Mansa Abu Bakr II

"Mansa Abu Bakr II" is one of history's most evocative names — the Mali sovereign said to have sailed west into the Atlantic and never returned. Yet careful scholarship has shown the name itself to be an error. No mansa called Abu Bakr II ever reigned; the figure entered European lists through Baron de Slane's nineteenth-century mistranslation of the historian Ibn Khaldun, who had named Abu Bakr only as an ancestor of Musa's line, not as a king.

The deed behind the legend is real in the record. In 1324, during his pilgrimage to Cairo, Mansa Musa told Egyptian officials that his predecessor had refused to believe the ocean had no far shore. That ruler dispatched a first fleet of ships; only one returned, its captain describing a great current that swallowed the others. Undeterred, the mansa himself led a second, vast fleet down the Senegal River and westward into the Atlantic around 1311. He did not come back, and Musa inherited the throne in 1312.

The account survives solely in al-Umari's encyclopedic Masalik al-absar, whose Mali chapter dates to about 1337–1338. According to Ibn Khaldun, Musa's true predecessor was Muhammad ibn Qu, and it is he — not the phantom "Abu Bakr II" — whom historians now identify as the voyager. No uncontested evidence of a pre-Columbian African crossing to the Americas has been found.

Whatever his true name, a ruler of Mali chose the unknown horizon over a secure crown, and the sea has kept his silence with honor.