The World's Great _Explorers : Mungo Park and the Niger.
By Joseph Thomson. (Philip and Son.)—Probably no African ex- plorer has had greater difficulties to overcome than Mungo Park, and it may be doubted if any traveller has surpassed him in courage and endurance. The story of his infinite perils and splendid resolution is, on the whole, well told by Mr. Thomson, whose mastery of the subject is complete. His style, however, lacks simplicity—an iron pier, for example, is described as "laving its hundred limbs in the placid depths "—and his statements are sometimes contradictory. On p. 47 it is said that " Park's ardent enthusiasm was ever tempered with the caution and prudent practical character of his race ;" but on p. 199, when describing the traveller's preparations for his second journey, Mr. Thomson points out Park's folly in taking with him a large number of Europeans unfitted for such an expedition, and adds that he com- mitted a mistake for which even less excuse can be found :— " Nowhere in his diary do we find a single reference to his having any native followers to do the common drudgery of the camp and the road. This was a want of foresight which appears almost incredible in one who knew what was before him, and the results which followed when all the men fell sick were disastrous
beyond description To the extreme perils and hardships which attend an African expedition at all times, Park added a start at the worst possible time of the year and with the worst possible selection of men." Three-fourths of the soldiers died on the march, a fact recorded by Park as if it were no more than a regrettable incident of travel. He saw, too, some of the worst evils of the slave-trade ; yet while he tells of abominations almost too horrible to be described, instead of denouncing the system, he expresses a doubt whether a discontinuance of the commerce would be of much advantage to the natives. It is one of the most remarkable facts connected with the dis- covery of the course taken by the Niger, that the hypothesis of Richard, a German, in 1808 has proved to be correct ; and that McQueen, " a stay-at-home geographer," eight years later published "a small treatise in which he pointed out, as had Richard before him, that the Niger certainly entered the ocean in the Bight of Benin." After giving an account of McQueen's views, and the facts on which he grounded them, Mr. Thomson adds :—" Never was a piece of arm-chair geography worked out more admirably. In its broad outlines it was per- fectly correct." Mr. Thomson, we may add, devotes an interesting chapter to the National African Company, and writes on the subject with authority, for he was deputed by that Company in 1885 to checkmate the designs of the German Colonial Society, and to secure the Niger basin to Britain. " To have the Germans in the Niger," he observes, " would mean irreparable ruin to legitimate commerce, and the flooding of the whole land with the styx-like flood of gin which would inevitably flow in a devastating flood from Hamburg." How much the Company was animated by a horror of gin, and how much by the desire to have the whole trade of Central Africa exclusively in British hands, need not be discussed here. Suffice it that Mr. Thomson's prompt and some- what dangerous expedition practically placed two empires under a British Protectorate, and that the Government, " recognising the incontestable claims and magnificent patriotic enterprise of the National African Company, granted it a Royal Charter and the right to the title of Royal Niger Company which it now bears."
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