“A Dream as Frail as Those of Ancient Time”: The in-Credible Geographies of Timbuctoo

Abstract

The author considers the politics and poetics of belief and disbelief in late 18th-century and early 19th-century Britain and France, with particular reference to the mythologies and controversies about the location and nature of Timbuctoo, a city widely believed to be the hub of a fabulously wealthy African trading system. Like other episodes in the history of European exploration, from the quest for the North-West passage to the search for the source of the Nile and the races to the North and South Poles, the scramble to reach Timbuctoo was sustained by intense international rivalry and spawned a widespread speculative discourse involving politicians, scientists, scientific patrons, explorers, and journalists. Drawing on recent work on the social history of truth, the author considers how and why different geographical descriptions of Timbuctoo were deemed credible by the scientific communities of London and Paris. Judgments about ‘new’ geographical information were influenced, if not determined, by a complex and shifting rhetoric of adjudication in which moral assessments about the character and status of rival claimants loomed especially large. When the French explorer René Caillié claimed the prize of the Paris Geographical Society as the first explorer to reach and return from Timbuctoo in 1828, his achievements sparked an acrimonious debate between British and French geographers that raised fundamental questions about the purpose of African exploration and the nature of geographical truth. Of central concern were the legitimacy of disguise as an exploratory tactic, and the importance of physical courage and bodily comportment in assessing an explorer's scientific credibility and moral authority.

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