The Age of Wonder (39 page)

Park eventually escaped, and on 20 July 1796 caught his first sight of the river Niger at Sego, some 300 miles inland. It was known locally as the ‘Jolliba’, or Great Water, and it struck him like a sacred vision.
¹⁶
He described this in a striking passage, a mixture of the dreamlike and the familiar. ‘Looking forwards, I saw with infinite pleasure the great object of my mission-the long sought for majestic Niger, glittering in the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing
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 endeavour with success.’
¹⁷
Eastwards, noted Park gravely, exactly as predicted by Herodotus.

Shortly after, the cruelty of the Moors was strangely set aside by an act of unexpected kindness and hospitality. At dusk Park was greeted by a Negro woman who had been labouring in the fields near the river. She invited him back to her hut, lit a lamp, spread a mat and made him supper of fish baked over a charcoal fire. Evidently Park half-expected some kind of sexual overture. But instead the woman invited into the hut various female members of her family, and they all quietly sat round him in the firelight, spinning cotton and singing him to sleep. Park suddenly realised the song was extempore, and the subject was himself. He was amazed when he began to understand the words: ‘It was sung by one of the young women, the rest joining in a sort of chorus. The air was sweet and plaintive, and the words literally translated, were these:-“The winds roared, and the rain 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.
Chorus:
Let us pity the poor white man, no mother has he…” ’
¹⁸

The women reversed all Park’s assumptions about his travels in Africa. He realised that it was he-the heroic white man-who was in reality the lonely, ignorant, pitiable, motherless and unloved outcast. It was he who came and sat under
their
tree, and drank at
their
river. He found it hard to sleep that night, and in the morning he gave the woman four brass buttons from his coat before he left, a genuinely precious gift.

This incident had a huge impact when Mungo Park’s
Travels
were eventually published in Britain, and one can imagine what memories it stirred in Banks of his Tahiti nights so many years before. It was however also easy to sentimentalise. The glamorous and well-intentioned Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, rewrote the women’s song and had it set to music by the Italian composer Giorgio Ferrari, and circulated among the London salons. The first stanza of her version, ‘A Negro Song’, is remarkably close to the original wording, and retains its strange tenderness:

The loud wind roar’d, the rain fell fast;
The White Man yielded to the blast:
He sat him down, beneath our tree;
For weary, sad and faint was he;
And ah! no wife or mother’s care,
For him, the milk or corn prepare.

But Georgiana could not forbear to add a second stanza, which makes the situation far more conventional, and puts the white explorer back in command of his fate. She also added a plangent chorus, which in three lines subtly transformed the African women into pious, domestic supplicants.

The storm is o’er; the tempest past;
And Mercy’s voice has hush’d the blast.
The wind is heard in whispers low;
The White Man far away must go;
But ever in his heart will bear
Remembrance of the Negro’s care.

Chorus:
Go, White Man, go!-but with thee bear
The Negro’s wish, the Negro’s prayer;
Remembrance of the Negro’s care.
¹⁹

Park travelled on down the river as far as Silla, where, exhausted, he decided to turn back short of Timbuctoo on 25 August 1796. On the return journey he was robbed and stripped by Moorish
banditti
in ‘a dark wood’ before he reached Kalamia. They took everything-his horse, his compass, his hat, all his clothes except his trousers and his battered boots (’the sole of one of them was tied onto my foot with a broken bridle rein’). They had evidently intended to kill him, but saw him as a feeble white man beneath contempt. They did however throw his hat back to him-not realising that it contained the papers of his travel journal folded up in the band. In what became another famous passage, Park described sitting down in utter despair, believing that the end had come. ‘After they were gone, I sat for sometime looking round me with amazement and terror…I saw myself in a vast wilderness in the depth of the rainy season, naked and alone; surrounded by savage animals, and men still more savage. I was 500 miles from the nearest European settlement. All these circumstances crowded at once on my recollection; and I confess my spirits began to fail me. I considered my fate as certain, and that I had no alternative, but to lie down and perish.’
²⁰

Park’s thoughts turned helplessly towards prayer, and ‘the protecting eye of Providence’. But then something curious happened. As he hung his head in utter exhaustion and misery, his gaze began listlessly wandering over the bare ground at his feet. He noticed a tiny piece of flowering moss pushing up through the stony earth beside his boot. In a flash, his scientific interest was aroused, and leaning forward to examine the minute plant, for one moment he forgot his terrible situation. He carefully described this movement out of paralysing despair: ‘At this moment, painful as my reflections were, the extraordinary beauty of a small moss in fructification, irresistibly caught my eye. I mention this to show from what trifling circumstances the mind will sometimes derive consolation; for though the whole plant was not larger than the top of one of my fingers, I could not contemplate the delicate conformation of its roots, leaves, and capsula, without admiration.’

In that moment of pure scientific wonder, Park’s thoughts and outlook were transformed: ‘Can the Being (thought I) who planted, watered, and brought to perfection, in this obscure part of the world, a thing which appears of so small importance, look with unconcern upon the situation and suffering of creatures formed after his own image?-surely not! Reflections like these would not allow me to despair. I started up, and disregarding both hunger and fatigue, travelled forwards, assured that relief was at hand; and I was not disappointed.’

He soon fell in with two friendly shepherds, and continued on his way westwards, towards the sea and the long journey home. Miraculously, he found he could pay his passage by writing phrases from the Koran on loose scraps of paper, saved from his journal, and selling these as religious charms.
²¹

Although it was Park’s scientific curiosity that saved him-the precise botanical term ‘capsula’ carries significant weight-a theologian might convincingly describe this moment as an example of the power of the Argument by Design. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner has a similar vision when, alone and becalmed in the Pacific, and dying of thirst, he sees the beautiful, phosphorescent sea creatures playing round the ship’s hull, and in a moment of redeeming selflessness he is saved.

O happy living things! No tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me
And I blessed them unaware.
²²

At this moment the albatross of despair falls from his neck.

Park’s moment of revelation fascinated the young Joseph Conrad. He wrote in an essay,’Geography’ (1924), of his inspiring boyhood image of Mungo Park: ‘In the world of mentality and imagination which I was entering, it was they, the explorers, and not the characters of famous fiction who were my first friends. Of some of them I had soon formed for myself an image indissolubly connected with certain parts of the world. For instance, the western Sudan, of which I could draw the rivers and principal features from memory even now, mean for me an episode in Mungo Park’s life. It means for me the vision of a young, emaciated, fairhaired man, clad simply in a tattered shirt and worn out breeches sitting under a tree.’

It is interesting that Conrad imagined Park in the Sudan, as if he had indeed successfully crossed the whole of Africa from west to east, via Lake Chad.
²³

3

Park slipped back into London just before Christmas 1797. He went quietly into the British Museum gardens to greet his brother-in-law James Dickson, who saw a tall, tanned figure walking up unannounced between the potted plants. Then Park went to Soho Square to receive a thunderous greeting from Banks, who had given him up for lost. In the last week of January 1798 the
True Briton
and
The Times
hailed his return with long articles, though claiming somewhat optimistically that he had glimpsed Timbuctoo and also found the great city of Houssa, a huge, magical metropolis twice as big as London.

Banks wrote delightedly about Park, his ‘Missionary from Africa’ (’missionary’ was still an entirely secular term), to his old crony Sir William Hamilton in Naples. For this sort of despatch Banks adopted a kind of breathless telegraphese. Park, wrote Banks, ‘has made most interesting discoveries he has penetrated Africa by way of the Gambia near a thousand miles in a strait line from Cape Verde…He has discovered a river traced for more than 300 miles till it was larger than the Thames at London. His adventures are interesting in a degree he will publish them soon & I will send you the book he was soon robbed of all his property and proceeded as a beggar sometimes gaining a little by the sale of Charms which he could easily manufacture as they are sentences of the Koran written in Arabic…hunger and thirst he frequently & patiently Endured & is come Home in good health.’
²⁴

Banks also announced the success of the expedition to the pioneering German anthropologist Johann Blumenbach, who wrote back from Göttingen: ‘how ardently I long to see once Mr Park’s own extensive Account of his wonderful & highly interesting Travels’. Blumenbach added a characteristic enquiry: ‘I wonder if he has not met with any
white
negroes [Albinos] similar to those you saw at Otaheite…?’
²⁵
Banks was not able to help with this, and left Park to spend over a year writing up his original journal. Park began with the editorial help of Bryan Edwards, of the Africa Association, but soon found he had become master of a new form of travel narrative, and continued without further assistance, working away quietly back in Scotland. When the manuscript was at last delivered to Soho Square, Banks was delighted and deeply moved by what he read.
²⁶

The book revealed Park as the essential Romantic explorer. His heart was a
terra incognita
quite as mysterious as the interior of Africa, about which he wrote with quiet humour and unflinching observation. The manuscript was published, with revised maps by Rennell, in the spring of 1799 as
Travels in the Interior of Africa,
and instantly became a bestseller, enabling Park to marry his childhood sweetheart, Allison Anderson of Selkirk.

Allison was a willowy, beautiful, cheerful young woman who bore Park two sons and a daughter, and encouraged him to settle down as a physician in Peebles. He proved an excellent doctor, quiet and sympathetic, and his fame brought him plenty of distinguished patients, including the young Walter Scott, who lived nearby at Melrose. But Park’s wanderlust was not appeased. He began to consider all sorts of exotic places his family might emigrate to, not least Australia or even China. Allison knew he was restless when in 1803 he employed an Arab doctor to teach him Arabic. Scott remembered how he rode over one day to visit Park, but found he was not at home, a more and more frequent occurrence, according to Allison. Scott finally discovered him wandering along the banks of the river Yarrow, solitary and distracted, skimming stones across the water. He explained to Scott how he used to throw stones to gauge the depth of the Niger before attempting a crossing. Then he broke out that he ‘would rather brave Africa and all its horrors’ than wear out his life as a country doctor, especially in such a cold climate, surrounded by ‘lonely heaths and gloomy hills’. Scott guessed that a new journey was being secretly planned.
²⁷

4

Park’s second expedition to West Africa (1805) had a very different complexion to the first. He was financed by the Colonial Office, and given troops and funds to buy his way through the various tribal lands along the Niger. He was offered a salary of £4,000 if he returned, and the same payment to his widow Allison if he did not. He was allowed to take along his best friend, his wife’s brother Dr Alexander Anderson, as a companion, and a young Edinburgh draughtsman, George Scott, as the expedition’s official artist.

Banks had spent many months trying to organise this expedition, but as war with France continued, its
raison d’être
had clearly altered. It was now transformed from a geographical survey to that of an armed trading caravan, its main purpose to seek to establish a commercial trade route down the Niger. Banks had secretly sent the outline of a grand imperial ‘project’ to the President of the Board of Trade, the Earl of Liverpool, as early as June 1799. The Niger expedition would form just one small element in this strategy. ‘Should the undertaking be fully resolved upon, the first step of Government must be to secure to the British Throne, either by conquest or by Treaty, the whole of the Coast of Africa from Arguin to Sierra Leone…’

For a moment Banks had a heady vision of a vast, benign commercial empire stretching over the dark continent and bringing light and happiness in its wake: ‘I have little doubt that in a very few years a trading Company might be established under the immediate control of Government, who…would govern the Negroes far more mildly, and make them far more happy than they now are under the Tyranny of their arbitrary Princes…by converting them to the Christian Religion…and by effecting the greatest practicable diminution of the Slavery of mankind, upon the Principles of natural Justice and commercial Benefit.’