PARK was apprenticed to a Selkirk surgeon in his teens and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh.  In 1793, he travelled as a ship’s surgeon to Sumatra.  In 1795, the African Association sent him to Western Africa to try to trace the route of the river Niger, as yet unseen by Europeans.  Park reached the river in July 1796, confirming that it flowed east, not west, and after an arduous journey back to the coast, returned to London the following year.  His Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799) became an instant classic.  Acclaimed as a hero, Park returned to West Africa in 1805 on a larger-scale government-sponsored expedition.  Of the 38 white men accompanying him, only seven survived to reach the Niger.  After shooting a number of tribesmen during their canoe journey down the river, Park and his remaining companions died in a hostile encounter with natives near Bussa.  His posthumous Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa in the Year 1805 (1815) contains a second-hand account of his death.   Brougham’s review offers a tribute to Park, calling him ‘a martyr’: ‘We … bid a mournful farewell to that … illustrious man … In Mungo Park … the world has lost a great man’ [ER, 24:490].  Subsequent explorers, including Park’s son, tried to piece together the circumstances of his disappearance, amid sporadic speculations that he remained alive somewhere in Africa.

K.W.