‘Timbuktu’ Tribute To Author’s Friend
“To Timbuktu” By Mark Jenkins (Morrow, 224 pages, $25)
Some fine adventure/travel books have been written in recent years by writers who have set themselves an audacious or quixotic quest. Paul Theroux hopped on a train in Boston and kept traveling south until he reached the tip of South America; the result was “The Old Patagonian Express.” Rory Nugent penetrated the most primordial African jungle in search of a legendary dinosaur, and came up with “Drums Along the Congo.”
Following in this tradition is “To Timbuktu,” Mark Jenkins’s account of his 1991 attempt with three other Americans to find the headwaters of the Niger River and to travel its 2,600 miles to the Atlantic Ocean by kayak.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Niger - its course and direction, and the supposed riches of the near-mythical city of Timbuktu situated on its banks - was a puzzle that exercised nearly as much power over the imaginations of Europeans as did the Nile.
In part charmed by this mystique, and in part attracted by the high-risk adventure of finding and traveling its still-unexplored headwaters, Jenkins and his friend Mike Moe decided to make the Niger their latest adventure. They brought along two other friends - John Haines and Rick Smith - who, in the end, became the first men to run the Niger River from source to sea.
“To Timbuktu” is not about that, however; the plodding singlemindedness needed for such a feat is not a value highly regarded by the author. Jenkins and Moe, in fact, abandoned the river a mere 250 miles or so from their starting point. Boredom with the river, which by that point had become a wide waterway clogged with commercial traffic, sent the two adventurers home to Wyoming. But not before Jenkins completed his pilgrimage by motorcycle and ferry to Timbuktu (which, contrary to legend, is a sleepy backwater town).
The aborted trip seems to have provided Jenkins with so little material that he’s forced to plump up his tale with an account of an earlier trip with Moe to Africa, and a history of West African exploration in the 18th and 19th centuries, both of which are interwoven with the main narrative.
It doesn’t take long for the reader to understand that he is in the hands of an immature observer, someone less interested in the country he is passing through than in his own experience as a traveler. Jenkins is not the writer to illuminate the dark continent; he is an adventurer - “misadventurer” might be more to the point - and he writes far more about what he feels than what he sees. “We weren’t really explorers and we knew it,” he writes. “We were never really searching for anything more than ourselves.”
Still, Jenkins is an intrepid traveler and an honest writer, and those qualities cover many a sin. Despite his abbreviated stay on the river, he makes the most of the experiences he did have. Whether it be hiking into war-torn Sierra Leone to find a tiny trickle that he is assured is the source of the Niger or paddling madly away from a charging hippo “the size of a garbage truck,” Jenkins is an entertaining narrator when he wants to be.
The book is also a poignant testimonial to a friendship, and it is perhaps this quality that most overcomes its weaknesses as travel writing. The aborted trip down the Niger turned out to be the last adventure that Moe and Jenkins shared. Moe died with three other friends in 1995 on a trip across Baffin Island. “To Timbuktu” is at bottom the author’s touching tribute to his friend and to the adventurous spirit they shared.