MUNGO PARK AND THE NIGER
Bruce died in the spring of 1794. Just a year later another Scotsman,
Mungo Park, from Selkirk, started off to explore the great river
Niger--whose course was as mysterious as that of the Nile. Most of
the early geographers knew something of a great river running through
Negroland. Indeed, Herodotus tells of five young men, the Nasamones,
who set out to explore the very heart of Africa. Arrived at the edge
of the great sandy desert, they collected provisions and supplied
themselves with water and plunged courageously into the unknown. For
weary days they made their way across to the south, till they were
rewarded by finding themselves in a fertile land well watered by lakes
and marshes, with fruit trees and a little race of men and women whom
they called pigmies.
And a large river was flowing from west to east--probably the Niger.
But the days of Herodotus are long since past. It was centuries later
when the Arabs, fiery with the faith of Mohammed, swept over the
unexplored lands. "With a fiery enthusiasm that nothing could
withstand, and inspired by a hope of heaven which nothing could shake,
they swept from district to district, from tribe to tribe," everywhere
proclaiming to roving multitudes the faith of their master. In this
spirit they had faced the terrors of the Sahara Desert, and in the
tenth century reached the land of the negroes, found the Niger, and
established schools and mosques westward of Timbuktu.
Portugal had then begun to play her part, and the fifteenth century
is full of the wonderful voyages inspired by Prince Henry of Portugal,
which culminated in the triumph of Vasco da Gama's great voyage to
India by the Cape of Good Hope.
Then the slave trade drew the Elizabethan Englishmen to the shores
of West Africa, and the coast was studded with forts and stations in
connection with it. Yet in the eighteenth century the Niger and
Timbuktu were still a mystery.
In 1778 the African Association was founded, with our old friend Sir
Joseph Banks as an active member inquiring for a suitable man to follow
up the work of the explorer Houghton, who had just perished in the
desert on his way to Timbuktu.
The opportunity produced the man. Mungo Park, a young Scotsman, bitten
with the fever of unrest, had just returned from a voyage to the East
on board an East India Company's ship. He heard of this new venture,
and applied for it. The African Association instantly accepted his
services, and on 22nd May 1795, Mungo Park left England on board the
_Endeavour_, and after a pleasant voyage of thirty days landed at the
mouth of the river Gambia. The river is navigable for four hundred
miles from its mouth, and Park sailed up to a native town, where the
_Endeavour_ was anchored, while he set out on horseback for a little
village, Pisania, where a few British subjects traded in slaves, ivory,
and gold. Here he stayed a while, to learn the language of the country.
Fever delayed him till the end of November, when the rains were over,
the native crops had been reaped, and food was cheap and plentiful.
On 3rd December he made a start, his sole attendants being a negro
servant, Johnson, and a slave boy. Mungo Park was mounted on a strong,
spirited little horse, his attendants on donkeys. He had provisions
for two days, beads, amber, and tobacco for buying fresh food, an
umbrella, a compass, a thermometer and pocket sextant, some pistols
and firearms, and "thus attended, thus provided, thus armed, Mungo
Park started for the heart of Africa."
[Illustration: MUNGO PARK. From the engraving in Park's _Travels into
the Interior of Africa_, 1799.]
Three days' travelling brought him to Medina, where he found the old
king sitting on a bullock's hide, warming himself before a large fire.
He begged the English explorer to turn back and not to travel into
the interior, for the people there had never seen a white man and would
most certainly destroy him. Mungo Park was not so easily deterred,
and taking farewell of the good old king, he took a guide and proceeded
on his way.
A day's journey brought him to a village where a curious custom
prevailed. Hanging on a tree, he found a sort of masquerading dress
made out of bark. He discovered that it belonged to a strange bugbear
known to all the natives of the neighbourhood as Mumbo Jumbo. The
natives or Kafirs of this part had many wives, with the result that
family quarrels often took place. If a husband was offended by his
wife he disappeared into the woods, disguised himself in the dress
of Mumbo Jumbo, and, armed with the rod of authority, announced his
advent by loud and dismal screams near the town. All hurried to the
accepted meeting-place, for none dare disobey. The meeting opened with
song and dance till midnight, when Mumbo Jumbo announced the offending
wife. The unlucky victim was then seized, stripped, tied to a post,
and beaten with Mumbo's rod amid the shouts of the assembled company.
A few days before Christmas, Park entered Fatticonda--the place where
Major Houghton had been robbed and badly used. He therefore took some
amber, tobacco, and an umbrella as gifts to the king, taking care to
put on his best blue coat, lest it should be stolen. The king was
delighted with his gifts; he furled and unfurled his umbrella to the
great admiration of his attendants. "The king then praised my blue
coat," says Park, "of which the yellow buttons seemed particularly
to catch his fancy, and entreated me to give it to him, assuring me
that he would wear it on all public occasions. As it was against my
interests to offend him by a refusal, I very quietly took off my
coat--the only good one in my possession--and laid it at his feet."
Then without his coat and umbrella, but in peace, Park travelled onward
to the dangerous district which was so invested with robbers that the
little party had to travel by night. The howling of wild beasts alone
broke the awful silence as they crept forth by moonlight on their way.
But the news that a white man was travelling through their land spread,
and he was surrounded by a party of horsemen, who robbed him of nearly
all his possessions. His attendant Johnson urged him to return, for
certain death awaited him. But Park was not the man to turn back, and
he was soon rewarded by finding the king's nephew, who conducted him
in safety to the banks of the Senegal River.
Then he travelled on to the next king, who rejoiced in the name of
Daisy Korrabarri. Here Mungo learnt to his dismay that war was going
on in the province that lay between him and the Niger, and the king
could offer no protection. Still nothing deterred the resolute
explorer, who took another route and continued his journey. Again he
had to travel by night, for robbers haunted his path, which now lay
among Mohammedans. He passed the very spot where Houghton had been
left to die of starvation in the desert. As he advanced through these
inhospitable regions, new difficulties met him. His attendants firmly
refused to move farther. Mungo Park was now alone in the great desert
Negroland, between the Senegal and the Niger, as with magnificent
resolution he continued his way. Suddenly a clear halloo rang out on
the night air. It was his black boy, who had followed him to share
his fate. Onward they went together, hoping to get safely through the
land where Mohammedans ruled over low-caste negroes. Suddenly a party
of Moors surrounded him, bidding him come to Ali, the chief, who wished
to see a white man and a Christian. Park now found himself the centre
of an admiring crowd. Men, women, and children crowded round him,
pulling at his clothes and examining his waistcoat buttons till he
could hardly move. Arrived at Ali's tent, Mungo found an old man with
a long white beard. "The surrounding attendants, and especially the
ladies, were most inquisitive; they asked a thousand questions,
inspected every part of my clothes, searched my pockets, and obliged
me to unbutton my waistcoat and display the whiteness of my skin--they
even counted my toes and fingers, as if they doubted whether I was
in truth a human being." He was lodged in a hut made of corn stalks,
and a wild hog was tied to a stake as a suitable companion for the
hated Christian. He was brutally ill-treated, closely watched, and
insulted by "the rudest savages on earth." The desert winds scorched
him, the sand choked him, the heavens above were like brass, the earth
beneath as the floor of an oven. Fear came on him, and he dreaded death
with his work yet unfinished. At last he escaped from this awful
captivity amid the wilds of Africa. Early one morning at sunrise, he
stepped over the sleeping negroes, seized his bundle, jumped on to
his horse, and rode away as hard as he could. Looking back, he saw
three Moors in hot pursuit, whooping and brandishing their
double-barrelled guns. But he was beyond reach, and he breathed again.
Now starvation stared him in the face. To the pangs of hunger were
added the agony of thirst. The sun beat down pitilessly, and at last
Mungo fell on the sand. "Here," he thought--"here after a short but
ineffectual struggle I must end all my hopes of being useful in my
day and generation; here must the short span of my life come to an
end."
[Illustration: THE CAMP OF ALI, THE MOHAMMEDAN CHIEF, AT BENOWN. From
a sketch by Mungo Park.]
But happily a great storm came and Mungo spread out his clothes to
collect the drops of rain, and quenched his thirst by wringing them
out and sucking them. After this refreshment he led his tired horse,
directing his way by the compass, lit up at intervals by vivid flashes
of lightning. It was not till the third week of his flight that his
reward came. "I was told I should see the Niger early next day," he
wrote on 20th July 1796. "We were riding through some marshy ground,
when some one called out '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_.
I hastened to the brink and, having drunk of the water, lifted up my
fervent thanks in prayer to the Great Ruler of all things, for having
thus far crowned my endeavours with success. The circumstance of the
Niger's flowing towards the east did not excite my surprise, for
although I had left Europe in great hesitation on this subject, I had
received from the negroes clear assurances that its general course
was _towards the rising sun_."
He was now near Sego--the capital of Bambarra--on the Niger, a city
of some thirty thousand inhabitants. "The view of this extensive city,
the numerous canoes upon the river, the crowded population, and the
cultivated state of the surrounding country, formed altogether a
prospect of civilisation and magnificence which I little expected to
find in the bosom of Africa." The natives looked at the poor, thin,
white stranger with astonishment and fear, and refused to allow him
to cross the river. All day he sat without food under the shade of
a tree, and was proposing to climb the tree and rest among its branches
to find shelter from a coming storm, when a poor negro woman took pity
on his deplorable condition. She took him to her hut, lit a lamp, spread
a mat upon the floor, broiled him a fish, and allowed him to sleep.
While he rested she spun cotton with other women and sang: "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"; and all joined in the chorus: "Let us pity the
white man, no mother has he."
[Illustration: KAMALIA, A NATIVE VILLAGE NEAR THE SOUTHERN COURSE OF
THE NIGER. From a sketch by Mungo Park.]
Mungo Park left in the morning after presenting his landlady with two
of his last four brass buttons. But though he made another gallant
effort to reach Timbuktu and the Niger, which, he was told, "ran to
the world's end," lions and mosquitoes made life impossible. His horse
was too weak to carry him any farther, and on 29th July 1796 he sadly
turned back. "Worn down by sickness, exhausted by hunger and fatigue,
half-naked, and without any article of value by which I might get
provisions, clothes, or lodging, I felt I should sacrifice my life
to no purpose, for my discoveries would perish with me." Joining a
caravan of slaves, he reached the coast after some nineteen hundred
miles, and after an absence of two years and nine months he found a
suit of English clothes, "disrobed his chin of venerable encumbrance,"
and sailed for home. He published an account of the journey in 1799,
after which he married and settled in Scotland as a doctor. But his
heart was in Africa, and a few years later he started off again to
reach Timbuktu. He arrived at the Gambia early in April 1805. "If all
goes well," he wrote gaily, "this day six weeks I expect to drink all
your healths in the water of the Niger." He started this time with
forty-four Europeans, each with donkeys to carry baggage and food,
but it was a deplorable little party that reached the great river on
19th August. Thirty men had died on the march, the donkeys had been
stolen, the baggage lost. And the joy experienced by the explorer in
reaching the waters of the Niger, "rolling its immense stream along
the plain," was marred by the reduction of his little party to seven.
Leave to pass down the river to Timbuktu was obtained by the gift of
two double-barrelled guns to the King, and in their old canoes patched
together under the magnificent name of "His Majesty's schooner the
_Joliba_" (great water), Mungo Park wrote his last letter home.
[Illustration: A NATIVE WOMAN WASHING GOLD IN SENEGAL. From a sketch
by Mungo Park made on his last expedition.]
"I am far from desponding. I have changed a large canoe into a tolerably
good schooner, on board of which I shall set sail to the east with
a fixed resolution to discover the termination of the Niger or perish
in the attempt; and though all the Europeans who are with me should
die, and though I myself were half-dead, I would still persevere; and
if I could not succeed in the object of my journey, I would at least
die on the Niger."
It was in this spirit that the commander of the _Joliba_ and a crew
of nine set forth to glide down a great river toward the heart of savage
Africa, into the darkness of the unexplored.
The rest is silence.