INTRODUCTION

Mungo Park was born on the 10th of September, 1771, the son of a farmer at Fowlshiels, near Selkirk.  After studying medicine in Edinburgh, he went out, at the age of twenty-one, assistant-surgeon in a ship bound for the East Indies.  When he came back the African Society was in want of an explorer, to take the place of Major Houghton, who had died.  Mungo Park volunteered, was accepted, and in his twenty-fourth year, on the 22nd of May, 1795, he sailed for the coasts of Senegal, where he arrived in June.

Thence he proceeded on the travels of which this book is the record.  He was absent from England for a little more than two years and a half; returned a few days before Christmas, 1797.  He was then twenty-six years old.  The African Association published the first edition of his travels as “Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, 1795-7, by Mungo Park, with an Appendix containing Geographical Illustrations of Africa, by Major Rennell.”

Park married, and settled at Peebles in medical practice, but was persuaded by the Government to go out again.  He sailed from Portsmouth on the 30th of January, 1805, resolved to trace the Niger to its source or perish in the attempt.  He perished.  The natives attacked him while passing through a narrow strait of the river at Boussa, and killed him, with all that remained of his party, except one slave.  The record of this fatal voyage, partly gathered from his journals, and closed by evidences of the manner of his death, was first published in 1815, as “The Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa in 1805, by Mungo Park, together with other Documents, Official and Private, relating to the same Mission.  To which is prefixed an Account of the Life of Mr. Park.”

H. M.

CHAPTER I—­JOURNEY FROM PORTSMOUTH TO THE GAMBIA

Soon after my return from the East Indies in 1793, having learned that the noblemen and gentlemen associated for the purpose of prosecuting discoveries in the interior of Africa were desirous of engaging a person to explore that continent, by the way of the Gambia river, I took occasion, through means of the President of the Royal Society, to whom I had the honour to be known, of offering myself for that service.  I had been informed that a gentleman of the name of Houghton, a captain in the army, and formerly fort-major at Goree, had already sailed to the Gambia, under the direction of the Association, and that there was reason to apprehend he had fallen a sacrifice to the climate, or perished in some contest with the natives.  But this intelligence, instead of deterring me from my purpose, animated me to persist in the offer of my services with the greater solicitude.  I had a passionate desire to examine into the productions of a country so little known, and to become experimentally acquainted with the modes of life and character of