Born August 21, 1825,
Kirkwall, Orkney Islands, Scotland
Died December 12, 1864, Sierra Leone

The history of Great Britain’s exploration of Africa’s great western river—the Niger—is one of extreme hardship. Rising in present-day Guinea near the Sierra Leone border, the river sweeps in a giant curve through what is now Mali and Nigeria where it forms a huge inland delta (a large triangular area where a river divides before it enters a larger body of water), full of channels and inland lakes, before it empties into the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean. One of the greatest challenges explorers of the Niger faced was the unhealthy climate of its vast, swampy delta. During the first half of the nineteenth century, countless sailors died as they tried to make their way up the river, usually victims of the ravages of...