Disaster struck the Niger and the Congo expeditions alike, though it took somewhat different forms in each case. The Congo River’s cataracts and the region’s diseases posed the most serious obstacles to the latter expedition, though it also ran out of the trade goods needed to hire guides and porters. For the Niger expedition, the rapid reduction in the number of pack animals at its disposal created serious logistical problems, which were amplified by the power the ruler of Futa Jallon increasingly wielded over its operations. Although disease also contributed to the expedition’s difficulties, the most prominent factor in its failure was political; African authorities blocked its passage because they saw it as a threat to their religious, strategic, and economic interests. By contrast, the Congo expedition reassured Boma’s rulers about its intentions, easing its access to the river. Both expeditions’ experiences demonstrated that African polities and peoples shaped their outcomes in important ways.

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.

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.

The ineluctable presence of slavery and other forms of servitude made its mark both on the Niger and the Congo expedition. The leader of the Niger expedition selected his force from among British convict soldiers and freed African slaves who had been forced into military service. Both had reason to resent their states of servitude, though they posed different challenges. The white soldiers were undisciplined and often drunk, while the black ones were likely to desert if the expedition reached their native lands. Slavery and servitude manifest itself differently for the Congo expedition. It encountered hostility from European and African traders who suspected it was a Royal Navy anti-slaving patrol, though it also benefitted from an ex-slave who mediated on its behalf in an important slave port. Another form of servitude was the sex trade, exoticized and eroticized by explorers as the Black Venus. Both expeditions were entangled in the slave trade even as they heralded its demise.

The British decision to dispatch expeditions to trace the courses of the Niger and Congo rivers was driven by two major considerations—strategic worries that the French would displace the British as the dominant European power in the region after the war and abolitionist concerns that the only way to stop the slave trade was to pressure Africans in the interior to turn to ‘legitimate commerce’. Acting on Park’s suspicion that the Niger and the Congo were the same river, officials organized expeditions to explore both of them. The Niger expedition was an army operation, its caravan consisting mainly of soldiers. The Congo expedition was a more scientifically-oriented naval endeavor that initially intended to use a steamship to go upriver. Both expeditions were large, costly ventures, indicating that various British ideological, political, and commercial groups had an interest in their success.

Mungo Park’s second expedition in 1805-1806 was a deadly failure, yet it did nothing to diminish his posthumous reputation as a national hero. What prompted this expedition, why it failed, and how it inspired new expeditions in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars are the subjects of this chapter. It frames Park’s expedition in the context of the transatlantic slave trade, showing how that trade shaped British imperial rivalry with France and Park’s efforts to solve the riddle of the Niger River’s route and outlet. Logistical problems, political tensions, and endemic diseases weakened the expeditionary force, and violent clashes with Africans along the Niger led to the deaths of Park and his remaining companions at Bussa. An investigation by the African trader Isaaco confirmed Park’s fate. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British developed an ambitious new plan to vindicate Park’s sacrifice by sending expeditions to the Niger and the Congo.

The domestic British response to the failure of the Niger and Congo expeditions was shaped by the opinions and agendas of various parties. John Barrow worked with the press and the publisher John Murray to produce a narrative that exculpated the government, placing the blame instead on the commanders’ excessive zeal. Groups with commercial or religious interests in Africa cast the setbacks as signs that the continent required colonization by the West, while critics of British involvement in Africa saw the failure of the expeditions as warnings against imperial expansion. The metropolitan scientific community had its own specialized standards for assessing the accomplishments of the two expeditions, and neither measured up to its expectations. If there was broad agreement, then, that the Niger and Congo expeditions failed, they were not heroic failures, unlike Mungo Park’s second expedition. This distinction—and the criteria that informed—determined which explorers lived on in public memory.

The Niger expedition was reconstituted and relaunched under the command of Captain William Gray in 1817. Although it took a different route, it adopted the same methods as its predecessor and met with the same results. Reliant on pack animals to transport its supplies and African rulers to grant it passage through their lands, it ground to a halt when the animals died and the rulers failed to cooperate. A suspicious Bundu regime detained the expedition. Some members deserted; others succumbed to disease. The rest fled to the French trading settlement of Bakel. In a desperate final bid to reach the Niger, Gray led a smaller party to Kaarta, but there too he encountered resistance, forcing his retreat to the coast. Gray’s later career as a settler in Tasmania highlights a key contrast to his experience as an explorer in Africa; unlike Aborigines, Africans held the upper hand in dealing with Europeans.

The overwhelming majority of the United Nations’ 193 member states were once colonies of Western empires. Most of these colonies gained independence during the era of decolonization that followed the Second World War. Despite their numbers and their nationalist struggles, these colonies-cum-countries have not attracted much attention in the standard works on nationalism. As the editors of this volume observe, those works are largely Eurocentric in their orientation. They generally portray the rise of nationalism in colonial dependencies as supplemental to, and largely derivative of, nationalism in the Western world.1 Even Benedict Anderson, a specialist on Southeast Asia who was deeply knowledgeable about nationalist movements in the colonial world, characterized these movements in his hugely influential Imagined Communities as conforming to a modular design that originated with American and European nationalism and nations.2