Mungo Park (Famous Scots Series)

160 pp. Red cloth boards with black titles. Mungo Park (11 September 1771 – 1806) was a Scottish explorer of West Africa. After an exploration of the upper Niger River around 1796, he wrote a popular and influential travel book titled Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa in which he theorized the Niger and Congo merged to become the same river. He was killed during a second expedition, having successfully traveled about two-thirds of the way down the Niger. With Park's death, the idea of a Niger-Congo merger remained an open question although it became the leading theory among geographers.[1] The mystery of the Niger's course, which had been speculated about since the Ancient Greeks and was second only to the mystery of the Nile's source, was not solved for another 25 years, in 1830, when it was discovered the Niger and Congo were in fact separate rivers. If the African Association was the "beginning of the age of African exploration" then Mungo Park was its first successful explorer; he set a standard for all who followed. Park was the first Westerner to have recorded travels in the central portion of the Niger, and through his popular book introduced the public to a vast unexplored continent which influenced future European explorers and colonial ambitions in Africa.--Wikipedia. CONTENTS: Mungo Park's Early Life; The Mystery of the Niger; Park's First Journey; A Captive Among the Moors; Escape from Captivity; Struggling Onward to the Niger; On the Niger; The Return Journey; Home with a Slave Caravan; Life as a Country Doctor; The Second Expedition--A Disastrous March; Once More on the Niger; The Fate of Mungo Park; The Mystery of the Niger Solved; The Niger of To-day--A Neglected Heritage.