Then the slave trade drew the Elizabethan Englishmen to the shores of West Africa, and the coast was studded with forts and stations in connection with it. Yet in the eighteenth century the Niger and Timbuktu were still a mystery. In 1778 the African Association was founded, with our old friend Sir Joseph Banks as an active member inquiring for a suitable man to follow up the work of the explorer Houghton, who had just perished in the desert on his way to Timbuktu. The opportunity produced the man. Mungo Park, a young Scotsman, bitten with the fever of unrest, had just returned from a voyage to the East on board an East India Company's ship. He heard of this new venture, and applied for it. The African Association instantly accepted his services, and on 22nd May 1795, Mungo Park left England on board the _Endeavour_, and after a pleasant voyage of thirty days landed at the mouth of the river Gambia. The river is navigable for four hundred miles from its mouth, and Park sailed up to a native town, where the _Endeavour_ was anchored, while he set out on horseback for a little village, Pisania, where a few British subjects traded in slaves, ivory, and gold. Here he stayed a while, to learn the language of the country. Fever delayed him till the end of November, when the rains were over, the native crops had been reaped, and food was cheap and plentiful. On 3rd December he made a start, his sole attendants being a negro servant, Johnson, and a slave boy. Mungo Park was mounted on a strong, spirited little horse, his attendants on donkeys. He had provisions for two days, beads, amber, and tobacco for buying fresh food, an umbrella, a compass, a thermometer and pocket sextant, some pistols and firearms, and "thus attended, thus provided, thus armed, Mungo Park started for the heart of Africa." [Illustration: MUNGO PARK. From the engraving in Park's _Travels into the Interior of Africa_, 1799.] Three days' travelling brought him to Medina, where he found the old king sitting on a bullock's hide, warming himself before a large fire. He begged the English explorer to turn back and not to travel into the interior, for the people there had never seen a white man and would most certainly destroy him. Mungo Park was not so easily deterred, and taking farewell of the good old king, he took a guide and proceeded on his way.