Mungo Park

Born in Selkirkshire, Scotland, in 1771, Mungo Park trained in medicine before turning to exploration. He became known for traveling in West Africa in the 1790s, where he traced part of the course of the Niger River and recorded what he saw in places few Europeans had described firsthand at the time.

Park's written account of his first journey made him famous with readers in Britain. Alongside observations about geography and trade, his narrative also described the hardships of travel, including illness, imprisonment, and long stretches of uncertainty.

He returned to West Africa on a second expedition in 1805. That journey ended the following year, when he died near Bussa in present-day Nigeria, but his name remained closely tied to the early European exploration of the Niger.