In consequence of this appointment, he left Portsmouth on the 22d May, 1795, in the Endeavour, an African• trader; and arrived at Jillifree, near the the mouth of the Gambia, on the 21st June. From this place he proceeded directly to Pisania, a British factory two hundred miles up the river, and was kindly received by Dr. Laidlcy the su perintendant, in whose house he resided some months, learning Mandingo, the dialect generally spoken in those parts, and collecting information with regard to his future On the 2d December, Park took leave of this last English friend, and directed his steps eastward in search of the Joliba. Soon, however, the intelligence of a war having occurred between two native chiefs, through whose territories he was to pass, induced him to bend his course to the north, into the country of the Moors. He had not proceeded far, till a horde of that savage people surprised and took him prisoner. He was carried before Ali their leader, and treated with a degree of inhumanity, which, combined with the severe fever partly occasioned by it, would have broken any spirit less energetic than his own. He bore up, however, under the accumulated hor rors of bodily exhaustion and barbarous captivity, till at length he fortunately escaped from the camp in the month of June. He reckoned his escap: fortunate, though, in truth, it might seem but a change of misery. Alone in the African desert, his body worn out with sickness, and perishing for thirst, it is impossible to estimate the hard ships he must have endured. Three weeks of painful wandering were at length, however, rewarded by a sight, which, in his estimation, compensated for them all. Ap proaching towards Sego, a considerable town on the banks of the Niger, he thus describes his feelings : " While we were riding together, and I was anxiously looking round for the river, one of the Negroes called out Geo allilli! (see the water !) and looking forwards, I saw with infinite pleasure the great object of my mission, the long sought for majestic Niger, glittering to the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing slowly to the eastward. I hastened to the brink, and, having drank of the water, lifted up my fervent thanks in prayer to the great Ruler of all things for having thus far crowned my endeavours with success." He had now indeed seen this mysterious stream, and as certained the great fact of its flowing to the eastward ; but more than this was beyond his power to accomplish. The presence of a white man excited jealousies among the Moorish traders of Sego : he did not find it safe to remain there, and, after proceeding onwards to Silla, where similar jealousies awaited him, a comparison of tile dimcuttioo to be surmounted, with the means he had of surmounting them, too clearly showed that he must needs return. The approach of the rainy season, whose destructive qualities he had previously experienced at Pisania, even required that he should lose no time in returning. Indeed, but for a concurrence of fortunate circumstances, he had little reason to expect to succeed in again reaching the Gambia. By the time he had arrived at Kamalia, still five hundred miles distant from the nearest British settlement, the rainy season had set in ; and Park being attacked with a fever, from which he recovered slowly and imperfectly, was glad to accept the hospitality of Karfa Taura, a benevolent Ne gro, who proffered to entertain him in his house, till a coffic, or caravan of slaves, should set out to the European set tlements. This did not occur till the latter end of April, and the journey, attended with great difficulty and distress, lasted upwards of six weeks. On the loth June, 1797, Park once more reached Pisania. He was received by Dr. Laidley " as one risen from the dead." In a few days he went on board an American store-ship, which, after a tempestuous passage, reached the island of Antigua with great difficulty; from whence having embarked for England, he arrived at Falmouth on the 22d December, after an ab sence from Britain of two years and seven months. It is mentioned as a circumstance connected with his return, that having instantly hastened from Falmouth to London, for the purpose of gaining intelligence about the many friends from whom he had been so long separated, Park arrived at the metropolis before daylight, and not caring to disturb his brother-in-law Mr. Dickson's family, determin ed to walk about the streets till their hour of rising. Find ing the door of the British Museum gardens open, he en tered, and had already continued some time, when Mr. Dickson, to whose charge the gardens were committed, having gone to his post that morning sooner than usual, here found, in this strange and unexpected manner, the relative whom he had long lost and numbered with the dead.
It is easy to conceive the feeling of such a rencontre, and the joy with which the news of it were received by all immediately concerned ; but the interest excited by Park's return was not confined to his personal friends, and those who knew him individually. It was looked upon as a kind of triumph by the Association, whose hopes and projects it had in some measure fulfilled ; while the tra veller's long absence, his dangerous adventures, and the extraordinary things he was said to have discovered, caus ed the public in general to regard him with a mingled curiosity and esteem, and to expect the appearance of his travels with no ordinary impatience In the course of two years these anticipations were amply realised. Im
mediately on finishing his arrangements in London, Park returned to Fowlshiels, where, in the bosom of domestic affection, in the pastoral solitude of his native glens, he busied himself strenuously in preparing his narrative for the press. It came out in the spring of 1799. Few books of travels have acquired so speedy and extensive a repu tation as this of Park's. It was sought for with an eager ness which might have done credit to a novel ; and the reader, whilst his imagination was exalted by the remote ness, the imminent perils, and strange scenes of the jour ney, could not help feeling something like affection for a person so kindly, so resolute, and yet so unassuming. It still continues one of the most popular works of its class; arid the qnalitioo both of itb subject and manner well de serve this pre-eminence. In perusing it, we follow the traveller with a keen anxiety ; we participate in all his toils, and dangers, and hairbreadth escapes, portrayed with a brief and touching simplicity, which at once awakens our sympathies by its indubitable air of truth; we are instructed and entertained by his delineation of those vast countries, and the rude tribes which people them ; we admire his modest though unshaken fortitude ; we love the honesty and benevolent candour everywhere displayed by him. Many travellers have possessed more learning, more philosophy, and greater intellectual endowments ; but none has ever known better the secret of concentrating our at tention, and calling forth our esteem. It required not only extraordinary strength of mind to accomplish this undertaking; no common powers of fancy and judgment were also requisite to describe it so agreeably*.
The profits of this publication, added to the recom• pense allowed him by his employers, had for the present placed Park in easy circumstances. In the autumn of this year, he married the eldest daughter of Mr. Anderson of Selkirk, his former master; a union adding greatly to his happiness for the short period during which he enjoyed it. In the mean time, however, his way of life was undeter mined, and it required some firmness to bear up under the cloud which overhung his future prospects. At one time he was applied to by government to engage in a mission which they had it in view to send out to New Holland; at another, he was on the point of taking a farm ; and two years passed away, in the house of his mother and brother at Fowlshiels, before he could finally determine to resume the exercise of his profession at Peebles, where a favoura ble opening, as he thought, occurred in 1801. The repu tation attached to his name, and the amiableness of his general character, soon procured him a respectable prac tice. He was beloved by the poor, to whom he showed himself at all times charitable and compassionate ; and several eminent literary characters in the neighbourhood, particularly Dr. Adam Fergusson, and Mr. (now Sir Walter) Scott, were eager to number in the list of their friends a person so distinguished for his unaffected worth and great achievements. But the duties of a country surgeon, at all times laborious, and still more so in a thinly peopled district, seem never to have been much to his taste; they were now rendered more disagreeable from the pre-existence of contrary habits, and the solicitations of those magnificent projects, which his late journey had naturally called into being. Park felt dissatisfied and im patient in the narrow circle to which he was now confined; and while traversing the bleak moors of Tweeddale, his mind was brooding with enthusiastic hope over the image of brilliant discoveries, which he thought himself yet des tined to make in the centre of Africa. He was alive in deed to all the dangers and hard vicissitudes from which he had already only escaped as if by miracle; whilst suf fering from the effects of indigestion, with which since his return he had been considerably afflicted, his disturbed slumbers used frequently to embody his pain in the shape of those miseries ho had endured when in Africa; he would dream of being in the camp of the Aloors, exposed to the brutal violence of Ali, and awake in extreme agita tion. But the ardent temper of his mind was not to be damped by such considerations. The evils of an African journey were distant in place, and becoming more distant in time; whilst the disquietudes of his present situation had the painful quality of presence and reality. and he turned from them with disgust, to contemplate the more exalted prospects which imagination delighted to picture in the scene of his former adventures. Those feelings were strengthened, and in part concentrated to a definite object, by an acquaintance which about this period he formed with Mr. George Maxwell, a gentleman of that quarter, formerly an African trader, who had frequently visited the mouth of the Congo ; and from his own obser vations had come to the conclusion, which in time Park also adopted, that this river was nothing but a continuation the Niger. Park longed to verify this idea, and to im mortalise his name by so splendid a discovery. The ob structions under which he laboured were growing daily more irksome, when fortunately, as lie judged, an oppor tunity occurred of putting his darling scheme into execu tion. In the autumn of 1803, a letter from the colonial secretary of state's office informed him that government designed to send a mission into the interior of Africa; for the purpose of arranging which, his presence in London was required immediately.