At the age of 16 he left home and signed up as a member of the crew on a French naval vessel sailing to Saint-Louis on the coast of modern Senegal in western Africa.

He made a second visit to West Africa two years later when he accompanied a British expedition across the Ferlo Desert to Bakel on the Senegal River.

He persuaded the French governor in Saint-Louis to help finance a stay of 8 months with the nomadic people in the Brakna Region of southern Mauritania where he learned Arabic and the customs of Islam.

He worked for a few months in the British colony of Sierra Leone to save some money, then travelled by ship to Boké on the Rio Nuñez in modern Guinea.

[4][b] His father, François Caillé, had worked as a baker but four months before René was born he was accused of petty theft and sentenced to 12 years of hard labour in a penal colony at Rochefort.

The History of Robinson Crusoe, in particular, inflamed my young imagination : I was impatient to encounter adventures like him; nay, I already felt an ambition to signalize myself by some important discovery springing up in my heart.

The shipwreck received a large amount of publicity and was the subject of a famous oil painting, The Raft of the Medusa, by Théodore Géricault.

[13][15] There he learned that an English expedition led by Major William Gray was preparing to leave from the Gambia to explore the interior of the continent.

[18] He made a journey into the interior to the pre-colonial state of Bundu to carry supplies for a British expedition but he fell ill with fever and was obliged to return to France.

[22] The Paris-based Société de Géographie was offering a 9,000-franc reward to the first European to see and return alive from Timbuktu, believing it to be a rich and wondrous city.

[23][24][e] He spent eight months with the Brakna Moors living north of the Senegal River, learning Arabic and being taught, as a convert, the laws and customs of Islam.

He laid his project of reaching Timbuktu before the governor of Senegal, but receiving no encouragement went to Sierra Leone where the British authorities made him superintendent of an indigo plantation.

[27] Starting from Kakondy near Boké on the Rio Nuñez on 19 April 1827,[28] Caillié travelled east along the hills of Fouta Djallon, passing the head streams of the Senegal River and crossing the Upper Niger at Kurussa (now Kouroussa).

[35][36] Continuing eastwards he reached the Kong highlands, where at the village of Tiémé in present-day Ivory Coast, he was detained for five months (3 August 1827 – 9 January 1828) by illness.

Djenné lies 5 km (3.1 mi) north of the Bani River to which it is connected by a narrow channel that is only navigable in the wet season.

[42] At the busy port of Sa they were joined by 30 or 40 other vessels also heading for Timbuktu as travelling in a flotilla provided some degree of protection against bandits.

I saw in the streets of Timbuctoo only the camels, which had arrived from Cabra [Kabara] laden with the merchandise of the flotilla, a few groups of the inhabitants sitting on mats, conversing together, and Moors lying asleep in the shade before their doors.

[49] After spending a fortnight in Timbuktu, Caillié left the city on 4 May 1828 accompanying a caravan of 600 camels heading north across the Sahara Desert.

[f] After six days the caravan reached Araouane, a village 243 km (151 mi) north of Timbuktu that acted as an entrepôt in the trans-Sahara trade.

[64] However, Barth criticised Caillié's picture of Timbuktu showing detached houses "while, in reality, the streets are entirely shut in, as the dwellings form continuous and uninterrupted rows.

In a period when large-scale expeditions supported by soldiers and employing black porters were the norm, Caillié spent years learning Arabic, studying the customs and Islamic religion before setting off with a companion and later on his own, travelling and living as the natives did.