_Richard Lemon Lander_, the heroic but unfortunate traveller, whose name will ever be associated with the splendid discovery of the course and termination of that mysterious and fatal river, which some of the ancients confounded with the Nile, and which the Moors of Northern Africa still call 'the Nile of the Negroes,'[96] was the fourth of six children, and was born at his father's house, the 'Dolphin Inn,' Truro (then called 'The Fighting Cocks'), on the 8th February, 1804, the day on which Colonel Lemon was elected M.P. for the town. Hence his second name; and hence also a certain appropriateness in the site which was chosen at the top of Lemon Street for his statue, the work of a Cornish sculptor, the late N. N. Burnard. In the midst of his unfeigned humility in his account of his parents, he nevertheless boasts that, as his father's name began with a _Lan_ and his mother's maiden name (Penrose) with a _Pen_, no one could deny his claim to being a right _Cornishman_. But Colonel J. Lambrick Vivian informs me that Lander came from an older and a better stock than he was himself aware of. The family can be traced, in St. Just at least, as early as 1619, at which time a Richard Lander married Thomasine Bosaverne, one of a good old Cornish family. The Polwheles and Landers also intermarried. Richard's grandfather, a noted wrestler, lived near the Land's End. Of Lander's early life in Truro I can learn little further than that he went to "old Pascoe's" school in Coomb's Lane, and was one of those few favourites of his master, who was thought worthy to receive one of the then newly-coined 1s. 6d. pieces. Richard seems to have been a merry, bright-eyed lad, somewhat below the usual height,[97] but he was always of a roving, adventurous spirit, and, when only eleven years old, accompanied a merchant to the West Indies, whence, after a residence there of three years, and having been attacked by fever in St. Domingo, he returned to England in 1818, and lived as a servant in various wealthy families, with some of whom he visited the continent of Europe.