THE

MODERN ATHENIANS

THE EDINBURGH REVIEW

IN THE JEFFREY YEARS, 1802-1829

Mungo Park (1771-1806)

 

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.

Mungo Park Expedition

PARK arrived in June 1795 at the mouth of the river Gambia, and eventually set out on his quest with a small party of native servants.  After a month’s captivity near Jarra and the theft of his belongings, he proceeded alone.  On July 20, 1796, he reached the Niger, ‘the grand 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’ [Lloyd (1973), 40].  Turning back before reaching Timbuktu, he set off on the 500-mile trip back to the coast.  Robbed of his possessions, he was consoled by the ‘beauty of … moss’ [quoted in Lloyd (1973), 42].  Walking with a convoy of slaves, Park reached the coast in June 1797 and then returned to England via Antigua.  Park embarked on his second expedition in 1805, hoping to prove that the Niger flowed into the river Congo.  Despite the loss of over thirty of the white men accompanying him, he declared, ‘though I were myself half dead, I would still persevere; and if I could not succeed in the object of my journey, I should at least die on the Niger’ [quoted in Lloyd (1973), 55].  The story of his death on the river was relayed by Park’s native guide, Isacco, and supplemented by later explorers, who found a few relics from the second expedition.

K.W.