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Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa has long been regarded as a classic of African travel literature. In fulfilling his mission to find the Niger River and in documenting its potential as an inland waterway for trade, Park was significant in opening Africa to European economic interests. His modest, low-key heroism made it possible for the British public to imagine themselves as a welcomed force in Africa. As a tale of adventure and survival, it has inspired the imaginations of readers since its first publication in 1799 and writers from Wordsworth and Melville to Conrad, Hemingway, and T. Coreghessan Boyle have acknowledged the influence of Park’s narrative on their work.Unlike the large expeditions that followed him, Park traveled only with native guides or alone. Without much of an idea of where he was going, he relied entirely on local people for food, shelter, and directions throughout his eventful eighteen month journey. While his warm reaction to the people he met made him famous as a sentimental traveler, his chronicle also provides a rare written record of the lives of ordinary people in West Africa before European intervention. His accounts of war, politics, and the spread of Islam, as well as his constant confrontations with slavery as practiced in eighteenth-century West Africa, are as valuable today as they were in 1799. In preparing this new edition, editor Kate Ferguson Marsters presents the complete text and includes reproductions of all the original maps and illustrations.Park’s narrative serves as a crucial text in relation to scholarship on the history of slavery, colonial enterprise, and nineteenth-century imperialism. The availability of this full edition will give a new generation of readers access to a travel narrative that has inspired other readers and writers over two centuries and will enliven scholarly discussion in many fields.… (more)
User reviews
Now I want to read Water Music again.
There are two editions in the Everyman's Library; the original from 1907 and the 1954 "enlarged and revised". The '54 is essentially a stripped down version of the 1816 edition. You have Park's text of the first journey entire but with everything else from that volume stripped out. Then you have an abridged version of the second journey. The narrative is complete but lists of supplies and astronomical observations have been edited out. Amadi Fatouma's journal is here, or at least part of it, but Isaaco's is not. The editor has added some connecting passages. The original maps have also been removed and replaced with a map of such poor quality I would expect to find better in a third rate fantasy novel. I have knocked off a star because of the map.
I think the one thing that stands out from the account is what a lovely guy Mungo Park is. Having read various old travelogues, the writers tend very much to a jingoistic scorn for the locals...Park treats those he meets as his equals, his assessment based solely on their actions.
But the Moors truly merit their description as "the rudest savages on earth"; the highlight for me was their effort to humiliate the 'kaffir' Park by bringing a wild hog into the assembly for him to eat. Park notes (with, we feel, considerable satisfaction) that far from running at the Christian, the hog "began to attack indiscriminately every person that came in his way, and at last took shelter under the couch upon which the king was sitting."
After Park's year long odyssey, the endless difficulties, the heroism, one feels that the following years, publishing his memoirs, marrying and working as a doctor in Peebles, is a huge anti-climax.
The short second part tells of his second trip to the Niger, leading a military expedition ten years later (1805.) Setting off ill-advisedly in the rainy season, and hampered by a bunch of men less resiliant than himself, this is a very different journey, as fever, dysentery, animals, hunger...and Moors...bring endless insurmountable challenges. The final section is based on account by an African guide, and is very sad after such amazingly determined efforts.
A total hero, up there with Ernest Shackleton and Belarusian war hero Tuvia Bielski in my pantheon of Incredible People.