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Alexander Gordon Laing
Major Alexander Gordon Laing (27 December 179426 September 1826) was a Scottish explorer and the first European to reach Timbuktu, arriving there via the north-to-south route in August 1826. He was killed shortly after he departed Timbuktu, some five weeks later. Early life Laing was born in Edinburgh in late 1794. He was educated by his father, William Laing, who was a private teacher of classics, and at the University of Edinburgh. In 1811, he went to Barbados as clerk to his maternal uncle Colonel Gabriel Gordon. Military service Through General Sir George Beckwith, the governor of Barbados, he obtained an ensigncy in the York Light Infantry Volunteers in 1813. He was promoted lieutenant without purchase in 1815 and transferred to the 2nd West India Regiment after his former regiment was disbanded in 1817. In 1822 he transferred into the Royal African Colonial Corps as a captain. In that year, while with his regiment at Sierra Leone, he was sent by the governor Sir Charl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edinburgh
Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth. Edinburgh is Scotland's List of towns and cities in Scotland by population, second-most populous city, after Glasgow, and the List of cities in the United Kingdom, seventh-most populous city in the United Kingdom. Recognised as the capital of Scotland since at least the 15th century, Edinburgh is the seat of the Scottish Government, the Scottish Parliament and the Courts of Scotland, highest courts in Scotland. The city's Holyrood Palace, Palace of Holyroodhouse is the official residence of the Monarchy of the United Kingdom, British monarchy in Scotland. The city has long been a centre of education, particularly in the fields of medicine, Scots law, Scottish law, literature, philosophy, the sc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone,)]. officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country on the southwest coast of West Africa. It is bordered by Liberia to the southeast and Guinea surrounds the northern half of the nation. Covering a total area of , Sierra Leone has a tropical climate, with diverse environments ranging from savanna to rainforests. The country has a population of 7,092,113 as of the 2015 census. The capital and largest city is Freetown. The country is divided into five administrative regions, which are subdivided into Districts of Sierra Leone, 16 districts. Sierra Leone is a constitutional republic with a unicameral parliament and a directly elected executive president, president serving a five-year term with a maximum of two terms. The current president is Julius Maada Bio. Sierra Leone is a Secular state, secular nation with Constitution of Sierra Leone, the constitution providing for the separation of state and religion and freedom of conscience (which includes freedom of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tripoli, Libya
Tripoli (; ar, طرابلس الغرب, translit= Ṭarābulus al-Gharb , translation=Western Tripoli) is the capital and largest city of Libya, with a population of about 1.1 million people in 2019. It is located in the northwest of Libya on the edge of the desert, on a point of rocky land projecting into the Mediterranean Sea and forming a bay. It includes the port of Tripoli and the country's largest commercial and manufacturing center. It is also the site of the University of Tripoli. The vast barracks, which includes the former family estate of Muammar Gaddafi, is also located in the city. Colonel Gaddafi largely ruled the country from his residence in this barracks. Tripoli was founded in the 7th century BC by the Phoenicians, who gave it the Libyco-Berber name ( xpu, 𐤅𐤉𐤏𐤕, ) before passing into the hands of the Greek rulers of Cyrenaica as Oea ( grc-gre, Ὀία, ). Due to the city's long history, there are many sites of archeological signi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Bathurst, 3rd Earl Bathurst
Henry Bathurst, 3rd Earl Bathurst, (22 May 176227 July 1834) was a High Tory, High Church Pittite. He was an MP for thirty years before ennoblement. A personal friend of William Pitt the Younger, he became a broker of deals across cabinet factions during the Napoleonic era. After the Napoleonic Wars, Bathurst was on the conservative wing of the Tory party. Background and education Lord Bathurst was the elder son of Henry Bathurst, 2nd Earl Bathurst, by his wife Tryphena Scawen, daughter of Thomas Scawen. He was educated at Eton College from 1773 to 1778 and then up to Christ Church, Oxford. This college was considered the most academic at Oxford, and he went up with his closest companions at Eton William Wyndham Greville, Richard, Lord Wellesley and Canon Bathurst, his cousin. He matriculated at Christ Church on 22 April 1779, at the age of sixteen. In 1781, he decided to embark on a Grand Tour of Europe. Without taking a degree, Bathurst left Oxford for Germany, where he tra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
African Association
The Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa (commonly known as the African Association), founded in London on 9 June 1788, was a British club dedicated to the exploration of West Africa, with the mission of discovering the origin and course of the Niger River and the location of Timbuktu, the "lost city" of gold. The formation of this group was effectively the "beginning of the age of African exploration". Organized by a dozen titled members of London's upper-class establishment and led by Sir Joseph Banks, the African Association felt that it was the great failing of the Age of Enlightenment that, in a time when men could sail around the world, the geography of Africa remained almost entirely uncharted (leading to the now-offensive nickname, the "Dark Continent"). The Ancient Greeks and Romans knew more about the interior of Africa than did the British of the 18th century.Kryza p. 12. Motivated by desires for scientific knowledge and seeking oppo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph Banks
Sir Joseph Banks, 1st Baronet, (19 June 1820) was an English naturalist, botanist, and patron of the natural sciences. Banks made his name on the 1766 natural-history expedition to Newfoundland and Labrador. He took part in Captain James Cook's first great voyage (1768–1771), visiting Brazil, Tahiti, and after 6 months in New Zealand, Australia, returning to immediate fame. He held the position of president of the Royal Society for over 41 years. He advised King George III on the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and by sending botanists around the world to collect plants, he made Kew the world's leading botanical garden. He is credited for bringing 30,000 plant specimens home with him; amongst them, he was the first European to document 1,400. Banks advocated British settlement in New South Wales and the colonisation of Australia, as well as the establishment of Botany Bay as a place for the reception of convicts, and advised the British government on all Australian matte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plan Of Timbuctoo 1896
A plan is typically any diagram or list of steps with details of timing and resources, used to achieve an objective to do something. It is commonly understood as a temporal set of intended actions through which one expects to achieve a goal. For spatial or planar topologic or topographic sets see map. Plans can be formal or informal: * Structured and formal plans, used by multiple people, are more likely to occur in projects, diplomacy, careers, economic development, military campaigns, combat, sports, games, or in the conduct of other business. In most cases, the absence of a well-laid plan can have adverse effects: for example, a non-robust project plan can cost the organization time and money. * Informal or ad hoc plans are created by individuals in all of their pursuits. The most popular ways to describe plans are by their breadth, time frame, and specificity; however, these planning classifications are not independent of one another. For instance, there is a close rel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ashanti War
The Anglo-Ashanti wars were a series of five conflicts that took place between 1824 and 1900 between the Ashanti Empire—in the Akan interior of the Gold Coast—and the British Empire and its African allies. Though the Ashanti emerged victorious in some of these conflicts, the British ultimately prevailed in the fourth and fifth conflicts, resulting in the complete annexation of the Ashanti Empire by 1900. The wars were mainly due to Ashanti attempts to establish a stronghold over the coastal areas of present-day Ghana. Coastal peoples such as the Fante and the Ga came to rely on British protection against Ashanti incursions. Earlier wars The British fought three earlier wars in the Gold Coast: In the Ashanti-Fante War of 1806–07, the British refused to hand over two rebels pursued by the Ashanti, but eventually handed one over (the other escaped). In the Ga-Fante War of 1811, the Ashanti sought to aid their Ga allies in a war against the Fante and their British alli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Major
Major (commandant in certain jurisdictions) is a military rank of commissioned officer status, with corresponding ranks existing in many military forces throughout the world. When used unhyphenated and in conjunction with no other indicators, major is one rank above captain, and one rank below lieutenant colonel. It is considered the most junior of the field officer ranks. Background Majors are typically assigned as specialised executive or operations officers for battalion-sized units of 300 to 1,200 soldiers while in some nations, like Germany, majors are often in command of a company. When used in hyphenated or combined fashion, the term can also imply seniority at other levels of rank, including ''general-major'' or ''major general'', denoting a low-level general officer, and ''sergeant major'', denoting the most senior non-commissioned officer (NCO) of a military unit. The term ''major'' can also be used with a hyphen to denote the leader of a military band such as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Niger River
The Niger River ( ; ) is the main river of West Africa, extending about . Its drainage basin is in area. Its source is in the Guinea Highlands in south-eastern Guinea near the Sierra Leone border. It runs in a crescent shape through Mali, Niger, on the border with Benin and then through Nigeria, discharging through a massive delta, known as the Niger Delta (or the Oil Rivers), into the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean. The Niger is the third-longest river in Africa, exceeded by the Nile and the Congo River. Its main tributary is the Benue River. Etymology The Niger has different names in the different languages of the region: * Fula: ''Maayo Jaaliba'' * Manding: ''Jeliba'' or ''Joliba'' "great river" * Tuareg: ''Egerew n-Igerewen'' "river of rivers" * Songhay: ''Isa'' "the river" * Zarma: ''Isa Beeri'' "great river" * Hausa: ''Kwara'' *Nupe: ''Èdù'' * Yoruba: ''Ọya'' "named after the Yoruba goddess Ọya, who is believed to embody the ri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rokel River
The Rokel River (also Seli River; previously Pamoronkoh River) is the largest river in the Republic of Sierra Leone in West Africa. The river basin measures in size, with the drainage divided by the Gbengbe and Kabala hills and the Sula Mountains. The estuary which extends over an area of became a Ramsar wetland site of importance in 1999. Geography The Rokel rises in the high interior plateau of the Loma Mountains, in the Guinea Highlands of north central Sierra Leone, flows southwest about through hill ranges and, together with a smaller, parallel stream called Port Loko Creek, feeds into the Rokel estuary before entering the Atlantic Ocean. The estuary, after it joins the Bankasoka River, is also called the Sierra Leone River, is in length and has a width of . Freetown and Pepel are the two ports located on the shores of the estuary. As the estuary widens and joins the Atlantic its width is about . The southern shore is the deepest and forms a natural harbour, which is r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Solimana (state)
Solimana was a minor West African state of the nineteenth century with a capital at the fortress town of Falaba. Situated on rich slave-trading routes in what is now Sierra Leone, Solimana was visited in 1822 by Alexander Gordon Laing and in 1869 by William Winwood Reade, making it nominally British. In 1884, Mandinka conqueror Samori joined the king of Kaliere in attacking Solimana, then under the rule of Manga Sewa. After Samori's general N'fa Ali destroyed a number of surrounding villages, the Mandinka forces began a five-month siege of Falaba itself. With the city's residents starved nearly to death, Manga Sewa gathered his family in Falaba's gunpowder magazine and lit a torch, simultaneously killing himself and breaching Falaba's walls. The territory of Solimana was then briefly assimilated into Samori's Wassoulou Empire The Wassoulou Empire, sometimes referred to as the Mandinka Empire, was a short-lived (1878–1898) empire of West Africa built from the conques ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
%2C_scene_at_the_river_front.jpg "Click for more on -> Niger River")