6 - Inquest

Summary

The domestic British response to the failure of the Niger and Congo expeditions was shaped by the opinions and agendas of various parties. John Barrow worked with the press and the publisher John Murray to produce a narrative that exculpated the government, placing the blame instead on the commanders’ excessive zeal. Groups with commercial or religious interests in Africa cast the setbacks as signs that the continent required colonization by the West, while critics of British involvement in Africa saw the failure of the expeditions as warnings against imperial expansion. The metropolitan scientific community had its own specialized standards for assessing the accomplishments of the two expeditions, and neither measured up to its expectations. If there was broad agreement, then, that the Niger and Congo expeditions failed, they were not heroic failures, unlike Mungo Park’s second expedition. This distinction—and the criteria that informed—determined which explorers lived on in public memory.