The Gentleman Savage: The life of Mansfield Parkyns 1823-1894.

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Sir Duncan Cumming, President of the Royal Geographical Society, died in December 1979. Educated at Caius College, Cambridge, he joined the Sudan Political Service as the first step in a distinguished career as an administrator in Africa taking a keen interest in Ethiopian affairs. After the War, Cumming returned to the Sudan until 1952, and was seconded to the Foreign Office to undertake what was perhaps his most important achievement, the federation of Eritrea with Ethiopia. During an active retirement, he found time for his own research, pursuing the tortuous trails of early travellers like Mansfield Parkyns in the library and on the ground. Victorian travel at its most adventurous and colourful, features in this biography of a remarkably gifted traveller of the 1840s.

Mansfield Parkyns came from a landed gentry backeround in the East Midlands. As a young man he was sent down from Cambridge and decided to leave England for the excitement of travel in Egypt and Abyssinia, where he intended to discover the source of the White Nile.

His especial gift as a traveller was his ability to immerse himself in local life, which led him to abandon his western clothes and outlook and to make, as Lady Palmerston put it, ‘the most successful attempt by a man to reduce himself to the savage state on record’. Unlike many other Victorians he did not believe in the innate superiority of the white man and he therefore took a refreshing view of his surroundings which led to many fascinating observations. He became part of a village community, married a local girl and took part in raids on other villages. He travelled by a route no European had previously taken to Khartoum and then tried to cross Africa to the Atlantic, but was thwarted by civil war.

Duncan Cumming does full justice to the exploits of this intrepid traveller, who eventually returned to England, wrote about his experiences in Abyssinia and the Sudan and married the Lord Chancellor’s daughter.

Biblethiophile, 01.07.2025