It is perhaps not the least of the many extraordinary circumstances attending the city of Timbuctoo, that no two travellers agree in their account of it; and for this reason it is most difficult to decide, to whom the greatest credibility should be awarded, or, on the other hand, whether some of them, who pretend to have resided within its walls, ever visited it at all. The contradictions of the respective travellers are in many instances so gross, that it is scarcely possible to believe that the description, which they are then giving can apply to one and the same place, and therefore we are entitled to draw the inference, that some of them are practising on our credulity, and are making us the dupes of their imagination, rather than the subjects of their experience. The expectations of moorish magnificence were raised to a very high pitch, by some of the inflated accounts of the wealth and splendour of the great city of central Africa; but these expectations were considerably abated by the description given of Timbuctoo by Adams and Sidi Hamet, a moorish merchant, who describes that city in the following terms:—
"Timbuctoo is a very large city, five times as great as Swearah (Suera or Mogadore). It is built in a level plain surrounded on all sides with hills, except on the south, where the plain continues to the bank of the same river, which is wide and deep, and runs to the east. We were obliged to go to it to water our camels, and there we saw many boats, made of great trees, some with negroes paddling in them across the river. The city is strongly walled in with stone laid in clay, like the towns and houses in Suse, only a great deal thicker."
The latter account is at total variance with both Adams and Caillie, who describe Timbuctoo as a city having no walls, nor any thing resembling fortifications. "The house of the king is very large and high, like the largest house in Mogadore, but built of the same materials as the walls. There are a great many more houses in the city, built of stone, with shops on one side, where they sell salt, the staple article, knives, blue cloth, haicks, and an abundance of other things, with many gold ornaments. The inhabitants are blacks, and the chief is a very large, grey-headed, old black man, who is called shegar, which means sultan or king. The principal part of the houses are made with large reeds, as thick as a man's arm, which stand upon their ends, and are covered with small reeds first, and then with the leaves of the date tree; they are round, and the tops come to a point, like a heap of stones. Neither the shegar nor his people are Moslem; but there is a town divided off from the principal one, in one corner by a strong partition wall, with one gate to it, which leads from the main town, like the Jews' town or millah in Mogadore. All the Moors or Arabs, who have liberty to come into Timbuctoo, are obliged to sleep in that part of it every night, or to go out of the city entirely. No stranger is allowed to enter that millah, without leaving his knife with the gate-keeper; but when he comes out in the morning, it is restored to him. The people who live in that part are all Moslem. The negroes, bad Arabs, and Moors are all mixed together, and intermarry, as if they were all of one colour; they have no property of consequence, except a few asses; their gate is shut and fastened every night at dark, and very strongly guarded both by night and by day. The shegar or king is always guarded by one hundred men on mules, armed with good guns, and one hundred men on foot, with guns and long knives. He would not go into the millah, and we saw him only four or five times in the two moons we staid at Timbuctoo, waiting for the caravan; but it had perished in the desert, neither did the yearly caravan arrive from Tunis and Tripoli, for it also had been destroyed."
"The city of Timbuctoo is very rich, as well as very large; it has four gates to it; all of them are opened in the day time, but very strongly guarded and shut at night. The negro women are very fat and handsome, and wear large round gold rings in their noses, and flat ones in their ears, and gold chains and amber beads about their necks, with images and white fish bones, bent round, and the ends fastened together, hanging down between their breasts; they have bracelets on their wrists and on their ankles, and go barefooted. I had bought a small snuff-box, filled with snuff, at Morocco, and showed it to the women in the principal street of Timbuctoo, which is very wide. There were a great number about me in a few minutes, and they insisted on buying my snuff and box; one made me an offer, and another made me another, until one, who wore richer ornaments than the rest, told me, in broken Arabic, that she would take off all she had about her, and give them to me for the box and its contents. I agreed to accept them, and she pulled off her nose-rings and ear-rings, all her neck-chains, with their ornaments, and the bracelets from her wrists and ankles, and gave them to me in exchange for it. These ornaments would weigh more than a pound, and were made of solid gold at Timbuctoo. I kept them through the whole of the journey afterwards, and carried them to my wife, who now wears a part of them."
"Timbuctoo carries on a great trade with all the caravans that come from Morocco, and the shores of the Mediterranean sea. From Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, &c. are brought all kinds of cloth, iron, salt, muskets, powder and lead swords or scimitars, tobacco, opium, spices and perfumes, amber beads, and other trinkets, with a few more articles. They carry back, in return, elephants' teeth, gold dust and wrought gold, gum-senegal, ostrich feathers, very curiously worked turbans, and slaves; a great many of the latter, and many other articles of less importance. The slaves are brought in from the south-west, all strongly ironed, and are sold very cheap, so that a good stout man may be bought for a haick, which costs in the empire of Morocco about two dollars."
"The caravans stop and encamp about two miles from the city, in a deep valley, and the negroes do not molest them. They bring their merchandize near the walls of the city, where the inhabitants purchase all their goods on exchange for the before-mentioned articles; not more than fifty men from any one caravan being allowed to enter the city at a time, and they must go out before others are permitted to enter. This city carries on a great trade with Wassanah, a city far to the south-east, in all the articles that are brought to it by caravans, and gets returns in slaves, elephants' teeth, gold, &c. The principal male inhabitants are clothed with blue cloth shirts, that reach from their shoulders down to their knees, and are very wide, and girt about their loins with a red and brown cotton sash or girdle. They also hang about their bodies, pieces of different coloured cloth and silk handkerchiefs. The king is dressed in a white robe of a similar fashion, but covered with white and yellow gold and silver plates, that glitter in the sun. He has also many other shining ornaments of shells and stones hanging about him, he wears a pair of breeches like the Moors and Barbary Jews, and has a kind of white turban on his head, pointing up, and strung with different kinds of ornaments. His feet are covered with red morocco shoes. He has no other weapon about him than a large white staff or sceptre, with a golden lion on the head of it, which he carries in his hand. His countenance is mild, and he seems to govern his subjects more like a father than a king. All but the king go bareheaded. The poor have only a single piece of blue or other cloth about them. The inhabitants are very numerous; I think six times as many as in Swearah, besides Arabs and other Mahommedans in their millah or separate town, which must contain nearly as many people as there are altogether in Swearah. [*] The women are clothed in a light shirt, or under-dress, and over it a green, red or blue covering, from the bosom to below the knees, the whole of them girt about their waists with a red girdle. They stain their cheeks and foreheads red or yellow on some occasions; and the married women wear a kind of hood on their heads, made of blue cloth or silk, and cotton handkerchiefs of different kinds and colours, and go barefooted."
[Footnote: Swearah or Mogadore is stated to contain above 36,000 souls, that is 30,000 Moors and 6,000 Jews. This calculation would make Timbuctoo to contain 216,000 inhabitants. A statement which deserves little credit.]
"The king and people of Timbuctoo do not fear and worship God like the Moslem, but like the people of Soudan, they only pray once in twenty-four hours, when they see the moon, and when she is not seen, they do not pray at all. They cannot read nor write, but are honest. They circumcise their children, like the Arabs. They have not any mosques, but dance every night, as the Moors and Arabs pray."
"If however European expectation had been raised to an extraordinary height respecting the size, riches, and importance of Timbuctoo, it was likely to be still more luxuriantly feasted with the description of another town of central Africa, in comparison of which Timbuctoo must appear as a city of a second rate, and which Sidi Hamet describes as being of the magnitude, that it took him a day to walk round it."
"According to the statement of Sidi Hamet, he travelled with about two hundred Moslem, to a large city called Wassanah, a place he had never before heard of, nor which is to be found in any of the modern maps of Africa. For the first six days, they travelled over a plain within sight of the Joliba, in a direction a little to the south of east, till they came to a small town called Bimbinah, where the river turned more to the south-east, by a high mountain to the east. They now left the river, and pursued a direction more to the southward, through a hilly and woody country for fifteen days, and then came to the river again. The route wound with the river for three days in a south-easterly direction, and then they had to climb over a very high ridge of mountains, thickly covered with very lofty trees, which took up six days; from the summit, a large chain of high mountains was seen to the westward. On descending from this ridge, they came immediately to the river's bank, where it was very narrow and full of rocks. For the next twelve days, they kept on in a direction generally south-east, but winding, with the river almost every day in sight, and crossed many small streams flowing into it. High mountains were plainly seen on the western side. They then came to a ferry, and beyond that travelled for fifteen days more, mostly in sight of the river, till at length after fifty-seven days travelling, not reckoning the halts, they reached Wassanah."