The British decision to dispatch expeditions to trace the courses of the Niger and Congo rivers was driven by two major considerations—strategic worries that the French would displace the British as the dominant European power in the region after the war and abolitionist concerns that the only way to stop the slave trade was to pressure Africans in the interior to turn to ‘legitimate commerce’. Acting on Park’s suspicion that the Niger and the Congo were the same river, officials organized expeditions to explore both of them. The Niger expedition was an army operation, its caravan consisting mainly of soldiers. The Congo expedition was a more scientifically-oriented naval endeavor that initially intended to use a steamship to go upriver. Both expeditions were large, costly ventures, indicating that various British ideological, political, and commercial groups had an interest in their success.

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.

The chapter charts the cultural and literary responses to the British Admiralty’s decision to explore the Arctic after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. The main impetus for launching these explorations was reports of vanishing sea ice. Because it was erroneously thought that ice had hemmed in the Eastern Settlement on Greenland’s east coast, hopes were raised that the Admiralty’s Arctic programme would lead to a recovery of the ‘lost colony’. Several studies have dealt with Britain’s early nineteenth-century ambitions in the Arctic, but the role Greenland played in these considerations has not received the attention it warrants. By collecting and juxtaposing diverse sources, the chapter produces a new perspective on British imperial thinking. Focus is on how the hope of discovering the lost European settlers of Greenland was expressed in several nationalist poems published around 1818. Among the poets examined in the chapter are Anna Jane Vardill and Eleanor Anne Porden, whose verses about British interest in Greenland are analysed.