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 sion to the Niger, though he kept perfectly silent on the subject. Such hopes were realised in October 1803, when he received an invitation from Lord Hobart, then secretary of state for the colonies, to consider the organisation of a fresh expedition of discovery to Africa. Park promptly accepted the leadership of the proposed enterprise; but a change of administration in 1804, and the succession of Lord Camden to Lord Hobart, occasioned considerable delay in setting out. Park spent the interval in the study of Arabic at the cost of the government. In a memoir which he presented to the colonial office in September 1804, he stated the object of the expedition to be generally ‘the extension of British commerce and the enlargement of our geographical knowledge.’ In the same memoir he also gave his reasons for believing that the Congo would be found to be the termination of the Niger. The brevet commission of a captain in Africa was conferred in a letter from Lord Camden to Park, dated 2 Jan. 1805, which instructed him ‘to pursue the course of this river [i.e. Niger] to the utmost possible distance to which it can be traced.’ The sum of 5,000l. was placed at his disposal, and he was empowered to enlist soldiers to the number of forty-five to accompany him on his journey. On 30 Jan. 1805 Park, accompanied by his brother-in-law, Alexander Anderson, a surgeon, and George Scott, a draughtsman of Selkirk, sailed from Portsmouth on the transport Crescent. They arrived at Goree on 28 March, where they were joined by Lieutenant Martyn, R.A., and thirty soldiers from the garrison, all of whom had volunteered, with four carpenters and two sailors. On 29 April the expedition arrived at Pisania, where Park engaged a Mandingo priest named Isaaco to accompany them as guide. On 19 Aug. 1805, when they reached Bambakoo on the Niger, only eleven out of the forty Europeans survived. On 21 Aug. Park embarked on the Niger, and proceeded down the river to Sansanding, a little eastward of Sego, where he remained for two months, trafficking with the natives and preparing for his passage down the river. The terrible effects of the climate continued to work havoc among the survivors of the expedition. Scott had fallen a victim a few days before the Niger was reached. Anderson, whom Park had nursed with most affectionate care for three months, died 28 Oct. (Addit. MS. 33230, f. 37). Undaunted by these disasters, Park continued his preparations for the descent of the unknown river. After constructing, mainly with his own hands, a flat-bottomed vessel out of two canoes, which he named H. M. schooner the Joliba (i.e. ‘the great water’), he started on his descent, leaving Sansanding on 19 Nov., accompanied by Lieutenant Martyn and three soldiers, the remnant of his party. To Lord Camden he wrote a remarkable letter on the eve of his departure. ‘I have changed,’ he wrote on 17 Nov., ‘a large canoe into a tolerably good schooner, on board of which I this day hoisted the British flag, and I shall set sail to the east with the fixed resolution to discover the termination of the Niger or perish in the attempt. I have heard nothing that I can depend on respecting the remote course of this mighty stream, but I am more inclined to think that it can end nowhere but in the sea. My dear friends, Mr. Anderson and likewise Mr. Scott, are both dead; but though all Europeans who are with me should die, and though I were myself half dead, I would still persevere; and if I could not succeed in the object of my journey, I would at least die on the Niger.’ This letter, together with others addressed to members of his family, and his journal were delivered by Park to the guide Isaaco, by whom they were safely conveyed to the Gambia; they were the last communications ever received from Park. Rumours of the explorer's death reached the coast in 1806, but no definite account of the fate of the expedition was obtained until 1812. In 1810 Colonel Maxwell, the governor of the Congo, had despatched the guide Isaaco on a mission to discover the facts, and if possible to secure any papers or journal belonging to Park. Isaaco returned with written information supplied by a guide named Amadi Fatouma, whom Park had engaged at Sansanding to accompany him down the river. This account, though not wholly satisfactory and much doubted at the time it was received (Philanthropist, July 1815; Edinb. Rev. February 1815), has subsequently been confirmed in its main features by the investigations of Bowditch, Denham, Clapperton, Lander, and later travellers (Addit. MS. 18390, for Sheerif Ibraham's account given to Bowditch, and translated by Professor S. Lee). Park apparently sailed down the stream past Timbuctoo as far as the town of Boussa, where, in a narrow and rocky stretch of the stream, an attempt was made by the natives to stop his further progress. A fight resulted, in which his whole party, except one slave rower, lost their lives. The various accounts agree in attributing the death of the white men to drowning, but give different explanations as to how the fight originated. There appears to be some reason for suspecting that Amadi Fatouma was respon-