On May 1, 1797, Joseph Banks wrote a note to his friend the French commissary in London that briefly outlined the state of the African Association. The business of sending “Travellers” to explore the interior regions of Africa was proving more difficult than he had hoped. “[We] have already Lost 3 well Qualified men,” he wrote, “without having much Elucidated the internal Geography of the Country, but [we] Still persevere.”
In truth, only two explorers had been definitively “Lost.” Lucas had set out shortly after Ledyard, leaving for Tripoli in August 1788, but a rebellion in southern Libya blocked his route south and he had returned safely without leaving the Mediterranean coast. Next came the indebted Irish soldier Daniel Houghton, who offered to try the interior from the Gambia, find the reputed city of “Tombuctoo,” then trace the unknown course of the Niger—all for the modest sum of £260. The association gladly accepted his proposal, and Houghton set out in 1790. On September 1 of the following year he wrote a note in pencil from Simbing, in the Sudanese kingdom of Ludamar, saying he was in good health, and was never heard from again.
There was a fourth traveler already in the field, however, who Banks very much hoped was now on his way back from “Tambuctoo.” This was the twenty-five-year-old Scotsman Mungo Park, who at that very moment was battling his way toward the West African coast after a two-year journey in which he had lost everything bar his beaver-skin hat. Unpromising as this sounds, Park’s mission would prove to be the African Association’s greatest success, laying down a new archetype of the heroic white-man-in-the-dark-continent against which later explorers would be measured. Park traveled through lands filled with murderous “Moors” and savage beasts, armed with little more than his British pluck, his unwavering faith, and a formidable constitution. Most important of all, he would come back alive.
The son of a prosperous farmer, Park trained as a surgeon, but it was botany that drew him to Banks’s attention. The Royal Society president arranged for him to travel to the Dutch East Indies to hunt for specimens, and he was hired by the African Association after returning with eight new descriptions of Sumatran fish. He was brave and persistent, even after being told of Houghton’s disappearance: “I knew that I was able to bear fatigue,” he wrote, “and I relied on my youth and the strength of my constitution to preserve me from the effects of the climate.”
He sailed from Portsmouth on May 22, 1795, carrying a letter of credit for £200 and instructions “to pass on to the river Niger, when arrived in Africa, … ascertain the course, and, if possible, the rise and termination of that river,” then use his “utmost exertions” to visit the principal towns or cities in its neighborhood, in particular “Timbuctoo and Houssa”—although Houssa, or Hausa, was not a town but a people. With those tasks complete, Park could return by any route of his choosing.
On June 21, the little trading brig carrying him reached the mouth of the Gambia, then began to work its way slowly upriver to the community of European traders at Jonkakonda, where it would deliver mail and take on goods of beeswax and ivory. Park was invited to stay sixteen miles farther east, at the village of Pisania, with an English contact of Beaufoy’s, the slaver John Laidley. There he settled down to learn Manding and gather any information he could about what lay ahead. After three weeks he was hit by his first attack of malaria and became delirious, and for much of August and September he was confined to the house, whiling away the “tedious hours” listening to the horrible sounds of the strange world into which he was about to venture:
The night is spent by the terrified traveller in listening to the croaking of frogs (of which the numbers are beyond imagination), the shrill cry of the jackal, and the deep howling of the hyæna; a dismal concert, interrupted only by the roar of such tremendous thunder as no person can form a conception of but those who have heard it.
Lesser spirits would have given up there, but Park always demonstrated phenomenal drive, and by early December, when the rains had given way to hot sunshine and the river had dropped, he felt well enough to set out. He left Pisania in the company of a freedman named Johnson, who had once been transported to Jamaica and England, and one of Laidley’s house slaves, Demba, who was promised liberty if the explorer returned alive. Park had a horse; a small assortment of beads, amber, and tobacco to barter; an umbrella; and his beaver-skin hat. At one p.m. on December 3, 1795, he took leave of his European companions and rode out into the African woods. By now, his excitement at the idea of becoming a “Traveller” had given way to dangerous reality, much as it had for Ledyard, and he was in a gloomy and introspective mood:
I had now before me a boundless forest, and a country, the inhabitants of which were strangers to civilized life, and to most of whom a white man was the object of curiosity or plunder. I reflected that I had parted from the last European I might probably behold, and perhaps quitted for ever the comforts of Christian society.
Park’s despondency didn’t last long. By February he had traveled three hundred miles inland, reaching the state of Kaarta, where he was well received by the king, Daisy Koorabarri. To avoid the imminent outbreak of war between Daisy and his neighbor Mansong Diarra, the king of Bambara, the explorer turned north toward Ludamar, the land in which Houghton had disappeared. This territory, located near the modern Mali–Mauritania border, was inhabited by “Moors,” the blanket European description for North African Muslims of Berber or Arab origin, and Park’s experiences there would mark him for the rest of his life.
In his first days in Ludamar he at least learned what had become of Houghton. The Irish soldier had paid some Moorish merchants to guide him toward Timbuktu, Park was told, but after two days he became suspicious of their intentions and insisted on turning back, whereupon the merchants robbed him and went off, leaving him without food or water. After walking for several days Houghton reached a well, but the people he encountered there refused to give him any food. “Whether he actually perished of hunger, or was murdered outright by the savage Mahomedans, is not certainly known,” Park recorded. The soldier’s body was dragged into the woods, and Park was shown the very spot where it had been left to perish.
This macabre story did not dissuade Park from proceeding deeper into Ludamar, and neither did Johnson’s declaration that he would relinquish every claim to reward rather than go one step farther. Park gave him copies of his papers to take back to the Gambia and continued with Demba, but they were increasingly harassed by the people of the territory, who tried to provoke the explorer by hissing and shouting at him and spitting in his face, and telling him that as a Christian his property was their lawful plunder. On March 7, a group of them entered the hut where he was staying and arrested him. They took him to Benowm, to the camp of Ali, the country’s ruler—a “tyrannical and cruel” man, according to Park. Ali imprisoned the traveler and as an added insult tethered a pig outside the hut where he was held. Ali’s camp followers—“the rudest savages on earth,” in Park’s view—then tormented both the unclean animal and the Christian from sunrise to sunset:
The rudeness, ferocity, and fanaticism, which distinguish the Moors from the rest of mankind, found here a proper subject whereupon to exercise their propensities. I was a stranger, I was unprotected, and I was a Christian; each of these circumstances is sufficient to drive every spark of humanity from the heart of a Moor; but when all of them, as in my case, were combined in the same person, and a suspicion prevailed withal, that I had come as a spy into the country, the reader will easily imagine that, in such a situation, I had everything to fear.
Arguably, given the future behavior of Europeans in Africa, Park was a spy, though Banks would have said his journey was being made for the purer motive of increasing human knowledge. In any event, this was the worst period in the young man’s life, and it would haunt his dreams for years to come. While suffering bouts of malaria, he was variously told that he would be put to death or have his hand chopped off and his eyes put out, and was subjected to a mock execution. He was deprived of food and, as the hot season arrived and water became scarce, was reduced to drinking from a cattle trough, since the Muslims feared his Christian lips would poison their drinking vessels. If it wasn’t clear to him already, in April, a sharif—a man who claimed direct descent from the Prophet—arrived in the camp and explained the desert tribes’ attitude to Christians. The sharif had spent a number of years living in Timbuktu and asked if Park intended to travel there. When Park replied that he did, the man “shook his head, and said, it would not do; for that Christians were looked upon there as the devil’s children, and enemies to the Prophet.”
The sharif evidently took pity on the young Scot, however, and told him where the legendary city was. To reach it, he would first have to go to Walata, ten days hence, and Timbuktu was eleven days beyond that. Park asked again and again in which direction the city lay, and the sharif always gestured to the southeast, never varying the direction by more than half a point.
In late June 1796, after three months in captivity, Park managed to escape, though he had to leave behind Demba, who had been taken into Ali’s army of slaves. He traveled through the savanna, dodging groups of “Moors,” and approached the Niger near the Bambara capital of Segu. On July 20 he was told by his traveling companions that he should see the great river itself the following day. He was too excited to sleep and saddled his horse before daylight, but the gates of the village where he was staying were kept closed at night to keep out lions, and he waited impatiently for dawn. Finally the gates were opened, and after two hours’ travel he set eyes on his prize:
As I was anxiously looking around for the river, one of [my companions] called out, “geo affili” (see the water), and looking forwards, I saw with infinite pleasure the great object of my mission—the long sought for majestic Niger, glittering to the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing slowly to the eastward.
He had become the first European explorer to set eyes on a river whose existence had been the source of speculation since the time of Herodotus. He was not surprised to find that it flowed toward the rising sun—in the direction opposite to that the African Association’s scholars believed—since he had been told as much by many of the people he met. As for its outlet: even the merchants who traveled on it did not appear to know where it reached the sea, but said only that they believed it ran “to the end of the world.”
He hurried to the river’s edge, drank some of its water, then lifted his fervent thanks in prayer to God for having crowned his endeavors with success.
On the far bank was Segu, the great capital of the Bambara nation, which formed a prospect of “civilization and magnificence” of a sort Park had not expected to find in Africa. Word of his arrival was passed to the Bambara king, but Mansong was suspicious of Park and refused him entry, so the explorer sought shelter in a nearby village. All day he waited beneath a tree, the traditional place for strangers to sit until a host came forward, but the people of the village looked on him with astonishment and fear and refused to take him in. By dusk he was hungry and worried: the wind was rising, rain threatened, and the many wild beasts in the area meant he would have to try to sleep in the tree’s branches. At last a woman returning from her work in the fields took him in, giving him water, a very fine fish for supper, and a mat to sleep on, and while he rested, the girls in the family spun cotton and sang a sweet and plaintive song in his honor that he was moved to record:
The winds roared, and the rains fell.
The poor white man, faint and weary,
Came and sat under our tree.
He has no mother to bring him milk;
No wife to grind his corn.
Chorus:
Let us pity the white man;
No mother has he.
Perhaps because of what he had suffered in Ali’s camp, Park was deeply affected by this act of compassion. After six months of threat and anxiety, the generosity of this stranger unleashed a powerful emotion. “The circumstance, was affecting in the highest degree,” he noted, through a less-than-stiff upper lip. “I was oppressed by such unexpected kindness; and sleep fled from my eyes.” It was one of many acts of charity he was shown in West Africa, and typical of his treatment by women. “I do not recollect a single instance of hardheartedness toward me in the women,” he recalled. “In all my wanderings and wretchedness, I found them uniformly kind and compassionate.”
When the Bambara girls’ words reached Britain, they became a subject of curiosity and delight. They were “simple and pathetic sentiments,” some said, but they demonstrated that these pagans could exhibit a humanity that many believed to be the exclusive preserve of Christians. The author and political activist Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, was moved to rework them into a rhyming poem, which she had set to music:
Go, White Man, go; but with thee bear
The Negro’s wish, the Negro’s prayer,
Remembrance of the Negro’s care.
In the morning, Park gave his hostess the only things of value he still possessed: two brass buttons from his waistcoat.
PARK REFERRED NOW to his plain but demanding instructions. He had achieved one of the African Association’s principal objectives: finding the Niger and determining its direction. What remained—apart from the impossible request that he also discover the river’s source and its termination—was the task of using his “utmost exertions” to visit the towns along it, especially Timbuktu. It was this goal that Park now set out to achieve. He followed the river’s course for a hundred miles northeast, reaching Silla at the end of July. There, the strain of his exertions finally overtook him. He was “worn down by sickness, exhausted by hunger and fatigue, half naked, and without any article of value by which I might procure provisions, clothes, or lodging.” Above all he recognized that he was heading deeper into the territory of those “merciless fanatics,” the Moors. Fearing that if he was killed his discoveries would die with him, he decided to turn back, but first he would wring from the traders of Silla all the information he could about Timbuktu, “the great object of European research,” which he was told lay farther to the northeast. Park’s questions doubtless focused on his persecutors, and he was duly told the city was filled with Muslims who were “more severe and intolerant in their principles than any other of the Moorish tribes in this part of Africa.” One old black man related how, on his first visit to Timbuktu, the landlord at his lodging house had spread a mat on the floor and laid a rope on it, saying: “If you are a Mussulman you are my friend, sit down; but if you are a Kafir, you are my slave, and with this rope I will lead you to market.”
If anyone could overcome these difficulties, however, the rewards would be great, since Park’s inquiries about the city’s wealth seemed to confirm the rumors:
The present king of Timbuctoo is named Abu Abrahima; he is reported to possess immense riches. His wives and concubines are said to be clothed in silk, and the chief officers of state live in considerable splendour. The whole expense of his government is defrayed, as I was told, by a tax upon merchandise, which is collected at the gates of the city.
His researches complete, the weary Park turned for home. He followed the Niger southwest to Bamako, then little more than a village, where he left the broad river to strike west to the coast. It was the rainy season and traveling was difficult: three times he had to swim streams in spate, pushing his horse ahead of him, with his journal tucked in the crown of his hat. A short distance from Bamako, robbers stripped him of what little he had left, returning only his worst shirt and a pair of trousers, but he refused to despair, and the headman of the next village ordered an attendant to find and recover his clothes and his horse. Park gave him the emaciated animal as thanks, before struggling on to the small town of Kamalia. By now he was in a dangerous condition: feverish, with an injured ankle that meant he could only hobble, and no food or items for barter. It was five hundred more miles to Pisania, and his route would soon take him through the gloomy wilds of Jallonkadoo, where there were further dangerous rivers to cross and no shelter for five days. “I had almost marked out the place where I was doomed … to perish,” he wrote.
In Kamalia, Park was lucky to stumble upon another exemplary act of hospitality.
He saw a group of people listening to a man reading from an Arabic text. The reader, a slave trader named Karfa Taura, noticed Park and asked with a smile if he understood what was written in the book. Park didn’t read Arabic, so Taura asked one of his companions to fetch a little volume that had been brought from the west. When Park opened it, he found it was The Book of Common Prayer. Both men were overjoyed by this moment—Taura by the fact that this ragged stranger could read the English words no one else could understand; Park by the discovery of a Christian text in English in West Africa—and an immediate bond was established. Taura offered to put Park up for free until the rainy season was over, and said he would then escort him to the Gambia with the party of slaves he was taking to the coast. Park accepted. Three days later he fell so severely ill he couldn’t walk, and he remained at Kamalia for the next seven months, making notes about the life in the town as he recovered. It was during this time that he became the first European to record how manuscripts were used in the West African interior.
When Taura went away on business, he left Park in the care of a Muslim teacher named Fankooma, who owned a large number of manuscripts. Park had been shown similar documents at other places during his travels, but now he had time to discuss them in detail:
Interrogating the schoolmaster on the subject, I discovered that the Negroes are in possession (among others) of an Arabic version of the Pentateuch of Moses [the first five books of the Old Testament], which they call Tauret la Moosa [the Torah of Moses]. This is so highly esteemed that it is often sold for the value of one prime slave.
The Sudanese also had copies of the Psalms and the Book of Isaiah, which were held in very high esteem, and Park discovered that many people in Kamalia knew the Old Testament stories, including those of Adam and Eve; the death of Abel; Noah’s flood; the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the story of Joseph and his brethren; and the histories of Moses, David, and Solomon. He was surprised to find a number of people who could relate these stories to him in Manding, and they were shocked to discover that he knew them too.
Fankooma used his manuscripts to teach the seventeen boys and two girls in his school. The boys were educated in the mornings and evenings and performed domestic duties for their master during the day, which was when he taught the girls. The pupils learned to read the Kuran and say a number of prayers, and when they were ready, a feast was prepared and the student sat an exam, or “[took] out his degree,” as Park put it. The explorer attended three of these ceremonies, listening with pleasure to the “distinct and intelligent answers” each of the students gave. When the examiners were satisfied, the last page of the Kuran was put into the student’s hand, and he or she was asked to read it aloud. Finally, all the scholars rose, shook each student by the hand and bestowed on each the title of “Bushreen,” or scholar.
The boys’ parents paid the schoolmaster with a slave or the equivalent price on their children’s graduation. (Park did not say whether the same was true for the girls.) This was always done, Park noted, if the parents could afford it; otherwise the boy would remain the domestic slave of the schoolmaster until he could collect sufficient goods to ransom himself. Although they were given an Islamic education, Park noted that most of Fankooma’s pupils were not Muslims, and their parents’ aim in putting them into school was solely their child’s improvement. Kamalia was far from unusual in having a school. He had noticed that “encouragement … was thus given to learning (such as it is) in many parts of Africa.”
After making these observations on a working eighteenth-century African education system, Park left Kamalia in April 1797. He traveled with Taura’s caravan of thirty-five slaves, some of whom had been kept in irons for years and could scarcely walk, but were now bound for a miserable life in the Americas or a terrible death on the middle passage. It took two months to cover the “tedious and toilsome” miles. As they approached Pisania, Park met an English-speaking woman who had known him before he set out but who now mistook him for a Muslim. When he told her who he was, she looked at him “with great astonishment, and seemed unwilling to give credit to the testimony of her senses.” The Gambia traders had been told long before that Park had been murdered in Ludamar, and had never expected to see him again.
PARK REACHED FALMOUTH just before Christmas 1797, after an absence from England of two years and seven months. Britain was thrilled with his discoveries, none more so than the members of the African Association, who had something to celebrate at last. Beaufoy had died in 1795, so the traveler worked up an account of his expedition with the association’s new secretary, Bryan Edwards. Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, which included new maps drawn by the noted cartographer James Rennell, was published in 1799. It was a gripping real-life adventure story, in which Park gave European readers their first proper account of the Sudan and its people, and it quickly became a bestseller. Timbuktu and the Niger were the talk of Europe.
The African Association had grown hugely in the decade since its founding. On May 25, 1799, its members met at the Star and Garter in Pall Mall, where Banks congratulated the assembly on Park’s book, “which has been so well received by the public.” While Lucas and Houghton had not been well chosen, Park had shown “Strength to make exertions, Constitution to endure fatigue, and Temper to bear insults with Patience, Courage to undertake hazardous enterprises where practicable, and judgement to set limits to his exertions when his difficulties were likely to become insurmountable.”
Europe’s attitude to Africa had changed in the decade since the Saturday’s Club had created the association. Britain and France were in the middle of a long series of wars, and Napoleon had seized Egypt to try to threaten the Suez Canal and British trade in India. One corner of the African continent, at least, had a strategic value, and Banks, who always worked to promote the nation’s interests, now talked frankly of exploiting Park’s new information for profit, and by military means. Park had opened “a Gate into the interior of Africa,” Banks said, through which “every Nation” could enter and extend its commerce. “A Detachment of 500 chosen Troops would soon make that Road easy, and would build Embarkations upon the [Niger]—if 200 of these were to embark with Field pieces they would be able to overcome the whole Forces which Africa could bring against them.” With European technology, the “ignorant Savages” of the interior could be taught how better to pan for their gold, and the value of the annual return, which he estimated to be currently worth a million pounds sterling, would likely be increased a hundredfold.
The meeting drew up a memorandum to the Committee of the Privy Council for Trade and Plantations, setting out an unabashed colonialist agenda. They advised that “the first step of Government must be to secure to the British throne, either by Conquest or by Treaty, the whole of the Coast of Africa from Arguin to Sierra Leone; or at least to procure the cession of the River Senegal.”
Park married that year and moved back to Scotland to work as a doctor, but the work didn’t suit him and he was soon longing to return to Africa. He told the novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott that he was troubled by a nervous disorder that meant he would awake suddenly in the night and believe he was still a prisoner in Ali’s tent in Ludamar. When Scott expressed surprise that he should still want to return to the continent, Park answered that “he would rather brave Africa and all its horrors than wear out his life in long and toilsome rides over the hills of Scotland, for which the remuneration was hardly enough to keep soul and body together.”
By the winter of 1803–1804, increasingly alarmed by French claims on West Africa, the War and Colonial Office was seriously discussing sending a military force to capture Timbuktu. In the end it was agreed that the African Association’s most successful traveler should be sent back with a small detachment of soldiers. This second Park expedition sailed from England on January 30, 1805, charged with following the course of the Niger “to the utmost possible distance to which it can be traced.”
If the key to the success of his first journey was its unthreatening nature—bolstered by the kindness of Park’s hosts, dollops of good luck, and immense personal fortitude—the second expedition was designed to fight. Park went with a captain’s commission, a £5,000 salary, £5,000 for expenses, and a party of forty-five, including a company of soldiers, sailors, and carpenters, his brother-in-law Alexander Anderson, and a friend from Selkirk, George Scott. The soldiers were recruited from Goree, an island off the coast of Senegal that had recently been captured from the French, so they were partially acclimatized to West Africa, but disease still killed them quickly in the interior. By the time they reached Bamako, thirty-one of the Europeans had died. But the stakes were higher than ever for Park, and he pressed on. He reached Sansanding in October, where he built a forty-foot sailing boat he christened His Majesty’s Schooner Joliba, the Manding name for the Niger. He hired a guide, Amadi Fatoumi, and bought three slave boatmen to help work it, but by the time they were ready to leave Sansanding there were only five Europeans left, and Anderson and Scott were both dead.
The survivors must have known by now that they were unlikely to escape the interior alive, and at least one of the soldiers was deranged. Even so, Park would not be swayed from his course. He informed London in his last dispatch that he had “the fixed resolution to discover the termination of the Niger or perish in the attempt,” adding that if he did lose his life, at least he would die on the river. HMS Joliba set sail in November 1805, and Park was never heard from again.
It took the British government six years to work out what had happened. In 1811, one of Park’s former guides tracked down Fatoumi, who had written his own account in Arabic of the expedition’s last days. The Joliba had sailed downriver for 1,500 miles, with Park, still haunted by his experience of “Moors,” electing not to land until they reached the coast. Whenever they encountered a threat they shot their way through it, and as reports of the Christians’ aggression spread, so did resistance to their progress. Fatoumi’s bald account of the Joliba’s passing of Timbuktu only hints at the last days of the disease-raddled crew as they teetered on the brink of madness:
[We] came to [Kabara]; on my passing there, three canoes came again to oppose our passage, we repulsed them by force as before; came to [Timbuktu]; on passing there we were again assailed by three other canoes, which we repulsed; passed [Gourma], after passing seven canoes [came] after us, which we likewise repulsed; we lost one white man, of sickness; there were then in [the Joliba] only four white men, myself, and three slaves we had bought, making eight hands; each of us had 15 musquets apiece, well loaded, and always ready for action … [Sixty] canoes came after us, which we repulsed after killing many of the natives, which we had done in all our former engagements.
In this last action one of the few surviving soldiers, Lieutenant John Martyn, was in such a savage bloodlust and had needlessly shot so many that Fatoumi took hold of his hands and tried to restrain him. “We have killed enough,” he told Martyn. “Let us cease firing!” The soldier turned his anger on the guide, but Park intervened to save him.
By a phenomenal effort of will, the bloodied boat reached Yelwa, in modern Nigeria, early in 1806, where Fatoumi left them. They were just five hundred miles from the Oil Rivers delta, where the Niger empties into the Gulf of Guinea, but they would not get much farther. Just above the steep rapids of Bussa, they were attacked from the shore. The boat ran aground, and Park and the three remaining Europeans jumped into the river, where they all drowned.
BY 1820 THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT had increasingly taken on the African Association’s role of exploring the continent. The association’s membership had dwindled along with its influence, from seventy-five in 1810 to forty-six by 1819. It had filled in many of the gaps on the maps of Africa and created a new model for exploration that would be built on by the geographical societies that were about to spring up all over the world. The association’s findings had been won at some cost, however, as every one of its “travellers,” apart from Simon Lucas, had died abroad. The young German Friedrich Hornemann reached Fezzan disguised as a Muslim in 1799 and sent back the intelligence that “Tombuctoo certainly is the most remarkable and principal town in the interior of Africa,” before disappearing. Twenty years later a report reached Britain that he had died in 1801 in what is now Nigeria. Henry Nicholls was dispatched from the Gulf of Guinea in 1804 to find the termination of the Niger, without realizing that the object of his search was the very spot from where he had set out. He died in 1805, probably of malaria. In 1809 the association dispatched Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who wandered the Middle East for nine years, learning Arabic and rediscovering the city of Petra, which had been lost for a thousand years, and the great temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel, which had been buried by sand. As he finally readied himself to set out for the Sudan late in 1817, he contracted dysentery and died.
Banks was an old man by this time. He was fat and gouty and spent his waking hours in a wheelchair, though he continued to preside over the Royal Society until his death, which came on June 19, 1820. It would be another six years before a European explorer finally attained Timbuktu.