Ultimately he and his son, Fadl-Allah, fell in battle with the French; and the British, when they took over Bornu as the result of Colonel Morland’s victories, replaced as Sheikh or native ruler of that ancient kingdom the great-grandson of Muhammad-al-Amin-al-Kanemi, the man who so befriended Denham and Clapperton in 1822-4. The Fula power[120] is not extinct in Nigeria. Far from it. The more intelligent Fula princes and aristocracy now assist the British as great chiefs, and in minor administrative posts. The trade of Hausaland is reviving, and a considerable mining development (mainly tin) is going on in the hilly country of Bauchi. A railway now links up Kano with Lagos on the Gulf of Guinea, and a branch of this great trunk line turns southward into Bauchi and may some day reach the upper Benue; just as the Kano line will in the future, far or near, join the French Trans-Saharan line and carry passengers from the Central Sudan and the eastern Niger to the Mediterranean ports of French North Africa. An interest in the trading possibilities of the Central Sudan was evinced by the British Government early in the 19th century, quite apart from the Niger problem; and it was at the expense of Great Britain that expeditions set out from Tripoli across the Sahara Desert in 1818 and 1822 to discover Lake Chad. This move was partly occasioned by the successes of a remarkable man, Muhammad-al-Amin-al-Kanemi[121], who had become the virtual ruler of Bornu and had opened up relations with Tripoli. Clapperton, a member of the 1822-25 expedition, traversed Hausaland and reached the court of the Fula Emperor at Sokoto. Denham nearly lost his life in joining a Bornu army which went to attack the Fulas of Mandara. Another expedition sent out from Tripoli in 1849 under Consul Richardson was mainly carried through to its ultimate purposes by one of its members, a German, Dr Heinrich Barth, who reached Timbuktu on the west and the Upper Benue on the south-east. So that Great Britain laid the foundations of her future Nigerian Empire both from the direction of the Mediterranean and by ascending the Niger and Benue from the Gulf of Guinea. At one time British influence was so strong with the semi-independent Basha of Tripoli, that it seemed possible British protection might be accorded to this Barbary state, seeing that France in a similar manner had ignored equally valid Turkish claims to the suzerainty of Algiers. But the uprising of Muhammad Ali in Egypt awakened the Turks to the necessity of reinforcing their claims to Tripoli, and British projects in that direction were abandoned.