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.

Mungo Park’s second expedition in 1805-1806 was a deadly failure, yet it did nothing to diminish his posthumous reputation as a national hero. What prompted this expedition, why it failed, and how it inspired new expeditions in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars are the subjects of this chapter. It frames Park’s expedition in the context of the transatlantic slave trade, showing how that trade shaped British imperial rivalry with France and Park’s efforts to solve the riddle of the Niger River’s route and outlet. Logistical problems, political tensions, and endemic diseases weakened the expeditionary force, and violent clashes with Africans along the Niger led to the deaths of Park and his remaining companions at Bussa. An investigation by the African trader Isaaco confirmed Park’s fate. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British developed an ambitious new plan to vindicate Park’s sacrifice by sending expeditions to the Niger and the Congo.

Part I, “Before Breadfruit: Natural History, Sociability, and Colonial Identity in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” explores the multiple meanings of science for Jamaican colonists by reconstructing the careers of Patrick Browne and Anthony Robinson, two naturalists active from the 1740s into the 1750s. The introduction situates their work in a chronology of naturalists working in Jamaica from the late seventeenth to the 1790s, when the dream of Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society of London, and botanically inclined Jamaicans culminated in the successful importation of the breadfruit from the South Pacific. It briefly sketches the social, economic, and political circumstances in which Browne and Robinson worked; it signals Part I’s emphasis on the circulation of information about the island’s natural history within Jamaica and between Jamaicans instead of the connections between colonists and metropolitan naturalists and institutions. Part I reveals how colonial naturalists worked in the field; how enslaved and free Jamaicans acquired and deployed knowledge about their environment; and how natural history promoted an affectively rich male intellectual sociability among White colonists.

This chapter analyses colonial botanical collection to reveal the role of non-elite collectors and Indigenous interlocutors in providing knowledge that underpinned British science. The Endeavour brought the new taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus to the Southern Hemisphere. Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander and Sydney Parkinson recorded findings and took over 30,000 plants back to London, many of them viewed for the first time by Europeans swept up in the rage for botany. Knowledge production after James Cook’s first voyage was exponential, and it had both scientific and territorial consequences. New kinds of scientific writing also emerged from the controversial publication of Parkinson’s journal, and scientific bodies used innovative magazines to broaden access to and public support of science in the service of empire. Reliable collectors in the settler colonies worked with Indigenous collaborators to identify novel plant and animal materials, and send them to Britain. These included George Caley who worked with the Eora youth Daniel Moowaatin. The history of colonial science was informed by diverse participants, interests and motivations, and it changed how field work was conceived and scientific authority was established.

Chapter 3 explores Sarah Sophia Banks’s archiving of ephemera associated with fashionable life in the broader context of the interests of other collectors of such material. It addresses the significance of No. 32 Soho Square, where Banks lived with her brother Sir Joseph Banks, as a hub of Enlightenment scientific inquiry, knowledge and social networks, and flows of documentary information.