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This was not a new idea. My friend Felix Dubois claims,

not unjustly, that the same thing occurred to Colbert. For

all that, however, scarcely a century ago no one knew the exact position either of the source or the mouth of the Niger; and those who were anxious to learn something about its geography, had only Herodotus, Ibn Batuta, and Leo Africanus to guide them.

But we must do justice to our rivals: the English were

the first to attempt to realize the dream of Colbert. In

1797, the Scotchman Mungo Park reached the Upper Niger

by way of Guinea. " Are there then no streams, no rivers,

no anything in your country," a chief of Kasso said to him,

" that you come at the peril of your life to see the Joliba ? " (the Upper Niger). Park stopped at Silla, near our present settlement at Sansanding, and renewing his attempt a few years later, he met his death — how, no one knows exactly, somewhere near Hussa.