ABSTRACT
In June of 1797, a 25-year-old Scotsman surfaced unexpectedly at Pisania on the coast of West Africa, alone, destitute, and rather the worse for wear. His name was Mungo Park, and he had just spent a year and a half in the interior exploring the Niger basin. He was about to go back to England and write one of the most popular travel books of his time. Park had traveled in the employ of the London-based Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, known as the African Association for short. This alliance of aristocrats and wealthy businessmen, “including peers, baronets, members of Parliament, a retired general, and a bishop,”2 was formed in 1788 under the leadership of Joseph Banks, and directed British exploration in West Africa for the next four decades. (Banks would be succeeded in 1815 by none other than John Barrow, whose youthful travels were discussed in the previous chapter.) At the Association’s inaugural meeting “twelve well-to-do gentlemen” convened to lament that, in the words of their own manifesto,
Notwithstanding the progress of discovery on the coasts and borders of that base continent [i.e. Africa] the map of its interior is still but a wide extended blank, on which the geographer, on the authority of Leo Africanus and of the Xeriff of Edrissi the Nubian author, has traced with hesitating hand a few names of unexplored rivers and of uncertain nations. . . . Sensible of this stigma, and desirous of rescuing the age from a charge of ignorance, which, on other respects, belongs so little to its character, a few individuals, strongly impressed with a conviction of the practicability and utility of thus enlarging the fund of human
knowledge, have formed the plan of an Association for Promoting the discovery of the interior parts of Africa.3
