The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  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.’33

  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.’34

  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.’35

  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.’36

  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.’37

  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.’

  5

  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 mid-nineteenth 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.38

  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 river-bank 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.♣

  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.39

  The legend of Mungo Park surviving somewhere beyond Timbuctoo – either the prisoner of some tribal king, or else ‘gone native’ (itself an idea that began to trouble nineteenth-century colonialists) and living as a great chieftain himself — became increasingly haunting. A biography of Park was published by ‘H.B.’ in 1835, but theories about his disappearance would continue into the twentieth century. In June 1827, the same year as Tennyson’s ‘Timbucto’ poem, Park’s eldest son Thomas, obsessed by tales of his father, set out to find him.

  Thomas Park had studied science at Edinburgh University, and was now a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Taking a year’s leave of absence, he sailed to Accra on the Gold Coast, where he taught himself the Ashanti language, and made a preliminary sortie into the African interior. From a single surviving letter, sent from Accra to his mother in Scotland, and dated September 1827, it emerges that Thomas had set out on his quixotic mission without warning his family. His jaunty optimism strangely mirrors that of his father’s last letters to his wife: ‘My dearest Mother, I was in hopes I should have been back before you were aware of my absense. I went off — now that the murder is out– entirely from fear of hurting your feelings. I did not write to you lest you should not be satisfied. Depend upon it my dearest mother, I shall return safe. You know what a curious fellow I am, therefore don’t be afraid for me. Besides, it is my duty — my filial duty — to go, and I shall yet raise the name of Park. You ought rather to rejoice that I took it into my head…’

  He went on to send love to his siblings, especially his sister, and to mention a possible plan to take his own boat down the Niger. But he gives no other details, no address or means by which he might be communicated with in Accra, and says nothing about companions, preparations or equipment. He signed off in the quiet, resolute Mungo Park style: ‘I shall be back in three years at the most — perhaps in one. God bless you, my dearest mother, and believe me to be, your most affectionate and dutiful son, Thomas Park.’40

  Thomas embarked on a full-scale expedition in October 1827, marching 140 miles inland to Yansong. It was rumoured that he travelled not like ordinary white men, but in a native style adapted from his father’s first expedition. He had taken ‘no precaution with regard to the preservation of his health, but, adopting the habits of the people with whom he mingled, anointed his head and body with clay and oil, ate unreservedly the food of the natives and exposed himself with scarcely any clothing to the heat of the sun by day and the influence of the pernicious dews by night’.41

  Having reached Yansong, Thomas started to make enquiries about his father, but was almost immediately overcome by malarial fever. One account has him lying beneath a sacred tree (like Mungo), awaiting deliverance. Another has him climbing the tree to watch a native festival, drinking too much palm wine in the hot sun, and falling out of its branches. Whatever brought about his death, Thomas Park never returned, and his body was never found. A month later, in November 1827, a clean white shirt, pressed and labelled ‘T Park’, turned up in a basket of laundry delivered to the explorer Richard Lander at Sokoto, a hundred miles away on the western coast.

  6

  There are many abiding mysteries about both of Mungo Park’s expeditions. In the first, of 1794, there was his extraordinary physical courage combined with a patience amounting to almost suicidal passivity. He refused on principle to engage in personal confrontation, or stand on European ‘superiority’. His apparent acceptance of extreme moral and physical humiliation at the hands of native tribesman was exceptional. His reliance on poor villagers, fishermen and native women, rather than on tribal leaders and chieftains, perhaps reflected something of his Scottish upbringing. His dogged determination and adaptability were oddly combined with a strange ineptness and imprudence. His scientific fascination with local wildlife — bees, lions, hippos and birds — seemed instinctive and inexhaustible. His real motives for undertaking the first Niger expedition, beyond a desire for adventure, remain wonderfully enigmatic. His attitude to slavery is not clear. But his role as an essentially solitary traveller, a lonely wanderer among men and communities, came to seem intensely Romantic.

  The second expedition of 1805 was entirely different in both manner and motivation from the first. Britain was now at war with France throughout the globe, and competitive exploration easily became colonial ambition. Mungo Park was ten years older, very conscious of family duties, and interested in financial reward. But equally, his intensely romantic attachment to his wife Allison did not prevent him from returning to the Niger, and the high likelihood of death. His agreement to lead an armed expedition, to accept a military commission and payment (and in effect a form of life insurance) from the Colonial Office, suggests a quite new kind of professionalism. So too does his acceptance of a commercial mission, to search for a ‘new trade route into the Sudan’, as well as his decision to learn Arabic before he set out. On his first trip he traded mostly in amber and cloth; on his second, in guns and gunpowder.

  Whether all this means that Mungo Park had consciously undertaken an ‘imperial’ mission in his second expedition remains ambiguous. At least up to the last boat journey from Sansanding, he was respectful of all native customs, modest in his behaviour, and humane and honourable in his treatment of anyone he met (including his own troops). The contrast with a soldier like John Martyn (who seems already to have been rehearsing his part for a Rudyard Kipling story) could not be more great.

  The dauntless tone of Park’s journals, even in the final desperate weeks at Sansanding, may disguise his character as much as it reveals it. The impenetrable optimism of his last letters in November 1805, not only to Lord Camden, but also to Sir Joseph Banks and to his wife, remains enigmatic. So too do the contradictory reports of the circumstances of his death. The tragic obsession of his son Thomas to solve the mystery of his father’s disappearance suggests that something far more personal than imperial ambitions was always engaged. Thomas’s parting declaration — that he would ‘raise the name of Park’ — has a curious resonance, and may be said to have been eventually fulfilled by the brass plate that was mounted by Victorian admirers on a monument overlooking the vast and shadowy delta of the river Niger, and dedicated ‘To Mungo Park, 1795, and Richard Lander, 1830, who traced the course of
the Niger from near its source to the sea. Both died in Africa for Africa’.

  Mungo Park’s career clearly fits into the wider pattern of great Romantic exploration during this period. His own patron Sir Joseph Banks had established the British tradition, and the few letters they exchanged show a special mutual understanding of the explorer’s mixture of endurance and delight. Other figures who actually made it home, like Bryan Edwards (from the West Indies), Charles Waterton (from South America) and William Parry (from the Arctic), would give it an increasingly literary dimension. At the very time that Park died (if he did die) in 1806, Alexander von Humboldt was just publishing the story of his South American wanderings in A Personal Narrative.♣

  Mungo Park’s story inspired a number of poets. Wordsworth included a passage about Park ‘alone and in the heart of Africa’ in an early version of The Prelude. He picked out another moment of crisis, when Park had collapsed in the desert, expecting to die from sunstroke, but later wakened to find

  His horse in quiet standing at his side

  His arm within the bridle, and the sun

  Setting upon the desert.

  Wordsworth subsequently withdrew this passage, probably because Robert Southey had used Park’s experiences at greater length in his adventure epic Thalaba the Destroyer (1801). Southey’s fictitious hero is compared to Mungo Park in a long historical prose Note to the poem: ‘Perhaps no traveller but Mr Park ever survived to relate similar sufferings.’ But this is a case where the historical fact is more powerful than the fiction based upon it. Park’s quiet, fresh, limpid prose has easily outlasted Southey’s gaudy, melodramatic poem.