Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

In 1805, Mungo Park, the Scottish physician and explorer, led a Colonial Office–sponsored expedition that aimed to chart interior West Africa. It took the party of forty Europeans eleven weeks to complete the first leg of the trip, an overland trek from the Gambia to the Niger in the rainy season. By the time they arrived at Bamako, all but ten of the party were dead and the survivors were weakened by illness. Park and four other survivors traveled by canoe along the Niger, but they drowned in the rapids near Bussa, 1,600 kilometers downstream.[80] In 1827 Mungo Park’s son Thomas set out to discover what had happened to his father, but he died from fever before reaching the interior. The British Navy then sent three iron-hulled steamers up the Niger in 1841–42. These were equipped with state-of-the-art chemical filters designed to protect the sailors from the “miasma” that was assumed to be the source of deadly tropical fevers. Unfortunately, they did not filter out mosquitoes—it was almost another half-century before scientists understood how malaria and yellow fever were transmitted—and the expedition fared only slightly better than Park’s: fifty-five of the 152 Europeans died.

While these men were driven by economic and political ambitions, it has to be said that these men were brave. These men were not naive - they knew the likelyhood of them dying from disease or from some other misfortune was high. Still, each man began the journey thinking he'd somehow come out of it alive. I imagine as disease and the climate began to take its toll, it became clear that they were going to die. The anxiety about how-and-when it'd come must've been terrible...