Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa 9780822398868

Citation preview

TRAVELS IN THE INTERIOR DISTRICTS OF AFRICA by MUNGO PARK

Edited with an Introduction by

Kate Ferguson Marsters

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Durham and London,

2000

©

2000

Duke University Press

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper @) Typeset in Baskerville by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

CONTENTS

List of Figures and Maps Preface

vi

vii

Introduction Note on the Text

29

Chronology of Mungo Park's Life Park's Instructions

31

33

TRAVELS IN THE INTERIOR DISTRICTS OF AFRICA

Title Page

41

Dedication

43

Preface

45

Contents

49

Explanation of African Words Subscribers' Names

56

58

Travels in the Interior of Mrica

67

A Vocabulary of the Mandingo Language

307

Questions and Answers That May Be Useful in the West Indies

312

Appendix: Geographical Illustrations of Mr. Park'sJourney, by Major Rennell Bibliography Index

397

403

315

39

LIST OF FIGURES

Mungo Park

1

Title Page

2

40 41

3 Dedication Page

43

4 Rhamnus Lotus

132

5 View of Ali's Tent

148

6 Postscript, by Mungo Park

196

7 A Negro Song, by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire 8 Song from Mr. Park's Travels, by G. G. Ferrari 9 View of Kamalia

233

View of a Bridge

289

10 II

Shea, or the Butter Tree

197

198

299

LIST OF MAPS

Map

1.

Route of Mr. Mungo Park

Map

2.

North Mrica

64

316

Map 3. Chart of the Lines of Magnetic Variations

340

PREFACE

This edition of Mungo Park's Travels makes available, for the first time in many years, the complete text as it was published in 1799. The introduction aims to provide enough background to make clear why it was so widely read and admired in 1799 and throughout the nineteenth century, and why, with the breakup of colonial empires in Africa, it has found new readers again at the end of the twentieth century. With the original illustrations, the "Negro Song," Park's Mandingo vocabulary with phrase list, and James Rennell's essay on geography, this edition provides material to broaden the continuing conversation among Park's readers; may their numbers increase. In my work for this edition I have been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, with a summer seminar on Rhetorical Theories of Narrative in 1995 at the Ohio State University, and by Gannon University, with funding for a research trip to Park's home territory in Scotland. Acknowledgments are also due to the always ready assistance of the librarians at Gannon's Nash Library and of the Rare Book Collection at the Pennsylvania State University. At Duke University Press, Richard Morrison, Jean Brady, and Maura High have been endlessly helpful. Finally, I thank my family, friends, teachers, colleagues, and students-for long encouragement, and for never failing to let me know when they have found yet another reference to Mungo Park. Park's Travels remains dedicated to the African Association; for my work on this edition, however, the dedication goes to my father, David Ferguson.

INTRODUCTION

Mungo Park's Travels has long been recognized as a classic of Mrican travel literature. At the age of twenty-four, Park had set out for the interior of Mrica with an umbrella, a horse, a few trade goods, two days' worth of provisions, and a basic pair of everything else: compasses, pistols, clothing, guides, and asses. When he reappeared eighteen months later, clothed in rags and carrying only his hat stuffed full of notes from his original outfit, he was greeted as one who had risen from the dead. Though misplaced in its geography, the epigraph from Virgil on Park's title page-which translates to "In Libyan deserts [I] wander thus alone"l-set the tone for his readers in 1799. He had been alternately the victim of abuse and the recipient of charity; repeatedly robbed, and once left for dead; held captive by Moors; and reduced to banging on village gates begging for shelter so that he wouldn't be eaten by lions. He had suffered repeated bouts of malaria, nearly starved during famine, and walked the last five hundred miles back to the coast in the relative safety of a slave come on the way to market. But he had accomplished his mission: to provide eyewitness proof (or, as he called it, an ocular demonstration) that the River Niger flowed east, a highly satisfactory direction for trade and commerce. The story had all the elements of a bestseller, and it was. That was not especially unusual for the late eighteenth century, a great age for exploration; most such narratives had something to offer, even when they were suspected of being a pack of lies, or, worse, were just plain dull. Park's narrative, however, is unusual in that it continued to be published and read. In 1799, it was particularly relevant to ongoing debates about slavery and abolition, and it was significant in opening up the possibilities of Mrica to Europeans. Through the nineteenth 1.

Book I, I. 539, in John Dryden's 1697 translation of Virgil's Aeneid.

century it continued to be read as the model narrative of a hero explorer, and copies of Park's story, often with illustrations focusing on the most highly dramatic or pitiful scenes from the book, were commonly given to boys in the United States and Britain as a prize for good behavior or achievement at school. These are the editions still found in many libraries today. In the late twentieth century Park's Travels has found readers for yet other reasons. The material that made it so relevant in 1799 has become interesting again today to scholars in many disciplines who are reexamining the history of slavery and the abolition movement as they affected Britain, the United States, and Mrica. It is also a valuable resource for those who study the way slavery worked internally in West Africa late in the eighteenth century. With the breaking up of European colonial empires in Mrica, other scholars have turned to Park to study not only the way exploration narratives operated in the public imagination to celebrate heroism, but to justify European intervention in Mrica. Though Park's actual geographic accomplishments were soon overshadowed by others, and many of those who came after him suffered more, his narrative offered a paradigm for the hero who would make it possible for expansionist-minded Europeans to imagine themselves as a welcome and positive force. While he was intrepid in gathering the news he reported with a degree of scientific objectivity, he is even better known as a sentimental traveler-one who recorded also his personal and subjective response to Mrica, his individual experience of the land and its people. And because Park traveled so lightly, relying on the native population for food, shelter, and directions (he had, after all, very little idea of where the Niger actually was), he had far more direct contact with the ordinary flow of life than did many of those who followed him in larger expeditions. (In this respect, the Travels is substantially different from even Park's second journey, where he was so overcome with the demands of managing his troops that what little interaction he had with native people only seemed to add to his problems.) Traveling alone through the warring kingdoms of Kaarta and Bambarra, Park provides a rare written record of African political struggles at the end of the eighteenth century, and an even more rare witnessing of the way those wars affected the lives of common people. Traveling sometimes with a troupe of jilla keas, or singing men, and at other times falling in with fleeing refugees, he covers a wide spectrum of life. The incident of the singing women in chapter 15-the inspiration for the "Negro Song," reprinted here as it was in 1799-is notable for being the first translation into English 2

INTRODUCTION

of the traditional West African practice of turning event into oral history, on the spot, as it happens. 2 As African history, Park's Travels has been translated into African languages for use in schools. 3 Park traveled through areas we now know as the Gambia, Senegal, and Mali, and he presents a picture of an Africa that was highly organized in its political, judicial, and economic systems. The legal system and the elegance of the rhetoric involved in settling disputes aroused his constant admiration, whether as "Mumbo Jumbo" for keeping people (especially wives) in order, or for settling disagreements about livestock. He reports the horrors of war, but also sophisticated and humane diplomacy. Literacy was much higher than he expected, although alarmingly to him, almost exclusively in Arabic, as the Muslim influence moved south (a process continuing today in the Sudan). Long-distance credit systems eased his way considerably until he lost everything when captured by the Moors. More than once he was able to draw credit on the five-year-old debt of a third party, no questions asked. Trade was well organized-and so, to Park's constant annoyance, was the method of taxing traders as they crossed the fron tiers of the various kingdoms. But as much as Park's adventures and observations have to tell us about the way Europeans perceived Africa and Africans, they also offer us an opportunity to read in reverse, and to think about how he looked to Africans. While Park was a brave, clever, and modest hero to European eyes, he was a distinct anomaly to Africans, and not only because of his unnatural white skin and pointy nose or his fascinating clothing. He stood out just as much for the monumentally ridiculous story he told to explain his presence. Time after time, when asked why he traveled, Park replied that he had come to see a river. He was not a trader and thought he should not have to pay the local taxes as if he were. No one believed him, and for good reason: the search for the river was only a preliminary step to trading. While he never stopped trying to pass his tourist story off on Africans, the mask does slip for his readers when the king ofSego asks him, with a laugh, ifthere aren't rivers enough in his own country, and Park explains in an aside to his readers that the king's fears that he was concealing his true mission were in fact "well warranted." The Africans recognized him from the beginning as being there on business, and they taxed him accord2. See Eileen Southern, Readings in BlacL1merimn Music (New York, 1971). 3. My thanks to Roxana Ma Newman for sharing with me her schoolbook edition of Park's narrative translated into Hausa.

INTRODUCTION

3

ingly. Through this system Park passed, moving from one territory to another, not substantially more important than the flea on a camel's back, but obliged to submit to the way Mricans perceived him, rather than the way he saw himself there. He regularly comments on his submission with dry humor by explaining, for instance, that it is always wise to give in to a lion when one is within reach of his paw. Park's lack of power gives a glimpse of Mrican life before the confrontation of imperialism. Further on in the narrative, after his captivity and escape from the Moors, Park was destitute, and yet another di mension of the African economy absorbed him. When he had something to trade, he was accommodated in the system as a trader, regardless of what he said. When he had nothing to trade, he fell into a different niche. This is especially clear with regard to cowrie shells, which he mentioned early in the narrative as a source of local exchange. He had started his journey defining money and trade in terms of the exchange value of pounds sterling, slaves, and iron bars - the economy of the coast and European trade. But after his escape from the Moors, he has nothing left to bargain with, and his presence in anyone's home or village is an unwelcome burden during a time of war and famine. To get rid of him, the king ofSego gives him 5,000 cowries and sends him on his way. At that point, immersed in and dependent on the local economy, Park defines their value: a hundred would buy him and his horse food for one day, provided food was available to buy. When even that local medium fails, he sells himself as magic, cutting off locks of his hair to trade as a saphie, or charm, for food. At this low point in his journey, Park finds charity-not always, but often enough to survive. Writing later, safe at home, Park relates the saphie-selling with humor, and the charity he received as a sick and lost beggar became evidence of a natural benevolence that cried out for Christianity. The trace of precolonial life, however, is still there. Beyond these scholarly interests, there is another dimension of Park's Travels that has kept it alive long after other travel narratives were relegated to forgotten dusty shelves, and long after the topical relevance of inclusions like the "N egro Song" and the list of Mandingo phrases for talking to slaves on the Middle Passage subsided. Park's narrative appeals to the imagination. References to it crop up regularly as a literary allusion. Wordsworth, Thoreau, and George Eliot have all referred to Park in their work at one time or another. Melville was inspired by Park on several occasions, and the famous scene of Park's epiphany with the moss in chapter 17 recurs as a source of meditation for Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon. Following a long

4

INTRODUCTION

tradition of fascination with travelers' tales, T. Coraghessan Boyle's novel Water Music retells Park's story with dark humor. Besides such background literary appearances, Park has maintained a steady presence for readers of geographical and adventure travelers.4 Conrad read Park as a boy, and somewhere deep in The Heart ojDarkness he followed Park's trail. In 1997, nearly two hundred years after Park's journey, a Cameroon hunter named Joseph Melloh explained his choice of profession as inspired by a wonderful confluence of heroes: he had read Mungo Park and Huckleberry Finn in school as a boy and made up his mind right there to have adventures of his own one day.s Others may have explored more, but Park's narrative has lasted, and so has the name he finally settled on the river. In the Travels, it is sometimes called by its Mrican name, the Joliba, or by its Arabic name, Neel el Abeed (which, according to geographer Major James Rennell, translates as River of Slaves). But since Park, it has been called by the name he took from Herodotus: the Niger.

Biographical Background

Mungo Park was born on September 10 or 11,1771, on FOlllshiels Farm near Selkirk, Scotland. He was the seventh of twelve (or possibly thirteen) children, and the fourth to survive infancy. The walls of the fortyfive-by-twelve-foot farmhouse are still standing; it has four window openings, a door, and one fireplace. It was small, but not poor. Park's father did well with his farm, easily paying his yearly rent of seventyfour pounds to the Duke of Buccleuch, and he took care to educate his children well. When they were young, they had a tutor at home, and as they grew older, they walked four miles to the Selkirk Grammar School. The family attended Selkirk's Secession Church, where the preaching was Calvinist, but not terribly grim. His father intended him for the ministry, but Park's preference for medicine evidently won the day. At fourteen, he was apprenticed to Dr. Thomas Anderson in Selkirk. For the next three years, he lived with the Anderson family, accompanying the doctor on rounds as an observer and helping to make up medicines when he was not at school. In the fall of 1788, he enrolled for the three terms required for a degree in medicine at Edin-

4. On the internet, Park has become an icon for the concept of adventure travel, On Microsoft's Mungo Park homepage, a click of the mouse takes armchair travelers to illustrated narratives of expeditions to remote areas around the world, 5, See Michael McRae, "Road Kill in Cameroon," Natural History (February 1997).

INTRODUCTION

5

burgh University, and it was there that he was able to pursue his interest in botany. By 1792 he had finished the course. He was twenty-one years old, a good age to visit his sister and brother-in-law, Margaret and John Dickson, in London to see what the world might offer him. John Whishaw, Park's biographer in 1815, placed great emphasis on the Scottish dedication to education. In his view-and he devoted a special appendix to the topic - education gave Scots the opportunity to improve their circumstances in life substantially. This was certainly the case for Park and his brother-in-law. Dickson, a self-educated gardener, had risen to owning his own seed business at Covent Garden. From that beginning, he had become a founding member of the Linnaean Society in Britain, an organization that followed the system (at that time fairly new) of Carl Linnaeus to gather and classify the plants and animals of the world. In botanical circles, Dickson held his own despite his origins, and while his education didn't allow him to cross the social boundaries of class, it did lead to connections. Dickson was a welcome visitor at the library of his fellow Linnaean Sir Joseph Banks, the great eighteenth-century organizer and sponsor of British scientific knowledge. Through such connections, Dickson was able to propose Mungo Park for membership in the Linnaean Society and introduce him to Banks. Soon after this meeting, Banks recommended Park for a position as surgeon's mate on the Worcester, which was bound for a fourteen-month voyage to the East Indies. When he returned to England in February 1794, Park was not much richer (the voyage had paid only £36), but he had had the chance to prove himself as a respectable scientific fieldworker. In addition to a series of botanical water colors and a number of plant specimens, he brought back eight new species of fish, which became the basis of his first and, as it turned out, only paper for the Linnaean Society. More important, he had discovered a taste for travel. Within a year, Park had contracted with a group known as the African Association for a journey of exploration into West Africa in search of the River Niger. Again, Banks, a founding member of the African Association, had recommended Park for the job. Park's mission was to begin at the mouth of the Gambia River, to travel inland to the Niger to find out which direction it flowed, and return with as much information as he could about the country he traveled through. It was no small task. The association had already sent three men; one had turned back, and two had died. But Mungo Park was ready to go, and on May 22, 1795,just a few months short of his twenty-fourth birthday, he left England for Africa. 6

INTRODUCTION

Two years later, on Christmas Day, Park was back in London. He had survived and completed his mission: the Niger flowed to the east. This book, Travels in the Interior Districts ofAfrica, is the record of Park's first African journey. From the beginning, it was a bestseller. The first printing of 1,500 large, illustrated quarto editions was gone within a week, and Park's publishers were so sure of the work's success that they took the unusual step of paying him £1,000 up front rather than applying profits first to the costs of production. Their confidence was well warranted; two more editions were published in 1799, and another in 1800. Smaller editions and abridgments proliferated, and the book was immediately translated into the major European languages. Those who didn't buy the book could read about Park's adventures in newspapers or in the substantial excerpts in literary periodicals. Circulating libraries-and there are many included on the list printed in the Travels of subscribers who placed orders in advance-made the book even more widely available. Despite the popularity of the Travels, however, Park himself did not become a celebrity. As a boy in school, Park had been known as a good student, but quiet, and by all accounts this quality remained with him as a man. His adventures would have made him a welcome guest almost anywhere in London, but he was simply unwilling to elaborate on his story, or even talk about it at all, on the round of parties that made up the London social season. His reticence could have been due to a desire to steer clear of controversy (a topic I will return to in discussing the African Association), but it could also have been his nature. In any event, Park returned to Selkirk to marry Allison Anderson, the daughter of the same Dr. Anderson with whom he had been apprenticed. The next few years were quiet. There was talk of exploration in Australia, but it soon petered out. Finally Park bought a medical practice in nearby Peebles and moved there with his family, which by 1803 included three children with another on the way. But Park wanted to go back to Africa, and when in 1804 he was at last offered the chance to lead a government-sponsored expedition, he took it. Park's second journey was a disaster almost from the beginning. In 1799 Banks had suggested that the government send a well-equipped unit of a hundred men to secure a base for colonization. War with France delayed the plans, and a change of government reduced the scope. Park spent months waiting in Scotland, passing the time by learning Arabic, and more months waiting in London while the plans were shuffled from one government office to another. When he finally left in January 1805, the hundred men had been reduced to his INTRODUCTION

7

brother-in-law, Alexander Anderson; another young man from Selkirk, George Scott; and four felonious carpenters from prison ships on the Thames, who were to receive pardons in exchange for helping Park build a boat to take down the Niger. They were to pick up a further thirty-eight men from the Royal Mrica Corps, the rock bottom of British military personnel, in Mrica. The mission, as set out by Lord Camden of the Colonial Office, was both vague and ambitious; they were to look for trade opportunities, establish communications with the natives, go as far as possible on the Niger, and return home any way they could manage. By the time they left England, they had already missed the best two months for traveling in West Mrica, and the rainy season was about to begin. In 1835, Richard Adams Locke, a journalist for the New York Sun, caused a brief sensation by claiming to have found the lost manuscript of Mungo Park's pocket diary of the second expedition. Unfortunately, it was a hoax. The narrative of Park's first journey was based on notes he wrote as he traveled, and carried, famously and safely, in the crown of his hat; he spent nearly a year writing and polishing the Travels before it was published. For the second journey, we have only a few letters -eloquent, but few, and they stop well before the expedition came to its grim end. The first death, from an epileptic fit, occurred in less than two weeks. The rains began, bringing fever and dysentery to all. Some men fell behind, to turn up days later, stark naked, robbed of everything. Some sat down, too ill to go further. And one after another, they died. They had started from Pisania on the Gambia River on May 4; by November 16, when Park wrote his final letter from Sansanding on the Niger, there were only three men remaining besides Park to sail in a rotten, refitted canoe to trace the Niger to its end. At Bussa, where the river narrowed dangerously between bluffs, they had an encounter with natives. Speculations about the cause of Park's death have never arrived at a conclusive answer; possibly the natives were trying to warn him about the river, or possibly they were ambushing the expedition; more than likely, linguistic problems caused miscommunications. The only certainty is that Mungo Park and the remnant few of his fellow travelers died at Bussa on the River Niger late in 1805. In 1815, the letters and various other documents relating to the second expedition were gathered together and published as TheJournal oj a Mission to the Interior ojAJrica, with the proceeds directed to Park's wife and four children. The expedition was a disaster, but it was significant in being the first West African expedition of exploration sponsored by the British government.

8

INTRODUCTION

Park's Travels and Journal have in them most of what we will ever know about him; he was reticent, and his family followed suit. Yet there is one thing more. In 1804, Park became friends with Sir Walter Scott, who had recently moved into his neighborhood. They went fishing on the River Yarrow, and spent what Scott described as convivial evenings together. On several occasions, Park talked freely about his first trip to Mrica, telling Scott a number of stories that were not in his Travels. When Scott asked why he had not included them in his book, Park replied that he had told the public everything of importance by way of information, but that he had not wanted "to shock their credulity, or render his travels more marvellous, by introducing circumstances which, however true, were of little or no moment, as they related solely to his own personal adventures and escapes" (Whishaw, 101). Respecting Park's wishes, Scott told no more, leaving those of us who have continued to read Park's Travels over the past two hundred years to wonder, in a narrative as packed with personal adventures and escapes as it is with information, what could have been left out.

The African Association and Sir Joseph Banks.

The Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Districts of Africa, more commonly known as the African Association, was formed on June 9, 1788. Its members were all men of wealth, influence, and social standing; the association grew, in fact, out of common interests they had discovered as members of a coffee house group known as the Saturdays Club. A committee of five, led by Sir Joseph Banks, made all the decisions and plans. General membership, at an exclusive rate of five guineas per year as dues, supplied the means for those plans. The association's goal was to improve the knowledge of African geography and markets, and its chosen method was to SPOllsor individual explorers who would be willing to take the risk of traveling on their own, or alone but for such native guides as they fell in with along the route. In addition, the African Association anticipated that "by means as peacable as the purposes are just, the conveniences of civil life, the benefits of the mechanical and manufacturing arts, the attainments of science, the energies of the cultivated, and the elevation of the human character, may be in some degree imparted to nations hitherto consigned to hopeless barbarism and uniform contempt" (Hallett, Records, 38). The association looked for knowledge, but these words show also the sense of the civilizing mission that was to become so central to justifying nineteenth-century imperialism. INTRODUCTION

9

The African Association's means were small, but its lone explorers would - if they survived - be able to supply information that would persuade the government to sponsor a larger expedition to set up factories, or trading stations, at public expense. Manned by government troops and agents, the factories would then support and protect private commercial ventures. This long-term economic plan lay at the heart of the association's efforts from the beginning. Crucial to the entire plan, however, was the question of the River Niger. Long rumored, seldom seen, it offered the hope of an inland waterway for trade-and possibly a connection with the Nile or Congo. But they didn't know yet even which direction it flowed. (They were also interested in news about Timbuktu, a city that was -like an African version of the fabled EI Dorado in America, always just over the next hill-rumored to be full of gold.) Within weeks of organizing in 1788, the association had sent two explorers to report on the Niger. Simon Lucas, whose experience of North Africa included three years as a slave, was assigned to the west coast approach; blocked by plague and war, he turned back with little to report. John Ledyard, an extremely adventurous American, was commissioned to make a start from the north. But Ledyard, who had sailed with Cook's third voyage and witnessed Cook's death in Hawaii, and been considered by Jefferson to lead what became the Lewis and Clark expedition, died in Cairo after taking too strong an emetic for a stomach condition. In 1790, the association sent Major Daniel Houghton inland from the Gambia River on the west coast; he made some progress, sent back a few reports, and then disappeared. In spite of these setbacks, however, the spirit in London was still strong, and when Mungo Park returned from his voyage to the East Indies, Banks was ready to sponsor him as the African Association's fourth emissary to the Niger. He was to be paid 7s. 6d. per day as he prepared, 15s. per day while in Africa, and £200 for initial gear. His trip was to be the association's most costly-fI,307 15s. 6d. over five years-and also the most productive in terms of meeting the longterm goal. With Park's return, they had the information they needed to propose a government-sponsored second expedition. The association had therefore a strong interest in Park's narrative; its success was closely tied to their future plans. In May of 1798 the association met formally. An abstract of the journey was distributed; it had been written by Bryan Edwards, the association's secretary, but based on Park's notes. Park's mission was formally approved as a success, and the association urged Park to write up the full narrative and publish it for his own benefit. To help him accomplish this task, 10

INTRODUCTION

they voted also to pay him a stipend while he wrote. More help came also from MajorJames Rennell, Britain's leading geographer, who took charge of the mapmaking job, and Bryan Edwards again, who continued to provide editorial assistance as needed. With this support then, Park went back to Scotland to spend the next year composing his narrative. He worked with some care, because he too had a goal: he wanted to lead the second expedition. With these goals in mind, there are two further dimensions of Park's connection with the Mrican Association that warrant discussion: first, the background role ofJoseph Banks, and second, the influence of Bryan Edwards, which extends to include the vexing question of Park's position on slavery. It would be difficult to overestimate Banks's influence. In the Mrican Association, he served continuously on the inner circle of decision making until 1804. He was further the president of the Royal Society from 1788 to 1820 and a member of any number of clubs. As a prime mover in scientific circles and as the director of George Ill's newly established Kew Gardens, which was devoted to botanical collections from around the world, he had the king's ear and was close to governing circles. Although his social life was relatively exclusive, he was known for opening his home, greenhouse, gardens, and library to anyone with a genuine scientific interest. Many young men like Park, with passing abilities in botany and burning desires for adventure, went to Banks's door, and from there, through his patronage and connections, around the world. His interest in science extended into the practical business of the nation. As a botanist he saw a fascinating variety of plants in Australia and also a potential site for a penal colony when one was needed after the American Revolution. When slaves needed a better source of food in the West Indies, he suggested the breadfruit of Tahiti, and his idea to transplant it led to the voyage upon which Bligh suffered his famous mutiny. Banks sought knowledge, and was a tireless advocate of ways to use that knowledge in the practical economic world. Park's observations about the Shea nut, and his effort to replace the withered sample in his hat with a fresher one for Banks shortly before he sailed back to England, were part of the same combined scientific and commercial interest in botany. But Banks was significant in another way, for his interest in exploration was tempered by a keen awareness of the public relations end of the business, and in this he had considerable personal experience. In 1769, Banks had sailed with Cook to Tahiti to observe the Transit of Venus. (It is one of history's small, delightful ironies that Park sailed to Mrica on the Endeavor, either the same ship that carried Cook and INTRODUCTION

11

Banks, or a ship of the same name.) Upon their return, Banks's journals and Cook's were turned over to Dr. John Hawkesworth, who had been commissioned by the Admiralty to write the official narrative of record for the government. Like Park's Travels, Hawkesworth's Voyages was a bestseller, but its public reception had been louder with indignation than praise. In developing the combined narrative from the two sets of journals, Hawkesworth made two fatal errors in judgment. He first speculated in a philosophical way about the possibility that Cook's ship could have been saved by the general providence of chance and a passing breeze when it foundered on the Great Barrier Reef, rather than by a particular Providence reaching out with direct and watchful care to save those particular worthy British sailors. And he presented quantities of titillating information about Tahiti sexual practices as curious and interesting to natural philosophy, rather than as clear opportunities for stern moral comment. Banks, whose liaisons on the island paradise were a rather eye-catching part of the narrative, had been widely satirized for such incidents as losing his trousers, gazing too closely at the naked tattooed buttocks of Tahitian women, and altogether participating with ungentlemanly eagerness in far too many island activities. A series of satirical heartthrob poems mocked him for having left a grieving Tahitian wife and baby behind, and the softporn Covent Garden Journal, or, Amorous Repository had used his name in advertising to sell more copies. At the time, Hawkesworth's errors of judgment on these religious and moral matters caused enough of a scandal that they were widely seen as bringing on his early death in 1774. For future writers of exploration narratives, it was a warning of sorts: it was not wise, as the AnnualRegisterfor 1773 put it, to go against received religious opinions, or to fail to take the opportunity to stand morally and judgmentally against behavior that would be questionable in Europe. And when the narrative was written as a public document, under official commission, the writer had a far greater obligation to prevailing opinion. For the African Association, with its plans for government support, the warning was especially pertinent. Because of his direct involvement in Hawkesworth's Voyages, Banks was well aware of the problems that could result from an ill-conceived report that failed to take account of what readers might not want to hear or believe, and it does not seem too great a conjecture to suggest that he had a particular interest in assuring that reports from the African Association, with their attendant goal of generating future support from public monies, did not arouse objections. Moral outrage, satire, and lack of credibility would be severe impediments when the 12

INTRODUCTION

time arrived to turn the private interest of the African Association into a national goal. As late as 1795, more than twenty years after his voyage with Cook, at the same time that Mungo Park was leaving for Mrica, Banks's youthful adventures were still close enough to his public reputation to be the subject of comment in one of James Gillray's sharp cartoons. Banks, of course, had money and position enough to float above such attacks in the popular press, but Park, an unknown Scot of no means at all, did not. There is no evidence that Banks actually interfered in any way with Park's writing, nor is there any reason to suppose that Park's journey, and his reflections on it, were any different from the way he presented them. But Park would have been aware of these problems, and, as we know from Scott, he did not include everything in his narrative. Given his knowledge of the Mrican Association's goals, however, and his own ambition to return to Africa, it is reasonable to think that he might have practiced some selective selfediting to avoid either offending his readers or presenting himself in inappropriate situations when he lacked the social prestige to overcome bad press. This possibility of inflaming his readers against him was even more real when he came to write of slavery in West Mrica, a topic he could in no way avoid. The members of the African Association were united in their search for knowledge and their hopes for commercial opportunity in Africa, but in the case of the highly volatile slavery and abolition debates, they were often divided. (Park's list of subscribers, too, includes names from both sides of the debate.) In 1799, while Park worried away at his writing at home in Selkirk, Parliament was debating one of many attempts to pass a bill limiting the slave trade. The membership of the African Association included the leaders (as well as many supporters) on both sides of the debate. On the one hand, William Wilberforce led the abolitionist cause; on the other hand, Park's assigned editor Bryan Edwards, who owned substantial property in the West Indies, led the opposition for the planters who relied on slavery to keep their plantations in business. Newspapers in the spring of 1799 were reporting on the progress of the debate, sometimes in columns adjacent to advertisements or excerpts from Park's Travel~. Wilberforce, with Prime Minister Pitt's support, was working for a bill that would raise the space allotted for slaves between decks on the Middle Crossingone step in a step-at-a-time strategy toward total abolition. Edwards's opposition countered with the argument that such expensive renovations to ships (not to mention the reduction in cargo as measured by numbers of bodies) would break the Liverpool shipping industry, INTRODUCTION

13

and that the economic fallout would affect the entire nation. Into this arena fell Mungo Park's Travels, with some reference to or incident of slavery in every chapter, and chapter 22 devoted to an essay on the origins of slavery in Africa. And here we arrive at one of the most curious dimensions of Park's book: it was used by both sides of the debate. While pro-slave trade interests could point to Park as support for their argument that European laws would have no actual effect on the trade itself, abolitionists could draw equally well on his qualifier at the end of chapter 22 - that lack of enlightenment was the real problem - and argue for enlightening Africans as well as Europeans. Park himself, with what has always been seen as his characteristic reticence, refused ever to enter the discussion, on the grounds that his book contained all he had to say on the topic. Thus it evolved that both sides believed him, and both sides used him. His biographer in 1815,John Whishaw, summarized the situation well: It is a remarkable circumstance, that while the supposed opinions of Park [a reference to chapter 22] have always been appealed to by the advocates of the slave trade, his facts [meaning the incidents scattered throughout the narrative] have as constantly been relied on by their opponents; and that in the various discussions that have taken place upon that subject since this work appeared, the principle illustrations of the arguments in favor of the Abolition, have always been derived from Park's Travels. (25-26)

Whishaw went on to defend Park and argue for his abolitionist leaning, but his point is on the mark. Each side was convinced that its interpretation was faithful to Park, and rather than attacking him, they attacked each other in their defense of him. A great part of these arguments and defenses concerned the role of Bryan Edwards, the West Indian plantation owner, in shaping Park's narrative. He was Park's employer, he had written (though from Park's notes) the initial fiftypage abstract of the journey, and - in the view of Park's defenders - he had probably exerted pro-slave trade pressure against Park's support of abolition. It is unlikely that we will ever know the full extent of Edwards's influence; we have little more than the book called Mungo Park's Travels, which contains his public position, and the letters Whishaw collected on the topic and published in the Journal of a Mission in 1815. Edwards himself left a confused trail. He told some people that he had served Park much as Hawkesworth had served Cook-which would certainly have been quite a substantial revision (Whishaw, 350). In the early 14

INTRODUCTION

stages of writing, Edwards evidently did have to do quite a bit of rearranging to keep everything from sounding boringly the same, and at one point wrote to Banks about approval for the changes. But by January of 1799, however, he decided that Park had hit his stride and in another letter to Banks, Edwards wrote that "Park goes on triumphantly - He improves his style so much by practice, that his journal by now requires but little correction; and some parts, which he has lately sent me, are equal to anything in the English language" (Hallett, Records, 165). And though Park himself refused to elaborate on any of his comments about slavery, he was steadfast in his insistence that the narrative represented his thought, and his alone. On the basis ofthe Travels, we can reach some conclusions. Park was appalled by the suffering he saw in slavery, both internally in Africa and on the coast with regard to the European trade. He recognized that any European law as a solution to slavery in Africa was likely to be ineffective, no matter how well-meaning. West Africa had no wage labor economy, and slavery was such a well-established part of war, legal retribution, and survival during famine that according to his estimate no less than three-fourths of the population of Africa were enslaved. There could be no simple solution. Park's reference to Esau in chapter 22 suggests that his own experience of near starvation during famine had led him to think deeply (and very personally) about the consequences of absolute opinions on liberty, slavery, and death. But despite his ambivalence in print, he was definite about wanting to return to Africa, and wrote in the knowledge that clearly emerging on one side or the other of the abolition debate would surely alienate a large number of readers (not to mention at least half his employers), and thus jeopardize the African Association's plans as well as his own hopes of leading the second expedition. Partisanship in Parliament would make it much harder to obtain funding from the notoriously tight-fisted Prime Minister Pitt. Whatever Park's reasoning, we know that when he did return to Africa, he followed through on the one strong and completely unqualified personal opinion he expressed throughout the Travels: he carried with him numerous copies of the New Testament to begin the process of bringing enlightenment to Africa. Though they don't appear on his list of supplies, his letters show him distributing them like breadcrumbs to mark his passage all along his route. Despite these problems hovering around the book, the success of Park's Travelswas apparent almost immediately. ByJune 8, 1799, Banks was confident enough that the book had been well received to use INTRODUCTION

15

it as the basis for a memorandum to the Committee of Privy Council for Trades and Plantations. In it, he advanced his plan for a military expedition to secure for the British crown, "either by Conquest or by Treaty," the whole coast of Africa from Arguin to Sierra Leone, the River Niger basin, and all inland areas that offered access to the river. The memo further establishes the threat of competition from two sources: other European countries, who would surely see the opportunity as clearly as he did, and the Moors, who were already moving in with Islam. One long passage is especially worth quoting: Should the experiment [the military expedition] be made, I have little doubt that in a very few years a trading Company might be established under immediate control of the Government, who would take upon themselves the whole expense of the measure, and would govern the Negroes far more mildly and make them far more happy than they are now under the tyranny of their arbitrary princes, would become popular at home by converting them to the Christian Religion by inculcating in their rough minds the mild morality which is engrafted on the tenets of our faith and by effecting the greatest practicable diminution of the Slavery of Mankind, upon the principles of natural justice and commercial benefit. (Hallett, Records, 212) The feasibility of this plan, Banks went on to say, could be deduced entirely from Mungo Park's Travels. Banks's words here display a singular shift for the African Association; the peaceful, civilized, scientific focus of the association's first minutes are here transformed into a combined economic and missionary goal to be aggressively supported with military force. His words are also a clear statement of what would become, later in the nineteenth century, the Scramble for Africabut that was still in the future. In 1799, the African Association had found in Park's narrative what they needed to take the next step in their plan and go to the government. Taken together, Banks's memorandum and Mungo Park's Travels, sharing the same goals, opened the gates to Africa. Mungo Park's Travels

In many ways, the most remarkable thing about Park's Travels is that everyone liked it. As popular as exploration narratives were in the eighteenth century, very few passed public review without arousing complaints from well-read, strongly opinionated, and highly conten-

16

INTRODUCTION

tious reviewers. Improvements in print technology steadily increased the number of books in circulation, and literacy was rapidly spreading across gender and class boundaries. There were more books, more readers, and also more explorations. For the writers, it became steadily more difficult to satisfy the variety of competing expectations. Park, however, seemed to please just about all. The words of the British Monthly Review in July of 1799 are typical of the general response: The narrative of Mr. Park is simple: he seems to have described things as he saw them, and to have consulted his senses rather than his imagination; he is unwilling to glut credulity by the narration of wonders; he draws no exaggerated picture of his sufferings and dangers; nor does he ascribe to his own sagacity any event which resulted from chance or accident. The manners, dispositions, and customs of the people are detailed fully and (we believe) faithfully; for if what is described be not real, at least that which is invented is probable .... Human nature, in its general characters, is nearly the same in all times and places; admitting modifications from the influence of climate, and from arbitrary regulations, which it is the business of the traveller to note; and which Mr. Park has noted. Those readers, then, who seek in the present work for what is marvellous and anomalous, will seek in vain. The author found, on the borders of the Desert and on the Banks of the Niger, what has been found in all countries, a mixture of good and evil. (249) For the end of the eighteenth century, these modest comments constitute high praise. They are also a nearly verbatim repeat of Samuel Johnson's description of the ideal exploration narrative given in the introduction to his 1735 translation of Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia, and they define a standard few had reached. In addition, they address nearly all the concerns of eighteenth-century readers when it came to evaluating exploration narratives and identify a number of problems common to the genre. For the writers, who always had to negotiate the space between the unknown and the known-to mediate between the alien experiences of their journeys and the familiar backgrounds of their readers' chairs - it was never enough to simply tell their tales. And when, like Park, they traveled alone, with no one to back up their words, it was especially difficult to establish authority and credibilityin short, to be taken as a reliable narrator. The reviewer plainly believed every word that Park wrote, commending him for his simplicity. This was partly a quality of language. INTRODUCTION

17

Where many writers were abused for their overly Latinate diction, or classical allusions, or even their poor grammar, Park did well. In terms of vocabulary, his Travels is still reasonably accessible today, and most unfamiliar words can be grasped from context. Such a style attested to honesty of character and intent, because writers who used highpowered stylistic devices were suspected of ornamenting their facts as well as their language. Simplicity also depended on narrative technique, and in this Park had a tremendous advantage. Explorers usually had to balance two kinds of journals: the dull daily business of such things as compass readings and soil quality and, on the other hand, the events that made the reading bearable. Both were important, because each guaranteed the other as evidence that the writer was, in fact, there at the scene for on-the-spot ocular demonstration, the eyewitness verification so necessary to true natural philosophy. Rennell's "Geographical Illustrations" essay at the end of the Travels absorbed most of the dull details and relieved Park of much of this burden. As an added benefit, Rennell's well-known name supported the unknown Park's credibility. The reviewer gives a great deal of attention to the difficult matter of marvels and wonders. Park, too, addressed the issue in his preface, where almost his first words were the promise of a "plain unvarnished tale." The phrase echoes Othello, who told a plain unvarnished tale to explain why Desdemona fell in love with him: she loved him for his traveler's tales of captivity, cannibals, and blemyes-those strange men with no heads and faces on their chests who populated maps of Africa in earlier, more credulous ages. The problem of marvels had hardly died away, though; an enormous number of eighteenthcentury readers longed for the thrill of the nearly unbelievable, their fascination with the possibility of giants and men with tails being closely akin to ours for aliens and abominable snowmen, and just as subject to sensationalizing journalism. Travelers to unknown and faraway places were definitely expected to offer something that would astonish their readers; the problem was identifying the line between astonishment and disbelief, a line far too often identified after the fact, when the writer would find himself hooted out of town for having had the nerve to expect anyone to believe such rot. Park handled this by reporting no wonders directly, and instead satisfying his readers' longing in a covert way by displacing it onto the Africans. His handling of cannibals, which people were always equally horrified and fiendishly delighted to hear about, provides a good example. Throughout his relation, he humorously encouraged his readers' amazement at

18

INTRODUCTION

the gullibility of people who actually believed, for instance, that white men took black people away on ships to eat them. When he does report cannibalism, it is as hearsay-an old trick for handling things the writer doesn't want to be personally responsible for (which is not, however, to say that Park saw cannibalism). The anomaly of nature in Park's Travels is Mungo Park himself, a freak of nature in Mrican eyes, as laughable as that might seem to his readers, who surely would have noticed his handsome portrait on first opening his book. It was a lowkey strategy, but it gave readers a taste of what they wanted without requiring them to risk their own gullibility. They could have their cake and eat it too, while simultaneously affirming their own superiority. Park's simplicity, handling of marvels, and heroism can readily be seen if we compare him - as many of his reviewers did in 1799 - to James Bruce, the Abyssinian traveler. Bruce, who always thought a good story was worth improving on, especially since that was what people really wanted to hear, had been roundly abused and widely disbelieved for the adventures he reported in Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile in 1790. When Bruce claimed to have eaten lions, he had crossed the line. It went against the order of nature (lions eat people, and there's no reversing the business), and he therefore could not be believed. He also claimed to have eaten meat that was cut from a living cow, which continued to walk after being sewn up, and was again disbelieved. (It was true; that's how soldiers on the march kept themselves supplied with meat.) Bruce said he had awed the royal court of Abyssinia with his athletic prowess by shooting a candle attached to an arrow through three shields and a thick wooden table. (A lamentable lack of modesty, but again, apparently true; it was verified with some annoyance by the explorer Henry Salt in 18lO.) And Bruce made his readers itch ",rjth disgust when he told of personally administering a full purge and blood-letting to a harem full of naked Abyssinian women. Park is a study in contrast. Ifhe ate anything to challenge the imagination or turn the stomach, he had the good taste to keep quiet about it. Rather than demonstrate his superiority, Park deliberately made himself quite useless; he couldn't repair guns, or even shave a boy's head without some mishap that disqualified him from being imposed on for such services again. When invited by a group of ladies to do some bloodletting, Park, a surgeon, heaved a sigh ofreliefwhen they lost their nerve and backed out. Bruce's exaggerations insulted his readers' credulity. As a result, when he reported desert storms with great, tall moving pillars of sand, they begrudged him even the possiINTRODUCTION

19

bility that it might be true. Park, on the other hand, reported the same tremendous storms and pillars of sand like smoke with no trouble at all. The reviewer in the Monthly, echoing Samuel Johnson, recognized the obvious: there is an element of fiction, even if only of artful selection and omission, in every exploration narrative. But Bruce's narrative fairly bristled with what seemed obvious fictions, whereas Park's was smoothly similar to acceptable reality. Bruce's reputation was recuperated by the mid-nineteenth century, and his Travels (though much abridged) came to be called the epic of Mrican travel narratives, on a par with Park's designation as a classic. But in the late eighteenth century, Bruce spent the last twenty years of his life suffering the consequences of having told, with great gusto, what was real without having taken into account the degree to which it would seem improbable to most of his countrymen and women. Pcrhaps- but only perhaps - the question of probability is what Park recognized in the incidents he left out, but told to Sir Walter Scott. Park's overall credibility was further supported by the way he stuck to his business in asking the questions a traveler should ask, regardless of his circumstances. There was little left to chance in the eighteenthcentury drive to organize knowledge, and the observations travelers were expected to make were too important to be neglected. Countless books of instruction with lists of questions were published to make sure no unusual or remarkable information escaped notice; some, like Leopold Berchtold's 1789 Essay to Direct and Extend the Inquiries 0/ Patriotic Travellers, even provided fold-out pages of labeled blank columns for the diligent to carry along and fill in. Of course, many questions on these lists predisposed the travelers to give confused or ambiguous answers. Those about beliefs in life after death or methods of transferring property, for instance, were almost meaningless to informants whose cultures didn't include Christianity or private property in the European tradition, though their answers were recorded as solidly as if they did (and often caused the same kinds of misunderstandings that were so common between Europeans and Indians in the Americas). But the pursuit of knowledge proceeded regardless. In this tradition, Park took note of rivers, seasons, water levels, hunting practices, crops, agricultural methods, domestic animals, clothing materials, manufacturing, mining, tools of any sort, musical instruments, housing construction, kinds of money, trade (both imports and exports were of crucial interest), the position of women in society, the methods of appointing advisors to kings and deciding issues of succession. Even when he is held captive by the Moors, we can see him pursuing 20

INTRODUCTION

his tasks when he questions the traveling Shereef (who even speaks some English) about days and distances to Timbuktu, or, as he spelled it, Tombuctoo. He fills the expected obligation of the manners-andcustoms portrait to describe in an orderly fashion the lives of the people whose lands he passed through, and collects lists of numbers in various languages, just as early explorers did in the Americas. Some of the information was presented effortlessly in the course of the narrative, but at other times Park took breaks in the story line to present a straight recitation of information. These small essays scattered throughout the book interrupt the narrative and give it a lurching quality. Park constantly switches back and forth from storytelling to objective-sounding essays, often giving his readers awkward explanations about why he pauses, and assuring them that it will save them some trouble if he does it now, or make things easier for them if he does it later. The famous singing women scene in chapter 15, for instance, comes to a characteristic abrupt halt with almost an apology for having been so self-indulgent, though he wrote knowing already that it had inspired the duchess of Devonshire to poetry (the incident had been included in Edwards's abstract). At other times he announces that he is delaying details of interest to natural philosophy in favor of devoting a full chapter to the topic at a later, more convenient point in the narrative. Yet as intrusive as they are, these lurches, breaks, apologies serve a powerful rhetorical function. Constantly, they remind readers that they are not reading a fiction, but the real journey of a real man who has not the sophistication to lie or embellish. Though Park's narrative and discursive essays often rub shoulders with each other awkwardly, neither form lasts long enough to bore. Such brevity also supported his credibility (and Park was remarkably brief in comparison to his contemporaries), even as it propelled readers on. The adventures were too short to let readers fly too far off into their imaginations, and the essays were long enough to give solid doses of information without bogging down. In short, Park satisfied the age-old rhetorical direction to delight and instruct at once. Where the Monthly's reviewer approved by default, others were quite explicit about Park's ability to delight and instruct, and to do so with great decorum. In an age when travels, as opposed to novels, were expected to be edifying, entertaining, and proper enough to be read by women and children, and often appeared on educators' lists of approved family reading material, Park filled the bill where others too often fell short. The limits this requirement put on writers often conflicted with the needs of another, more philosophical, audience, who INTRODUCTION

21

were greatly interested in such things as the origin and evolution of human society, and the question of whether European civilization was a degradation of earlier, primitive purity, free of artificial restrictions or if civilization was an endlessly forward-moving improvement on humanity's original savagery. (It goes without saying that these more philosophical readers saw themselves as being able to handle material that might give lesser but still literate souls entirely the wrong idea.) Thus the social, or ethnographic, information explorers gatheredwhich was a large part of the traditional and expected manners-andcustoms portrait-was at once at the top of the list in generating interest, but fraught with hazards in the telling. Polygamy, sexual practices, medical details, eating habits, notions of communal ownership, initiation rituals, circumcision ceremonies, and, above all, religion - these topics were virtual mine fields for explorers, and were scrutinized minutely for appropriateness of language and any trace of challenge in the writer's attitude. Throughout his Travels, Park maintains decorum by signaling his alliance with the social order of his readers. And this, I think, is crucial to understanding why his work is singularly significant: in meeting his readers' needs, in maintaining decorum, Park's narrative functioned as an act of domestic persuasion. Mary Louise Pratt has written extensively on the interaction between sentimental, experiential travelers like Park and the nineteenth-century discourse of imperialism. Like many other such travelers, Park did see with what Pratt has called an imperial eye, viewing the land and its people in terms of their potential if European methods of production were to be applied. The background of Park's relationship with the African Association, however, suggests that Park's work went beyond being an especially good example of a sentimental traveler. In meeting the goals he shared with the African Association, his Travels became instrumental not only in maintaining the sense of a civilizing mission, but in creating it at a pivotal moment in time-a moment that required domestic persuasion as a necessary preliminary step to gaining public support for the interventionist policy of setting up trading stations backed by military force. In seeking to avoid the pitfalls and pratfalls that had overwhelmed so many other exploration writers, he stumbled into the heroic mold that fit the expectations of the public, and, as much by default as by design, resolved the political and religious conflicts of his readers into a coherent image not only of Africa, but of a British presence in Africa. Park's sentimentality was a large part of his close fit with his readers. In thinking of this, we need to distinguish Park's sentiments, or opin22

INTRODUCTION

ions, from his sentimentality, which is concerned with the degree of emotional sympathy he resonates with in regard to his subject matter. This latter sense is what we mean when we speak of sentimental travelers; the type was widely recognized in 1799, and yet this quality was not noted in Park by his contemporaries. Nevertheless, he was sentimental, and signaled it regularly. In chapter 7, he is touched by the "affecting" reunion of his blacksmith traveling companion with his blind mother, in a scene that recalls the Monthly reviewer's praise again; it reminds the reviewer-and the Monthly's readers, too-of the commonality of much human experience, as a good travel narrative should. In chapter 19, Park is "shocked" -as his readers would be-at the callous burial of a boy slave. His choice of adjectives reveals his heart at every turn; who would not sympathize with "poor" Nealee in her suffering on the slave march to the coast? Park's own suffering is great, too, as he wanders through the fasting pains of famine, or is forced to shove amongst cattle at a trough for water. The Critical Review inJuly of 1799 showed sentimentality throughout in commenting on Park, and illuminated the general effect in saying that readers could trace the sufferings "from the events of the narrative, not from his complaints" (256). That was the key: Park aroused sentimentality without displaying any excess of it himself. His brief narrations and spare adjectives (no sentimentality lasted longer than two or three sentences) gave all the signals his readers needed to know that he responded to events as they would like to think they would, were they in his shoes. They gave him their approval. Another facet of Park's style was even less noted in 1799: his narrative is suffused with humor. In this, it seems again to have fit the reviewing and reading public so well that it passed completely without remark. Often the humor is on two levels, as in the classic scene with the ladies who request an ocular demonstration from him in order to settle once and for all the question of whether or not Christians are circumcised (chapter ll). The desire to see the stranger's skin is almost conventional in exploration narratives, and troublesome indeed for writers, who find it hard to tell without presenting themselves in a precariously undignified position with regard to the readers peering over their shoulders. But Park jests his way free of the problem by offering to show only the prettiest girl, and only by herself. Laughing heartily, the ladies leave, and later send him some much-needed food. But Park's domestic readers shared with him a joke completely unavailable to the Mrican ladies who jested with him. Safe at home, Europeans in their drawing rooms could el~oy his wit and admire his INTRODUCTION

23

cleverness with relief-a narrow escape! But an escape nonetheless, and one that proved their expectation that strength of purpose, modesty, and virtue carry the day. They could also appreciate his use of the term "ocular demonstration": though he refused it to the Africans, the words represented his business in their home. For Park, ocular demonstration supplied the knowledge for future action, while the ladies' request for the same was nullified and evaded with humor: knowledge was a one-way transaction. Park's humor accomplishes a great deal in his narrative. It gives him an excellent character, and it acts as a brake on sentimentality and fear. It also shows conflicting undercurrents of power, and in this it parallels much of what Pratt has written about the covert, or "anticonquest," dimension of sentimental travel literature, which obscures the overtly dominating goals of imperialism by promoting "a utopian, innocent vision of European global authority" (Imperial Eyes, 39). Park's humor almost always masks and defuses a situation that is at least unsettling, at worst dangerous, and it works to confirm his superiority when he is most apparently powerless. The let-me-see-your-skin scene above takes place in the Moorish camp, where Park is forced to sleep with a pig, and constantly fears for his life at the hands of the arbitrary Ali. At the end of the scene, he added almost as an afterthought that the ladies were so entertained that they sent him some food-a point of some importance at the time, because the Moors nearly starved him through sheer neglect. The same humor is evident in the many incidents in which he makes saphies. It was a joke with his readers when he sold his hair to be made into a saphie (how amusing a way for the purchaser to gain access to European knowledge and culture) or wrote the Lord's Prayer out to transfer the wisdom of his literacy and white skin (how ironic to sell it to an illiterate Muslim who superstitiously washed the words off the board Park wrote on and drank the inky water).6 But such tricks were also his only currency in a famine so dire that women were selling their children for food to keep the rest of their families alive. His survival in such seemingly powerless situations guaranteed his ultimate superiority, not to mention his ability to return one day with the full force of European civilization at his heels. The sentimentality of Park's responses to Africans demon-

6. In his 1999 television series Wonders aIthe African "arid, Henry Louis GatesJr. records the drinking of holy words as a Muslim tradition in part 5, "The Road to Timbuktu." This segment of the series, through modern Mali, retraces large parts of Park's 1799 and 18osjourneys.

24

INTRODUCTION

strated that their natural character would welcome the civilizing mission, while the humor confirmed the natural capacity of Europeans as having something better to offer-and both fit his readers so seamlessly that they didn't remark it at all. The benefits Park gained by dispersing authority of interpretation over his text have already been discussed with regard to his relationship with the African Association; he avoided becoming directly embroiled in the abolition disputes in such a way that participants on both sides took him as their champion. At the end of his essay in chapter 22, he was even more explicit, saying that it was not within his province or his power to interpret facts. So he left interpretation and final judgments up to those who did have the power. Similarly, Rennell's authority carried for him the burdens of dry facts and geographical accuracy. Throughout his narrative, Park defers the authority to interpret the events he experiences to others. Despite his extraordinary accomplishment, he was still a Scot-honest and genuine, but still a man of no particular family. Banks, who had sponsored his travel and urged his writing, evidently agreed. Shortly after Park's publication, Banks described his work this way: "His details carry with them the manifest tokens of veracity; and his unassuming remarks bear the testimony of good natural parts, which though not highly cultivated, have evidently not been neglected" (Hallett, Records, 166). Where Park's natural good parts left off, others were ready to take up the slack and make the stronger judgments that Park resisted. And on the matter of race, too, he deferred to outside authority: Karfa Taura, the African slatee, or slave trader, who took him in, nursed him back to health, sheltered him for months, and brought him back to the coast. It was Karfa, not Park, who had the last word on race, and who interpreted the seemingly obvious conclusion for European readers. Although he had cared for Park for months, Karfa was astonished at the change he saw in Park when they reached the coast. Seeing Park in a European context, shaved and dressed in his own clothes again, Karfa also saw and acknowledged the plain superiority of European manufacturing, technology, and civilized life. The ships and their rigging astonished him, and kept him in "deep thought." He could only sigh and say, "Fato fing inta jeng, black men are nothing." These words came within three pages of the end of the narrative, and Park reported them as evidence that Karfa possessed a mind "above his condition" -apparently enough reason to give him the last word on Africans in general. His words, not Park's, appeared in nearly every review of Park's Travels; in the July 1799 Monthly Review, the judgment "black INTRODUCTION

25

men are nothing" was promoted from the end of Park's narrative to the reviewer's introductory overview to set the tone for pages of excerpts that followed. Plainly, the judgment met the readers' needs, and helped persuade Park's readers of the value their presence would have in Africa. I n October of 1799, the Anti-Jacobin reviewer looked into the future to "predict that Park's Travels through Africa will be a standing book; because it is a book of strong sense, sound principles, virtuous and religious sentiment" (175). Though the reviewer might be said to have failed in identifying the full range of Park's appeal-adventure, for instance, struck no chord at all-the prediction held true. Mungo Park slipped into the public imagination with the extraordinary tale of an ordinary man, and in seeking to avoid offense and controversy, he shaped a hero anyone could identify with. He was no superhuman; he did not threaten to go native; he steered clear of women; he knew his place; he kept the faith. He had heart, and he was brave without being foolish-which is to say that his heart warmed appropriately when he saw Africans rejoice in the simplicity of their family reunions, and he wasn't ashamed to admit to being afraid of lions. Park's sentimentality - his textualized response to the experience of his journey -resonated so closely with his readers that they accepted him completely as one of their own, regardless of their own differences. Boys could still look to Park to imagine themselves as African adventurers, but, even more important, he came home as committed (at least in print) to the domestic world he had left as any mother, father, wife, sister, or sweetheart could want. It was exactly what people needed to hear to envision a purpose and a reason for getting more involved with Africa, and without any fear of upsetting the social order on the home front. In persuading the domestic reading public to accept his work, Park created the necessary conditions to make that involvement possible. Finally, a word about Major James Rennell's essay of "Geographical Illustrations." Dryas the essay is, it has its own slow, quiet drama. Carefully, Rennell assembles his data. His goal is nothing less than a new map of Africa, one that will incorporate every reference he can find, beginning with the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century B.C. and the first mention of the River Niger. To accomplish his task, he must reconcile miles as measured by camel travel, as men with a baggage train travel, men on foot travel, and native messengers travel (by far the fastest). He must bring together local measurements in Ara-

26

INTRODUCTION

bic, Portuguese, French, German, and British miles as they varied over the course of centuries, and convert them all to standardized geographical (or G) miles of 6,020 feet, or 1/60 of a minute, each. The ground-level observations of over a thousand years of individual travelers had to be integrated with complex mathematical formulas to work together and allow for the curvature of the earth on a large-scale map of the entire continent. Some locations had been reckoned by astronomical observations and others by timekeepers, or clocks (a major eighteenth-century advancement). In addition to all these problems, Rennell had to perform wonders of linguistic guesswork. Place-names were recorded in varying alphabets. To compound the problem, it was nearly impossible to tell if any name represented what a place was called by those who lived there, or if it was, perhaps, a name derived from what a neighboring people called it, heard through Portuguese ears, translated into Latin, and then translated again into English or French several centuries later. The area Rennell designated as Melli, or Malel, or Lamlem, is probably the old kingdom of Mali, from which comes the name of the modern country. Jenne, Bammakoo, and Sego are now called Djenne, Bamako, and Segou. But it was by no means always so easy, as Rennell's struggle with the overlapping variations of Ghana, Guinea, Ginea, Genni, Ghenoa, Ghinny, and Ginny makes clear. Furthermore, people didn't stand still; they moved around, were conquered and renamed, abandoned their homes altogether, and took their names elsewhere. Such a fluctuation of names, he observed with great understatement, did tend to confound the geographer. It was a monumental task, and Rennell slogged through it relentlessly, citing his sources and justifying every step of the way, because he knew from the beginning that whatever his result, it would still be only the best possible preliminary map. Thus he included the chart of magnetic variations, to show how he figured compass variations. In gathering so much together, he cleared the way for future mapmakers and travelers. He made a good start, and in many places his best guess was remarkably accurate. Park didn't get to Timbuktu, but with his hearsay report and other observations, Rennell put it at lat. 16 a 13' W, long. 1 33' N-not far off the location we have now, lat. 16 a 46' W, long. 3 a 01' N. The biggest question, however remained unsolved: the Niger flowed east, but exactly what happened to it was still unknown. Park was convinced it would run into the Congo; Rennell thought it might possibly run into a lake, but more probably into a dry bed where it eventually evaporated. Both were wrong. It would be 1830 before Richard and John Lander would 0

INTRODUCTION

27

bring back the news of the great bend where the Niger turned southeast, and ran out its length of over 2,600 miles into the delta on the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic. Rennell's geography was not, however, restricted to cartography. His comments throughout are infused with judgments connecting the land with the character of the people who lived on it. He was in accord with Enlightenment ideas about the causal relationship between climate and human nature-ideas that equated, for instance, hot climates with (overly) passionate characters, and harsh climates like deserts with savage characters. In this, Rennell's conclusions cast a strong interpretive slant over Park's Travels. On the map of Park's route, he drew a long blue line to separate the barbaric, Muslim Moors, who lived on worthless desert land, from the more sympathetic Negroes, who occupied land with agricultural and mineral potential. On the very first page of his "Geographical Illustrations," Rennell explained that Park's narrative presented a "moral and physical geography" of Mrica, with the line separating desirable moral characters of people in desirable areas of land from undesirable people and land. In 1799, Rennell's essay was a major contribution to knowledge, and many readers would have pored over it. Reviewers were quick to spot his phrase of definition, and several used it as the starting point for their overall evaluation of Park's representation of West Africa. But even readers today can appreciate Rennell at work, with images from the poet James Thomson springing often to his mind as he stretches out to envision and then fill the blanks spaces on his map. In this Rennell is in many ways like Park: each tells us about the world by an act of the imagination.

28

INTRODUCTION

NOTE ON THE TEXT

This edition is based on the second edition of 1799. Many errors from the first edition were corrected in the second, but as is usually the case, new errors were introduced. The transposed letters of the word "inscribed" on Park's dedication page, for instance, were not present in the first edition, and suggest quite a rush to print the second. The goal for this edition has been to produce a readable text that retains the flavor and style of the original, without being a strict facsimile. Park's often inconsistent spelling and punctuation have been retained throughout, as have Rennell's; variants were checked against the Oxford English Dictionary for spelling and contemporary usage. The symbols Park and Rennell used for footnotes have for the most part been replaced with numbers; my editorial footnotes, marked off with brackets, have been sequenced into the original footnotes. Running heads have been changed, signature folios have been removed, and all the pages renumbered, along with Park's and Rennell's cross-references. Variations of type style-such as words in italic or small caps for emphasis-have been retained, even if they are used inconsistently. I did not impose consistency on the order, spacing, or use of punctuation, such as the placement of commas or periods with closing parentheses. I also normalized spacing between words (in the "List of Contributors" and "A Vocabulary of the Mandingo Language") where it was altered in order to make the copy fit the line. Some obvious typographical errors, such as missing or transposed letters, have also been corrected in the interest of readability; they are marked in the text with a dagger (t). Curious readers can refer to the list of textual changes below to see which misprints were corrected. As Rennell notes in his "Geographical Illustrations" essay, the fluctuation of names in West Mrica throughout history confounds those who wish to standardize or cor-

relate them. Names of places, peoples, and individuals in this edition therefore remain as Park identified and spelled them in 1799.

Textual Changes

Page numbers indicate where the corrections are located in this edition; the brackets following each page number enclose the original misprint. 51 [XXI] 59 [M.P.F.R.S.] 62 [M.D.F.R.S.] 62 [R] 62 [M.P.F.R.S.] 63 [Book ciey] 91 [white, men] 107 [been] ll8 [havving] 137 [gave] 171 [proprieties] 189 [regulars] 196 [themselves great] 212 [I I] 216 [Dooty's soon] 223 [Sera-wolli] 233 [perform] 235 [Slatess] 237 [shifs] 238 [burning the grass] 243 [woman] 244 [ocassions] 244 [chid] 247 [unworthy attention] 248 [general apply]

30

259 [cautions] 268 [minkall;] 272 [ivory, together] 281 [shoolmaster] 286 [cornIe] 289 [Thisinduced] 297 [Serawollies] 297 [inufferably] 301 [four] 334 [EXPEDITION ,as] 336 [is] 347 [10 12] 354 [ignornt] 354 [it it] 356 [geographichal] 363 [adjustmenr] 363 [its] 371 [northwark] 379, n.6 [Hatmann's] 382 [hearssy] 384, n. 23 [D'Anvilles] 389, n. 1 [Portugeze] 390 [mort] 395, n. 25 [246 .]

NOTE ON THE TEXT

CHRONOLOGY OF MUNGO PARK'S LIFE

September land. 1785 1788 1788 1792 1792 1793

1794 1795

1796

1797

1798

10

or 11,1771

Born; Foulshiels Farm, near Selkirk, Scot-

Moves to Selkirk; apprentice to Thomas Anderson, surgeon; attends Selkirk Grammar School. African Association founded. Enrolls for three terms at Edinburgh University; studies medicine and botany. Visits sister Margaret and brother-in-Iaw,John Dickson, in London; meets Sir Joseph Banks. Joins Linnaean Society. Takes oral exams for the Company of Surgeons in London; receives a low pass; signs on as surgeon's mate on the Worcester, bound for the East Indies. Returns to England; reads paper to the Linnaean Society on eight new fishes he found in Sumatra. Makes final arrangements with the African Association for a west coast approach to the River Niger; sets sail on the Endeavor, May 22. Arrives at Pisania, on the Gambia River,July 5, and departs for the interior, December 2. Captive of the Moors, March 7-July 1. Arrives at the Niger, July 22, and begins return journey, August 3. Stays at KamaIia with Karfa Taura, September 16-ApriI17, 1797. April 17, sets out for the coast with the slave coille. Arrives at Pisania,June 10, and departs on American ship the Charleston. Arrives back in London, December 25. May 26, General Meeting of the African Association; Park is

1799

1801 1802

1805

1806 1815

commended for his success, and the abstract of his journey is distributed. Vague plans for exploring in Australia fall through. Goes home to Selkirk; publishes Travels in May; marries Allison Anderson in August. Moves to Peebles, Scotland, and sets up a medical practice. Commissioned by government to organize a second African expedition; plans delayed by war with France; studies Arabic while he waits. Sets sail for Africa on the CrescentinJanuary; last journal entry, November 16, from Sansanding on the River Niger. Charleston Courier in America publishes the first rumor of Park's death. Park's Journal of a Mission published, under the auspices of the African Institute, to benefit Park's wife and four children.

32

CHRONOLOGY

PARK'S INSTRUCTIONS

Park's instructions were the same as those given to M~or Daniel Houghton, whose route Park followed in beginning his search for the Niger from the West Coast and the Gambia River. The original is recorded in the Minute Book of the Mrican Association under a meeting later in the year, on December 18, 1790. Available only in manuscript, the original is in the University Library, Cambridge, U.K.; these instructions are quoted from Robin Hallett's documentary history, The Records of the African Association (1964, pp. 122-127). Great George Street. Sept: 26. 1790. The unexpected opportunity of an immediate passage to the Gambia, having precluded M~or Houghton from the advantage of receiving the Instructions of the Committee of the Mrican Association, Mr. Beaufoy, in the absence of his colleagues, thinks it his duty to point out the objects that he conceives they would wish to recommend to the Major's particular research. 1. The Committee having reason to believe that a considerable Empire, distinguished by the name of Houssa, has long been established in the neighbourhood of the Neel el Abeed (called by the Europeans the Niger); and being desirous, for a variety of reasons, that a communication with the said Empire may be opened from the British possessions on the Gambia, the Major cannot more effectually fulfill the purpose of his mission, than by travelling from the Falls of Baraconda to the Capital of the said Kingdom. This journey they conceive may be effected by the aid, and under the conduct of the Foulans (called by Europeans Foulies,) whose merchants Trade to the Gambia, as well as to the Empire of Houssa. 2. The Committee being also desirous to be informed of the Rise,

the Course and the Termination of the Niger as well as of the various Nations that inhabit its borders, are in hopes that partly by the Major's own Discoveries, and partly by the information he will be able to collect in the Neighbourhood of the River, this object of his mission may also be accomplished. 3. The accounts that have been sent to the Committee ofthe wealth and population of the city of Tombuctoo having engaged their earnest attention, they will naturally entertain the hope that a visit to that place will be considered by Major Houghton as one of the principal objects of his journey. The rout [sic] by which Major Houghton will return must be left to his own discretion; but the Committee will feel the strongest solicitude to receive, by every possible opportunity, an account of his proceedings: and they are not without hopes that the various Caravans from Morocco, Godempsi (Ghedesmes) Fezzan, and Cairo; as well as the communication of the Slave Dealers with the Gambia and the Gulph of Guinea, may render the opportunities frequent, and that the expedient of drawing a Bill for Five Pounds, on a part of each Letter, may ensure the safety of the conveyance. Whatever observations Major Houghton's Journey may enable him to make on the Animal, Vegetable or Mineral productions of the Inland Countries of Africa, the Committee will be happy to receive. For Major Houghton's farther information as to the nature of the knowledge that the Committee wish to obtain, Mr. Beaufoy has subjoined the following Queries.

Queries to Those Who Have Visited Houssa 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

From what place did you begin your journey? Through what countries did you pass? and what are their towns? In how many days did you travel to the first of those countriesin how many to the second. etc.? How did the Sun set as you travelled-before you or behind, on the right hand, or on the left? What Rivers did you pass, or see upon your rout? How many days is Houssa distant from Tombuctoo? In travelling from Tombuctoo to Houssa does the Sun set before you, or behind? How many days journey is Tombuctoo from the Neel il Abeed (the Niger)? How many days journey is the City of Houssa from the N eel?

34

TRAVELS IN THE INTERIOR DISTRICTS OF AFRICA

In going from Tombuctoo to Houssa do you travel upon the Neel, or near its Banks-If you do, is the Current with the Traveller, or against him? 11. Is Tombuctoo connected with, or dependent upon Houssa? 12. Is the City of Houssa larger, or smaller than Tunis? 13. Is it walled round? are its Houses of the same form with those of Barbary? Have they built the same sort of roof? are they built of stone or mud-are the streets as wide as those of Tunis-is there room for a loaded camel to pass-are the Houses white washed? 10.

GOVERNMENT

14. Is Houssa governed by a King? 15. When he dies who succeeds to his Government? -has the Eldest son a preferable claim to the Crown? 16. Is the King absolute; or has the council (if there be one) a considerable influence in the State? 17. In what manner are the Members of the Council appointed? 18. Are there any Nobility in Houssa? Is their rank hereditary, or does it arise from the possession of office, or from their admission to the Council? are they distinguished by Titles of Honour, or by any particular Dress? ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE

19. In what manner is Justice administered -1st in the City- 2nd in the Provinces? 20. Is there any appeal in Criminal or Civil Suits to the King, or the King in Council? 21. What attention is paid to the police of the city? 22. Are there watchmen, or any other guard appointed to preserve the peace of the town in the night? 23. Is there a Governor of the City? if there be, what are his functions? 24. What crimes are punished with death?-and what other punishments are in use? 25. By what authority are Laws enacted; and in what manner are they made known to the people? REGULATIONS WITH RESPECT TO PROPERTY

26. In what manner are Lands transferred from one person to another? 27. By what marks are the boundaries of each man's Lands ascertained? PARK'S INSTRUCTIONS

35

28. Are written receipts given when Lands are sold? 29. Are there any officers, hereditary or otherwise, whose particular business it is to determine all such disputes as respect the boundaries of Lands? 30. Are the lands of one man rented by another? 31. How are the rents collected? REVENUE OF THE STATE

32. From what sources does the Revenue of the State arise?-from Lands?-from Tithes? or from Taxes on merchandize? AGRICUL TURE

33. At what period does the Season of the Rains begin, and when does it terminate, or is there no rain at Houssa? 34. What Grains are cultivated?-when are they sown, and when reaped? Is Rice or Allillee, or Maize among the sorts of Grain that are raised in Houssa? 35. Is the use of the Plough a part of their system of Husbandry, or do they only employ the Hoe? 36. What animals tame or wild; and what Trees are found in the country? TRADE

37. 38. 39. 40.

What species of money are in use at Houssa? What are their weights, of what their measures? What articles do they Manufacture? What Goods do they Import? from what countries do they receive them? and in what articles do they make their payments?

RELIGION

41. Have they any public form of Worship-any buildings appropriated to Religion? 42. Do they believe in a future State of reward or punishment? 43. Do they imagine that the Spirits of the Departed are sometimes allowed to revisit their Benefactors, or their Enemies? LANGUAGE

44. Is their Language the same as that of the People of Tombuctoo? Have they a written character? Does it consist of an Alphabet? what kind of marks or Letters are in use?

36

TRAVELS IN THE INTERIOR DISTRICTS OF AFRICA

MUSICK

45. What Instruments have they? MANNERS

46. Are the Women excluded from, or admitted into Society? 47. What is the history of a day at Houssa - 1 st as to a Merchant and his wife-2nd as to a Husbandman and his wife-3rd etc. etc.? GOLD

48. Is any found in the Dominions of Houssa? In what manner is it collected? QUESTIONS RESPECTING THE NIGER

49. Does the Neel il Abeed (the Niger) flow from, or towards the Setting Sun? 50. In what country does it rise?-through what countries does it pass? 51. Does it overflow its banks, so as to cover at one time, lands that are uncovered on another? 52. Are there any Boats upon it? How are they Built, how navigated? 53. Does it empty itself into the Sea? or does it end in a great Lake? or is it lost in the sands of a Desert? 54. An account of the Countries in the neighbourhood of Houssa would be very desireable - At any rate it is material to ascertain their relative situations. Do they lie between Houssa and the setting Sun, or the reverse?-or, in looking towards the setting Sun when the Spectator is at Houssa, do they lie to the right or Left? Where is Bombara, jinnee, Foulan, etc. etc. In addition to these written Instructions, Mr. Beaufoy, in several conversations with Major Houghton, minutes of which were taken by the Major at the time, particularly recommended, that as the vessel in which he was preparing to Sail, would convey to the Gambia, a quantity of Fire Arms which the Southern Foolees had commissioned Capt. Bevan to prepare; and as certain Messengers from the Foolees were expected to attend the arrival of the Ship for the purpose of receiving the said Fire Arms, Major Houghton should accompany the said Messengers on their return; should make a present to their King, and ask his permission to pass through his dominions, and under his safe conduct to the Empire of Houssa. -That he should state to the King, the important advantages to himself and to his People, that would result PARK'S INSTRUCTIONS

37

from a Treaty with the Sovereign of Great Britain, and should offer his Services to the King in promoting such a negociation, and should describe the valuable Presents that would be annually made to him in case the Treaty should be accomplished. Resolved, That the said Instructions are approved by the Committee.

38

TRAVELS IN THE INTERIOR DISTRICTS OF AFRICA

TRAVELS IN THE INTERIOR DISTRICTS OF AFRICA

Figure 1. Mungo Park. Engraved by T. Dickinson, from the portrait by Henry Edridge. Courtesy of the Rare Books Collection, The Pennsylvania State Library.

TRAVEL IS TilL

INT ERI R DISTRICTS OF A FRI C. \ : rJ:ltrORlJ[O l!so(a TII[

DIR E TlO;'>;

:\0 PATRO:\ .\ GE OF TII£

AFRICA N

ASSO CI A TI O ' , I~

YEA RS

Bv

T il t

' 795, '796,

MUl\GO

P

A ND

RK ,

' 797. S ORCEO".

W ITH

AN APPENDIX , CONTAINI NC

GEOGRAPHI CAL ILLUSTRATIO:\

OF AFRIC \ .

By MAJOR REN NE LL. - - cem' Libyz drxrU ptraaro.

Vue: .

SECOND EDIT ION.

LONDO, rllN'T£D BY w. lIUUIE" A!'IiU CO . fOR Till: AUTHOR ; ANO SOLl) &,' C. A;o.-O

w.

1-1(;01. , IU,XU,5ULI:Il

PALI.-WALL .

TO II" "''''JUTY,

17 99.

Figure 2. Title page. Mungo Park's Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, 2nd ed., 1799. Photo by Louis Caravaglia.

TRAVEL IS TilL

INT ERI R DISTRICTS OF A FRI C. \ : rJ:ltrORlJ[O l!so(a TII[

DIR E TlO;'>;

:\0 PATRO:\ .\ GE OF TII£

AFRICA N

ASSO CI A TI O ' , I~

YEA RS

Bv

T il t

' 795, '796,

MUl\GO

P

A ND

RK ,

' 797. S ORCEO".

W ITH

AN APPENDIX , CONTAINI NC

GEOGRAPHI CAL ILLUSTRATIO:\

OF AFRIC \ .

By MAJOR REN NE LL. - - cem' Libyz drxrU ptraaro.

Vue: .

SECOND EDIT ION.

LONDO, rllN'T£D BY w. lIUUIE" A!'IiU CO . fOR Till: AUTHOR ; ANO SOLl) &,' C. A;o.-O

w.

1-1(;01. , IU,XU,5ULI:Il

PALI.-WALL .

TO II" "''''JUTY,

17 99.

Figure 2. Title page. Mungo Park's Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, 2nd ed., 1799. Photo by Louis Caravaglia.

TO TilE

NOBLEME

A 0

GENTLE~SE

,

ASSOCIATED FOR THE PURPOSE OF EXPLORING THI

IN T E R 10 R REG lOS 0 F A F RIC A, THIS

JOURNAL OF TRAVEL 0:-; THAT CONTINENT, PERFORMED UNDER TIJEIR PATRONAGE, II,

"'Inl ALL U UWIL1Tl,

I ·SRCIBED, IIY' Tlffla. F.unIFUL

AND OILiCED IIUNILE ItlVAl'fT.

MU:-.'GO PARK.

Figure 3. Dedication page. Mungo Park's Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, 2nd ed., 1799. Photo by Duke University Press.

TO TilE

NOBLEME

A 0

GENTLE~SE

,

ASSOCIATED FOR THE PURPOSE OF EXPLORING THI

IN T E R 10 R REG lOS 0 F A F RIC A, THIS

JOURNAL OF TRAVEL 0:-; THAT CONTINENT, PERFORMED UNDER TIJEIR PATRONAGE, II,

"'Inl ALL U UWIL1Tl,

I ·SRCIBED, IIY' Tlffla. F.unIFUL

AND OILiCED IIUNILE ItlVAl'fT.

MU:-.'GO PARK.

Figure 3. Dedication page. Mungo Park's Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, 2nd ed., 1799. Photo by Duke University Press.

PREFACE.

The following Journal, drawn up from original minutes and notices made at the proper moment and preserved with great difficulty, is now offered to the Public by the direction of my noble and honourable employers, the Members of the African Association. l I regret that it is so little commensurate to the patronage I have received. As a composition, it has nothing to recommend it, but truth. It is a plain, unvarnished tale;2 without pretentions of any kind, except that it claims to enlarge, in some degree, the circle of African geography. For this purpose, my services were offered, and accepted by the Association; and, I trust, I have not laboured altogether in vain. The work, however, must speak for itself; and I should not have thought any preliminary observations necessary, if I did not consider myself called upon, both by justice and gratitude, to offer those which follow. Immediately after my return from Africa, the acting Committee of the Association,3 taking notice of the time it would require to prepare I. [The Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Districts of Africa, frmnded in 1788. To he distinguished from the Royal Mrican Company, a trading company earlier in the century, and the Mrican Institute, founded in 1807 to continue the fight for African rights after the passage of the Abolition Bill. Ed.] 2. [An allusion to Othello, l.iii.75-170. Ed.] ;). This Committee consists of the following Noblemen and Gentlemen; Earl of Moira, Lord Bishop Landaff, Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society; Andrew Stuart, Esq. M. P. and Bryan Edwards, Esq. F. R. S. Concerning the original institution ofthe Society itself, and the progress of discovery, previous to my expedition, the fullest information has already been given in the various publications which the Society have caused to be made.

an account in detail, as it now appears; and being desirous of gratifying, as speedily as possible, the curiosity which many of the Members were pleased to express concerning my discoveries, determined that an epitome, or abridgment of my travels, should be forthwith prepared from such materials and oral communications as I could furnish, and printed for the use of the Association, and also, that an engraved Map of my route should accompany it. A memoir, thus supplied and improved, was accordingly drawn up in two parts, by Members of the Association, and distributed among the Society: the first part consisting of a narrative, in abstract, of my travels, by Bryan Edwards, Esq.; the second, of Geographical Illustrations of my progress, by Major James Rennell, F. R. S.4 Major Rennell was pleased also to add, not only a Map of my route, constructed in conformity to my own observations and sketches (when freed from those errors, which the Major's superior knowledge, and distinguished accuracy in geographical researches, enabled him to discover and correct), but also a General Map, shewing the progress of discovery, and improvement in the Geography of North Mrica; together with a Chart of the lines of magnetic variation, in the seas around that immense continent. Availing myself therefore, on the present occasion, of assistance like this, it is impossible that I can present myself before the Public, without expressing how deeply and gratefully sensible I am of the honour and advantage which I derive from the labours of those Gentlemen; for Mr. Edwards has kindly permitted me to incorporate, as occasion offered, the whole of his narrative into different parts of my work; and Major Rennell, with equal good will, allows me not only to embellish and elucidate my Travels, with the Maps beforementioned, but also to subjoin his Geographical Illustrations entire. Thus aided and encouraged, I should deliver this volume to the world, with that confidence of a favourable reception, which no merits of my own could authorise me to claim; were I not apprehensive that expectations have been formed, by some of my subscribers, of discoveries to be unfolded, which I have not made, and of wonders to be related, of which I am utterly ignorant. There is danger that those who feel a disappointment of this nature, finding less to astonish and amuse in my book, than they had promised to themselves beforehand,

4. [Fellow of the Royal Society, which was chartered in 1662 to encourage the dissemination of scientific knowledge, including geography. Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and Benjamin Franklin were all members at various times. Joseph Banks served as president from 1778 to 1820. Ed.]

46

PREFACE

will not even allow me the little merit which I really possess. Painful as this circumstance may prove to my feelings, I shall console myself under it, if the distinguished persons, under whose auspices I entered on my mission, shall allow that I have executed the duties of it to their satisfaction; and that they consider the Journal which I have now the honour to present to them, to be, what I have endeavoured to make it, an honest and faithful report of my proceedings and observations in their service, from the outset of my journey to its termination.

M.P.

47

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

The Author's Motives for undertaking the Voyage- his Instructions and Departure-arrives atJillifree, on the Gambia River-proceeds to Vintain. -Some Account of the Feloops. -Proceeds up the River for Jonkakonda-arrives at Dr. Laidley s. - Some Account of Pisania, and the British Factory established at that Place. - The Author's Employment during his Stay at Pisania-his Sickness and Recovery-the Country described-prepares to set out for the Interior. page 67 CHAPTER II.

Description oj the Feloops, theJaloffi, the Foulahs, and Mandingoes. - Some Account oj the Trade between the Nations of Europe and the Natives oj AJrica by the Way of the Gambia, and between the Native Inhabitants of the Coast and the Nations of the interior Countries-their Mode of selling and buying, &c. page 76 CHAPTER III.

The Author sets out Jrom Pisania-his Attendants-reaches Jindey. -Story related by a Mandingo Negro. - Proceeds to Medina, the Capital oj Woolli. Interview with the King. -Saphies or Charms. -Proceeds to Kolor. -Description oj MumboJumbo-arrives at Koojar-wrestling Match-Crosses the Wilderness, and arrives at Tallika, in the Kingdom oj Bondou. page 86

CHAPTER IV.

Some Account qf the Inhabitants of Tallika. - The Author proceeds for Fatteconda-Incidents on the Road. -Crosses the Neriko, arrives at Koorkaranyreaches the River Faleme-Fishery on that River-proceeds along its Bank to Naye or Nayemow-crosses the Faleme and arrives at Fatteconda. -Has an Interview with Almami, the Sovereign of Bondou. -Description of the King's Dwelling-has a second Interview with the King, who begs the Author's Coat. -Author visits the King's Wives-is permitted to depart on Friendly Terms.journey by Night-arrives atjoag. -Some Account of Bondou and its Inhabitants the Foulahs.

page 97 CHAPTER V.

Account of Kajaaga. -Serawoollies-their Manners and Language. -Account ofjoag. - The Author is ill treated, and robbed of half of his Efficts, by Order of Batcheri, the King- Charity of a female Slave. - The Author is visited by Demba Sego, Nephew of the King of Kasson, who offirs to conduct him in safety to that Kingdom. - Offir accepted. - ThE? Author and his Protector, with a numerous Retinue, set out and reach Samee, on the Banks qf the Senegal. Proceed to Kayee, and crossing the Senegal, arrive in the Kingdom of Kasson. page 108 CHAPTER VI.

Arrival at Teesee. -Interview with Tiggity Sego, thE? King's Brother-the Author's detention at Teesee-some Account of that Place and its Inhabitantsincidents which occurred there. - Rapacious conduct of Tiggity Sego towards the Author on his Departure. - Sets out for Kooniakary, the Capital of the Kingdom. - Incidents on the Road, and Arrival at Kooniakary.

page ll5 CHAPTER VII.

The Author admitted to an Audience of the King of Kasson, whom he finds well disposed towards him. -Incidents during the Author's Stay at Kooniakary. Departs thence for Kemmoo, the Capital qf Kaarta. - Is received with great Kindness by the King of Kaarta, who dissuades him from prosecuting his Journey, on Account of approaching Hostilities with the King of Bambarra. - The Author determines, notwithstanding, to proceed; and the usual Routes being obstructed, takes the Path to Ludamar, a Moorish Kingdom. - Is accommodated by the King with a Guide to jarra, the frontier Town of the Moorish Territories; and sets out for that Place, accompanied by three of the King's 80m, and 200 Horsemen.

page

50

122

CONTENTS

CHAPTER VIII.

Journey from Kemmoo to Funingkedy. -Some Account of the Lotus. -A Youth murdered by the Moors-interesting Scene at his Death. -Author passes through Simbing. -Some Particulars concerning Major Houghton. -Author reachesJarra-Situation of the surrounding States at the Period of his Arrival there, and a brief Account of the War between Kaarta and Bambarra. page 130 CHAPTER IX.

Some Account ofJarra, and the Moorish Inhabitants. - The Author applies for, and obtains Permission from Ali, the Moorish Chief or Sovereign of Ludamar, to pass through his Territories. -Departs from Jarra, and arrives at Deena- ill treated by the Moors. -Proceeds to Sampaka-finds a Negro who makes Gunpowder. - Continues hisJourney to Samee, where he is seized by some Moors who are sent for that Purpose by Ali. -15 conveyed a Prisoner to the Moorish Camp at Benowm, on the Borders of the Great Desert. page 140 CHAPTER X.

Various Occurrences during the Author's Confinement at Benowm-is visited by some Moorish Ladies. -A Funeral and Wedding. - The Author receives an extraordinary Present from the Bride. - Other Circum5tances illustrative of the Moorish Character and Manners. page 150 CHAPTER XI.

Occurrences at the Camp continued. - Information collected by the Author, concerning Houssa and Tombuctoo; and the Situation of the latter. - The Route described from Morocco to Benowm. - The Author's Distress from Hunger. Ali removes his Camp to the Northward. - The Author is carried Prisoner to the new Encampment, and is presented to Queen Fatima. - Great Distress from the Want of Water.

CHAPTER XI I.t

Containing some further miscellaneous Reflections on the Moorish Character, and Manners. - Observations concerning the Great Desert, its Animals, wild and domestic, &c. &c. page 165

CONTENTS

51

CHAPTER XIII. Ali departs for jarra, and the Author allowed to follow him thither. - The Author's faithful Servant, Demba, is seized by Ali's Order, and sent back into Slavery. -Ali returns to his Camp, and permits the Author to remain atjarra, who, thenceforward, meditates his Escape. -Daisy, King of Kaarta, approaching with his Army towards jarra, the Inhabitants quit the town, and the Author accompanies them in their Flight. - A Party of Moors overtake him at Queira. He gets away from them at Daybreak: - is again pursued by another Party, and robbed; but finally effocts his Escape.

page 173 CHAPTER XIV. The Author feels great joy at his Deliverance, and proceeds through the Wilderness, E. S. E.; but finds his Situation very deplorable. -Suffirs greatly from Thirst, and faints on the Sand: - recovers, and makes another Effort to push forward. Is providentially relieved by a Fall of Rain. -Arrives at a Foulah Village, where he is refused Relief by the Dooty; but obtains Food from a poor Woman. - Continues his journey through the Wilderness, and the next Day lights on another Foulah Village, where he is hospitably received by one of the Shepherds. -Arrives on the thirdDay at a Negro Town called Wawra, tributary to the King of Bambarra. page 182 CHAPTER XV. The Author proceeds to Wassiboo-is joined by some fugitive Kaartans, who accompany him in his Route through Bambarra. -Discovers the Niger. -Some Account of Sego, the Capital of Bambarra. - Mansong, the King, refuses to see the Author, but sends him a Present. - Great Hospitality of a Negro Woman. page 188 CHAPTER XVI. Departure from Sego, and Arrival at Kabba. -Description of the Shea, or vegetable Butter Tree. - The Author and his Guide arrive at Sansanding. - Behaviour of the Moors at that Place. - The Author pursues his journey to the Eastward. -Incidents on the Road. -Arrives at Modiboo, and proceeds for Kea; but obliged to leave his Horse by the Way. -Embarks at Kea in aFisherman's Canoe for Moorzan; is conveyed from thence across the Niger to Silla. -Determines to proceed no further Eastward. - Some Account of the further Course of the Niger, and the Towns in its Vicinage, towards the East.

page

52

200

CONTENTS

CHAPTER XVII.

The Author returns Westward-arrives at Modiboo, and recovers his Horsefinds great Difficulty in travelling, in consequence of the Rains, and the overflowing of the River; - is informed that the King of Bambarra had sent Persons to apprehend him:-avoids Sego, and prosecutes hisJourney along the Banks of the Niger. - Incidents on the Road. - Cruelties attendant on African Wars. The Author crosses the River Frina, and arrives at Taifara.

page

211

CHAPTER XVIII.

Inhospitable Reception at TaJfara. -A Negro Funeral at Sooha. - The Author continues his Route through several Villages along the Banks of the Niger, until he comes to Koolikorro. - Supports himself by writing Saphies - reaches Maraboo-loses the Road; and after many Difficulties arrives at Bammakoo. - Takes the Road for Sibidooloo - meets with great Kindness at a Village called Kooma; -is afterwards robbed, stripped, and plundered by Banditti. - The Author's Resource and Consolation under exquisite Distress. - He arrives in Safety at Sibidooloo.

page

220

CHAPTER XIX.

Government of Manding. - The Author's Rer:eption by the Mansa, or chief Man 0fSibidoo{oo, who takes Measures for the Recovery of his Horse andt-fficts. - The Author removes to Wanda; - great Scarcity, and its afflicting Consequences. - The Author recoven his Horse and Clothes-presents his Horse to the Mansa; and prosecutes hisJourney to Kamalia-some Account of that Town.The Author~5 kind Reception by Karfa Taura, a Slatee, who proposes to go to the Gambia in the next dry Season, with a Caravan of Slaves. - The Author's Sickness, and Determination to remain and accompany Karfa.

page

228

CHAPTER XX.

Of the Climate and Seasons. - Winds. - Vegetable Productions. -Population. - General Observations on the Character and Disposition of the Mandingoes; and a summary Account of their Manners and Habits of Life, their Marriages,

&c. page 237 CHAPTER XXI.

The Account of the Mandingoes continued. - Their Notions in respect of the Planetary Bodies, and the Figure of the Earth. - Their religious Opinions, and Belief in a Future State. - Their Diseases and Methods of Treatment. CONTENTS

53

Their Funeral Ceremonies, Amusements, Occupations, Diet, Arts, Manufactures, &c.

page 246 CHAPTER XXII. Observations concerning the State and Sources of Slavery in Africa.

page 256 CHAPTER XXIII. Of Gold-dust, and the Manner in which it is collected. -Process of washing it. - Its Value in Africa. - Of Ivory. - Surprise of the Negroes at the Eagerness of the Europeans for this Commodity. - Scattered Teeth frequently picked up in the Woods. -Mode qf Hunting the Elephant. -Some Reflections on the unimproved State of the Country, &c.

page 264 CHAPTER XXIV. Transactions of Kamalia resumed. -Arabic MSS. in Use among the Mahomedan Negroes. -Reflections concerning the Conversion and Education of the Negro Children. -Return of the Author's Benefactor, Karfa. -Further Account qf the Purchase and Treatment of Slaves. -Fast of Rhamadan how observed by the Negroes. -Author's anxiety for the Day of Departure. - The Caravan sets out - Account of it on its Departure, and Proceedings on the Road, until its Arrival at Kinytakooro. page 273 CHAPTER XXV. The Coffle crosses the Jallonka Wilderness. - Miserable Fate of one of the female Slaves; - arrives at Sooseeta; -proceeds to Manna. - Some Account oj the Jolonkas. - Crosses the main Stream of the Senegal. - Bridge of a singular Contruction. -Arrives at Malacotta. -Remarkable Conduct qf the King of the Jaloffi·

CHAPTER XXVI. The Caravan proceeds to Konkodoo, and crosses the Falerni River. - Its arrival at Baniserile, Kirwani, and Tambacunda. - Incidents on the Road. A matrimonial Case. -Specimen of the Shea Tree. - The Caravan proceeds through many Towns and Villages, and arrives at length on the Banks of Gambia. Passes through Medina, the Capital oj Woolli, and finally stops atJindey. - The Author, accompanied by Karfa, proceeds to Pisania. - Various Occurrences pre-

54

CONTENTS

vious to his Departure from Africa, - takes his Passage in an American Ship. Short Account of his Voyage to Great Britain by the Way of the West Indies. page 294

Appendix. CHAPTER 1.

Concerning the Ideas entertained by the Ancient Geographers, as well as the Moderns, down to the Times of Delisle and D'Anville, respecting the Course of the River Niger. page 319 CHAPTER II.

Concerning the Geographical Discoveries of Mr. Park. page 326 CHAPTER III.

Construction

0/ the Geography of M1: page

Park's Expedition into Africa.

3:~4

CHAPTER IV.

The Construction of the Geography continued. page 348 CHAPTER V.

Construction of the New Map of North A/rica. -New Arrangement of the Course of the Nile. -Its distant Fountain yet unexplored by Europeans. -A central Position in Africa, determined. -Edrisi's Line of Distance, consistent.Errors of Leo.

CHAPTER VI.

The Subject continued- Course of the River Niger, at large- has no Cmnmunication with the Nile- Ptolemy's Description 0/ it consistent. page 378 CHAPTER VII.

Observations on the physical and political Geography of North Africa - Naturally divisible into three Parts-Productive in Gold-Boundary of the Moors and Negroes-the Foulahs, the Leuc~thiopes of the Ancients. page 388 CONTENTS

55

The following AFRICAN WORDS, recurring very frequently in the course of the Narrative, it is thought necessary to prefix an Explanation of them for the Reader's convenience. Mansa. A king or chief governor. Alkaid. The head magistrate of a town or province, whose office is commonly hereditary. Dooty. Another name for the chief magistrate of a town or province: this word is used only in the interior countries. Palaver. A court of justice; a public meeting of any kind. Bushreen. A muss ulman. Kafir. A Pagan native; an unbeliever. Sonakee. Another term for an unconverted native: it signifies one who drinks strong liquors, and is used by way of reproach. Slatees. Free black merchants, who trade chiefly in slaves. CojJle or Caffila. A caravan of slaves, or a company of people travelling with any kind of merchandize. Bar. Nominal money; a single bar is equal in value to two shillings sterling, or thereabouts. Minkalli. A quantity of gold, nearly equal in value to ten shillings sterling. Kowries. Small shells, which pass for money in the Interior. Korree. A watering-place, where shepherds keep their cattle. Bentang. A sort of stage, erected in every town, answering the purpose of a town hall.

Baloon. A room in which strangers are commonly lodged. Sao/roo. A skin for containing water. Saphie. An amulet or charm. Kouskous. A dish prepared from boiled corn. Shea-toulou. Vegetable butter. Calabash. A species of gourd, of which the Negroes make bowls and

dishes. Paddle. A sort of hoe used in husbandry.

EXPLANATION OF AFRICAN WORDS

57

SUBSCRIBERS' NAMES.

HIS MAJESTY'S LIBRARY. ABERCORN, the most Noble the Marquis of Ailesbury, the Rt. Hon. the Earl of Aylesford, the Rt. Hon. the Countess of Archer, the Rt. Hon. Lady Annesley, the Hon. Richard Anderson, Mr. James Archer, Edward, Esq. Ashton, Nicholas, Esq. Atkinson, Thomas, Esq. Arts, &c. the Society for the encouragement of B.

Buccleuch, his Grace the Duke of Buccleuch, her Grace the Dutchess of Bute, Marquis of Beverley, Lord Banks, the Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph, Bart. K. B. 4 copies. Burges, Lady

Bruhl, Count de Bailie, Dr. Baker, William, Esq. M. P. Baker, William, Esq. Baker, John, Esq. Balan, Mr. Bale, the Rev. Mr. Balfour, GeneralJames Banks, William, Esq. Baring, Sir Francis, Bart, M. P. Baring,]. Esq. M. P. Barker, Samuel, Esq. Barratt, Mr. Barrow, Mr.John Bathurst, the Rev. Charles Bedford, Charles, Esq. Bensley, William, Esq. Bickerdike, G. Esq. Biddulph, Charles, Esq. Bill, Charles, Esq. Birmingham, the Library at Blackburne,John, Esq. Blackston, Mr. Blith, James, Esq.

Blundell, - - , Esq. Boddington, S. Esq. Bonar, Mr. James Boosey, Mr. Boucher,John, Esq. Boys, Mr. John Braithwaite, Daniel, Esq. Bramston, John, Esq. Brand, Mr. Bristol, the Library Society at Brodie, Alexander, Esq. Brompton, the Book Society of Brown, Mr. Thomas Bull, Mr. Burgh, William, Esq. Bush, F. Mr.

c. Chesterfield, the Rt. Hon. the Earl of Chichester, the Bishop of Carnegie, Sir David, Bart. Cotton, Sir Charles, Bart. Cavendish, the Hon. Henry Carter, the Rev. John, M. A. and F.S.A. Chalmers, George, Esq. Clarke, Dr. James Claxton, - - , Esq. Cleeve, the Rev. Mr. Cockfield, Mr. Joseph Collins, David, Esq. Comings, Thomas Gray, Esq. Cooper, R. B. Esq. Cork, Mr. Cornwall, the County Library of Corser, the Rev. William Costeker,John, Esq. Coussmaker, Mr. W. K. Coxe, the Rev. Mr. Cracherode, the Rev. Mr. Creser, Mr. Thomas

Crowe, James, Esq. Cruikshank, James, Esq. Cruikshank, John, Esq. Curtis, the Rev. Mr. Cure, Capel, Esq. D.

Dalkeith, the Rt. Hon. the Earl of Durham, the Bishop of Douglas, the Rt. Hon. Lord Dundas, the Rt. Hon. Lord Dalrymple, Sir John, Bart. Drummond, William, Esq. M. P. Dalrymple, Alexander, Esq. Dalton, Mrs. Jane Dawson, John, Esq. DeaconJames, Esq. Deal, the Book Society at Denman, Dr. Dick, Mungo, Esq. Dickson, Mr. James Dickinson, Caleb, Esq. Dickenson, Rev. Samuel, LL. B. Disney, the Rev. Dr. Douce, Francis, Esq. Douglas, Andrew, Esq. Douglas, Miss Dowdeswell, Thomas, Esq. Dulwich College, the Library of E.

Egremont, the Rt. Hon. the Earl of Edwards, Bryan, Esq. M. P.,t F. R. S. and A. S. Edwards, Z. B. Esq. Ellis, George, Esq. M. P. Ellis, Charles, Esq. M. P. East, Mr. Eden, Robert. Esq. Edmondsbury, Saint, the new Public Library of

SUBSCRIBERS' NAMES

59

Edwards, Mr. Egerton, the Hon. and Rev. Francis Escher, Mr. Eyre, Francis, Esq. Exeter, the Book Society of F.

Falconer, the Rev. Mr. Fearnside, Mr. Fearon, Dr. Ferriday, William, Esq. Fitzhugh, Thomas, Esq. Forbes,james, Esq. Fortescue,joseph, Esq. Fox,james, Esq. Fraser, Mr. Frere,john, Esq. Fry, Nicholas, L. Esq. G.

Grafton, his Grace the Duke of Glasgow, the Rt. Hon. the Earl of Grantham, the Rt. Hon. Lady Gape, Rev. james, Carpenter Garthshore, Dr. 4 copies Garrow, William, Esq. Gebhardt, Mr. Gillett, Mr. Gisborne, the Rev. Thomas Gordon, Thomas, Esq. Gore, Colonel Greene, Thomas, Esq. Green, Charles, Esq. Green, Mrs. Gregory, Robert, Esq. Gregory, the Rev. Edward Greville, Robert, Esq. H.

Howe, the Rt. Hon. Earl Howe, the Rt. Hon. Sir William Howe, the Hon. Caroline

60

Howard, the Rt. Hon. Lady julia Hawkins, Sir Christopher, Bart. Hort, Sir john, Bart. Hudson, Sir Charles Grave, Bart. Hale, Curteis, Esq. Haliburton, David, Esq. Halifax, Dr. Halifax, the Library of Hall,]. G. Esq. Hammond, G. Esq. Hanbury, Sampson, Esq. Hardcastle,joseph, Esq. Harford,joseph, Esq. Harris, Mr. Nathaniel Harvey, Mr. Haworth, Mr. Hedgeland, Mr. P. Heinemman, Mr. J. H. Hill, Mr. William Hislop, Mr. Hislop, Mrs. Hoare, Charles, Esq. Hoare, Henry Hugh, Esq. Hobhouse, Benjamin, Esq. M. P. Hogarth, Mr. John Hoffman, Mr. Home, Everard, Esq. Hooper, the Rev. W. B. D. and F.A. S. Horne, Edward, Esq. Horne, Miss Howarth, Mr. Hussey, Phineas, Esq. I.

James, Houghton, Esq. jarett, Herbert, Esq. Jennings, David, Esq. jenyns, the Rev. George johnes, Thomas, Esq. Imeson, Mr. William Ingram, Francis, Esq.

SUBSCRIBERS' NAMES

Innis, John, Esq. Jones, Mrs. Jones, Miss Judge, Mr. John Ivatts, Mr. Thomas K.

Kerry, the Rt. Hon. the Earl of King, the Rt. Hon. Lord Kemble,John Philip, Esq. Kendal, the Library at King, Edward, Esq. Knight, R. P. Esq. Knowles, Mr. L.

Martin, the Rev. Mr. Mason, Major Mavor, John, Esq. Melville, General Michell, Charles, Esq. Miles, William, Esq. Millman, Dr. Miller, Charles, Esq. Mills, Dr. Monro, Captain George Mordaunt, General Morgan, William, Esq. Morland, Mr. Thomas Morris, Lieut. Col. Morris, Charles, Esq.

Landaff, the Bishop of Lucas, the Rt. Hon. Lady Leyser, Le Baron de Larkin, Mr. E. Lean, Mr. Alexander Lee, Thomas, Esq. Leeds, the Library of Leeds, the new Subscription Library at Lindsey, the Rev. Theoph. A. M. London Library Society Long, William, Esq. Long, Edward, Esq.

Northumberland, his Grace the Duke of Neave, Sir Richard, Bart. 2 copies Newbery, Francis, Esq. Newcastle upon Tyne, the Literary Society of Newcomen, William, Esq. Nicholls,John, Esq. M. P. Norris, H. H. Esq. North, Percival, Esq.

M.

o.

Montrose, his Grace the Duke of Moira, the Rt. Hon. the Earl of, 5 copIes. Morton, Rt. Hon. Earl of Middleton, the Rt. Hon. Lord Viscount Middleton, Sir Charles, Bart. Macclesfield, Subscription Library at Maitland, Ebenezer, Esq. Maitland,John, Esq. Malcolm, Colonel Mappleton, Dr.

Oglander, Sir William, Bart. Ogle, Rev. Dr. Ogle, Nathaniel, Esq. Onslow, Arthur, Esq. Ormerod, the Rev. R.

N.

P.

Palmerston, the Rt. Hon. Lord Viscount, 3 copies. Peachey, the Hon. John Pelham, the Hon. Mr. Penryhn, the Rt. Hon. Lord Price, the Rt. Hon. Lady Maria Pulteney, Sir William, Bart.

SUBSCRIBERS' NAMES

61

Pocock, Sir Isaac Parker, Samuel, Esq. Parker, Mrs. Palmer, Thomas, Esq. Paulett, Norton, Esq. Pearson George, M. D. Pearson, the Rev. Mr. Peart, Dr. Peltier, Mons. Philips, the Rev. John Pickering, the Rev. Joseph Pryme, Mr. Rt

Roxburghe, his Grace the Duke of Riddell, Sir John Buchanan, Bart. Rainsford, General Repton, Book Society of Reyner, Joseph, Esq. Rennell, Major Rennie, John, Esq. Reynolds, Richard, Esq. Rippon, Cuthbert, Esq. Roberts, the Rev. Thomas Robley, Joseph, Esq. Robley,John, Esq. Rochester, the Book Society of Rudge, Samuel, Esq. Russell, Claud, Esq.

s. Stopford, the Rt. Hon. Lord Viscount Suffield, the Rt. Hon. Lord Sheffield, the Rt. Hon. Lord Sudley, the Rt. Hon. Lord. Spencer, Rt. Hon. the Countess Stepney, Sir John, Bart. Staunton, Sir George, Bart. Stephens, Sir Philip, Bart. M. P.,t F. R. S. and S. A.

62

Sutton, Sir Richard, Bart. Samuda, Mr. David,Jun. Scott, Samuel, Esq. Sharp, William, Esq. Sharpe, Granville, Esq. Sharpe, the Rev. Mr. Shaw, David, Esq. Shepherd, Tuffen, Esq. Simmons, Samuel Foart, M. D.,t F. R. S. Sittingbourn, the Library of Skipp,John, Esq. Skirrow, Mr. Sloane, Hans, Esq. Smith, Mr. James Smith, the Rev John Smith, Thomas, Esq. Smith, William, Esq. M. P. Soane,John, Esq. Spann,john, Esq. Sparrow, R. Esq. Spooner, Isaac, Esq. Stainsforth, George, Esq. Stamford, the Library at Stanhope, Mr. Spencer Stanley, Colonel Staples, Mr. Stead, Mr. John Stephens, Francis, Esq. Steevens, George, Esq. Stonard, the Rev. John Stonhewer, Richard, Esq. Storie, Rev. George Henry Stratford, the Rev. Wm. A. M. Stuart, And. Esq. M. P. 3 copies Sulivan, R. J. Esq. Sullivan,john, Esq. Symmons,john Esq. 3 copies Symes, the Rev. james T.

Tate, the Rev. B. B. D.

SUBSCRIBERS' NAMES

Taylor, the Rev. Dr. Thomas, Mr. L. Thompson, Mr. Thornton, Henry, Esq. M. P. Toulmin, T. Esq. Townley, Charles, Esq. Travers, Benjamin, Esq. Travers, joseph, Esq. Trevelyan, Sir John, Bart. Trist, the Rev. Mr. Trowbridge and Warminster Book Society Tunnard, Mr. Turner, Charles, Esq. Turney, Mr. john v. Upper Ossory, the Rt. Hon. the Earl of Vaughan, William, Esq. w. Winchester, the Bishop of Walley,josiah, Esq. Walker,]. Esq. F. R. S. and S. A. Walls, the Rev. Edward Warburton, John, Esq. Warminster, the Book Society at Warwick, the Library of Watson, William, Esq.

Wedgewood,Josiah, Esq. West, the Rev. Mr. Weston, the Rev. Stephen Wheeler, Rev. john Whitaker, Mrs. White,james, Esq. Whitehead, Miss Whitfeld, the Rev. Henry, D. D. Whorton, Richard, Esq. Wilberforce, William, Esq. M. P. Williams, Mr. Edward Williams,james Rice, Esq. Windham,joseph, Esq. Witke, Mr. 2 copies Wolff, George, Esq. Wolferston, Samuel Pipe, Esq. Woodhouse, Mr. Woodmason,james, Esq. Wright, Dr. William Y.

Yarmouth, the old Book Society at Yarmouth, the Monthly Book Societyt of Yerbury, john, Esq. Yonge, the Rev. D. Yorke, Lieut. Col. Young, Sir William, Bart. M. P.

DIRECTIONS FOR PLACING THE PLATES. Portrait Route of Mr. Park Rhamnus Lotus View of Ali's Tent View of Kamalia View of a Bridge Shea, or the Butter Tree

to face the Title Chap. I. page 132 14 8 233

28 9 299

APPENDIX.

Map of North Africa Chart of Variations SUBSCRIBERS' NAMES

Chap. I. page 340

63

1

~

,