outlawing the trade for the simple reason that they benefited enormously from it. Typical of the correspondence between London and Tripoli was the instruction in 1778 to the British Consul Richard Tully to provide
an account of the Trade in Slaves carried on in the Dominions of the Bey of Tripoli, stating the numbers annually brought into them and sold, distinguishing those that are natives of Asia from those that are natives of Africa, and specifying as far as possible, from what parts of Asia and Africa the slaves so sold in the Dominions of the Bey are brought, and stating whether the male slaves are usually castrated.
Such correspondence makes grim reading. For all the British determination to stamp out this ‘miserable trade’, it continued apace and for more than a century after Tully’s time, consuls would write to London of the Turkish authorities’ ‘apathy and utter indifference’ to the slave trade, their ‘palpable’ neglect and ‘flagrant infraction’ of orders from Constantinople. In 1848, the sultan prohibited the Turkish governor of Tripoli and his civil servants from trading in slaves and in 1856 slave dealing itself was outlawed throughout the Ottoman empire. But in practice, the trade continued, albeit in reduced volume. In 1878, 100 years after the letter to Tully, Frank Drummond-Hay, the British Consul, was telling the Foreign Office that ‘the vigilance required in watching the Slave Trade, in thwarting the devices resorted to by the local authorities in order to evade the execution of the orders for its suppression, in obtaining information on the arrival of slaves by the caravans from the Interior, of intended shipments and other numerous matters in connection with this traffic’ justified a substantial increase in his salary.
On the other side of a massive wooden door was the cool marble floor of an elegant courtyard, decorated with plants, on one side of which a worn flight of steps led up to the ‘general scientific library’ to which the building was now devoted. This was the house in which Miss Tully, sister of the British Consul, composed her fascinating Narrative of a Ten Years’ Residence at Tripoli in Africa between 1783–93. This doughty lady lived through the great plague of 1785 that carried off a quarter of Tripoli’s inhabitants and regularly witnessed slave caravans arriving from the Sahara. One limped into town in the dreadful heat of summer in 1790. ‘We were shocked at the horrible state it arrived in,’ she wrote. ‘For want of water many had died, and others were in so languishing a state, as to expire before any could be administered to save them from the parching thirst occasioned by the heat. The state of the animals was truly shocking; gasping and faint, they could hardly be made to crawl to their several destinations, many dying on their way.’
An intimate of the Pasha of Tripoli’s family, Miss Tully heard eyewitness accounts of the assassination in 1790 of Hassan Bey, his eldest son and heir. Sidi Yousef, the Pasha’s youngest son and pretender to the throne, had been feuding with his elder brother for some time before announcing he was ready for the sake of the family to effect a reconciliation in front of their mother Lilla Halluma.
The Bey replied, ‘with all his heart’ that ‘he was ready’ upon which Sidy Useph rose quickly from his seat, and called loudly for the Koran – the word he had given to his eunuchs for his pistols, two of which were brought and put into his hands; when he instantly discharged one of them at his brother, seated by his mother’s side. The pistol burst, and Lilla Halluma extending her hand to save the Bey, had her fingers shattered by the splinters of it. The ball entered the Bey in the side: he arose, however, and seizing his sabre from the window made a stroke at his brother, but only wounded him slightly in the face; upon which Sidy Useph discharged the second pistol and shot the Bey through the body.
Hassan’s gruesome murder – Miss Tully informs us he was stabbed repeatedly by Sidi Yousef’s black slaves as he lay dying and had eleven balls in him when he perished – plunged Tripoli into chaos. Further assassinations of leading figures followed and the Karamanli dynasty, which had ruled Tripoli since 1711, found itself under siege. Fighting broke out against the neighbouring Misratans and the rapacious Sidi Yousef prepared to attack Tripoli Castle. From its ‘situation and strength’, the British Consulate was regarded as the only safe asylum among the consular houses. Miss Tully braced herself for an invasion: ‘The Greeks, Maltese, Moors and Jews brought all their property to the English house. The French and Venetian consuls also brought their families; every room was filled with beds; and the galleries were used for dining-rooms. The lower part of the building contained the Jewesses and the Moorish women with all their jewels and treasures.’
While the family’s internecine conflict raged, on 29 July 1793 a Turkish adventurer named Ali Burghul – well acquainted with the turmoil – sailed into Tripoli harbour with a fleet of Turkish vessels claiming to have a firman from the Grand Signior to depose the Pasha and assume the throne. The crimson flag with the gold crescent was raised over Tripoli, Turkish guards rampaged through the city and the Tullys fled. After the failure of their initial attempt to repel the usurper, the princes Sidi Yousef and his second brother Sidi Hamet escaped to join their father who had taken refuge with the Bey of Tunis.
By 1795, the father and his two sons had made up their differences and a reunited Karamanli family expelled the Turkish impostor from Tripoli, installing Yousef as the new Pasha. His rule dovetailed neatly with growing British interest in unexplored Africa, born of the desire both to extend commercial relations with the continent and to investigate and suppress the Saharan slave trade. In 1788, in recognition of the fact that ‘the map of the interior of Africa is still but a wide extended blank’, the Society Instituted for the Purpose of Exploring the Interior of Africa (African Society for short) was founded in London. European knowledge of the continent and its peoples had hardly developed since the times of Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny and Ptolemy. Arab writers and travellers of the Middle Ages such as Abu Obeid al Bekri, Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Battuta, the fabled fourteenth-century adventurer who blazed a swathe through the lands of Islam, had forged ahead. In the sixteenth century the Arabs pressed home their advantage, most notably through the travels of Ali Hassan Ibn Mohammed, or Leo Africanus (the African Lion), who crossed the Sahara to Timbuctoo in 1513. It fell to Jonathan Swift to lampoon this lamentable European ignorance.
So Geographers in Afric-Maps
with Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps:
And o’er unhabitable Downs
Place Elephants for want of Towns.
As Pasha of Tripoli, Yousef later gave assurances to the British government that he would, for a princely fee, guarantee safe conduct to any expedition to the River Niger. He held sway over parts of Fezzan, south of Tripoli – the central province to the south of Tripolitania that extended as far west as the borders with modern Algeria and, to the south, as far as the borders with present-day Niger and Chad – and claimed to be on friendly terms with the Sultans of Bornu and Sokoto in the heart of what Britons knew as ‘Negroland’ or ‘Soudan’, from where the caravans dragged their wretched human cargo across the Sahara to the Mediterranean coast. London duly dispatched the adventure-seeking surgeon Joseph Ritchie to Tripoli in 1818. His brief, as ambitious as it was unlikely, was to attempt an exploration from the north across the Sahara, install himself as British Vice-consul in Fezzan and chart the Niger. Like many of his assurances, Yousef’s promise of safe conduct proved worthless – the lands he controlled extended no further south than Ghadames, not, as the British believed, as far as Timbuctoo and Bornu. But what tempted London to launch the Ritchie expedition was the fact that it offered a considerably less expensive alternative to penetrating towards the Niger from the west coast of Africa. An expedition from Sierra Leone had already been devastated by disease and would end up costing Britain £40,000. Ritchie was given £2,000.
Once landed at Tripoli, he and Lyon met the redoubtable British Consul Colonel Hanmer Warrington, who took them to an interview with the Pasha to discuss their journey into the Sahara. Warrington, a brilliant servant of the Empire and a leading figure at the Pasha’s court, would watch British expeditions into the interior come and go during his residency from 1814 to 1846. Such was his influence that to many of his contemporaries, including
