I am second generation Kenya born and East Africa has exerted the strongest hold over me for as long as I can remember[1]. My childhood there could not have been more removed from the experience of the early explorers and pioneers who had to walk across the landscape, but once you get away from the noisy and chaotic cities, it is easy enough to re-connect with nature and the marvellous abundance of life. No wonder their experience of the continent changed the lives of men like Burton, Speke, Grant as they searched for the source of the Nile.
Despite being fascinated by these extraordinary men, I never set to write a book about the horrors of the EPRE and in fact knew next to nothing about it when I started my journey through the archives in search of small, long dead birds which had been collected in East Africa nearly 150 years ago. I had not intended to attack the reputation of Henry Morton Stanley, whom I was prepared to accept had been unfairly pilloried ever since his famously banal greeting “Dr Livingstone, I presume?”[2] but as I followed the evidence and dug deeper into the story, I began to realise that Stanley was an outstandingly dishonest man who thought nothing of misleading the public and trashing the reputations of his colleagues to protect his own. What depressed me was how easy it was for him to persuade others to become complicit in his lies and excuse his worst excesses.
Although I have been a lawyer for the past 40 years, there was a time when I flirted with the idea of becoming an illustrator and in my 20’s I was introduced to the bird skin collection at Tring to reference some of my bird commissions. The collection started life as part of the British Museum and it is a remarkable resource, currently curated by a team of dedicated and knowledgeable scientists whose predecessors were men with unusually enquiring minds, but by the end of the 19th century it was in a mess. When the genial and methodical Richard Bowdler Sharpe[3] was appointed Head of Ornithology, he set about cataloguing and recording the provenance of every specimen so systematically that it is possible today to work out how and when it entered the collection and from where it was collected. Crucially, he retained the original labels in the handwriting of the original collectors.
Well into the 20th century, collecting birds and animals for museums involved nothing much more careful than shooting them. Very light shot was used for small birds which killed them or brought them to the ground to be dispatched by a swift bite or blow to the back of the neck, but by and large this did not damage the skin very much. If the hunter had a level of artistic ability and the time to capture detail and coloration he might sketch the bird before skinning and preserving it for the journey back to Europe. Specimens were damaged or destroyed by beetles and fungal attacks unless they were properly treated and well-preserved collections still had to survive the dangerous journey back to Europe from the remote wilderness before they could be scientifically examined. As a result, only a relatively small proportion of creatures shot actually made it back to the major scientific collections, even under the best circumstances. The carnage was considerable, and many species became scarce and even extinct because of the mania for collecting[4].
I had been struck even on my earliest visits to Tring by the fact that the labels on a great many of the specimens I was handling carried names I recognised from the great age of East African exploration and it was only of passing curiosity that the most renowned African explorer did not seem to have merited his own bird. Nothing was named after the most famous explorer of his age, Henry Morton Stanley, almost as if the ornithological community had decided that whatever the public thought about his exploits, he was so far from being a man of science that he really had no right to be honoured in pretty feathers[5].
When I came across the skin of a small female Vitelline weaver which had apparently been collected in a place called Mtoni by a man with a very Turkish name of Emin Pasha, I was intrigued[6]. I vaguely knew him as a German Jew who had converted first to Christianity and then to Islam before heading into central Africa and that in the full cast of strange characters who had ever tramped across the East African plains he was certainly the most enigmatic, but as I dug into my research I was taken aback to find a man who seems to have had only a small walk on part in his own life story. I discovered that he had been rescued by the same Henry Morton Stanley who had so memorably “presumed” to find Dr Livingstone, but I had no idea why the American journalist should have agreed to rescue a little known collector of natural history, nor from what he being rescued. I decided to investigate the expedition which was put together in the last weeks of 1886 to rescue him.
By coincidence, I had tracked down and was intending to paint the skin of an olive bellied sunbird Emin had collected in July 1883, when I discovered another olive bellied sunbird which had been shot and skinned by a man named Jameson, whom I knew by now was one of the men who had joined the same expedition to rescue the Emin. Jameson was a sportsman and passionate accumulator of hunting trophies, but he was far from blind to the beauty of the things he killed and his passion served to increase his knowledge and interest in the natural world. His first experience of Africa was on an ambitious and exciting hunting trip from Potchefstroom near Johannesburg up as far as modern-day Zimbabwe in the company of Frederick Selous, who was the most famous African hunter of his generation[7]. They travelled in some style by ox cart and horse, accompanied by dozens of servants and a tame baboon called Susan. Jameson had his sights on the biggest trophies and was after elephants, ostriches, eland and rhino but he was also building up a private collection of small trophies for which purpose he employed a professional naturalist Tom Ayres to do the shooting and skinning for him[8].
One of the smallest victims of this blood-fest was a gorgeous crimson fire-finch which was carefully skinned and sent back to London with his larger trophies. It is by no means a rare bird, but it belonged to a sub-species that had not previously been described and it now bears his name – Jameson’s Fire-finch - and Safari tourists to East Africa often spot it visiting small pools of water. The original bird skin is in the Museum at Tring, very well preserved on account of it having been expertly skinned and because it has been kept sealed in the controlled environment as befits the species “Type”.
Jameson sadly never met Emin, but that the expedition had focused my attention on not one, but two scientific collectors was interesting, and I decided to look in closer detail at the men who had undertaken the journey into the dark heart of Africa[9]. I was in for a shock - nice young Jameson appeared to have descended into depravity when he participated in the murder and dismemberment of a little African girl by way of scientific curiosity and what was even more surprising was that he had recorded the incident in a series of six sketches, which I found barely credible for such a charming and well-liked man. The first accounts of this incident were given by the expedition’s interpreter Assad Farran[10] who was immediately condemned and dismissed by Jameson’s family as a liar with a grudge and it took two years before the public was to discover, courtesy of Stanley’s vindictive spite, that Jameson’s own letters and diary proved the story to be true.
Text, photograph and paintings Copyright Marcus Rutherford 2024
[1] I worked as a lawyer in Mombasa for a while, but most of my spare time was spent on the reef in front of my house or in the “bundu” (wilderness) behind it.
[2] Tim Jeal’s book “Stanley – The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer” [2007] is a good read, but the author’s admiration for his subject has led him to excuse or ignore far too many of Stanley’s faults – certainly as far as his account of the EPRE is concerned.
[3] Bowdler Sharpe was extremely protective of James Jameson and tried very hard to secure his reputation as a scientist rather than a mere adventurer.
[4] Collecting was not just undertaken for personal gratification. There was a huge trade in exotic specimens and many explorers funded their safaris by selling the bits and pieces they collected.
[5] This turned out to be true – almost to a man, the scientific community including Geographers, loathed Stanley and viewed his exploits in Africa as self-promotion exercises rather than serious scientific endeavours. The Royal Geographic Society contributed £1,000 to the EPRE but only because they came under pressure from Francis de Winton.
[6] The smaller label is a German Museum tag.
[7] Selous was the oldest soldier to enlist in the First World war and was killed in trench warfare in southern Tanzania. He is buried in Nyerere Game Park, which used to bear his name
[8] We know this from the Crook papers in the Pitt Rivers Museum.
[9] I discovered that four men on the expedition were collecting natural history and ethnographic specimens – Emin, Jameson, Ward and Bonny. Bonny found several insects that were new to science, including a butterfly still named after Major Barttelot and a beetle which bears his name (Corynodei Bonnyi). It had an interesting journey to its final resting place in the NHM. Bonny showed his beetles to the scientists at the Museum but they were returned to him and in need of cash, he sold them. The Rev HS Gorham donated them to the Museum in 1892.
[10] Farran’s portrait can be seen in the section dealing with Jameson’s people.