STORY OF THE REAR COLUMN OF THE EMIN PASHA RELIEF EXPEDITION

By The Late James Sligo Jameson, Naturalist To The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. Edited By Mrs. J.S. Jameson

First edition 455 pages, frontispiece, illustrated throughout with 98 black and white illustrations based on the author's sketchbooks, and two fold out maps to the rear. Original green cloth boards, crest in gilt to front, titles in gilt to spine.

Condition: Binding is good except that the front fly leaf is loose at the bottom. There is foxing, mainly to the endpapers, and less so inside the book and two corners were turned down to mark pages. There is a bookplate for John E. Matcham, which could refer to a South African Naturalist around 1900.

Extract from Rutherford (Marcus) On the hunt for Jameson's Wattle-eye: A twentieth-century exploration through museum archives in Tring and Oxford (Pitt River Museum Website), "James Sligo Jameson (1856–1888) was a minor member of the wealthy Jameson whiskey family who joined an expedition organised in the last days of 1886 under the leadership of Henry Morton Stanley to rescue an enigmatic German Jewish convert to Islam who is known to us today as Emin Pasha and who had become stranded in Central Africa.

Jameson was so keen to go on the expedition that he paid a thousand pounds for the privilege, and he assumed that he was going to be the naturalist, rather like Charles Darwin on The Beagle, collecting and painting animals, birds, butterflies and beetles. Things did not work out quite the way he had hoped, mainly due to the fact that Stanley had different priorities for him, and he spent most of the time stuck with the so-called 'rear column' at Yambuya on a tributary of the Congo River.

The expedition, known as the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, was an unmitigated failure, taking three times longer to complete than had been planned and becoming notorious for a series of dreadful atrocities. Jameson himself witnessed the murder of a slave girl for the purpose of being eaten by cannibals and may even have been responsible for her being killed [as he had bought her for the price of six handkerchiefs]. Eight hundred men had started out on the expedition from Zanzibar but barely one third of these men made it home – the rest dying of a variety of tropical diseases or by starvation, murder or execution, or because they deserted just to escape the whole ghastly experience. Jameson died of cerebral malaria."

The central character of Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness may have been modelled after Jameson as they were both charged with many of the same acts including cannibalism.