No great fuss was made over the Landers when they returned in 1831. John Lander remained at home. Richard Lander afterwards joined the MacGregor Laird expedition for opening up the Niger. This commercial undertaking met with the most awful disasters from sickness, but James MacGregor Laird nevertheless succeeded in discovering the Benue, and ascended it for some distance. In 1833 Richard Lander and Dr Oldfield ascended the Niger from the Nun mouth as far as Rabba, and explored the Benue for 140 miles above its junction with the Niger. After returning from a third trip up the Niger Lander was attacked by savages in the delta, was severely wounded, and died from his wounds at Fernando Pô on the 6th of February, 1834. In 1840-41 Mr John Beecroft, superintendent of Fernando Pô, and afterwards first consul for the Bights of Biafra and Benin, not only explored the Niger, but made known for the first time the Cross river, to the east, which he ascended from Old Calabar to the rapids. In 1841 the British Government sent out an important surveying expedition to the Niger under four naval officers. This expedition was despatched at the instigation of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, the philanthropist, who had thrown himself heart and soul into the anti-slavery movement. At this period philanthropy reigned supreme in England, and a sense of humour was in abeyance, though it was beginning to bubble up in the pages of Dickens, who has so deliciously satirized this Niger expedition in “Bleak House” with its inimitable Mrs Jellyby and her industrial mission of Borriaboola-Gha. The ghastly unhealthiness of the lower Niger was ignored, and an item in the programme of the expedition was the establishment of a model farm at the junction of the Benue and the Niger. The other aims of the expedition were nicely balanced between the spreading of Christian civilization and the suppression of the slave trade on the one hand and the zealous pushing of Manchester goods on the other. Numerous treaties were made, but the results of the expedition were disappointment and disaster, occasioned by utter ignorance of the conditions under which some degree of health might be retained, and a muddle-headed indecision as to the practical results which were to be secured by the opening up of the Niger. The loss of life was enormous. Still, in spite of this check, British traders gradually crept into and up the Niger, with the results detailed in Chapter VIII. In 1836 John Davidson, an Englishman of considerable attainments, started from the Atlantic coast of Morocco for Timbuktu, but was murdered at Tenduf, in the Sahara Desert.