Mungo Park’s Second Niger Expedition — Forty men sent to trace a river; nearly all died

Summary

In 1805 the Scottish surgeon and explorer Mungo Park led a British government expedition of roughly forty Europeans inland from the Gambia to trace the course of the River Niger to its end. Within a few months almost the entire party was dead. By the time Park reached the Niger at Bamako in mid-August 1805, only eleven of the Europeans were still alive; the rest had died of malaria and dysentery on the march. By the time he built a boat and set off down the river from Sansanding on 19 November 1805, the European company had shrunk to Park himself, one army officer, three soldiers and a few others. Park drowned at the Bussa rapids, on the Niger in what is now Nigeria, in about 1806, when his boat was attacked by people on the riverbanks and the men leapt into the water to escape. None of the Europeans who entered the boat survived; only an African guide, Amadi Fatouma, lived to carry the story out.

The expedition was the second time Park had gone to the Niger. His first journey, of 1795–97, had been a privately backed reconnaissance for the African Association; he had reached the river at Ségou in July 1796, the first European known to have seen it there, and returned to write a celebrated account. That success persuaded the British government to mount the far larger venture of 1805 — a column of soldiers and artificers commissioned to follow the Niger downstream and settle the geographical question of where it went. The difference between the two journeys was fatal: the small, lightly equipped first expedition had given Park the prestige that justified the second, while the second's size, its soldiers and its timing turned it into a death march.

The decisive error was the calendar. The party left the coast late and pushed inland into the West African rainy season, the deadliest time of year for malaria, with no understanding of how the disease was transmitted and no effective protection against it. Men sickened and died at a catastrophic rate, the column melting away stage by stage until barely a tenth of it remained. Park pressed on regardless, converting the survivors' situation into an all-or-nothing dash down the river. The attempt ended in violence at a rapids he could not pass, and with it the lives of nearly all the men he had led inland. The expedition is remembered as one of the costliest in the history of African exploration measured against the size of the party — a venture in which the science of geography advanced barely at all, while almost everyone who set out died.

Timeline

The march that emptied the column

Park's reputation, and the expedition itself, grew out of his first journey. Sent by the African Association in 1795, he had travelled with minimal support, reached the Niger at Ségou in July 1796 and confirmed that the great river flowed eastward — a finding that overturned European guesswork and made his published Travels a sensation. On the strength of that success the British government, eager to settle the Niger question and extend its commercial and imperial reach, gave him a captain's commission and a far larger force: a column of roughly forty Europeans, the bulk of them soldiers drawn from the garrison at Gorée, with officers, artificers and a draughtsman. The plan was to march to the upper Niger and then follow it by boat to wherever it ended.

The expedition left Portsmouth on 31 January 1805 and began its inland march from the Gambia in April — and there the fatal timing was set. The party pushed toward the Niger as the rains came on, into the season when malaria is at its height, and the men had no defence against a disease whose cause was then unknown. The column died on its feet. By the time Park reached the Niger at Bamako on 19 August 1805, only eleven of the Europeans were still alive; the rest had succumbed to fever and dysentery over a few terrible months. A venture conceived as a confident geographical survey had become, before it even reached the river it came to chart, a procession of the dying.

The river and the boat of the dead

At Sansanding, on the Niger, Park gathered the survivors and prepared the descent. He had two large canoes cut down and joined into a single flat schooner roughly 40 feet long, which he named the Joliba, the local name for the river. By the time the boat was ready, the European party had dwindled further still: when Park pushed off downstream on 19 November 1805 he had with him only Lieutenant John Martyn, three soldiers — one of them said to be deranged — the African guide Amadi Fatouma, and three enslaved men. He expected to reach the sea within weeks.

He never did. The boat ran more than a thousand miles down the Niger, past hostile stretches where the men, fearing attack, are reported to have fired on people along the banks rather than risk landing — a defensive ferocity that can only have hardened the response against them. At the Bussa rapids, in what is now Nigeria, the Joliba grounded on rock in a narrow channel and came under attack from the shore with bows, spears and stones. Trapped, Park and the remaining Europeans threw themselves into the river and drowned. Of the men who had boarded the boat at Sansanding, none of the Europeans survived; only the guide Amadi Fatouma, left behind shortly before, lived to tell what had happened. The single witness's account, carried slowly back toward the coast, was the only reason the world ever learned how the expedition ended.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

For years the expedition's fate was unknown in Britain; only the slow emergence of Amadi Fatouma's testimony, confirmed by about 1812 and corroborated by later travellers such as Hugh Clapperton and Richard Lander, established that Park had drowned at Bussa with the last of his men. His journals from the final voyage were lost. The geographical prize he had died chasing fell to the Lander brothers in 1830, who proved that the Niger emptied into the Atlantic through the delta — the answer the 1805 expedition had paid for in lives without obtaining.

Park is remembered in Scotland and in the history of exploration as a figure of real courage and skill, and his first journey remains a genuine landmark. The second is a darker monument: a government expedition in which a large, well-equipped party was almost entirely destroyed, chiefly by disease and finally by the violence of a route forced through inhabited country. The toll — roughly thirty-eight of forty Europeans dead, none of the river party surviving — stands as one of the starkest illustrations of how lethal the West African interior was to nineteenth-century European expeditions, and of how little geography it bought in return.

Lessons

References

• Mungo Park (explorer) WIKIPEDIA
• Mungo Park | African Explorer, Scottish Surgeon ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA
• Mungo Park: Biography UNDISCOVERED SCOTLAND
• Legends Series: Mungo Park EXPLORERSWEB
• Mungo Park | History | Research Starters EBSCO