Chapter XIX: Preparing for a New Expedition

In this as in his earlier expedition, Park was dogged by his usual ill-luck.

Disappointment met him at the very outset.

He had left Scotland in the belief that almost every arrangement had been made, and that a very short time would suffice to complete the necessary preparations.

He arrived in London only to hear that the departure of the expedition had been postponed till the end of February 1804. With what patience he possessed he waited. The allotted time went by. Once more everything was ready. Part of the troops destined for the service were actually on board ship, when orders came countermanding the expedition, pending the decision of Lord Camden, the new Colonial Secretary, as to whether it should go at all or not.

Park was naturally bitterly disappointed at thus being thrown again on the seas of uncertainty. The expedition might now never set out, and the task of solving the great African problem would be reserved for another.

Meanwhile the date of departure was provisionally put off till September, and till then he was recommended to return to Scotland and occupy the interval in perfecting himself in taking astronomical observations and in learning Arabic--acquirements which would be of the utmost importance to him afterwards.

A suitable teacher of Arabic was found in one Sidi Ambak Bubi, a native of Mogador, and then residing in London. Accompanied by the Moor, Park returned to Peebles in March. Here he remained till May, when he finally quitted that town and took up his residence at Foulshiels while awaiting the decision of the Colonial Office.

It was at this time that the great traveller came in contact with his still greater countryman and neighbour, Sir Walter Scott, then living at Ashesteil, and separated from Foulshiels only by the sharp ridge of hills which divides the Yarrow from the Tweed.

Between two such men--the one absorbed in a career of prospective action in a new continent, the other revelling in a romantic world of retrospective thought--it might be supposed there was little in common.

In reality there was much. Scott, though he delighted to sing of the past and conjure up its knightly deeds, had a soul capable of appreciating all forms of glorious and adventurous enterprise, whether seen in the prosaic lights of the passing moment, or invested with the romantic vagueness and fascinating glamour which the shades of time gather around bygone days. To such an one Park was a man after his own heart. Had but his deeds been surrounded with the pomp and circumstance which glorified those of the knights of old, Scott might have sung them in a similar heroic strain. Mayhap the day will come when another Scott will arise to do for Park and his successors what Sir Walter and others have done for the heroic figures of our nation’s history.

On the other hand, Park, imbued as he likewise was with the romantic instinct, could not fail to be attracted by Scott’s peculiar genius. Moreover, both were Scotchmen, both Borderers, and both alike were passionate lovers of the minstrelsy, tales, traditions, and ballads of their native country. The ballads especially were dear to Park, and he tells how, in his last expedition, one of his followers used “to beguile the watches of the night with the songs of our dear native land.”

But whatever were the links which drew these two famous men together, they were sufficient speedily to develop a very warm and cordial friendship, and visits were frequently interchanged across the heathery hills which separated them. On one of these occasions Scott discovered Park sitting alone beside the noisy Yarrow, employed in the apparently idle and boyish amusement of throwing stones into the river and anxiously watching the bubbles as they rose to the surface. On being asked what interest he found in such a pastime, Park replied that he was thus in the habit of ascertaining the depth of rivers in Africa before venturing to cross them--the time taken by the bubbles to rise being an indication of the depth.

Early in September came the long expected summons to repair to London, and Park lost no time in settling his affairs preparatory to leaving home. Among others, he paid a farewell visit to Sir Walter Scott at Ashesteil, where he spent the night. Next morning his host accompanied him on his way to Foulshiels. The path lay up the Glenkinnen to Williamhope, whence it continued over the ridge and passed between the Brown Knowe and the humpy elevation of the Broomy Law. As they passed from the birchen slopes of Glenkinnen into the heather and grass-clad zones above, Park talked much of his plans of exploration, and the results that would accrue to science and commerce should he prove successful.

Under other conditions the panorama which slowly unfolds itself with the ascent of the hill would have been sufficient to draw even Park’s thoughts from Africa and the Niger. The various glens and valleys of the Tweed, the Gala, the Yarrow, and the Ettrick divide the land into a picturesque succession of winding ridges, isolated hills, and rounded mountain tops, where wood, heather, and grass give variety of colour to the higher levels, while below waving crops and busy harvest-fields, ruined castle and noble mansion, humble cottage and straggling village, with glancing bits of stream and river, flocks of sheep and scattered herds of cattle, combine to produce the softer effects of “cultivated nature.”

But on this day of leave-taking a leaden-coloured mist hung over hill and valley, hiding their every feature. Only now and again did the breeze lift a corner of the enshrouding veil and give a momentary glimpse, vague and fleeting, of glen and hill-top. As they talked of the coming journey Scott seemed to see in the vaguely defined landscape an emblem of his friend’s prospects, where all was problematic, uncertain--the path beset with unknown dangers and pitfalls, nothing sure save the presence of surrounding perils which might neither be foreseen nor prepared for. In this ignorance as regards the exact nature of the dangers to be faced lies one of the chief difficulties and terrors of travel in unexplored savage lands. All the traveller does know is that dangers in various forms will most assuredly confront him, and he must depend upon his presence of mind and readiness of resource at the moment to avoid or repel them.

But Park was not to be debarred from his enterprise by any thought of the difficulties in the way. To all that Scott could urge he had his answer. The idea of solving the question of the Niger’s termination was one which possessed him to the exclusion of all thoughts of self. As well have asked him to renounce his belief in the existence of God as expect him to give up his cherished scheme.

At last the glen of the Yarrow lay before them. At the bottom could be hazily defined the “birchen bower,” from which the stately tower of Newark and the humble cottage of Foulshiels alike looked forth on the beautiful murmurous stream.

Here they must say good-bye. A ditch divided the road from the moor, and in crossing it Park’s horse stumbled and nearly fell. “I am afraid, Mungo,” said Scott, “that is a bad omen.” “Freits” (_i.e._, omens) “follow those who look to them,” was the prompt reply; and without another word Park rode away and disappeared in the mist.

It now only remained to Park to take farewell of his wife. Brave as he was, the ordeal was more than he dared face. Not that she had raised any objections to his going, or put any barriers in the way. Seeing how much her husband’s heart was in it, and not perhaps without some natural womanly pride in being the wife of a hero rather than of a nobody, she seems to have accepted as a matter of course his determination to avail himself of the chance of further distinction presented by the proposed expedition. Still, the moment of actual parting, with the prospect of at best a long period of separation, would be agony. Even better than his wife Park knew how many chances there were that the separation might be final--that wife and children, of whom there were now three, might never see him again. Sanguine as he was of success, there were moments when he could not but admit that the coming enterprise looked very like a forlorn hope--moments, too, when it became difficult for him to discern whether his duty to humanity or to his family had the stronger claim upon him.

It was under the influence of some such feeling of despondency that he finally resolved to spare both himself and his wife the anguish of a parting scene, and betaking himself to Edinburgh on the plea of business, thence wrote to her his last farewell.

On his arrival in London in September 1804, Park presented a written statement to the Colonial Office embodying his views as to the commercial and geographical results likely to accrue from the intended expedition, at the same time pointing out the best means to accomplish the work as regards men and goods. In this memorandum he pointed out the course he proposed to pursue. Passing through Bondu, Kajaaga, Fuladu, and Bambarra to Sego, he would construct a boat and proceed by way of Jenné and Kabara (the port of Timbuktu) through the kingdoms of Haussa, Nyffé (now called Nupé), and Kashna, &c., to the kingdom of Wangara. If the river ended here, he pointed out, his chief difficulty would begin. To return by the Niger, to cross the desert to Tripoli or Egypt, or to pass eastward to the Nile and Abyssinia, he considered equally difficult. The most feasible course seemed that towards the Bight of Benin. If, however, the Niger was, as he confidently believed, in reality the Congo, he would follow it to its termination. After pointing out the grounds for his belief, Park concluded with the opinion that when “your Lordship shall have duly weighed the above reasons, you will be induced to conclude that my hopes of returning by the Congo are not altogether fanciful, and that the expedition, though attended with extreme danger, promises to be productive of the utmost advantage to Great Britain. Considered in a commercial point of view, it is second only to the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, and in a geographical point of view is certainly the greatest discovery that remains to be made in the world”--a very strong statement of the case, it must be admitted, though undoubtedly if the Niger and the Congo had proved to be one, it could scarcely have been said to be too strong.

Park had been converted to this view of the identity of the two great rivers by one George Maxwell, a West African trader, who had seen much of the Congo near its mouth, and had published a chart embodying the results of his observations. When closely examined, the arguments in its favour were of small value, and practically arose out of the fact that there was a large river with a southerly trend whose termination was unknown, while further south there was a second, the Congo, whose origin was equally a mystery. Prolong these in the necessary direction and the result is identity, and the mystery of both is settled.

Meanwhile Major Rennell stuck to his view with all the pertinacity of the arm-chair geographer, and the man of one idea. For him the Niger ended in the desert wastes of Wangara and Ghana. Unfortunately for his theory the Major was unconsciously confounding two Wangaras separated from each other by fifteen hundred miles and more, and likewise the old Empire of Ghana on the middle course of the Niger with Kano at the eastern extremity of the Haussa States. A similar confusion also appears in Park’s memorandum, where he speaks of the continuation of the river after Nupé to Kashna (Katsina) and the kingdom of Wangara.

Strange indeed it seems to us now that no geographer even at this time ever suggested that the outlet of the Niger might be in the Bight of Benin, among the numerous creeks that penetrate the low swampy mangrove ground which here subtends the Bight. Looking at the map, the suggestion seems to us to come naturally, yet Park had to carry the course of the river away south to the Congo; Rennell turned it west, and ended it where our maps are now occupied by Lake Chad, while there were not wanting others, like Jackson, who persisted in joining it to the Nile, “en abusant, pour ainsi dire, du vaste carrière que l’intérieur de l’Afrique y laissait prendre,” as D’Anville had said of earlier geographers.

Whatever we may now think of Park’s theories as to the termination of the Niger, they did not appear in any way absurd in his own time. The wildest conjecture was permissible as regards a vast river flowing by an uncertain course through a continent still blank on our maps. Accordingly his memorandum was received favourably by Lord Camden, and the despatch of the expedition to carry out the traveller’s ideas was determined on.

A liberal compensation was to be given to Park on his return, and it was also stipulated that in the event of his death, or of his not being heard of within a given period, a certain sum should be paid by Government as a provision for his wife and family.

Meanwhile Rennell, in the most friendly fashion, not only argued against Park’s views as to the Niger termination, but earnestly advised him to relinquish his dangerous project. With as little effect in the one case as in the other, however. The explorer’s determination, like his opinions, was not to be shaken. Sir Joseph Banks took up a more philosophic position. He admitted the hazardous nature of the enterprise; but since the work was not to be accomplished without risk of life, he could not attempt to dissuade Park from it, he being the man most likely to carry it through with least danger of a fatal issue.

Gradually the affairs of the expedition began to take shape. Dr. Alexander Anderson, Park’s young brother-in-law, was selected as his second in command, and Mr. George Scott, a fellow-dalesman, was added to the party as draughtsman. A few boat-builders and artificers were also to accompany the party from England, for the purpose of constructing the boat intended for the navigation of the Niger when it was reached. Soldiers to assist and protect the expedition were to be selected at Goree, where a garrison of the African corps was stationed.

It was now a matter of paramount importance that the expedition should leave England at once if it was to take advantage of the dry season. But official red-tape was as difficult to galvanise into activity and life as African apathy, and in spite of his utmost endeavours to push matters on, delay succeeded upon delay, and Park saw the good season gradually dwindling away, leaving him to the maddening contemplation of all the additional difficulties and dangers engendered by the rains. Two whole months were thus lost; and when he at last received his official instructions, he knew that the Government, by its continued procrastination, had done much if not everything to ensure a disastrous termination to the expedition.

In the instructions supplied to him Park’s mission was defined as being to discover whether and to what extent commercial intercourse could be established in the interior of Africa for the mutual benefit of the natives and of His Majesty’s subjects. He was directed to proceed up the Gambia, and thence to the banks of the Niger by way of the Senegal. The special object of his journey was to determine the course of the Niger, and to establish communication with all the different nations on its banks. He was at liberty to pursue any return route which he might find most suitable, either by turning west to the Atlantic, or by marching upon Cairo.

To carry out this great mission effectively, a captain’s commission was bestowed on him, and that of a lieutenant on Anderson. European soldiers to the number of forty-five, and as many natives as he might deem necessary, were to be selected at Goree, and a sufficient number of donkeys at St. Jago. He was further empowered to draw for any sum he might want not exceeding £5000.