AN ABORTIVE START 5

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

NATIVES OF THE BANKS OF THE SENEGAL.

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 Bussa.