Travels into the Interior of Africa (39 page)

According to Amadi Fatouma, the
Joliba
passed Timbuktu, around the great Niger bend and down into Yauri, one of the Hausa states in what is now Nigeria. Park seems to have been taken over by a sense of paranoia: perhaps the memory of the way he was treated by Ali of Ludamar was preying on him as he travelled east from Segu. In contrast to his first journey, where he made contact with people in every village he passed and was always happy to palaver, on the second journey he had less and less contact with Africans, until Amadi made the revealing comment that ‘during our voyage I was the only one who had landed’. This growing distrust seems to have created the circumstances that, according to Amadi, led to his death.

When Amadi Fatouma’s journal reached London, it was accepted that the fact of his death had been established. But the circumstances of his death – and the whereabouts of his final journal – were still a matter of debate. Amadi Fatouma had not been present when Park’s boat was attacked: he had heard the details from the slave who survived. And in spite of the guide’s compelling account of the traveller’s end, rumours of Park’s survival continued to emerge – in June 1813, for instance, Banks heard from a Cambridgeshire clergyman, who had heard from his brother, a Bombay merchant, who had heard from an Englishman resident in Abyssinia, who had heard from a Muslim trader from Gondar that a strange white man, fifty years old, with a red beard, had been seen in the interior of Africa. Banks seemed convinced of the explorer’s death, but Ailie, Mungo Park’s wife, and her children continued to believe he was alive. When nothing more was heard, Thomas, their second son, sailed to Accra in 1827, spent three months on the coast preparing to travel up to Bussa, but died of fever when he went inland.

A year earlier, twenty years after Parks’ death, the British explorers Hugh Clapperton and Richard Lander passed by Bussa and had Amadi’s story confirmed to them by several people, including a man who claimed to have been an eyewitness. This man insisted that the travellers were killed not by the King of Yauri but on the orders of the King of Bussa, who heard of the arrival of an unfamiliar boat containing lighter-skinned and heavily-armed people, and assumed that Park and his companions were Fulani raiders.

As well as confirmation of Park’s death, Clapperton was also hoping to retrieve some of Park’s belongings, in particular his last journal. In this he was disappointed, for the King of Yauri had given it to a trader who was subsequently killed by Fulani raiders. Lander returned to the Niger several years later and in Bussa was given Park’s embroidered damask robe, while in Yauri he bought the double-barrelled gun Park had given to the king. Both of these were lost in his subsequent journey, during which he settled the question of the course of the Niger. One thing Lander saw but could not obtain was a printed book with Park’s name in it. But in 1858, a British army officer saw this same ‘volume of logarithms, with Mungo Park’s name, and autobiographic notes and memoranda’ and was able to trade it for his pocket knife. It was then given to the Royal Geographical Society in London, where it remains, the last known relic of one of the great travellers in Africa, and one who considered he was travelling among civilised people. ‘The mode of supporting foreigners,’ he wrote from first-hand experience, ‘does great honour to their humanity.’

It will never be possible to pin down the exact events that led to Park’s death, but perhaps the most fitting way to remember it is through a story that was recorded by a British official in the Kontagora area of Nigeria. The date, 1913, more than a hundred years after the traveller had passed on:

A
NTHONY
S
ATTIN

London

2003

Anthony Sattin is an acclaimed writer, broadcaster and literary critic with extensive knowledge and experience of travel in northern Africa. His books include
The Pharaoh’s Shadow
:
Travels in ancient and modern Egypt
(Phoenix, 2001) and
The Gates of Africa: Death, Discovery and the Search for Timbuktu
(HarperCollins, 2003), which tells the remarkable story of the African Association and their African travellers, among them Mungo Park.

 

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