Far from being deservedly neglected outliers, the Niger and Congo expeditions were in many respects emblematic of British efforts to explore Africa. The historical forces that did so much to shape the trajectories of the Niger and Congo expeditions—slavery and the slave trade, imperial rivalries with other European powers, and the roles of African states and communities—were a persistent feature of these efforts. Failure was a frequent outcome. The preoccupation with the Niger River and West Africa persisted through the first half of the century and the renewal of interest in the Congo River and Equatorial Africa toward the end of the century spurred the Scramble for Africa. The main throughline that runs from Mungo Park at the start of the century through the Niger and Congo expeditions to the many British explorers who trekked across Africa in the decades that followed was a shared sense of hubris.

Violent conflict between white settlers and Aboriginal people had ceased across most of the continent, but north-western Western Australia continued to witness clashes, brutal labour practices and sexual exploitation. In 1885, the missionary John Brown Gribble, fresh from a visit to London’s Exeter Hall circle, attempted to establish a mission in the Gascoyne River region. He quickly antagonised the region’s pastoralist interests and a press scandal eventuated, in which the pastoralist lobby sought to ridicule Gribble’s claims for sympathy toward Aboriginal people, and assert their own. Gribble aspired to what is often termed ‘muscular Christianity’, a form of masculinity that linked spiritual belief to more secular values of bravery and heroism, and his hero was African abolitionist and missionary David Livingstone. British anti-slavery sentiment framed Gribble’s notorious 1886 denunciation, Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land. Yet the colonial public was sceptical regarding what many considered sensational and excessive. Gribble’s writing is typical of narratives of Christian heroism within a religious literary tradition of persecution, self-sacrifice and redemption that were ultimately modelled upon the life of Jesus Christ himself.