The Race for Timbuktu: The Hunt for Africa's City of Gold

For centuries, Timbuktu was Europe's idea of the unreachable place - an African El Dorado where the roofs were said to be made of gold. The myth had roots in something real: in 1325 the Malian emperor Mansa Musa travelled to Mecca with so much gold that his spending in Cairo devalued the Egyptian currency for years afterwards. By the time European explorers went looking, the city had been in decline for two centuries. Nobody in Europe knew that, because nobody had been there and come back.

In the 1820s, the French put up a prize: a small fortune for the first person to reach Timbuktu and return alive to describe it.

Two men went after it, and they could not have been less alike. Alexander Gordon Laing was a Scottish army officer who crossed the Sahara openly. René Caillié was the son of a convict, orphaned at eleven, self-taught and self-funded. He spent months learning Arabic, travelled alone and in disguise. One man never returned, and the other discovered something he could have never predicted. 

Charlie English joins Hugh to tell the story of both men. A writer and journalist, and formerly head of international news at the Guardian, Charlie left the paper to write The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu, which braids this nineteenth-century race together with a modern one - the librarians who smuggled the city's ancient manuscripts to safety during the jihadist occupation of 2012.

The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu by Charlie English is out now, published in the US as The Storied City.

Charlie and a group of academics are raising funds to support the Mohammed Tahar Library in Timbuktu. Search for the Mohammed Tahar Library Project on Patreon.

The Art of Adventure is brought to you by Arthur Beale, outfitters to sailors, adventurers, vagabonds and explorers for over 500 years.