Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

In the early 19th century, two different British expeditions headed into the interior of West Africa, and both ended in disaster.

In today's episode, we'll be hearing about what exactly went wrong on those expeditions,

from Dame Kennedy, Emeritus Professor of History and the author of Mungo Park's Ghost,

the haunted hubris of British explorers

in 19th century Africa. He was speaking with Eleanor Evans.

We're talking today about a book which explores two ambitious and disastrous British

expeditions to West Africa in the early 19th century. We'll get into why they happened and more

about them in due course.

But as the title of your book, Mungo Park's ghost alludes to, Dane, these expeditions came in the wake of

another explorer. Can we start with Mungo Park himself? Who was he? And what was he up to in the early

19th century? Yeah, Mungo Park was a Scottish physician who became explorer and really came to fame for an

expedition he made into West Africa in the 1790s. It was, in some respects, not much of an

expedition. That is to say, he didn't discover anything particularly earth-shattering or new,

but he survived two years in West Africa, often under very difficult circumstances, and managed

to come back to Britain and as a result became really a romantic hero in Britain.

Poems were written about him. He was fedded by the

British aristocracy. He was the object of enormous attention. He wrote a account of his

expedition that became a bestseller. And as a result, you know, found himself in a situation where he wasn't quite sure what he was going to do afterwards and was persuaded in 1805 to return to West Africa, this time leading a force of 50 men, with the intention of reaching the headwaters of the Niger River and following the Niger to its outlet,

which was unknown to Europeans at that time. It was on that expedition that he disappeared and,

as we now know, died, which only enhanced his reputation as an explorer, an adventurer, a romantic hero.

That's a great sense of park as a figure. I wonder if we can dive into a little bit more,

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