Travels to the Interior Districts of Africa by Mungo Park

First published: 1799

Type of work: Journal of exploration

Principal Personages:

• Mungo Park, an agent of the African Society, the narrator
• Johnson, a Mandingo native, ex-slave, Park’s servant-interpreter
• Demba, a “Serawoolly” native, a slave, Park’s servant
• Ali, a Moorish chief
• Mansong, King of Bambarra
• Karfa, a slave trader who rescues Park
• Dr. John Laidley, trader at Pisania, Gambia, Park’s agent

Analysis

The journal of Mungo Park’s eighteen months’ struggle in West Africa to find the source of the Niger and visit Timbuktu has become a classic of English exploration literature for three reasons: this is an adventure story of life and death; it deals with the narrow escape of a remarkable individual; and the author describes his terrible experiences in classical prose which is still a pleasure to read. Mungo Park’s character can be seen in the story he tells; he was twenty-five years old, qualified at Edinburgh University as a surgeon, experienced in tropical conditions in the East Indies. Eight years after his return from West Africa to Scotland he made another attempt to explore the Niger from its delta to its source. He was ambushed and killed at Busa in 1806, some four hundred miles from his starting point.

As for the simple yet graphic style, here is this account of his situation when, having reached the Niger, he was unable after eight months of traveling to make the remaining fourteen days’ journey to Timbuktu: “Worn down by sickness, exhausted with hunger and fatigue, half-naked, and without any article of value by which I might procure provisions, clothes, or lodging, I began to reflect seriously on my position.” Park then turned westward and began the long walk back to the coast, arriving there nearly a year later. The record he published encouraged the abolition of the slave trade, and his second book, THE JOURNAL OF A MISSION TO THE INTERIOR OF AFRICA IN 1805, led eventually to the occupation of Nigeria.

The assignment for which Park volunteered was in some ways ill-considered. In the midst of the French Revolutionary Wars the African Society (a missionary-trade-scientific association) decided to use the disruption of French trade in coastal West Africa to attempt to lay hands on the key to that trade, the interior routes by which slaves, ivory, and gold came down to the coast. The society had already lost one explorer a year or two before Park set out, and one of his instructions was to find what happened to his predecessor. The disruption of trade rippled back into the interior and exacerbated tribal warfare in which Park was caught up; furthermore, he was a devout “Nazarini” or Christian in territory which, though organized into African kingdoms, was at the mercy of Moorish bandits, traders, and officials, all fanatic Muslims; he ran a constant risk of their enslaving him. Also, Park traveled alone, his supplies simply the trade goods which immediately excited the greed of the Moors and brought him to destitution; only the kindliness of slaves and women, the enlightened self-interest of slave-traders, and the merciful intervention of an African king brought Park back alive.

Park’s motives in exploring West Africa show that curious blend of commercial and Christian drives which was to open up Africa and much of the rest of the world as the British Empire in the century inaugurated by Park’s journeys; his instructions were to clear up the rumors that the Niger went north, then west, rising somewhere not far from the Gambia mouth, a well-established trading center, and especially to visit Timbuktu and “Houssa” (name for the Hausa of Northern Nigeria) which were the great entrepots or bottlenecks for all the trade between the northern coast of Africa and the thickly settled West African hinterland and coast. His plan was to strike east from the Gambia mouth until he hit the Niger and could confirm its eastward flow at that point.

Park arrived at the Gambia trading post of Pisania on July 5, 1795, and stayed four months with his agent there, the trader Dr. John Laidley; in that time he caught the coastal or acclimatizing fever which he never lost, learned the Mandingo language, and wrote the first of the chapters of observations scientific, economic, religious, botanical, and social which occur in his journal whenever he is detained for some time in an area. The Africans, he found, were well organized in kingdoms, towns, and villages, with a court, civil service, and judicature working generally efficiently; Park attended several law moots or “palavers” and was intrigued to find African advocates very like their counterparts in Britain. At each town it was necessary for him to pay his respects to the king’s representative, the head man (sometimes called “alkaid” and sometimes “dooty”), and also the custom duties and tolls extracted from all traders in spite of his protests that he was no trader. His mission aroused distrust, expressed by King Mansong of Bambarra, who rescued Park when the traveler was destitute but prohibited further passage east, and who, “when he was told that I had come from a great distance, and through many dangers, to behold the Joliba river [Niger], naturally inquired if there were no rivers in my own country, and whether one river was not like another.”

The principal trade of the whole area Park covered was in slaves, but Park was careful to point out that although three-quarters of the African population was enslaved to the other quarter, the capture and selling of slaves was largely enforced by the Moors, the Africans being bound by their laws not to dispose of their slaves except under unusual conditions. Slaves were a kind of capital in the vital trade in salt without which the teeming millions of West Africa could not live; had there been no outlet on the coast for the slaves it is possible that they might have remained within the area except for the demand from the North African Moslem slave markets. But the European trade also came to consist of slaves. Its currency was iron bars at ten to one pound sterling, a slave being worth about one hundred and fifty bars. Park made his escape back to the coast by going along with a “coffle” of slaves, and paid his rescuer in goods to the value of two slaves; in the interior he had been given five thousand cowrie shells by King Mansong. Park’s attitude to the Europeans’ and Americans’ trading liquor and firearms for slaves is not as righteously indignant as we might expect; he pleads for its abolition on the grounds of human suffering and as a blow against the vicious Moors.

Mungo Park set out on December 3, 1795, with two servants provided by Dr. Laidley, which Park was later able to cash, a letter of credit to a slaver in the interior, an umbrella, firearms, compass, clothing, some trade goods, and an Arabic grammar. He rode a horse which lasted him about eight hundred miles, and the servants rode asses. One servant was named Johnson, an elderly Mandingo who could help Park with the language because he had been enslaved on Jamaica as a youth, freed, gone to England, and found his way back to Gambia; the other was a slave-boy, Demba, who was promised his liberty when the party returned.

The principal cause of Park’s failure to reach Timbuktu was his decision to try to avoid the tribal wars which were hampering his movement eastward; he turned northeast into semi-desert country. Close to the place, as he learned, where Major Houghton, the previous agent of the African Society, was stripped, starved, and abandoned by the nomadic Moors of that kingdom, Park was himself seized, and imprisoned for a month. Demba was enslaved by the chieftain, Ali. Park sent Johnson back to Gambia with copies of his papers; he never heard of him or Demba again. He himself made his escape, nearly died of thirst, was robbed by the Moors, and finally helped as far as the Niger by friendly Africans. There at King Mansong’s capital of Segou he was astonished at its resemblance to London on the Thames; “The view of this extensive city . . . formed altogether a prospect of civilization and magnificence which I little expected to find in the bosom of Africa.” If he was unable to reach the fabled and more magnificent city of Timbuktu, he was at least able to confirm reports of the wealth of the hinterland.

Park managed to get a few miles further down the Niger past Sansanding, but by that time his horse was exhausted. He collected what information he could and turned back for the far more difficult return journey on July 30, 1796, in the midst of the rainy season. He attempted to follow but abandoned the Niger upstream at Bamako, and struck east toward Gambia, more than five hundred miles away. He fell in with a slave dealer named Karfa on September 16 and thereafter was protected by the trader until Karfa’s coffle reached Pisania, Park’s starting place. There he was reunited with Dr. Laidley on June 12, 1797. During his association with Karfa Park learned a great deal about the Mandingos, information he recorded in detail in Chapters XX through XXIV in his journal. But he gained more valuable information when he traveled to the coast with the slave coffle and then boarded a slaver for the West Indies as the quickest way of getting home. It was this first-hand experience of the slave trade which made Park’s Journal one of the prime pieces of evidence in the hands of the Abolitionists, who within twelve years achieved their objective by ending the slave trade in British territories.