THE EMIN PASHA RELIEF EXPEDITION 1887 - 90

CAST LIST

 Arabs – the term was used by all 19th century Europeans in Africa to describe not only the sailors who came from the Arabian peninsular, but also their mercenary slaves who were often of pure African blood.  It is therefore not an accurate term, since not all of these “Arabs” were direct descendants of the original Omani  traders that had been visiting East Africa from the 14th centuries and it should only ever be considered a useful shorthand, since the colonisation of East Africa by people from the Middle East and Indian is more nuanced.  These are some of the Arabs mentioned in my website who were operating in East Africa in the last two decades of the 19th century.

bin Hamad
Mohammed bin Hamed in April 1888
  • Sheik Abdullah was the chief of the village of Banalya where the Rear Column disintigrated and Major Barttelot was murdered.
  • Hamid bin Mohammed bin Dhuma (Juma) al-Murjabi was better known as Tippu Tib (1837 – 1905) – see below
  • Jahid bin Hamis was one of the Arab chiefs at Singatini.  Jameson sketched him and two of his wives (including “Curry Eyes – not kept in the shade”)
  • Sheik Mohammed bin Hamed was paramount chief at Riba Riba where the "cannibalism" incident took place while Jameson was paying him a courtesy visit.
  • Sheik Mahommed bin Said bin Hamedi al-Murjabi (better known as Bwana Nzige) was Tippu Tib's half-brother and the senior Arab left in charge of Singatini when Tippu Tib was travelling. He and Sefu (qv) captured  the Belgian station of Stanly Falls, which was across the water from Singatini, in early 1886 - the event that led to Stanley's proposal to make Tippu Tib an employee of the Congo State.  
  • Sefu bin Hamad, known as "Matara" was the eldest son of Tippu Tib and was never a fan of the Belgians.  He had helped capture Stanley Falls when it was under the command of Walter Dean and subsequently led the revolt that was known as the Arab wars of 1892 - 1894, in which he was killed.
  • Munie Somai was Mohammed bin Hamid's second in command at Riba Riba.  He was appointed by Tippu Tib to command the 400 Manyema slave porters to help move the Rear Column out of Yambuya in July 1888.  Although he signed an agreement with Barttelot and Jameson and was promised £1,000, he failed to keep the men together and contributed to the shambolic events that led to Barttelot's murder in Banalya. 
  • Sultan Bargash bin Said (ruled 1870 – 1888) was the Sultan of Zanzibar when the EPRE arrived at Zanzibar in February 1887.
  • Sultan Khalifa bin Said (ruled 1888 – 1890) - Khalifa succeeded Bargash during the EPRE's struggle to reach Emin and he died shortly after the expedition arrived in Bagamoyo. 

 

Barttelot, Major Edmund Musgrave – (1859 – 1888)

Barttelot
Major Barttelot wearing his
medals

Edmund, know as “Ted” to his family, was the youngest child of Sir Walter Barttelot whose family which can trace its roots in Sussex back to the Norman conquest.  Ted  served with the Royal Fusiliers in Afghanistan and Egypt and was raised to the rank of Brevet Major for conspicuous gallantry.  He was awarded 2nd Afghan War Medal (Kandahar clasp), Khedive’s Star, and Egypt Medal and was still only 27 years old when he was accepted on the expedition.  He was headstrong and brave, and although his attitudes to discipline and race seem extreme to us in the 21st century, they were in line with mainstream opinion in the British Army at the end of the Victorian era.  An African named Sanga was accused of shooting him dead in the early hours of the morning of 19 July 1888 and subsequently executed by Belgian officers at Stanley Falls, but the evidence against him is far from clear cut.  After Ted's death, Stanley accused him of "disobeying orders" even though in his private papers Stanley reveals that he did not believe it to be true.  It was nevertheless a terrible accusation to make against any Army Officer, particuarly one who was unable to defend himself, and his elder brother Walter (the name recurs through generations) became Stanley’s fiercest critic,  publishing Ted’s letters and diaries in October 1890 in an effort to prove the expedition's leader was lying to the world.  He would have succeeded but for Stanley's decison to go public with the "cannibalism" story against Jameson.

 

 

Bonny, William – (1846 - 1899)

According to his own diary Bonny was born on 30 November 1846 and Stanley says he was married three times, but neither fact can be assumed to be true in the absense of corroboration, which despite my best efforts, I have been unable to find.  There is a record of a William Bonny - soldier and widower - so possibly our man - marrying Mary Ann Diprose on 10 September 1883 but the trail is difficult to follow.  Bonny served as a nurse in the Army Medical Corps in South Africa and Egypt but was deeply mistrusted by his fellow officers and disliked by almost everybody who came across him.  While at Yambuya collected butterflies and beetles and some of his specimens are still to be found in the Natural History Museum in London.  His last years were spent in and out of the Fulham workhouse and he is buried in a common pauper's grave in Brompton Cemetery.  Stanley bought his notebooks from his estate to prevent them from being made public.

 

Bowdler Sharpe, Richard – (1847 - 1909)

Bowdler Sharp was a genial family man with 10 daughters and although well known for his sense of humour, he was a serious scientist and curator in the ornithology department of the British Museum.  He befriended Jameson, encouraging his earlier expeditions to the Far East and Africa and when he received Emin’s and Jameson’s consignments of birds into the museum, he arranged for them to be examined by Captain Shelley who was one of the world experts in sub-tropical African birds.   Although Bowdler Sharpe never travelled much (no doubt because he had little spare money after providing for such a large family), he was the epitome of the desk bound expert and helped build up the Museum’s collection into one of the most important research collections in the world. His enormous loyalty to Jameson and his young widow, coupled with his loathing of Stanley led to several birds being named after Jameson despite public revulsion at the cannibalism story.

 

Dean, Walter – (? – 1888)

Walter Dean was employed by King Leopold's Congo State and put in command of the Belgian station at Stanley Falls which sat across the water from the Arab station of Singatini.  He was an uncompromising opponent of the slave trade and as a result resented by his Arab neighbours.  Matters came to a head in early 1886 when a slave of one of the Arab commandeers took refuge with the Belgians at Stanley Falls and Dean refused to hand her back to her owner.  The Arabs, under Tippu Tib's half brother and son stormed Stanley Falls and Dean just managed to escape by swimming the river and hiding naked in the forest.  He was eventually rescued but his young Belgian second in command had drowned in the river.  Dean was killed by an elephant in 1888 and the slave woman he had protected eventually became the wife of one of the Belgian officers at Bolobo (see map 3).

 

de Winton, Col Sir Francis – (1835 – 1901)

De Winton
Sir Francis de Winton

de Winton was born in Northamptonshire and commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1854, serving in the Crimean War and present at the siege of Sevastopol.  He was the absolute epitome of the British Imperial establishment, a career soldier/diplomat who served (amongst many posts) as Administrator-general to the Congo Free State (founded by King Leopold) after Stanley's time in the post.  He became secretary to the EPRE Committee in 1886 but one senses he was an arrogant and unlikeable man and there was a huge sigh of relief from MacKinnon's staff in Zanzibar when he resigned once controversies about the expedition started to emerge.  He was also a senior member of the Royal Geographical Society, becoming Hon Sec between 1888 and 1889 (during the EPRE) and it was due to his intervention that the RGS contributed £1,000 towards the costs of the expedition.

emin, his mother and sister
Eduard Schnitzer, his mother and sister

 

 

Emin Pasha

see Eduard Schnitzer

 

Farran, Assad

Assad Farran was born in Palestine and nothing is known of his life before he was recruited in Egypt to be one of the interpreters for the EPRE, but he was not popular with any of the officers.  His eyewitness account of the murder and dismemberment of a child in May 1888 sent shock waves around the world and led directly to an assault on the post-mortem reputations of Barttelot and Jameson from which they never recovered. The only known image we have of him of him was painted by Jameson.

 

Felkin, Dr Robert William – (1853 – 1926)

Felkin was born in Nottinghamshire and was the son of a Baptist Minister.  He qualified as a doctor and joined the Church Missionary Society in his early twenties before being sent to Buganda (Uganda) with two other missionaries.  For a while he became the personal physician to Kabaka Mtesa and he wrote up an account of a successful C-section performed by a local "mganga" (medicine man) in The Lancet on his return.  He was a guest of Emin Pasha on his journey to and from Uganda and the two men became good friends - it probably helped that Felking spoke German, Emin's mother tongue.  It was Felkin's call for him to be rescued that focussed world attention on Emin's predicament and it was used by Mackinnon and Stanley as the excuse to justify their own interests in central Africa.  Despite having been sponsored by Christian missionaries, Felkin was more of a spiritualist, attracted to the occult and esoteric religions like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.  He founded the quasi-masonic temple of Stella Matutina and the Temple of Smaragdum Thallases, and eventually died in New Zealand.

 

Gordon, General Charles George – (1833 – 1885)

Gordon was born in Woolwich, London and was always destined for a military career.  He served with distinction in the Crimean War and was posted to China where he made his reputation suppressing the Taiping rebellion.  Deeply religious and utterly incorruptible, he had very fixed ideas of Duty under Empire, and although he accepted appointments in the Sudan under the Egyptian Government, he turned downmost of the salary he was offered on the ground that it was far too much.  He had to defend Kahartoum from the Mahdi for months  during 1884 but was killed in early January 1885 when the Mahdi's forces finally overran the station.  The British Government had already decided to abandon the Sudan and was slow to come to his aid, but the public reaction to his death led it to reconsider its involvement in the region.

 

Grant, Col James – (1827 -1892)

Grant was born in Scotland and was commissioned in the Indian Army, serving in the Sikh Wars and the Indian Mutiny.  He was chosen to accompany Speke on the successful Royal Geographical Society sponsored expedition to find the source of the Nile.  The Speke/Grant combination was a much happier pairing than the Speke/Burton expedition a few years earlier because Grant seems to have been a much more laid back companion.  By the 1880’s he was one of the grand old men of African exploration and was co-opted onto the EPRE Committee by MacKinnon.  His eldest son accompanied the explorer Thomson on his exploration of Lake Bangweolo and his younger son died in the Boer War.

 

Hamed bin Mohammed al-Murjabi – (1837 – 1905)

Hamed is better known to history as Tippu Tib - the nick-name has a number of spelling variations and possible derivations - but he was undoubtedly the most important and successful of the Arab traveller-traders in East Africa in the second half of the 19th century.  At one time he had more than 2,000 slaves working on his clove plantations on Pemba Island alone.  He personally knew all of the great explorers of the age and had assisted a number of them in their explorations including Stanley, with whom he had a long and uneasy relationship.  Unlike most of his fellow Arabs, he recognised that the superior fire-power, administrative skills and determination of  the Europeans would spell doom for his fellow Arabs and he actively tried to work with them rather than fight them, despite the commercial rivalries over ivory and trade.  He was the only Arab to have left an autobiography.  He died in Zanzibar after having lost much of his wealth due to the collapse of the slave trade and the market for clove oil.  His house and grave in Stone Town can be visited, but are in a state of delapidation as his association with slavery is roundly condemned by modern Zanzibaris who do not think the upkeep is worth the memory.

 

Hoffman, William – (1867 – 1941)

William Hoffman was born in Germany and through his father obtained a position as Stanley’s personal valet when he was still a teenager.  He is barely mentioned by other members of the EPRE in their accounts of the expedition and he seems to have been one of life’s losers.  Stanley dispensed with his services on the expedition's arrival in Bagamoyo, but he did get him a job with the Congo State.  Hoffman brought a family of pygmies over to Europe to exhibit at fairs and amusement parks and he wrote his own very unreliable account of the expedition many years after the expedition was over.  He kept up correspondence with Stanley and his wife throughout their lives,  mostly begging for money or job references.

 

Jameson, James Sligo – (1856 – 1888)

James Jameson was born on 17 August 1856 in Alloa, Scotland and although he was one of the lesser members of the famous Jameson Whiskey family, he still inherited enough wealth to be able to travel and indulge in his passion for hunting birds and animals around the world.  He paid £1,000 to join the EPRE and was left behind with Major Barttelot at Yambuya on the Aruwimi River when Stanley led the Advance Column east to find Emin.  Barttelot send him up the Congo River (known on this stretch as the Lualaba) to find Tippu Tib and procure the long promised porters.  On their return journey, he and Tippu Tib  stopped in the village of Riba Riba where Jameson was alleged to have purchased a little girl to watch her be killed and eaten by local cannibals.  When the story came to world attention, his reputation was utterly destroyed.  He died of cerebral malaria on his 32nd birthday on his way downriver to get help after the disintegration of the Rear Column although his diaries were published by his family after his death in a vain attempt to protect his reputation, his highly illustrated original notebooks have lain almost unexamined in the Pitt Rivers Museum for nearly 100 years.  His collections of bird skins is still to be found in the Natural History Museum and three (perhaps four) species of bird and a beetle were originally named after him.

 

Leopold II, King of the Belgians - (1835 – 1909)

Belgium was a relatively new country when Leopold was born, but he became obsessed by the idea of putting its monarchy on a par with others in Europe by creating an Empire.  He annexed the Congo River basin and treated it as his personal estate before it developed through various manifestations as  the Congo Free State, becoming the Belgian Congo and latterly Zaire and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  He employed Stanley for a number years to negotiate treaties with local tribes and build stations up the Congo River as far as Stanley Falls but the way he went about the task is now besmirched with controversy.  The relationship between Stanley and Leopold was complex and is difficult to unravel, despite a there being a great deal of archive material, since both were natural liars and schemers.

 

Livingstone, Dr David - (1813 – 1873)

David Livingstone was born in Blantyre, Scotland of deeply religious but poor parents and from the age of 10 he was working in the cotton mills.  He was determined to improve himself and studied at night, eventually qualifying as a doctor.  After meeting the missionary Robert Moffat in 1840, he decided to join the missionary movement in South Africa and eventually married Moffat’s rather plain daughter.  He was more successful as an explorer in Eastern Africa than as a missionary, being the first European to make the transcontinental crossing from West to East Africa and leading an expedition up the Zambezi River to find an easy route for trade and Christianity inland and in the process discovered Victoria Falls.  He had been lost to the world for six years before Stanley was sent out to find him and their meeting at Ujiji on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1871 became a world news event.  After the rescue he continued to travel in East Africa, fixated by the desire to prove that the four fountains of central Africa mentioned by Herodotus as being the source of the continent’s great rivers was no myth.  When died of dysentery in what is now Zambia, the story of how his servants Chuma and Susi found his body kneeling in prayer and then carried his dessicated remains down to Bagamoyo and eventually back to London, cemented his reputation as saintly.  He is buried in Westminster Abbey. 

 

Mackinnon, William - (1823 – 1893)

McKinnon was born on the Mull of Kintyre, where he had no formal education beyond elementary school and he became a grocer’s boy before moving to Glasgow to work for a merchant trading in the Far East.  He was sent out to India and formed a partnership with a school mate which became one of the leading trading houses in the Indian Ocean and led to the founded of one of the most successful shipping companies in the world, with a fleet of over 100 vessels.  He was an old-fashioned Scottish Presbyterian with strong religious principles who believed in the virtues of self-improvement and “doing one’s best”. His interest in Africa came relatively late in this life as a result of the influence of David Livingstone and he saw the continent as a worthy cause for his philanthropic brand of commercial salvation.  He was the major promoter of the EPRE, but he did not apply his renowned commercial skills to his African ventures, indulging Stanley more than was sensible and making ill-considered investments which were ultimately doomed to failure.  His rather colourless personality became defined by his relationships with more extrovert men like Stanley, de Winton and King Leopold and he died a couple of years before the final collapse of his East African commercial ventures, but he fired the starting gun on British colonial rule in East Africa.     

 

Manyema

The tribes in the area to the south and west of Lake Victoria adapted particularly well to the arrival of the Arab trade caravans and although they were little more than slaves themselves, they went on to become violent mercenaries in service of the Arabs, a number rising to become guerrilla fighters and war lords in their own right.  Some adopted Islam but it was violent conflict, ivory and slave hunting which cemented their reputation as the fiercest and most feared warriors in the Congo region.  Arabs and Europeans alike believed that they were all practicing cannibals and even when working together (as when the Rear Column was employed Manyema fighters to act as porters in 1888) they proved to be impossible to manage.    

 

Mounteney Jephson, Arthur Jermy – (1858 – 1908)

Mounteny Jephson was born in Essex, the tenth in a family of twelve children.  He was not particularly bright or academic and was sent into the Merchant Navy before his rich and well connected cousin the Countess de Noailles took him under her wing.  She contributed £1,000 to enable him to join the expedition, although he hardly seemed to be qualified for the adventure - Stanley used his navy experience for nothing more than being responsible for the expedition's self assembly rowing boat and thought he was effeminate.  He was one of the officers who accompanied Stanley and the Advance Column and was the first officer to meet Emin Pasha on the shores of Lake Albert.  He wrote a good account of his time in captivity with Emin Pasha and also a book for children which contains some absorbing detail about life in Camp Bodo.  He suffered from ill health in the last years of his life, married late and died in London.  Although he was initially highly critical of Stanley and never entirely saw eye to eye with him throughout their friendship, the two men were nevertheless close enough for him to join Stanley on his honeymoon.  He insisted on being called by his full surname of “Mounteney Jephson” but others (including me) have found this tiresome to keep up.   

 

Stanley and his officers
Dr TH Parke, RH Nelson, HM Stanley (seated), Capt WG Stairs, A Mounteney Jephson.  This well known image of the officers of the Advance Column was taken at the end of the expedition.  Bonny was quite deliberately not invited.

Nelson, Robert Henry – (1853 – 1892)

Robert Nelson was the son of a Leeds solicitor who sent his son off to Harrow School to be grounded as a gentleman.  He did not last long there and went out  to South Africa with a private regiment known as Methuen’s Horse (1st Mounted Rifles) that was raised from “young men of good family, briefless barristers, yeomen out of luck – in short, all that nondescript class who, although decently if not well educated, cannot find in these days of depression the right sort of work and are ashamed to beg”. He was assigned to the Advance Column but when he became lame at a crisis point of the expedition, Stanley abandoned him without food and pushed ahead with the fittest men.  Nelson was boringly dependable, without any discernible hobbies apart from stamp collecting as a child and was the least interesting member of the expedition.  He worked in Kenya for the British East Africa Company but was headstrong and stirred up conflict with the Kikuyu tribe, causing problems for his successor.

 

Parke, Dr Thomas  Heazell – (1857 – 1893)

Tom Parke was born in Ireland and qualified as a surgeon in Dublin before joining the Army. He was serving with the British Army in Egypt when Barttelot arrived there in January 1887, and was persuaded to join the EPRE after the man Stanley had wanted to be the expedition’s doctor refused to sign a restrictive contract.  If anybody is entitled to be considered the hero of this disastrous expedition it is Parke, who saved Stairs’ life by sucking poison from an arrow wound to his chest and tended Stanley through several serious bouts of illness but even he participated in atrocities in the Congo.  He died in Scotland, possibly from an epileptic fit or parasitical tapeworm which worked its way into his brain after his return from Africa. There is a monument to him in the grounds of the Natural History Museum and his small archive is in the Royal College of Surgeons, both in Dublin.

 

James B Pond  - (1838 - 1903)

JB Pond
James B Pond

Pond was passionately anti-slavery and fought with honour on the Unionist side in the American Civil War.  Public lectures by famous men were an extremely popular form of entertainment and Pond became the most successful manager of speakers like Winston Churchill, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and PT Barnum.  He managed Stanley's American tour of 1890-91 and involved himself in Stanley's PR initiatives when the explorer was coming under a sustained attack from the Barttelot and Jameson families in the autumn of 1890.

 

 

 

Schnitzer, Eduard Isaac – (1840 – 1892)

Eduard was better known to the world as Emin Pasha, but he was born a Jew in German Prussia  before converting first to Lutherism and then to Islam.  After training as a doctor, a series of adventures took him via Albania, Egypt and Sudan where eventually found himself as Governor of the region known as Equatoria (roughly where South Sudan is today) which was  nominally under the control of Egypt.  When the Mahdi overran the Sudan and killed General Gordon, Emin found himself cut off and abandoned by his employers but in 1885 he managed to get letters through to friends in Europe, prompting the British mission to rescue him.  After he was rescued in 1890, he turned his back on his British rescuers and took a commission with the German East African Company, heading back into the jungles of central Africa where he was murdered on the orders of a local Arab trader in 1892. He collected all manner of natural history specimens (including pygmy skeletons) many of which are still in the Natural History Museum in London and other museums throughout Europe. 

 

Stairs, Captain William Grant – (1863 – 1892)

Stairs was born in Canada and trained in the army as an engineer.  He joined the EPRE at the age of 23 and was one of the officers who went with the Advance Column from Yambuya as it marched towards Emin and then down to the coast.  He was possibly the first European to see and was certainly the first to climb into the snow-capped Ruwenzori mountains (believed to be the fabled “Mountains of the Moon”) although he never reached a summit.   After the expedition he went into King Leopold’s service and died of malaria just short of his 29th birthday on the Zambezi River.  He is buried at Chinde in Mozambique.  

 

Stanley, Dorothy – (1855 – 1926)

Dorothy was born in London and was the second daughter of Charles Tennant. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and in Paris and married Stanley in 1890.  She was a very competent artist and illustrated several popular books as well as providing illustrations for the books written by both Mounteney Jephson and Dr Parke.  She edited Stanley’s autobiography and his archive of papers before they were consigned to Belgium.

 

Stanley, Henry Morton – (1841 – 1904) 

Stanley's grave
Stanley's outsize gravestone in Pirbright churchyard

John Rowlands was born in Wales on 28 January 1841 and taken at the age of six to a workhouse, from where he eventually made his way to America.  Here he enlisted on each side (not at the same time) in the American Civil War, changed his name and re-invented himself as an American journalist.  His first assignment in Africa was to cover a British military expedition in Ethiopia but he become world famous for discovering Dr David Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1871.  He now made Africa his specialist area, subsequently making one of the great feats of exploration in Africa by crossing the continent from East to West.  This gave him an unrivalled knowledge of the region and led to employment as King Leopold’s principal agent in central Africa, tasked with opening up the country and setting up stations for the commercial exploitation of the Congo River basin.  In 1886 he was approached to lead the EPRE.  He was the most famous non-Royal of the day and on his return from Africa became a reluctant and largely pointless English Member of Parliament.  When he died in 1904 in London, there were calls for him to be buried in Westminster Abbey alongside the bones of Dr Livingstone, but this was a step too far for many people and he is buried under a monumental granite block in Pirbright, Surrey.

 

Charles Stokes – (1852 – 1895)

Charles Stokes
Charles Stokes

Stokes was a hot-headed Irishman from County Fermanagh who became a missionary and travelled out to Africa to follow in the footsteps of his hero Dr Livingstone.  Although his religious calling was not of the highest, he was highly skilled in logistics and organised a number of huge caravans from the East African coast up to Lake Victoria. After his first wife died in childbirth, his marriage to the daughter of an important African chief secured local connections which gave him undisputed access to the trade routes through what was at times very dangerous territory for other European pioneers and explorers.  Although the marriage served his business well, it led to him being thrown out of the Missionary Society and he was largely shunned by Stanley and the British except when they had no option but to use his services.  He was hanged by the Belgians for gun running in an affair which tested international relationships and his death was one of the catalysts in the development of colonial East and central Africa.

 

 

Troup, John Rose – (1848 – 1919)

J Rose Troup
J Rose Troup

John Rose Troup was son of General Sir Colin Troup and born in Cawnpore, India.  He was recruited to the EPRE because he had logistics experience on the Congo River and he was one of the officers who was assigned to the Rear Column under Major Barttelot.  He suffered from ill health during much of his time at Yambuya  and was invalided home in 1888, earning Stanley’s subsequent contempt and derision.  He became involved in litigation with the EPRE Committee over the publication of his account of the expedition, but the action was compromised before it came to trial.  He married an American, Frances Batchelder James and had one son who became well known for a poem he wrote in the First World Ward.  Troup died at Harrow-on-the-Hill in North London on 1 December 1919.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thomson, Joseph – (1858 – 1895)

Joseph Thomson trained as geologist before being sent out by the RGS to be the specialist adviser on an expedition in East Africa under the command of an older man, Alexander Johnston.  When Johnston died at Beho Beho in what is now Nyerere National Park Tanzania, Thomson took over the expedition and brought it successfully home.  On his second East African expedition he became the first European to cross the Taru desert as he made his way through Kenya to Lake Victoria.  He was consulted as to the best way of reaching Emin Pasha and offered to lead the EPRE, but the Committee had already chosen Stanley. 

 

Vizetelly , Edward – (1847 – 1903)

Edward Vizetelly came from a famous family of publishers and journalists and became a well-known war correspondent in his own right.  Gordon Bennett, Stanley's old employer at the Daily Herald in New York, sent him out to East Africa to find the EPRE as it moved down to the coast from Lake Victoria and they finally met up near Mpwapwa.  He was libelled in Emin Pasha's diaries and he forced the English publishers to recall the book and remove the offending passage.  Unfortunatey for it, Mudie’s Circulating Library failed to do so and Vizetelly successfully sued them for libel but the case established that there was a proper defence of innocent dissemination.   

 

Ward, Herbert – 1863 – 1919

Herbert Ward’s father and uncle were known for their and keen interests in natural history (basically shooting everything that moved) and for their taxidermy skills.  Herbert was educated at Mill Hill school in north London, but left school early (quite possibly expelled) and met Stanley in 1884 who recommended him for a post with the Congo State.  He met and became very close friends with Roger Casement who was also working on the Congo River at the time and he was about return to England when the EPRE arrived and he volunteered for the expedition.  Stanley did not give him very much responsibility and he was one of the officers who remained with the Rear Column on the Aruwimi River when Stanley set off to find Emin.  Ward did not get along with Barttelot and was sent down river to deliver a message back to London.  He was a gifted artist and although he never returned to Africa after 1889, it remained a source of inspiration for his sculptures which are to be found in various museums and private collections.  He was wounded in the First World War and was utterly shocked when his old friend Roger Casement was executed for treason, refusing to mention his name again.  Ward died in France and is buried in the famous Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.  Most of his huge collections of sculptures  and ethnographic objects is in American Museums.

 

Werner J R

Werner was an engineer in the service of the Congo State who was responsible for the steamers going up and down the Congo River.  His time at Yambuya camp in June 1888 was the focus of his book “A Visit to Stanley’s Rear-Guard at Major Barttelot’s Camp on the Aruhwimi” [1889].  In 1890 when the Rear Column controversies were at their height, he sided with the Barttelot family and gave them a map he had drawn of Yambuya camp as a memento. 

Text, paintings of Barttelot and Stokes, photo of Jameson's painting of Bin Hamed  © Marcus Rutherford 2024. Other photographs in the public domain.