Lewis Grassic Gibbon [1901-1935], Niger. the Life of Mungo Park

NIGER THE LIFE OF MUNGO PARK BY LEWIS GRASSIC GIBBON EDINBURGH THE PORPOISE PRESS FIRST PUBLISHED IN I 934 BY THE PORPOISE PRESS I 33A GEORGE STREET, EDINBURGH LONDON; FABER AND FABER LIMITED 24 RUSSELL SQUARE, W.C. I PRINTED IN SCOTLAND BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD. THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, GLASGOW ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TO COMPTON MACKENZIE PRELIMINARY NOTE I think I have read almost everything by or about Mungo Park-everything which still survives in print or manuscript. Two interesting letters from the Peebles days seem to have found their way to America, and, though I tried, I could trail them to no more definite locality. More exhausting was the experience of reading a certain private collection, and then being denied the right either to quote from it or to mention the owner's name ! This incident provided me with the interesting alternative of either cultivating a partial amnesia with regard to what I had learned, or of consciously bearing that information in mind and disregarding it as unim portant. I followed the latter course, recasting slightly the last third of this book. The Peebles and Colonial Office records have supplied certain negligible sidelights on exits and entrances, dates and departures. But the Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, r795, I797, with an Appendix containing Geographical Illustrations of Africa, by Major Rennell ( 1799) and The Journal of a Mission in the Interior of Africa in r8o5, by Mungo Park ; to gether with other documents, official and private, relating to the same Mission ~· to which is prefaced an Account of the Life of Mr. Park ( 1815) remain thefons et origo of any 7 biography of Park. Most biographers, it is true, instead of looting these rich galleons of the requisite treasure, cower down in the shadow of their hulks, shamefacedly. I have been moved to no such shame. Similarly, in their acceptance of the explorer's view of his own rectitude in the conduct of the Second Expedition, I have found the attitude of other writers impossible. The worst example is T. B. Maclachlan in Mungo Park ( 1 8g8), the last attempt at a more or less full-length biography. A much better book is' H. B.'s' Life of Mungo Park (1835), sincere and serene in the conventions of camouflage peculiar to its age. Doubt has been thrown on the veracity of the account of the guide, Amadi Fatoumi, which did not come to light until six years after the close of the Second Expedition. I see no reason to doubt Fatoumi in the main details of his narrative, and have incorporated these details in this book without other acknowledgment of doubt or indebtedness than this. L. G. G. 1933 8 Mungo Park the elder farmed at Fowlshiels, four 1miles from Selkirk, a pleasant place, with the Y arrow below and the lour of N ewark across the valley. In summer this was a country of green and gold and the blue blur of heath, but in winter a frost-bitten stretch, with the sough of the wind raging down the valley of the Y arrow and turning its placid waters mottled-green and lapping its drifting mists against the grey whinstone wall of the Fowlshiels biggings. But for Mungo it is probable neither sun nor storm were agents of colourful scenic change : they were facts to be faced in his fight with the dour acres of Fowlshiels, ploughed with the wooden plough of those days, a sturdy figure, the ploughman, in the hodden grey that Burns had made the traditional garb of the land and period-even if economic fact had de signed a more enduring costume. The portrait of Mungo the elder is a mosaic, built up against the greens and greys of Fowlshiels, built up of casual references in the letters and allusions of his son, glossed and varnished in the references of the genteel biographers of an earlier day who sought for the origins of that son. He had the usual Scots passion for education-that passion com pounded of a belief that education meant power and knowledge and the ability to climb from the sodden 9 rees of the farms to the comfort of kirk and manse, compounded of that and a dour desire to beat the next man in an argument. It had, and has, some thing of the same quality, this Scots desire and pride in education, that the Chinese merchant has in almost exactly similar circumstances when he moils to make of his sons members of the literati, those who pass the Examinations and attain the ranks of the blessed. But Mungo went beyond the reach of most of his contemporaries, even to the extent of employing a private tutor for his family. Where he came from there is no knowing, except from the soil, up out of its darkness with that horde of men oflike kind, the dour even-tempered peasants of Scotland. But when he settled at Fowlshiels he married a daughter of John Hislop of Tennis, a ' woman of great prudence and sense ',-else indeed she would not have survived, we may guess, the life that awaited her at Fowlshiels. There Mungo took her and installed her and proceeded to beget upon her in the three-roomed house with the brownstone walls a family of thirteen. The winds came down the Yarrow in winter, the springs came greening its banks and the dark clay rigs of Fowlshiels, summer broadened across and about them, autumn brought the flay of flails in the barns of Fowlshiels ; and throughout a space of twenty years, in the fashion of her time, Mistress Park went perpetually bowed in the ungracious lines of pregnancy, exercising that prudence and good sense as she might, and apparently not unsuccess- Io fully. Her son's biographers make of her a hand some personage, as they do of her consort : they were probably both constitutionally cold and cool, and treated to an unbroken silence discussion of those intimacies which produced their family. They re garded each other, no doubt, with that mixture of sardonic humour and iron tenderness that was of their life-quality-an attitude ground out in steel with the wear and moil of their years, its tenderness made up of sudden unloosenings of the bonds of sheer pity and compassion one for the other. For the matrix that produced Mungo Park, the now ruined whinstone house, mantled with ivy and set with a neat little tablet, is unconvincing enough unless one remembers the quality of his father and mother, and the life they led. To cram a family of thirteen, not to mention an altogether improbable maidservant, inside the compass of those narrow walls, and imagine it a winter night with the elder Mungo coming laired from the fields, the cruse-lamp with a murky splutter on the earthen floor and the plain walls, the scrubbed table and the shining dresser, is to reach to a type oflife now remote from anything in Scotland or outside the huts of the Esquimaux. It is to penetrate below the gentility of polite commentators and realise the changes of a hundred years that have made that life impossible, even as, in a fashion, they have made impossible the production of such personalities as the seventh child, the third son, who presently came to bless the union of the Parks of Fowlshiels. 11 It was an era and a district producing Scotsmen 2of note. The eighteenth century's sunset shone forth, and many Scotsmen spawned. Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, was born at Ettrickhall in I no, a year before the birth of the younger Mungo; John Leyden, the orientalist, was born at Denholm four years after him. And in that year 1771 a puny child, Waiter Scott, was born a few months before that September the 1oth when Mrs. Park's third son came through the humble portals of all birth into the daylight of Fowlshiels' dark kitchen. The family had thinned out. Three were already dead when Mungo arrived, and blinked his eyes, and waited throughout the months and years of babyhood the impingement of those multitudes of impressions upon his mind which were yet to make of him-such the play of chance-alien and different. The chickens came chirawking into the doorway and pecked at crumbs on the floor of the kitchen while he lay in his cradle and watched them, and blinked drowsy eyes, and was fed intermittently and efficiently by the handsome and prudent mother who was generally a whirlwind of energy engaged in baking, brewing, and washing, directing, darning, and scolding. The clamping feet of his father would wake him from sleep, and perhaps, though seldom, the touch of a rough-grained hand on his cheek. 12 But that unseldom, for it would have been gyped foolishness, and folk must work, and get on with their work, and see to the making of silver, and that all the bairns are well-rigged when they gang to the kirk of a Sabbath. Ofunnecessary affection, none. So young Mungo grew out of swaddling clothes into a thickly-breeched childhood. Because second sight in the Scots was a fiction not yet invented in the fertile shallow brain of that other Scot born in the same year as Mungo, the parents of the young Park neglected to foresee the curiosity of later generations in the acts and actions of their third son. But letters and biographies march the same phrases meticulously across his early childhood as across his later years. He was quiet, restrained, grave of de meanour, proper and shy-a fit subject, in fact, for the psycho-analysts as yet inapparent upon that un happy era.

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