He proceeded to Egypt, intending to make his way to Sennaar, and thence to traverse the entire breadth of the African continent; but, seized with an illness at Cairo, he died just as he was about to start with a caravan.
The next traveller engaged by the society was Mr Lucas, who, having been captured by a Salee rover, had been several years a slave in Morocco. He started from Tripoli, but was compelled by the disturbed state of the country to the south of that place to put back.
It should have been said that it had been long known that two mighty rivers flowed through the interior of Africa, one called the Gambia and the other the Niger, or Quorra; but whereabouts they rose, or the direction they took, or the nature of the country they traversed in their course, no exact information was possessed.
From Arab traders, also, accounts had been received of a vast city, situated near the banks of the Niger, far away across the desert, called Timbuctoo, said to possess palaces, temples and numberless public buildings, to be surrounded by lofty walls and glittering everywhere with gold and precious stones, to rival the ancient cities of Mexico and Peru in splendour and those of Asia in the amount of its population.
A century and a half before, two sea captains, Thompson and Jobson, sent out by a company for the purpose, had made their way some distance up the Gambia in boats, and early in the eighteenth century Captain Stibbs had gallantly sailed up the same river to a considerable distance, but, his native crew refusing to proceed, he was compelled to return without having gained much information.
As a wide sandy desert intervened between the shores of the Mediterranean and the centre of Africa, it was naturally supposed that the unknown region could be more easily reached from the west coast than over that barren district, and, soon after the return of Lucas, Major Haughton, a high-spirited, gallant officer who had lived some time in Morocco,
volunteered to make his way along the bank of the Gambia eastward, under the belief that a journey by land was more likely to succeed than one by water. Some way up that river is the the town of Pisania, where an English factory had been established, and a few Europeans were settled, with a medical man, Dr Laidley. Leaving this place, he proceeded to Tisheet, a place in the Great Desert, hoping from thence to reach Timbuctoo; but, robbed by a Moorish chief, of everything he possessed, he wandered alone through the desert, till, exhausted by hunger and thirst, he sat down under a tree and died. The news of his fate was brought to Dr Laidley soon afterwards by some negroes.
These expeditions threw no light on the interior of the continent. A fresh volunteer, however, Mungo Park, then unknown to fame, was soon to commence those journeys which have immortalised his name, and which contributed so greatly to solve one of the chief African problems—the course of the Niger.