True, I cannot claim to have left behind me tribes entirely devoted to us, or districts completely won over to our ideas, to which France has but to send her traders and her directors; but I think I can say that where our passage did nothing to ameliorate the situation, it at least made it no worse; and of this I am proud.
Briefly stated, what we did on our expedition was, to ascend the Senegal, reach the Niger at its highest navigable point, and go down it to the sea.
This was not a new idea. My friend Felix Dubois claims, not unjustly, that the same thing occurred to Colbert. For all that, however, scarcely a century ago no one knew the exact position either of the source or the mouth of the Niger; and those who were anxious to learn something about its geography, had only Herodotus, Ibn Batuta, and Leo Africanus to guide them.
But we must do justice to our rivals: the English were the first to attempt to realize the dream of Colbert. In 1797, the Scotchman Mungo Park reached the Upper Niger by way of Guinea. “Are there then no streams, no rivers, no anything in your country,” a chief of Kasso said to him, “that you come at the peril of your life to see the Joliba?” (the Upper Niger). Park stopped at Silla, near our present settlement at Sansanding, and renewing his attempt a few years later, he met his death—how, no one knows exactly, somewhere near Bussa.
NATIVES OF THE BANKS OF THE SENEGAL.
Although very celebrated in England, Mungo Park was quite unknown to the French, even in their colonies. I give the following well-known anecdote from memory. “In 1890 a highly educated person said to M. X———, a French colonial officer of high rank, ‘There is a future before the Niger districts. See what Mungo Park says about them;’ and he followed this up with a lot of quotations from Park’s book. ‘Oh, that is all very interesting,’ said the other; ‘if Mungo Park is in Paris, you had better take him to the Minister.’ Then when the death of Park in 1805 was explained, M. X——— cried, thinking he had found an unanswerable argument, ‘I bet your Park died of fever!’”
Perhaps after all he confused him with the Parc Monceau, the healthiness of which had lately been called in question.
Our journey was accomplished just one century after Mungo Park’s first attempt. We started from about the same point, too, as did the great Scotch traveller, only from the Senegal instead of the Gambia, but our attempt was crowned by success.
Of course, it will be said, that we had fewer unknown districts to go through. Since 1805, Europeans have conquered half the continent of Africa. We stepped from a French colony into an English Protectorate. Moreover, earlier travellers than ourselves explored certain sections of our route, whilst Park had everywhere to work his way through virgin territory.