And so it was at Goree, the little blister of volcanic rock just off the coast of Senegal that was home to the Royal African Corps. Heat, filth and disease. Inadequate supplies, beggarly broken soldiers recruited from the hulks, a scarcity of drinking water, the sickly yellow wash of the sea. Degradation, debilitation, death. Things were so bad that the garrison commander (a career soldier by the name of Major T. W. Fitzwilliam Lloyd whose improprieties [5] had so alienated his superiors that he’d been given the choice of discreetly shooting himself or taking the post at Goree) was forced to halve food rations, double the brandy allowance and issue the following standing orders: Gang No. 1 to be employed digging graves as usual. Gang No. 2 making coffins until further notice.
It was the winter of 1805. The dry, salubrious season, when there was a bloom in every wasted cheek and a faint fey smile on every pair of cracked lips. When insect populations were down and sun baked out your lungs and dried up your bowels. But already the eternal forces of meteorological change were at work, the earth spinning round the sun, tilting on its axis, winds hissing, clouds mounting in the south like celestial armies.
Before long, it would begin to rain.
♦ OH MAMA, CAN THIS
REALLY BE THE END? ♦
Ned Rise wakes with a headache. Or no. Not a headache. A sort of generalized racking misery that makes him feel as if his pores are bleeding and his brain is leaking out his ears. Weak as a nonagenarian, he props himself on an elbow in the darkened dormitory and listens to the wheezing and moaning of the others as they toss on their sweaty pallets. He recognizes the racheting gasps of Jemmie Bird, one of his mates on the work crew, the oral flatulence of Samuel Purvey and the puling intermittent whistle of Boyles, hardly distinguishable from the whine of the mosquitoes. It is dark as the grave. Two o’clock? Three? Ned turns to reach for his gourd of rum and suddenly he’s doubled up on the floor, that fiery demonic pain tearing at his guts until he can do nothing but stiffen and champ at the wooden bedpost until the spasm passes. But it doesn’t pass. It mounts in waves like a storm hitting the beach until it leaves him rocking and moaning and clutching at his stomach like a woman laboring to deliver a monster.
When he wakes again, he finds himself in the middle of the floor. He is wet with his own perspiration and his trousers are crusted with the yellowish serum he’s been evacuating these past few days. There is a stench of illness in the air — of catastrophic, all-devouring illness, of illness like a hungry, insatiable thing — and someone is whimpering softly at the far end of the room. It is then that the chill takes hold of him again, gently at first, like a dog with a rodent in its teeth. Then it comes on with a vengeance and Ned hugs his legs to his chest, teeth clacking, his head jittering at the tip of his spine like a jack-in-the-box. The cold is terrible, worse than the fire. He can feel the ice floes poking at him, the dark cold grip of the Thames, the tread of polar bears dancing on his chest, he looks up into the blackness and sees crystal igloos and Eskimos dead in the snow. He struggles to push himself up and stagger back to his pallet and the feeble warmth of his army-ration blanket. But he can’t. He can only lie there, huddled, while all around him the darkness opens like a mouth.
♦ A LOAD OF ASSES ♦
Pennants are flying, mainsails, topsails and jibs rattling in the breeze, the prow slicing the water as neatly as a scythe while whales spout and dolphins leap and a fine invigorating salt-sea spray fans out over the rails like a nimbus. Sea and sky are a matched set, blue as delftware, and the sun is nothing less than a stupendous spotlight fixed in the middle of it all — as if the world were a stage indeed and the ship and its crew approaching the denouement of some momentous command performance. The atmosphere rings with the joyous braying of the asses as their nostrils dilate round the rich and multifarious scents of landfall, with the huzzas of the sailors and the wild exuberant strains of Georgie Scott’s clarinet as he soars through “Over the Sea to Skye,” “Jolly Mortals, Fill Your Glasses” and “O An’ Ye Were Dead, Guidmen.” Bracing, is what it is.
Mungo Park stands at the rail of the Crescent, His Majesty’s military transport, and looks out over the spanking blue waves to where the island of Goree heaves up out of the sea, crenellated battlements and great stone barracks scintillating in the sun like something out of a fairy tale. At his side, Zander, Georgie Scott, and the four carpenters he’d recruited from the hulks at Portsmouth. At his back, forty-five asses. Dun-colored, with stubborn, red-veined eyes. They razz and stink, lift their tails, spatter the decks. “This is it. Zander,” the explorer shouts, throwing an arm round his brother-in-law. “There’s no stopping us now!”
♦ ♦ ♦
Perhaps not. But they were very nearly stopped on the glossy conference tables of London and Portsmouth, the expedition ground down to nothing under the foot-dragging heels of Pitt’s wartime government and Lord Camden’s somnambulist’s shuffle. Mungo had rushed down from Scotland in September — at Camden’s urgent request — expecting to leave before the month was out. He’d dodged Ailie, briefed Zander on the sly, and drawn up a detailed list of supplies and equipment necessary for the expedition. He’d even come up with a proposal that would warm the cockles of the most mercenary bureaucratic heart. At Sir Joseph’s suggestion, the explorer had emphasized the practical benefits of the proposed expedition rather than the purely scientific ones. There was gold in the Niger Valley, he asserted — more even than in Guinea or Ashanti — and a host of primitive black nations mad to trade massy lumps of it for a few beads, mirrors or pewter gravy boats. And if the British didn’t claim it, the French would. To plumb the Niger was a mandate that went beyond science, beyond national pride even — it was good sound business sense.
The government went for it. Camden agreed to underwrite the whole thing and to give the explorer carte blanche in the selection of trade goods, pack animals, equipment and manpower. Mungo was to be assigned the rank of captain, and his brother-in-law commissioned a lieutenant. Georgie Scott, an old school chum and distant relation of the poet, would serve as draftsman and third in command. The explorer would be further authorized to choose four carpenters from among the prisoners confined to the hulks at Portsmouth, and to take one officer and thirty-five soldiers from the garrison at Goree. The carpenters would assemble the longboats in which the explorer planned to cruise down the Niger; the soldiers would protect him from the Moors. As far as beasts of burden were concerned, Mungo planned to stop in the Cape Verde Islands and purchase forty-five asses — this in addition to the fifteen or twenty negroes he would hire at Pisania.
“Fine, fine, fine,” Camden had grinned from beneath his wig of office. “Splendid. Spare no expense, my son, we’re behind you one hundred percent.” He plucked a silver letter knife from his desk and began picking at his fingernails. “There is one small matter, though — how do you propose to get back?”
It was a good question. No one was quite certain where the Niger disembogued — there was even some doubt whether it gave onto the sea at all. One faction, led by Major Rennell, the most distinguished geographer of the day, insisted that the Niger either ran out of steam in the Great Desert or flowed into Lake Chad. If this were so, the entire expedition would be stranded in the middle of the continent, with no possibility of returning against the stream, and faced with a long perilous trek through uncharted territory — a prospect that smacked of death, disaster and a rotten investment. Others, however, felt that the Niger was in reality the upper tributary of the Nile or the Congo, in which case the expedition could safely — perhaps even merrily — float down to the sea. Mungo was certain that the latter was true, and he insisted that on reaching the mouth of the Congo it would be a simple matter to catch a slave boat bound for St. Helena or the West Indies. He looked Camden dead in the eye. “In any case, Sir, I am prepared to do what I must and suffer the consequences. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”