Mungo Park left in the morning after presenting his landlady with two of his last four brass buttons. But though he made another gallant effort to reach Timbuktu and the Niger, which, he was told, "ran to the world's end," lions and mosquitoes made life impossible. His horse was too weak to carry him any farther, and on 29th July 1796 he sadly turned back. "Worn down by sickness, exhausted by hunger and fatigue, half-naked, and without any article of value by which I might get provisions, clothes, or lodging, I felt I should sacrifice my life to no purpose, for my discoveries would perish with me." Joining a caravan of slaves, he reached the coast after some nineteen hundred miles, and after an absence of two years and nine months he found a suit of English clothes, "disrobed his chin of venerable encumbrance," and sailed for home. He published an account of the journey in 1799, after which he married and settled in Scotland as a doctor. But his heart was in Africa, and a few years later he started off again to reach Timbuktu. He arrived at the Gambia early in April 1805. "If all goes well," he wrote gaily, "this day six weeks I expect to drink all your healths in the water of the Niger." He started this time with forty-four Europeans, each with donkeys to carry baggage and food, but it was a deplorable little party that reached the great river on 19th August. Thirty men had died on the march, the donkeys had been stolen, the baggage lost. And the joy experienced by the explorer in reaching the waters of the Niger, "rolling its immense stream along the plain," was marred by the reduction of his little party to seven. Leave to pass down the river to Timbuktu was obtained by the gift of two double-barrelled guns to the King, and in their old canoes patched together under the magnificent name of "His Majesty's schooner the _Joliba_" (great water), Mungo Park wrote his last letter home. [Illustration: A NATIVE WOMAN WASHING GOLD IN SENEGAL. From a sketch by Mungo Park made on his last expedition.] "I am far from desponding. I have changed a large canoe into a tolerably good schooner, on board of which I shall set sail to the east with a fixed resolution to discover the termination of the Niger or perish in the attempt; and though all the Europeans who are with me should die, and though I myself were half-dead, I would still persevere; and if I could not succeed in the object of my journey, I would at least die on the Niger." It was in this spirit that the commander of the _Joliba_ and a crew of nine set forth to glide down a great river toward the heart of savage Africa, into the darkness of the unexplored. The rest is silence. CHAPTER XLIX VANCOUVER DISCOVERS HIS ISLAND