Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa, in the Year 1805 (ed John Whishaw) | Page 7

Niger, the great object of his journey; and ascertained the
extraordinary fact, that its course is from West to East.
After a short stay at Sego (where he did not find it safe to remain), Park
proceeded down the river to Silla, a large town distant about seventy or
eighty miles, on the banks of the Niger. He was now reduced to the
greatest distress, and being convinced by painful experience, that the
obstacles to his further progress were insurmountable, he reluctantly
abandoned his design of proceeding eastwards; and came to the
resolution of going back to Sego, and endeavouring to effect his return
to the Gambia by a different route from that by which he had advanced
into Africa.
On the 3d of August, 1796, he left Silla, and pursuing the course of the
Niger, arrived at Bammakoo, the frontier of Bambarra, about the 23d of
the same month. Here he quitted the Niger, which ceases to be
navigable at this place; and travelling for several weeks through a
mountainous and difficult country, reached Kamalia, in the territory of
Manding, on the 16th of September. He performed the latter part of this
journey on foot, having been obliged to leave his horse, now worn out
with fatigue and unable to proceed farther.
Having encountered all the horrors of the rainy season, and being worn
down by fatigue, his health had, at different times, been seriously
affected. But, soon after his arrival at Kamalia, he fell into a severe and
dangerous fit of sickness, by which he was closely confined for
upwards of a month. His life was preserved by the hospitality and
benevolence of Karfa Taura, a Negro, who received him into his house,
and whose family attended him with the kindest solicitude. The same

excellent person, at the time of Park's last Mission into Africa, hearing
that a white man was travelling through the country, whom he
imagined to be Park, took a journey of six days to meet him; and
joining the caravan at Bambakoo, was highly gratified by the sight of
his friend. [Footnote: See Journal, p. 137.]
There being still a space of five hundred miles to be traversed (the
greater part of it through a desert) before Park could reach any friendly
country on the Gambia, he had no other resource but to wait with
patience for the first caravan of slaves that might travel the same track.
No such opportunity occurred till the latter end of April, 1797; when a
coffle, or caravan, set out from Kamalia under the direction of Karfa
Taura, in whose house he had continued during his long residence of
more than seven months at that place.
The coffle began its progress westwards on the 17th of April, and on
the 4th of June reached the banks of the Gambia, after a journey of
great labour and difficulty, which afforded Park the most painful
opportunities of witnessing the miseries endured by a caravan of slaves
in their transportation from the interior to the coast. On the 10th of the
same month Park arrived at Pisania, from whence he had set out
eighteen months before; and was received by Dr. Laidley (to use his
own expression) as one risen from the grave. On the 15th of June he
embarked in a slave ship bound to America, which was driven by stress
of weather to the West Indies; and got with great difficulty, and under
circumstances of considerable danger, into the Island of Antigua. He
sailed from thence on the 24th of November, and after a short, but
tempestuous passage, arrived at Falmouth on the 22d of the following
month, having been absent from England two years and seven months.
Immediately on his landing he hastened to London, anxious in the
greatest degree about his family and friends, of whom he had heard
nothing for two years. He arrived in London before day-light on the
morning of Christmas day, 1797; and it being too early an hour to go to
his brother-in-law, Mr. Dickson, he wandered for some time about the
streets in that quarter of the town where his house was. Finding one of
the entrances into the gardens of the British Museum accidentally open,
he went in and walked about there for some time. It happened that Mr.
Dickson, who had the care of those gardens, went there early that
morning upon some trifling business. What must have been his

emotions on beholding at that extraordinary time and place, the vision,
as it must at first have appeared, of his long-lost friend, the object of so
many anxious reflexions, and whom he had long numbered with the
dead!
* * * * *
Park's arrival was hailed with a sort of triumph by his friends of the
African Association, and in