Romantic Exploration and Atlantic Slavery: Mungo Park’s Coffle

Abstract

IN JUNE 1797, AT A VILLAGE NEAR THE MOUTH OF THE RIVER GAMBIA ON Atlantic coast of West Africa, Scottish explorer Mungo Park bid farewell to a group of people with whom he had just made a five-hundred-mile journey across western Africa. His book, Travels in Interior Districts of Africa (1799), describes their emotional parting: I could not part, for last time, with my unfortunate fellow-travelers, doomed, as I knew most of them to be, to a life of captivity and slavery in a foreign land, without great emotion. During a wearisome peregrination of more than five hundred British miles, exposed to burning rays of a tropical sun, these poor slaves, amidst their own infinitely greater sufferings, would commiserate mine; and frequently, of their own accord, bring water to quench my thirst, and at night collect branches and leaves to prepare me a bed in Wilderness. We parted with reciprocal expressions of regret and benediction. My good wishes and prayers were all I could bestow upon them; and it afforded me some consolation to be told, that they were sensible I had no more to give. (1) This group of 34 enslaved Africans, part of a caravan or coffle of 73 travelers, had been marched from interior to coast to be sold to European slave traders and shipped across Atlantic. Park traveled with coffle by permission of its leader, African slave trader Karfa Taura. The two had made a deal: on arrival at coast, Park would pay Karfa the value of one prime slave. This benevolent Negro, as Park calls him, helped explorer at lowest point of his adventurous journey (Travels, 234). When he arrived at slave trader's village, he was wandering, hungry, sick, and alone, after achieving his goal of seeing which direction Niger River flowed (to east). Karfa fed, clothed, and sheltered bedraggled Park and let him join his traveling party to begin journey home. But explorer's homeward journey was his fellow travelers' journey away from their homes into New World slavery. This essay will call attention to Park's dependence on infrastructure and personnel put in place by slave trade: both Atlantic slave trade, still legal and active during his travels, and internal African slave trade that supplied European ships with human cargo. I will consider Park's book (most often read as an exploration narrative) as part of archive of enslavement. (2) Recent approaches to epistemological and ethical challenges involved in recovering history of slavery highlight generative tension between recovery as an imperative ... and impossibility of recovery when engaged with archives whose very and organization occlude certain historical subjects. (3) To what extent--if at all--does Park's account of his travels through western Africa give us access to history of enslavement? What are its limitations of assembly and organization, when considered from this perspective? Park's book is distinctive in its attention to connection between internal African slave trade--what historian Walter Johnson has termed Passage--and Atlantic slave trade, notorious Middle Passage. The Passage, as Johnson points out, too often disappears from academic historians' account of slave trade, an omission that effectively reproduces perspective of a European slave trader, focused on ocean voyage, or an abolitionist, intent on banning traffic in humans. The First Passage was integral to experience of those who eventually made Middle Passage--to their understanding of what it was that was happening, their emotional condition going into journey, and their ability to survive it. (4) Park's account of enslaved Africans with whom he traveled in Karfa Taura's coffle may yield some insight into these issues. Before and during trip, he conversed with his fellow travelers, learning how they became enslaved and gauging their response to their captivity. …