Abu Bakr II's Atlantic Voyage: Mali's Lost Expedition (c. 1311)

Abu Bakr II’s Atlantic voyage is the story, told by Mansa Musa of Mali, of a predecessor who launched a great fleet into the Atlantic Ocean around 1311 and vanished, leaving Musa as ruler. Recorded by the Arab scholar al-Umari in Cairo in the 1330s or 1340s, it is one of the most intriguing accounts of medieval African exploration. In recent decades it has also become the basis of claims that Africans reached America before Columbus, claims for which there is no evidence.

Mali in the early 14th century

By 1300 the Mali Empire, founded by Sundiata Keita in the 13th century, stretched from the upper Niger to the Atlantic coast of what is now Senegal and the Gambia. It controlled rich goldfields and the trade routes across the Sahara, and its rulers, called mansa, were Muslims in contact with North Africa and Egypt.

Mali’s people were skilled in river transport. Large dugout canoes carried goods and people along the Niger and the Gambia. Atlantic seafaring, by contrast, is poorly documented for this region before the arrival of the Portuguese in the 15th century.

Medieval ideas about the Atlantic

In the 14th century nobody in Africa, Europe or Asia knew what lay across the Atlantic. Arab geographers called it al-Bahr al-Muhit, the Encircling Ocean, which they believed surrounded the inhabited world. It was also known as the Sea of Darkness, a place of fogs, storms and monsters, where ships rarely ventured far from land.

There were other reported attempts to explore it. The 12th-century geographer al-Idrisi told of a group of adventurers from Lisbon, known as the Maghrurin (“the deceived ones”), who sailed west into the ocean, reached islands and were eventually sent back to the mainland. In 1291 the Genoese brothers Vadino and Ugolino Vivaldi sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar hoping to reach India by sea, and were never heard of again.

The Mali story belongs to this world of curiosity and risk. It shows that the question of the ocean’s far shore was being asked in West Africa as well as in the Mediterranean, nearly two centuries before Columbus.

The source: al-Umari and Mansa Musa

In 1324 Mansa Musa passed through Cairo on his pilgrimage to Mecca. There he met Ibn Amir Hajib, an official who governed the district where the king stayed. Years later, Ibn Amir Hajib told the scholar and administrator Shihab al-Din al-Umari what he had learned from Musa.

Al-Umari included the account in his encyclopedia, Masalik al-absar fi mamalik al-amsar (“Paths of Vision into the Realms of the Kingdoms”), written around 1340. According to this report, Ibn Amir Hajib asked Musa how he had become king. Musa replied that the ruler before him did not believe that the ocean had no end and wished to find its far side.

The story of the voyage

In the account, the ruler first equipped 200 ships full of men and 200 more loaded with gold, water and provisions to last for years. He ordered them not to return until they had reached the end of the ocean or used up their supplies.

After a long time, only one ship came back. Its captain reported that the fleet had sailed on until they met what seemed like a river with a powerful current in the open sea. The other ships had gone ahead and not reappeared; he had turned back rather than follow them.

The ruler then prepared a much larger fleet, 2,000 ships, 1,000 for himself and his men and 1,000 for water and provisions. He left Musa as his deputy, set out on the ocean and never returned. Musa therefore became king.

Who was the voyaging king?

Al-Umari does not give the ruler’s name. The name “Abu Bakr II” was applied by modern writers, partly because the name Abu Bakr appears in Musa’s own family line. However, the historian Ibn Khaldun, writing later in the 14th century, gives a list of Mali’s kings in which Musa’s immediate predecessor was Muhammad ibn Qu.

Many historians therefore think the voyager, if he existed, was Muhammad ibn Qu. Some suggest that the story disguised a less flattering transfer of power, such as a deposition, but there is no evidence either way. The date of about 1311 follows from estimates that Musa began his reign around 1312.

The claim that he reached America

From the 1970s, some writers argued that the expedition landed in the Americas. The best known is the historian and linguist Ivan Van Sertima, whose book They Came Before Columbus (1976) proposed African contacts with ancient Mexico and elsewhere. The Malian writer Gaoussou Diawara also popularised the story of “Abubakari II” in Mali.

Proponents point to several kinds of evidence: the westward Atlantic currents, a report recorded on Columbus’s third voyage that people in the Caribbean spoke of black traders bringing spear-points of a gold alloy called guanín, and claimed resemblances in art and language. Some also cite the colossal Olmec heads of Mexico, which are in fact far older, dating from around 1200 to 400 BC.

Archaeologists and historians have not accepted these arguments. No Mande artefacts, inscriptions, skeletons or genetic traces from the 14th century have been found in the Americas. The guanín report is second-hand and can be explained by local metalworking, and the Olmec heads predate Mali by about two thousand years.

What can be said

The physical possibility is real. The Canary and North Equatorial currents and the north-east trade winds run from West Africa towards the Caribbean, and in 1952 the French doctor Alain Bombard crossed the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to Barbados in a small inflatable boat with a simple sail. A boat from West Africa might well have been carried west.

But possibility is not evidence. The voyage itself is known from a single report passed from Musa to Ibn Amir Hajib to al-Umari. Its large round numbers suggest exaggeration. If ships did sail, the likeliest outcome is that they were lost at sea. River craft built for the Niger and the Gambia would have faced storms, a lack of fresh water and months at sea, and even a fleet that survived would have had little chance of finding its way home against the winds and currents.

For comparison, the Norse in Vinland around AD 1000 are known from sagas and confirmed by archaeology at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. No equivalent evidence exists for Mali.

Timeline

• c. 1235: Sundiata Keita founds the Mali Empire.
• c. 1311: According to Musa’s account, his predecessor sails into the Atlantic and does not return.
• c. 1312: Mansa Musa becomes ruler of Mali.
• 1324: Mansa Musa visits Cairo on his pilgrimage and meets Ibn Amir Hajib.
• c. 1340: Al-Umari records the story in Masalik al-absar.
• 1492: Christopher Columbus crosses the Atlantic on his first voyage.
• 1976: Ivan Van Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus popularises the American-landing theory.

Why it matters

The story shows that a West African ruler of the early 14th century was, at least in memory, curious about what lay beyond the Atlantic, and that Mali’s kings told such stories to foreign courts. It is a genuine part of the historical record, but the claim that the fleet reached America remains speculation without evidence, and is best kept separate from what the sources actually say.