Niger

mission. And to him with a mass of materials
regarding the country whence issued the raw
material of slavery came young Mungo Park,
seeking a literary guide.
Bryan Edwards supplied his not solely altruistic
aid. So the Travels were prepared without a word
in condemnation of the institution of slavery.
Down in London again in December of that year
and January of the next, Mungo and Edwards
repolished and straightened up the narrative to its
final form. The book was published in the early
spring of 1799.
Mungo had kept his public waiting long, but not
too long. His Travels reached a third edition in as
many months. People who had never heard of him
before, heard of the book, bought it, read it,
marvelled upon it, hated it, admired it. The flat
genteel writing was to the taste of his period, as was
his fondness for recording his invoking of the Deity
and his pious reflections on life and death and the
advantages of European civilization and the Chris¬
tian gods. London and the provinces devoured
the book ; the critics expended their pages mostly
in quotations from it. There was a general
applause, except from the Abolitionists.
They raised the cry that Park had written little
of the Travels. It was the work of the notorious
Edwards. And if not, Park was of the same calibre
as his colleague. Did he denounce slavery or the
system guilty of the horrors he had observed ?
Were not all his sympathies indeed pro-slaver ?
259