Introduction

Summary

This introductory chapter highlights the book’s key themes. It explains why Mungo Park exerted so much influence on the British cultural imagination and inspired so many others to follow in his footsteps. It shows how Park’s legacy led to the two expeditions that are central focus of the book, one to follow up on his failed mission to trace the course of the Niger River, the other to determine whether the Niger became the Congo River, as he believed. It sets the two expeditions in the broader context of Britain’s imperial rivalry with France, the slave trade and the campaign to end it, and the independent agendas of the region’s African states. It then asks why these expeditions disappeared from the annals of British exploration, a question that requires an examination of the roles that mythic masculinity and heroic failure have played in shaping popular interest in explorers and exploration. Challenging these ideas, it calls for a more integrative history of exploration that acknowledges the involvement of a wide range of parties and frames their actions within the context of the political, social, and economic forces that transformed British interest in Africa in the early nineteenth century.