The popular Nigerian schoolbook tells children that Mungo Park discovered the River Niger. He did not — millions of Songhai, Mali, Nupe, Hausa and Bozo fishermen had lived on it for a thousand years before he was born, and an entire chain of West African empires (Ghana, Mali, Songhai, the Sokoto Caliphate to-be) had risen and fallen on its banks. What Park actually did, on his two expeditions, was settle two narrow European geographical questions — and die trying to settle a third.
The First Journey (1795–1797): the direction question. Park, a 24-year-old Scottish surgeon, was hired by the African Association in London — a private learned society founded in 1788 by Sir Joseph Banks to map the African interior for commercial reconnaissance. The Association's standing puzzle was simple: in which direction did the Niger flow? Major James Rennell, the East India Company cartographer, insisted (following Leo Africanus and a stack of Arab sources read backwards) that it flowed *westward* and was the upper course of the Senegal or Gambia. Others, citing Herodotus, thought it bent east and joined the Nile. Nobody in Europe had seen it.
Park sailed from Portsmouth in May 1795, landed at the Gambia, lost his interpreter, was robbed, was imprisoned for four months by a Moorish chief named Ali at Ludamar, escaped on a stolen horse with a compass and a pocket Bible, and on 21 July 1796, at Ségou (in present-day Mali), reached the river. He stood on the bank, watched the current, and recorded a single sentence that would re-draw the maps of Europe: the Joliba, as the locals called it, flowed *eastward*. He had not 'discovered' it. He had answered, for European geography, the direction question. He turned back, nearly died of fever, was rescued by a slave caravan, and reached London in December 1797 to write *Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa* (1799) — a bestseller that made him famous and the African Association's prospectus credible.
The Second Journey (1805–1806): the mouth question, unanswered. In 1805 the British government — not the Association — sent Park back with a 40-man party (soldiers, carpenters, his brother-in-law, a friend) to follow the Niger to wherever it ended. By the time the expedition reached the river at Bamako, thirty-seven of the forty were dead of dysentery and fever. Park, his brother-in-law Alexander Anderson, Lieutenant Martyn and three soldiers built a flat-bottomed schooner they named the *H.M. Schooner Joliba*, and on 19 November 1805 pushed off downriver, determined not to land until they reached the sea. They never reached it. Park's last surviving letter, written to Lord Camden from Sansanding, said: 'I shall set sail to the east with the fixed resolution to discover the termination of the Niger or perish in the attempt.' He perished. The party drowned in the Bussa rapids on the Niger in what is now Niger State, Nigeria, in early 1806, after a running fight with local archers at a narrow point in the river. The bodies were never recovered. The mouth question was left open for another quarter-century.
What Park actually proved, and what he didn't. Park proved the eastward flow. He did *not* prove where the Niger ended. The leading European theory after his death was that the river bent south and became the Congo (championed by James MacQueen in *A Geographical and Commercial View of Northern Central Africa*, 1821). A rival school held it dispersed into a great inland lake or swamp. Both were wrong. The question was finally settled in 1830–31 by Richard and John Lander — Richard had been Park's servant on a later, separate Hugh Clapperton expedition — who descended the river from Bussa and emerged at the Nun mouth in the Niger Delta in November 1830, proving the Niger emptied into the Atlantic at the Bight of Benin. That 1830 discovery, not Park's, opened the door to Macgregor Laird's 1832 steamer, the 1841 and 1854 Niger expeditions, the Royal Niger Company charter (1886), and ultimately the colony.
The Bussa question. Park died on a river the Nupe and Borgu had patrolled for centuries, at a rapid the locals knew by name. The Bussa rapids — where he drowned — were submerged in 1968 by the reservoir of the Kainji Dam. The town of Old Bussa, with whatever physical trace of his death may have remained, lies under the lake. There is a monument at the new Bussa, and a marker at Jebba placed by the colonial administration in 1930 on the centenary of the Landers' descent — not Park's death.
The accurate summary. Mungo Park was the first European on record to reach the middle Niger and confirm its eastward flow (1796). He was the first European to attempt to follow the Niger to the sea (1805–06) — and he failed, was killed at Bussa, and the mouth question was solved 24 years later by the Lander brothers, who descended the river to the Atlantic Delta in 1830. He 'discovered' the Niger only in the sense that European cartography did not previously know which way it ran. Every Nupe canoeman on the river already did.