Rene+Auguste+Caillie

=Rene Auguste Caillie was the 1st European to reach Timbuktu and return safely.=

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===The reading of //[|Robinson Crusoe]// kindled in him a love of travel and adventure, and at the age of sixteen he made a voyage to [|Senegal] from where he went to [|Guadeloupe]. Returning to Senegal in 1818 he made a journey to [|Bundu] to carry supplies to a British expedition then in that country. Ill with fever he was obliged to go back to France, but in 1824 was again in Senegal with the idea of reaching Timbuktu. The Paris based [|Société de Géographie] was offering a 10,000 franc reward to the first European to see and return alive from Timbuktu, believed to be a rich and wondrous city.===

===He spent eight months with the [|Brakna Moors] living north of the [|Senegal River], learning Arabic and being taught, as a convert, the laws and customs of [|Islam]. He laid his project of reaching Timbuktu before the governor of Senegal, but receiving no encouragement went to [|Sierra Leone] where the British authorities made him superintendent of an [|indigo] plantation. Having saved £80 he joined a [|Mandingo] caravan going inland. He was dressed as a Muslim, and gave out that he was an Arab from [|Egypt] who had been carried off by the French to Senegal and was desirous of regaining his own country.===

===Starting from Kakondy near [|Boké] on the [|Rio Nuñez] on April 19, 1827, he travelled east along the hills of [|Fouta Djallon], passing the head streams of the Senegal and crossing the [|Upper Niger] at [|Kurussa]. Still going east he came to the [|Kong highlands], where at a place called Time he was detained five months by illness. Resuming his journey in January 1828 he went north-east and reached the city of [|Djenné], from where he continued his journey to Timbuktu by water. After spending a fortnight (April 20 - May 4) in Timbuktu he joined a caravan crossing the [|Sahara] to [|Morocco], reaching [|Fez] on the August 12. From Tangier he returned to France.===

===Caillié was preceded at Timbuktu by a British officer, [|Major Gordon Laing], but Laing had been murdered in September 1826 on leaving the city and Caillié was the first to return alive. He was awarded the prize of 10,000 francs offered by the Société de Géographie to the first traveller who should gain exact information of Timbuktu, to be compared with that given by [|Mungo Park]. He also received the order of the [|Legion of Honor], a pension, and other distinctions, and it was at the public expense that his //Journal d'un voyage à Temboctou et à Jenné dans l'Afrique Centrale, etc.// (edited by [|Edmé-François Jomard]) was published in three volumes in 1830.===