The Forgotten Peddie/Campbell Expedition into Fuuta Jaloo, West Africa, 1815-17: A Record of Elaborate Planning and Grand Misfortune and Misunderstanding
| UW-L Author: | Bruce L. Mouser, Ph.D. Emeritus History |
| Copyright: | 2007 |
| Publisher: | University of Wisconsin Madison African Studies Program |
Mouser, Bruce L. The Forgotten Peddie/Campbell Expedition into Fuuta Jaloo, West Africa, 1815-17: A Record of Elaborate Planning and Grand Misfortune and Misunderstanding. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin-Madison, African Studies Program, 2007.
This volume contains the annotated record of a failed mission to explore the interior of Africa by Brevet-Major John Peddie and Captain Thomas Campbell for the purpose of following the course of the Niger River from Segu to its mouth from 1815 to 1817. The full record of this mission has remained unpublished and includes official letters, instructions, and reports, Captain Campbell’s journal, and memoranda collected by Peddie or Campbell. The work provides valuable information about the observations and prevailing attitudes of European expeditionary participants regarding the African landscape, the peoples among whom they moved, the obstacles that confronted them. This transcription of letters, reports and journals found in official records of the expedition is also important for what it adds to knowledge about circumstances upon the African coast at the beginning of the nineteenth century, local conditions and diseases, prevailing trading practices and diplomatic patterns. “Above all [it is] a record of a profound chasm in understanding that divided European and African thinking during this expedition.”
[From preface and introduction]
About the Author
Bruce L. Mouser is Emeritus Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, where he taught African history, World history, Historical Research Methods, and Japanese history from 1968 to 1996. His principal research interests has been African history, with a focus on the transition of commerce along the upper Guinea coast of Africa that accompanied the ending of the slave trade and before the imposition of colonial regimes in that area. He has contributed numerous chapters in works by other authors and has published scholarly articles in many scholarly journals, including the Journal of African History, the International Journal of African Historical Studies, and History in Africa. His writings on Black settlers in La Crosse have been widely published by the La Crosse County Historical Society.