Majestic River: Mungo Park and the Exploration of the Niger

(Hardback)

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Majestic River: Mungo Park and the Exploration of the Niger is about geography, exploration, and a 2000-year-old geographical mystery. By the eighteenth century, the river Niger was to Europeans a source of wonder, potential wealth, and a two-part problem. The first would be solved by Mungo Park in 1796. Parks death in 1806 in failing to solve the second prompted other expeditions which sought to determine the cause of his death and to trace the Nigers course.

This book offers the first full length biography of Mungo Park for over forty years. It traces the expeditions who followed him. It documents for the first time Parks afterlife how and why he was commemorated long after his death. The book shows how the Niger was slowly revealed, in texts, maps and through indigenous knowledge. The Niger problem was finally solved by exploration in 1830. But years before, it had already been solved by armchair geographers who never set foot in Africa and who, unlike Park, did not die trying.

Park remains today one of Britains best known explorers and his classic Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa both became a bestseller and has remained in print for over 200 years. The mystery of Park's death and the ongoing fascination with the Niger problem prompted expedition after expedition well into the 19th century. This is not simply one of the great stories of world exploration but a rich and varied account of Africa and its cultures at the time.

Reviews

'Punchy, eloquent, and infused with forensic research ...This book is in all senses a geographical epic'

-- Nicholas Crane, writer and presenter, BBC Twos Coast and author of The Making of the British Landscape

'This deeply researched and sumptuously illustrated book is at once an exciting new biography of Mungo Park, a wide-ranging history of the decades-long efforts by the British to explore the Niger, and an illuminating study of the evolution of geography and cartography as fields of scientific knowledge'

-- Dane Kennedy, author of The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia

'A fascinating and illuminating read'

-- Megan Amato * Scottish Field *

'Both an admirable biography of the explorer Mungo Park and also a thoughtful meditation on early British involvement in West Africa'

-- Allan Massie * The Scotsman *

'It's always thrilling to stumble across a book that is so well researched and written that as a reader you get the sense it will be the definitive account of the subject it covers for quite some time to come. "Majestic River" is one of those books'

-- Ken Lussey * Undiscovered Scotland *

Author Bio

Charles W.J. Withers is Professor Emeritus and former Ogilvie Chair of Geography at the University of Edinburgh. Between 2015 and 2022, he was Geographer Royal for Scotland, the first in 118 years. His books include Zero Degrees: Geographies of the Prime Meridian (2017) and, as co-author, the prize-winning Scotland: Mapping the Nation (2011).