Life and Travels of Mungo Park

Mungo Park was a Scottish explorer of West Africa. He was born in 1771 and died in 1806. After exploring the upper Niger River in 1796, he wrote a popular and influential travel book called Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa. In it, he thought that the Niger and Congo rivers merged to become the same river, but it was later shown that they are different rivers. Mungo Park was born in Selkirkshire, Scotland, at Foulshiels on the Yarrow Water, close to Selkirk, on a tenant farm that his father rented from the Duke of Buccleuch. Before he went to Selkirk grammar school, he learned at home. At age 14, he went to work for Thomas Anderson, a doctor in Selkirk, as an apprentice. During his apprenticeship, Park became friends with Anderson's son Alexander and met his future wife, Anderson's daughter Allison. Moby-Dick, which was written by Herman Melville in 1851, talks about Mungo Park. In Water Music, written by T. C. Boyle in 1981, Mungo Park is one of the two main characters. In his song "Monsters You Made," which is on the 2020 album Twice as Tall, Burna Boy talks about Park.