Mungo Park and the Niger

by Joseph Thomson

But the public demanded something more than the dry bones of geography to satisfy their hungry appetite. They wanted also the flesh and blood of his narrative—how he lived and moved, what he felt and suffered, what dangers he faced, what hardships endured, the wonders he saw. Books of travel had not then deluged the market and saturated men’s minds with details about the remotest corners of Inner Africa. It was practically virgin soil to the reader, who could in nowise guess beforehand what startling revelations were in store for him. Compared with the modern devourer of books of travel, his sensations would be as those of the first explorer of the Gambia to the subdued expectancy of our latest traveller.

To gratify this very natural curiosity Park now devoted himself. His materials, apart from his memory, were but scanty. They consisted, in fact, of short notes or memoranda, written on odds and ends of paper, which must often have been far from legible, considering how they were carried for months in the crown of a battered hat, exposed to damp and all manner of accidents.

In the task of authorship Park was no doubt materially aided by Mr. Edwards, with whom he lived on terms of great friendship. In one or two places the pen of Edwards is clearly traceable, but these are few and far between. Where he lent the most valuable assistance was in the pruning, rearrangement, and revision which the work of a novice in composition would almost necessarily require. In this respect, however, Park is not alone among travellers. Few indeed among them have had such a complete mastery of the pen and of the English language as to trust absolutely in their own literary powers and judgment, although, as in Park’s case, the assistance required has seldom gone beyond guidance and revision.

Apart from his literary influence, it can hardly be doubted that Edwards very materially moulded Park’s views on at least one important subject—the slave trade. At that time the question of abolition had become a burning one in the country, and Edwards was one of the warmest advocates of the old order of things. He would give Africa Light, but no Liberty. While actively employed in trying to open up the Dark Continent to European influence, he strenuously strove to ensure that that influence should remain of the most criminal and degrading nature.

Let the reader imagine what would have been the consequence to Africa if the advocates of slavery had had their way, and the exploration of the Continent had only been the forerunner of more widespread ramifications of the slave trade. However incredible it may appear, such might easily have been the case. People once accustomed to an evil soon forget that it is such, and begin to look upon it as one of the necessary and unavoidable ills of life. Take, for example, the survival of the African gin trade to this very day, increasing and flourishing long after its dissociation from its well-matched sister traffic in slaves, and everywhere dogging the explorer’s footsteps. It is doubtful if even the slave trade has done more to brutalise and degrade the negro; and yet even in our time there is only a partial awakening to the frightful evils of the iniquitous traffic.

This culpable blindness or carelessness on our part is doubtless largely fostered by the comforting and comfortable belief that our missionaries are doing a great and noble work in Africa, and that mere contact with the European and European commerce must of necessity have an elevating effect upon the lower races. The truth is that for every negro nominally or genuinely brought under the influence of Christianity, ten thousand have been driven by drink to depths of moral and physical depravity unheard of among uncontaminated native tribes, and that so far contact with the European and his commerce has resulted not in elevation to the African, but in degradation of the most loathsome kind.

To what extent Park was really influenced in his opinions on the slave question by Edwards it would be difficult to say. It matters little, however, for whether he really believed in the righteousness of slavery or was merely reasoned into neutrality, his position was equally indefensible. Nay, more, if, as his friends say, he really believed that the trade was an unjust one, the position he assumed was nothing more nor less than criminal. These urge, as if it were an extenuating circumstance, that in private conversation he even expressed the greatest abhorrence of the traffic. This, it must be confessed, seems improbable. Such an attitude is utterly unlike what we should expect from a man of Park’s marked individuality and strong earnest truthfulness. Moreover, it seems sufficiently clear that the public opinion of his day ascribed to him a belief in the righteousness of the principle of slavery, and if it was wrong, it seems strange that he took no means to correct it. But that it was not wrong seems evident from a speech delivered on the Abolition of the Slave Trade by George Hibbert in Parliament in 1803.

The following is an extract—valuable, too, as throwing light upon the share of Edwards in the writing of Park’s book:—

“I have read and heard that we are to look to Park’s facts and not to his opinions; and it has been insinuated that his editor, Mr. Edwards, had foisted those opinions (relating to the slave trade) into his book. It happened to me once to converse with Mr. Park at a meeting of the Linnean Society, when this very topic was started, and he assured me that, not being in the habit of literary composition, he was obliged to employ some one to put his manuscript into a form fit for the public eye, but that every sheet of the publication had undergone his strict revision, and that not only every fact but every sentiment was his own.”

We must, therefore, till more convincing proof than hearsay evidence is forthcoming, believe that Mungo Park was a believer in the slave trade. Such a position we can understand and make all due allowance for as the result of the ideas of the time, and of those by whom he was immediately surrounded—to believe else were to place Park on a distinctly lower pedestal than that to which he is entitled by his many meritorious characteristics.