Mungo Park & David Livingston

The lives, travels, and writings of explorers and others who spent their lives exploring foreign places and cultures often provide us with much more than a glimpse of the individuals themselves. So, too, we are privy to a host of information on distant and exotic lands and cultures in the writings of such explorers. This information allows us to appreciate the differences among other lands and cultures in comparison to our own, as well as giving us insight into the often titanic struggles endured by such explorers, in primitive and dangerous environments, in order to chronicle their experiences. Such men are the European explorers Mungo Park and David Livingstone. Both men often suffered hardships and persecution in an effort to explore unknown-to-Europeans regions of Africa as well as performing missionary work in Livingstone's case. Park would die on an exploration of the Niger and Livingstone died peacefully in an African village after years of missionary efforts and an attack aimed at diminishing the slave trade. This analysis will highlight some of the exploration and missionary work of Park and Livingstone in order to support the contention that because of their work, the Western world became increasingly aware of and interested in African geography and culture, including increased Christian missionary activity in the region.

Mungo Park was a great explorer who greatly contributed to the

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ituations Park found himself in while trying to explore and discover this unknown-to-Europeans region. Despite disease ravaging his crew, most of his men being dead, and makeshift craft, Park insisted on continuing downstream on the Niger. No European had ever sailed the Niger and Park was determined. On November 17, 1805, Park wrote to his patron that he intended to use the winds and currents, keep to the middle of the stream, and find the end of the Niger (Roberts 1). On the same date, Park wrote to his wife "I think it not unlikely but that I shall be in England before you read this. You may be sure that I feel happy at turning my faces towards home" (Roberts 1). No one ever heard from Mungo Park again, and it was widely believed that he perished in violence with a native tribe who attacked Park mistaking his makeshift craft for a slave trade vessel. DAVID LIVINGSTONE David Livingstone was born in Blantyre, England, in 1813 (Dr. 1). The young Livingstone was of poor origins and lived in a tenement on Shuttle Row, an area that housed many of the cotton mill workers in the region. Most of the children in Livingstone's village were put to work in the cotton mills at the age of ten, experiencing low pay, harsh conditions,

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