Park now received intelligence of the death of Mr. Scott, who had been left behind near Bambakoo. Mansong very soon convinced the traveller that he understood the art of receiving presents much better than that of returning them; for upon being requested to furnish a canoe in which the mission, now reduced to a very small number, might embark on the Niger, he sent one after another several half-rotten barks; two of which Park, seeing no hope of getting better, was at length compelled to accept, and with these he constructed what he termed a schooner. Shortly after this he lost his friend Anderson, upon whose death “I felt myself,” says he, “as if left a second time lonely and friendless amid the wilds of Africa.” Dreary and perilous as was his position, however, he still determined to persevere. His companions were now reduced to four, Lieutenant Martyn and three soldiers, one of whom was deranged in his mind; yet with this wretched remnant of a detachment which, it must be confessed, had been thus thinned, or rather annihilated, by his own ill management and want of foresight, he purposed following the course of the Niger to its termination, whether that should prove to be in some great lake or inland sea, or, as he rather believed, in the Atlantic Ocean. And this voyage, says one of his biographers, one of the most formidable ever attempted, was to be undertaken in a crazy and ill-appointed vessel, manned by a few negroes and a few Europeans! On the 16th of November, having completed all the necessary preparations for his voyage, our traveller put the finishing hand to his journal; and in the interval between that and his embarkation, which seems to have taken place on the 19th, wrote several letters to England. These letters, together with the journal, were then delivered to his guide Isaaco, by whom they were conveyed to the Gambia, from whence they were transmitted to England; after which nothing certain or authentic can be said to have been heard either of Park or the expedition. In 1806, however, vague accounts of the death of Park and his companions were brought to the British settlements on the coast by the native traders from the interior; but several years elapsed without any further intelligence being obtained. At length, in 1810, Colonel Maxwell, governor of Senegal, despatched Park’s guide, Isaaco, into the interior, for the purpose of ascertaining the truth or falsehood of the reports which prevailed, and, should they prove correct, of collecting information respecting the place and manner of the catastrophe.