The Age of Wonder (40 page)

Banks added that ‘the whole Tenor of Mr Park’s book’ showed that such a strategy was possible, and that the grand civilising mission should include ‘the more intelligible doctrines’ of the Scriptures and the more useful branches of ‘European mechanics’. But then he checked himself, and concluded that he had been ‘led away too far by this Idea’. It is not clear how much of this imperial dream he ever vouchsafed to Park himself.
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One indication of the changed plan was that Park and Anderson were appointed to the military ranks of captain and lieutenant, in an attempt to give them authority over their troops. Park was uneasy about this, as appears in a letter from Lord Camden at the Colonial Office to the Prime Minister, William Pitt, dated 24 September 1804: ‘Mr Park has just been with me. He is inclined to attempt the expedition proposed for the sum I mentioned…It is therefore to be determined in what manner a Journey of Discovery and of Enquiry for commercial purposes can best be attempted. Mr Park seems to think that he shall be able to travel with less suspicion and therefore with more effect, if he was only accompanied by 2 or 3 persons on whom he could depend.’
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But in the end he was supplied with forty soldiers.

After a delayed departure from England because of confused expeditionary orders and financing, Park arrived at the island of Goree, off the West African coast, on 28 March 1805. This was barely six weeks before the onset of the rainy season, and was the hottest time of the year for travelling. Nearly a month was spent organising the detachment of forty volunteer troops, commanded by twenty-two-year-old Captain John Martyn, and packing up supplies from the coastal fort. Park finally left the Gambia on 27 April, having written letters to Lord Camden, to Joseph Banks, and to his wife Allison. For the first time, he also made a Will.
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The arrival of the rains, long before they reached the Niger, had a catastrophic effect on both their progress and their health. They were ravaged by malarial fever and dysentery, and men dropped behind one by one. They were attacked frequently by wild dogs, by crocodiles, and once by a party of lions. They were continuously soaked by the torrential rains, which fell implacably day and night. Their donkeys’ packs (containing gifts of amber beads, pistols, cloth) were split open and looted by tribesmen.

Park was indefatigable in caring for his troops and donkeys, paying natives for help, and arranging staging camps for those left behind. But the death toll was terrible all along the 500-mile march inland from Bamako to join the Niger at Sego. By the time they reached the river on 19 August, only twelve Europeans from the original party were still alive.

The exhausted expedition made camp and began tortuous negotiations with the local leader, chief Mansong. Mansong finally agreed to send them sufficient canoes to embark the remaining men and baggage. These cost Park ‘very handsome presents’, but the relief of taking to the water was immense. ‘The velocity was such as to make me sigh,’ he wrote of their swift journey downstream. Although suffering from dysentery and crippling headaches, Park delighted in the elephants, and a passing hippo which blew ‘exactly like a whale’.
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At Sansanding four more white troops died, and young George Scott. Park dosed himself with mercury calomel to cure a potentially lethal attack of dysentery, and recorded in his journal that with the burning in his mouth and stomach he ‘could not speak nor sleep for six days’. It is notable that he somehow managed to keep the knowledge of this illness from his remaining troops, who believed that he was in good health and completely adapted to the terrible conditions. His steady bearing never altered, as catastrophe followed catastrophe, and their surroundings grew steadily more hostile. When Private William Garland died, animals carried away his body from the hut during the night. The Moors urged Mansong to kill the beleaguered white men and seize their goods. ‘They alleged that my object was to kill Mansong and his sons by means of charms, that the White People might come and seize on the country. Mansong, much to his honour, rejected the proposal, though it was seconded by two-thirds of the people of Sego, and almost all Sansanding.’
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With nine remaining men, including his beloved brother-in-law Anderson, three white troopers, his military friend Captain Martyn, two black slaves (promised their freedom) and his Arabic guide Amadi, Park constructed a forty-foot wooden ‘schooner’ from the shells of two native canoes roughly carpentered together. It was narrow-just six feet wide-but its shallow one-foot draught made it excellent for negotiating rapids. He built a small cabin on the stern, armoured the deck with bullock hides and rigged and stocked the craft for a non-stop descent of the river, which he was now convinced (rightly) turned southwards after Timbuctoo and reached the Atlantic in the bay of Benin. He expected opposition, and supplied each remaining man with fifteen muskets apiece and a huge supply of ammunition.

The atmosphere among the surviving members of the expedition is caught in a letter which the cheery, hardbitten Captain John Martyn wrote on 1 November 1805 to a fellow officer, Ensign Megan, safely back at the military station of Goree on the coast. ‘Dear Megan-Thunder, Death and Lightning-the Devil to pay! Lost by disease Mr Scott, two sailors, four carpenters and thirty one of the Royal African Corps, which reduces our numbers to seven, out of which Dr Anderson and two soldiers are quite useless…Captain Park has not been unwell since we left Goree; I was one of the first taken sick with fever and ague…’

Martyn goes on to describe Park’s quiet efficiency, the building of the schooner, and the continued motivation of the expedition to pursue the course of the Niger. ‘Captain Park has made every enquiry concerning the River Niger, and from what we learn there remains no doubt that it is the Congo. We hope to get there in about three months or less…Captain Park is this day fixing the Mast-schooner rigged-40 feet long-All in the clear. Excellent living since we came here (August 22), the Beef and Mutton as good as ever was eat. Whitbreads Beer is nothing to what we get here…’

Finally he added a scrawled note on the stained outer flap of his letter, dated 4 November. It captures a soldier’s-eye view of the British imperial mission. ‘PS Dr Anderson and Mills dead since writing the within-my head a little sore this morning-was up late last night drinking Ale with a Moor who has been at Gibraltar and speaks English-got a little tipsy-finished the scene by giving the Moor a damn’d good thrashing.’
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For Park the loss of his close friend and brother-in-law was the most terrible blow, an event that put something like despair for the second time in his heart. He wrote in his journal: ‘At a quarter past five o’clock in the morning, my dear friend Mr Alexander Anderson died, after a sickness of four months. I feel much inclined to speak of his merits but…I will rather cherish his memory in silence, and imitate his cool and steady conduct, than weary friends with a panegyric in which they cannot be supposed to join. I shall only observe that no event which took place during the journey ever threw the smallest gloom over my mind till I laid Mr Anderson in the grave. I then felt myself
as if left a second time,
lonely and friendless, amidst the wilds of Africa.’
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Before setting out from Sansanding, Park wrote three farewell letters: to his sponsor Lord Camden at the Colonial Office, to Sir Joseph Banks, and to his beloved wife Allie. In each he stated that he was in good spirits and determined to press on, and hoped to be back in England the following summer. But he also sent back to Goree by Arabic messenger his journals written up to that date, as if this would be the last chance.

His letters appear to be an extraordinary mixture of dogged courage and feverish delusions. To Lord Camden he wrote with quite uncharacteristic bravado: ‘I shall set sail for the east with the fixed resolution to discover the termination of the Niger or perish in the attempt though all the Europeans who are with me should die, and though I were myself 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.’
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To his wife, carefully dating his letter ‘Sansanding 19 November 1805’, he wrote more reassuringly and calmly. ‘I am afraid that, impressed with a woman’s fears and the anxieties of a wife, you may be led to consider my situation as a great deal worse than it really is…I am in good health. The rains are completely over, and the healthy season has commenced, so that there is no danger of sickness, and I have still a sufficient force to protect me from any insult in sailing down the river to the sea…I think it not unlikely but I shall be in England before you receive this. You may be sure that I feel happy at turning my face towards home…the sails are now hoisting for our departure for the coast.’
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But to Joseph Banks he wrote with almost visionary detachment, making no mention of hardships or dangers, but as one explorer speaking quietly to another, over a last cigar: ‘My dear Friend…It is my intention to keep to the middle of the River and make the best use I can of Winds and Currents till I reach the termination of this Mysterious Stream…I have purchased some fresh Shea Nuts which I intend taking with me to the West Indies as we will likely have to go there on our way home…I expect we will reach the sea in three months from this, and if we are lucky enough to find a vessel, we shall lose no time on the Coast.’
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From this point, there is no further direct evidence from Park, as no later letters or journals survive. His last known note records that he was departing, his party reduced to ‘three soldiers (one deranged in his mind), Lieutenant Martyn, and myself’.

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Casting off from Sansanding on about 21 November 1805, Park paddled downriver, keeping well clear of the banks until he hove to outside Timbuctoo, hoping to trade. But apparently he did not dare to disembark because of the threat from hostile Tuareg tribesmen. So finally Mungo Park never entered the city of his dreams.

This dream of ‘Timbuctoo’ would continue to haunt English writers and explorers for another thirty years. The young Alfred Tennyson submitted a 300-line blank-verse poem entitled ‘Timbucto’ for the Chancellor’s Medal at Cambridge University in 1827. He headed it with an epigraph drawn from Chapman’s Homer: ‘Deep in that lion-haunted Island lies/A mystic City, goal of high emprise!’ Young Tennyson asked dreamily:

Wide Afric, doth thy Sun
Lighten, thy hill enfold a City as fair
As those which starr’d the night o’ the elder World?
Or is the rumour of thy Timbucto
A dream as frail as those of ancient Time?…

His poem concludes prophetically with a new fear, one which would become frequent in both English and French travel-writing of the midnineteenth century (especially in Gérard de Nerval’s 1851
Voyage en Orient
), that the actual discovery of the legendary city would reduce its seductive image to something mundane. Tennyson’s private, tantalising mirage of ‘tremulous’ domes, abundant gardens and ‘Pagodas hung with music of sweet bells’ would resolve itself into the bleak reality of a few primitive mud huts.

…The time is well-nigh come
When I must render up this glorious home
To keen Discovery: soon your brilliant towers
Shall darken with the waving of her wand;
Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts,
Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand,
Low-built, mud-wall’d, Barbarian settlements:
How changed from this fair City!

Alfred Tennyson won the Chancellor’s Medal, but he never went to Africa.
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As he proceeded downriver, Park inexplicably refused to pay any tribute to the local chiefs, considering that he had made all necessary payment to Mansong. This was a fatal mistake which the young Mungo Park would never have made. After this failure to render these customary gifts (in effect a river-tax or toll), the boat was attacked from the riverbank almost continuously by infuriated tribesmen. These attacks became more severe when they entered the territory of the Houssa, and their Arabic guide Amadi left them by agreement. On one occasion they were pursued by a flotilla of sixty canoes, and they were constantly subjected to showers of arrows, spears and clubs.
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Reports agree that the boat was eventually ambushed by Tuareg tribesmen at the rapids of Boussa, some 500 miles downstream from Timbuctoo, and with only another 300 miles to go. Here it seems to have run aground in a narrow, shallow, rocky defile. A witness later found by Amadi described a day-long battle, during which Park threw all his valuables overboard, hoping either to lighten the boat and shoot the rapids, or to placate the tribesmen. If that is true, he achieved neither. At the last, with all their men either killed or wounded, Park and Martyn threw themselves into the river. Their bodies were never recovered. They were either drowned, or killed when they came ashore, or-haunting possibility-disappeared into captivity.

One black slave remained alive on board the
Joliba.
He surrendered, was spared, and was finally released by the local Tuareg chieftain. He was the witness that Amadi eventually tracked down. His account includes one particularly haunting detail: that when Park jumped into the river he held one of the other white men in his arms. There is no explanation for this. Perhaps he was still trying to save one of his wounded soldiers, or was making some sort of last stand with young Martyn.

Nothing else survived-no journals, letters or personal effects of any kind-except for an annotated copy of an astronomical almanac (thought, correctly, to be a sacred book) and a single swordbelt. Amadi was able to buy back the almanac at great expense, but the swordbelt was retained by the local tribal chief as a ceremonial horse’s bridle. Park was aged thirty-four at the time of his death (reckoned to be about February 1806), and his widow Allison was paid the compensation of £4,000 by the Africa Association. She died in Selkirk in 1840. Park’s
Journal of a Second Voyage
was published in 1815 with a brief, anonymous Memoir; but rumours of his survival persisted for many years in Britain.
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