“It is wrong, always, everywhere and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence” – William Kingdon Clifford - The Ethics of Belief 1877
Stanley was one of history’s most prolific liars. Throughout his published books, lectures, reports, articles and letters and even in his private writing, he made assertions that he knew were untrue or which deliberately obscured important facts and he did so with such frequency that it puts him at the “pathological” end of the scale of liars[1]. This is not a modern revisionist view nor is it much of a revelation since most of his contemporaries suspected the same. Because they fell out on so many occasions, it may not be so surprising that Tippu Tib thought he was the biggest liar in the world, but even a friend like Mounteney Jephson thought there could be nobody in existence more untruthful than Stanley. Even his most enthusiastic modern supporters concede that much of what he wrote simply cannot be accurate and rather more significantly, Stanley candidly admitted in the preface of his book “In Darkest Africa” (IDA) that he was not going to be telling the whole truth about that particular expedition.
In the search for historical accuracy, how should one approach the evidence of a proven liar, especially one like Stanley who frequently created a false trail of statements, letters and diary entries to support a version of events he wanted people to accept?[2] In the context of the court cases in which he became involved, it amounted to perjury. Historians and biographers may argue that the fact that somebody disguises the truth about some facts or events does not mean that everything he says is false, but lawyers tend to approach evidence with greater rigour, which is why proscriptive “Rules of Evidence” are applied in court[3]. The conservative approach assumes that once a witness is caught out in a lie, no part of his evidence should be accepted as reliable unless it is corroborated.
William Clifford’s assertion that a statement of belief is of no value unless based on some solid evidential foundation may seem uncontroversial, but since there is no universal definition of what “evidence” is, no consensus as to how “sufficient” it would have to be to enable the belief to be validly held and no discussion as to what is meant by “anyone”, it turns out that the process of getting to the truth is a good deal more difficult than one would have thought, although we have to do the best we can. Since the whole premise of my book has been to re-examine the evidence and reach a fresh understanding of the facts, it is important for readers to understand my own approach, not because it is necessarily right, but because it might help others decide whether and if so where, I may have gone wrong.
For those who would draw lessons from the EPRE or from the conduct of those involved, no conclusions reached are of any value if they rely on mere assumption – for example, it is unfair to accuse the participants of brutality or inhumanity before establishing to the best of our ability what actually happened. Evidence is created when an eyewitness sets down his personal recollection, or when somebody focuses a camera on the locus on quo from the most visually compelling angle, or when a police officer picks up a spent cartridge from a murder scene, but it is crucial to remember that it is only ever the shadow left over from the event itself - already at least one step away from reality. Whatever techniques of analyse we apply must therefore be consistent, logical, attributable and lead to the most plausible outcome based on the totality of available information rather than a selective part of it.
Anybody researching the EPRE has to wade through a vast amount documentary evidence in the form of published and unpublished diaries, notebooks and correspondence as well as Government papers, press reports, opinion pieces and the occasional hearsay report of what one witness may have told another. Hundreds of books, articles, commentaries, academic theses and internet posts have been written about the expedition by people who were not themselves witnesses and however compelling their analysis, none has much value as evidence. It is still disappointing that so little attempt has been made to assess the relative weight of available material, almost as though successive writers have assumed that their own authority is enough to muscle its way through some less than coherent conclusions[4].

Most people believe they can recognise the difference between truth and falsity and will acknowledge that although “truth” is fragile, it is an absolute, however hard it may be to establish. It is therefore profoundly unhelpful to use language suggesting that there is any probative value in a statement which is “nearly” true, “almost” true, a “half-truth” or a “personal” truth, since all of these can more accurately be summed up as “not true”. At the same time, there are countless degrees of falsity. People lie, bend the truth, suppress inconvenient facts and sometimes simply misremember events and although an honestly written account has the limited virtue of being what the author believes to be true, it can still fail the test of being objectively accurate.
The judicial approach for testing the credibility of a witness’s account is to look for internal consistency and narrative support from other contemporary documents or witnesses. Judges pay particular attention to motivation – might the witness have had special reasons for presenting a version of events which is at odds with other evidence or common sense? A good starting point is to apply what lawyers call the “best evidence” rule which means going back to the earliest available version and working out how it was created.
In this section I look at specific archives or aspects of them.
[1] The most complete book about the EPRE is “The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition 1886-1890” [1972] by Professor Ian Smith who was clear about the evidential value of Stanley’s account “Among the deliberate omissions, the veiled references, and the false trails which Stanley made about the expedition when it was all over – and most obviously and assiduously in his book about it – one can occasionally perceive the glint of truth...” [p62]. Smith never grappled with the issue that if Stanley was only ever “occasionally” truthful, how and why he decided which parts of IDA were ever likely to be reliable. More recent biographers, with the wealth of material available to them, need to explain why they rely on anything he published
[2] There are a number of examples, including statements Stanley helped compile with Saleh bin Osman, Assad Farran, Stairs, Nelson, and particularly Bonny
[3] Lawyers are more cautious about hearsay evidence than historians because it is usually impossible to test whether the originator of the statement is himself being truthful. This is a major problem with accusations against the Rear Column because Stanley relied extensively on “facts” as relayed to him by Bonny, a man he knew was a liar and fantasist
[4] “This is what must have happened, because I am the expert and know more than you”. Some authors are better than others at explaining why they prefer one bit of evidence to another
Text © Marcus Rutherford 2024. Own photo of JSJ diary entry Pitt Rivers Museum