslim. Compared to Laing’s experience, Caillée’s journey had been relatively dull, apart from several weeks of illness and a bad fall from a camel. He encountered danger just once when he was forced to hide from the Tuareg under a pile of carpets.

  Caillée was able to confirm the few facts about Timbuktu reported back to Tripoli by Laing, visited the mud hut where he had lived, was shown a compass said to have belonged to him, and discovered that Laing’s body was buried under a tree to the north of the town. There was, however, no sign of the much-vaunted journal.

  Unlike Laing, Caillée lived to tell his tale and returned home to a hero’s welcome, publishing the story of his epic trip to Timbuktu two years later. Predictably, the French took great satisfaction in rubbing Britain’s nose in it, declaring Caillée the first European to reach Timbuktu – “that which England has not been able to accomplish with the aid of a whole group of travellers and at an expense of more than twenty millions (of francs), a Frenchman has done with his scanty personal resources alone and without putting his country to any expense”.

  The British Colonial Office retaliated by claiming that Caillée’s trip was a hoax and that he had fabricated the whole story from Laing’s journal, which had somehow found its way into French hands. In fact, it is just possible that the journal never existed in the first place and had all been a figment of Laing’s imagination.

  The news of her husband’s grisly demise broke Emma Laing’s heart and destroyed her health. She remarried and went to live in Italy but appears to have lived out the rest of her brief life in a state of bottomless depression. Just over four years to the day after kissing him goodbye and watching him ride off into the African desert, she died of tuberculosis in October 1829, aged twenty-eight.

  Shortest Space Programme

  The first manned rocket flight was attempted in AD 1500 by a Chinese government official called Wan Hu. He built a wheelchair and attached to the base forty-seven rockets filled with a combustible mixture of charcoal, saltpetre and sulphur. Seated in his wicker chair, grasping a large kite in each hand to keep him airborne, he braced himself and signalled to his assist
ants to ignite the rockets beneath him. The fuses blazed and the gunpowder ignited in a mighty explosion.

  Wan Hu’s assistants looked skyward for signs of their master, but in vain. When the billowing clouds of smoke cleared, there was nothing left – no chair, no kites, no Wan Hu. The experiment was presumed a great success. There were, however, no attempts to repeat it.

  “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”

  Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society, 1895

  Least Successful Bonding Exercise

  Exploration, it almost goes without saying, is dangerous work. If the pack ice, or the gale-force winds, or brain-boiling heat, or starvation didn’t get you, then bandits, or frostbite, or scurvy, or malaria, or dysentery, or some other despicable disease almost certainly could. And yet if you study the historical records, more often than not, the expedition party itself is largely to blame for its own failures. One of the most difficult challenges of expeditionary life was not weathering the elements, it was enduring one’s colleagues.

  One of the great obsessions of the Victorian era was the search for the River Niger in Africa. The course of the Niger was presumably known to locals, but it was a complete mystery to the outside world. Where did it go? Speculation was rife. Some thought that it flowed west to Gambia or Senegal; others insisted that the Niger disappeared into a huge swamp called Wangara. There were those who believed it joined the Nile, or that it flowed into the Congo. Another theory had it that it flowed nowhere at all and simply evaporated under the blazing Saharan sun. Dozens of explorers had died trying to find the answer to this, the burning geographic question of the age.

  In 1822, Britain had another crack at trying to solve the mystery of the Niger. The task of assembling a team to achieve this fell to Sir John Barrow, second secretary of the British Admiralty. Barrow had the bright idea of using British officers who’d been decommissioned after the defeat of Napoleon. Of course, if you are putting together a team of men that might have to spend months, even years, together, it is really important to get the chemistry right. Two of the three men chosen for the expedition were Scots: Walter Oudney, a naval surgeon from Edinburgh; and the huge, red-bearded, quick-tempered Lieutenant Hugh Clapperton. The third member of their party was an arrogant English army officer called Major Dixon Denham, described by one historian as “the most odious man in the history of exploration”. His rude and aggressive behaviour and sense of superiority made him immediately disliked by the Scots. It was a disastrous mix, resulting in a terrible clash of personalities and the most acrimonious and badly planned expedition in the history of African exploration.

  The mission was fatally undermined before they even set off by a misunderstanding over who should actually lead the expedition. The two Scots assumed that Oudney was the leader. Denham thought he was the commanding officer because he outranked them both. To add to the confusion, there was no agreement over where they should even be looking. Oudney and Clapperton were under instructions to find Lake Chad, which had been mentioned in an earlier expedition as a possible outlet, while Denham was ordered to look for the Niger to the south.

  There was even a huge row over what they should wear on the expedition. The Scots argued that they should “go native” and wear turbans and robes so they would blend in; the Englishman insisted that in the interests of national pride they should wear full dress uniforms to remind the Africans how important Britain was.

  The prolonged argument over where they were going and what they should be wearing meant that they set off months later than planned. Meanwhile, the long enforced stay in an unhealthy border town made them ill with fever before they had even started their journey. Eventually, Denham had his own way over the dress code and, in March 1822, they set off across the blazing Sahara in blue frock coats, white waistcoats, breeches and silk stockings. In the event, their choice of clothing actually saved Denham’s life; at one point, he was captured by marauding tribesmen who stripped him and started squabbling over his clothes. While his captors were arguing over their catch, he was able to slip away, naked, and dodging snakes and scrambling through thickets was able to scramble, muddied and bleeding, back to camp.

  Large portions of their expedition are lost to posterity because, according to their published journal, it was “wholly uninteresting, and is therefore omitted”. One of the more illuminating entries in Denham’s journal recorded, “Desert as yesterday, high sandhills”. The most remarkable thing about their journey across the Sahara was that all the way to Lake Chad, despite braving treacherous sandstorms, bouts of malaria, travelling for days without water, while members of their party dropped dead around them – even the flies and camels were dying from exhaustion – the three men never once stopped squabbling. Clapperton and Oudney were goaded by Denham’s habit of constantly giving orders; meanwhile Denham was irritated by Clapperton’s mistreatment of his bearers including regular threats to shoot them.

  Relations between the three men hit a new low when Denham accused Clapperton of having sex with his native bearers. Casual sex with natives during expeditions into Africa was not unheard of; Denham himself was not averse to the charms of African ladies and it was even alleged the great David Livingstone fathered a child by an African woman. But these natives were men. Clapperton angrily denied the charge and Oudney backed him up, but from that point onwards even the faintest hope of unity in the camp was abandoned.

  As they heartily detested each other, the three men decided that the best way forward was to split into two separate expeditions, Denham going south-east and Clapperton and Oudney going west. Clapperton’s journey took him to Sokoto, where he met the local ruler Sultan Bello. When he asked for directions to the mouth of the Niger, the Sultan was only too happy to oblige. Clapperton couldn’t believe his luck. It was only much later that he learned that the Sultan had deliberately sent him the wrong way because he feared that the British would steal their country from them if they knew the truth about the course of the river.

  In January 1824, Oudney died from tuberculosis aggravated by intermittent bouts of fever. Denham and Clapperton, now reunited, stopped arguing just long enough to agree that it was time to go home. This was only a signal, however, to start another row over which route to take. In the end, they decided to return they the way they had come, and so they bickered and squabbled all the way back to London.

  Although they had completely failed to achieve what they set out to do, their return to England on 1 June 1825 caused a sensation and was a day of great national rejoicing.4 Bizarrely, one newspaper likened the journey to Marco Polo’s trip to China.

  A couple of years later, during another attempt at finding the mouth of the Niger, Clapperton died from a combination of malaria and a fierce bout of dysentery. In 1826, the only surviving member of the original party, Dixon Denham, published his recollection of the expedition. He took credit for everything and left out almost all mention of his travelling companions.

  Least Successful Hunting Party

  The Frenchman Francis Barrallier was a jack of all trades. He was an officer serving in the British Army in Australia’s New South Wales Corps, an engineer, surveyor and graphic artist. He was also a significant figure in the history of Australian exploration; he made the first sightings of the koala bear, was the first European to describe the use of the native boomerang, and recorded numerous general observations about botany, geology and the Aborigine people, including their method of hunting kangaroo. His own skills as a kangaroo hunter, however, fell short.

  In 1802, Barrallier was sent by the governor of New South Wales to use his surveying skills to lead a detachment of soldiers to try to find a way over the Blue Mountains. Harassed by unfriendly Aborigines and desperately short of supplies, Barrallier’s party covered just 130 miles in seven weeks, an average of just one-and-a-half miles a day. Half starved, they stalked kangaroos in vain for several days, before realizing that they might have more success if they fir
st removed their bright red army coats.

  “Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.”

  Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Supérieure de Guerre, 1904

  Least Successful Attempt to Cross Australia

  Burke and Wills – in Australian folklore, one name is rarely mentioned without the other. Together, they participated in one of the most miserable failures in the history of exploration.

  After 100 years of European settlement, by the mid-nineteenth century the interior of Australia was still a mystery to all but the indigenous Aborigines. The challenge of mapping it had defeated the country’s best explorers;5 fame and fortune awaited the first man who did.

  In the 1850s, there was a race to to lay a new Overland Telegraph Line to connect the south coast of the Australian continent via the centre to Darwin in the north. There was fierce competition between colonies because the economic benefits of being at the centre of the Australian telegraph network were huge. In 1860, the Australian Government put up a reward of £2,000 to anyone who succeeded in crossing the continent from south to north, thereby determining a route for the proposed new telegraph line. South Australia and the newly founded state of Victoria each proposed an expedition to try to win the prize. It would be a straight race to the northern coast of Queensland and back, a return journey of about 4,000 miles.

  South Australia was ably represented by John McDouall Stuart. He was one of his country’s greatest and most successful explorers having already led four expeditions into some of the most hostile territory in the world without loss of one human life. Victoria, with the prestige of its newly founded colony at stake, decided to go with a group of men who hadn’t spent a day in the outback between them. Their expedition team was put together by a group of armchair experts who called themselves the Exploration Committee of the Royal Society of Victoria. Most of the committee members had never even seen the outback. There were just two members – Ferdinand von Mueller and Wilhelm Blandowski – with any actual experience in exploration, but they were constantly outvoted by the others.