← back to the index
IN-007 Overland expedition · Congo basin 1887

The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition — A relief march that became a scandal of atrocity

diseasemismanagementstarvationpartial-loss1800s
Lost
~139 of 271 at Yambuya
Into
The Congo interior
Ended
Banalya, August 1888
Status
Partial loss

Summary

The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition was a British-organized venture of 1886–89, led by Henry Morton Stanley, to march across central Africa and bring out Emin Pasha — the German-born governor of Egypt's Equatoria province, isolated near Lake Albert after the Mahdist revolt cut him off from the north. Stanley approached not from the east coast but up the Congo, a far longer route, and in June 1887 divided his force of nearly 800 men on the Aruwimi River. He pushed ahead with an Advance Column through the Ituri rainforest and left a Rear Column of about 271 men at a camp called Yambuya, under Major Edmund Barttelot, to wait for porters promised by the slave-trader Tippu Tip and then follow. The Rear Column was not relieved in time and disintegrated. When Stanley returned to it at Banalya in August 1888, more than half the men were dead or had deserted, its officers were dead, dying, invalided or gone, and accounts of starvation, savage floggings and a recorded atrocity against an enslaved African girl had begun to spread.

The expedition's professed purpose — relief — sat uneasily with its conduct. It was a private enterprise of the Scramble for Africa, funded by a committee under the shipowner William Mackinnon, entangled with King Leopold II's Congo Free State and British commercial ambitions in East Africa, and it moved through the lands and lives of central African peoples as if they existed only to be used. The route through the Congo basin and the Ituri forest was murderous: of the 389 men of the Advance Column who left Yambuya, only 169 reached Lake Albert alive. The Rear Column's fate was worse in character if not in raw numbers, because what destroyed it was not only disease and hunger but the cruelty of its own command.

The dead must be counted plainly, and most were African: the Zanzibari, Sudanese and Manyema porters who died of starvation and untreated illness, the men flogged to death on Barttelot's orders, and above all the enslaved girl whom the naturalist James Sligo Jameson paid to have killed and eaten so that he could sketch it. Stanley did reach Emin Pasha and brought survivors to the east coast in 1889, but the venture is remembered less for that than for the Rear Column, an episode that stands as a case study in how an imperial expedition can become an engine of the suffering it claims to relieve.

Timeline

Jan 1885
Khartoum falls
The Mahdist capture of Khartoum and death of General Gordon isolate Emin Pasha in Equatoria, prompting calls in Britain for his relief.
Dec 1886
The committee forms
The Emin Pasha Relief Committee, led by William Mackinnon, raises about £32,000 and appoints Stanley to lead.
Jan 1887
The Congo route chosen
Stanley elects to approach via the Congo River, securing Leopold II's steamers, rather than the shorter eastern route from Zanzibar.
Jun 1887
The force divides at Yambuya
Stanley splits the expedition on the Aruwimi; he takes the Advance Column ahead and leaves about 271 men as the Rear Column under Major Barttelot.
1887–88
The Rear Column waits
Promised porters from Tippu Tip never sufficiently arrive; starvation, disease, desertion and brutal floggings set in at Yambuya.
~May 1888
Jameson's atrocity
At a camp on the route, James Sligo Jameson pays for an enslaved girl to be killed and eaten by Manyema men and records the act in sketches, admitted in his diary.
Apr 1888
Stanley reaches Emin
The Advance Column, reduced to 169 of 389 men, meets Emin Pasha near Lake Albert; Emin is unwilling to leave Equatoria.
11 Jun 1888
Barttelot moves at last
With about 560 Manyema brought up, Barttelot sets off from Yambuya to find Stanley.
19 Jul 1888
Barttelot shot dead
During a Manyema ceremony Barttelot is shot and killed by a man named Sanga after threatening a woman with his revolver.
Aug 1888
Jameson dies
Jameson, having gone downriver to seek more porters, dies of fever at Bangala.
17 Aug 1888
Stanley reaches Banalya
Stanley finds Bonny the only European left in charge of a column reduced from 271 to about 132 by death and desertion.
Dec 1889
The march ends
The reunited expedition reaches the east coast with Emin Pasha; the Rear Column scandal soon engulfs its reputation.

The division at Yambuya

The expedition was a creature of its moment. Emin Pasha, cut off in Equatoria after the Mahdist revolt, remained in communication with the outside world and was not obviously in need of rescue, but the British public, primed by the Gordon tragedy, embraced the idea of relieving him. A committee under the shipowner William Mackinnon raised the funds and chose Stanley to lead, in a venture inseparable from the ambitions of the Scramble: it leaned on King Leopold II's Congo Free State for transport and on Mackinnon's designs for a British company in East Africa.

Stanley's first major decision shaped everything that followed. Rather than approach Equatoria by the relatively short eastern route from Zanzibar, he chose to ascend the Congo and cross the continent through the Ituri rainforest — a far longer and more dangerous line, attractive partly because it served Leopold's interests and his own. On the Aruwimi he split his force of nearly 800 men in June 1887, going forward with the Advance Column and leaving roughly 271 men at an entrenched camp at Yambuya as the Rear Column, under Major Edmund Barttelot, with the naturalist James Sligo Jameson, William Bonny, John Rose Troup and Herbert Ward. Their orders were to wait for porters that the Zanzibari slave-trader Tippu Tip had agreed to supply, then follow with the expedition's reserve of stores and ammunition — a plan that made the rear party's survival depend on a man who had little reason, and as it turned out little ability, to keep the bargain.

The disintegration of the Rear Column

The porters did not come, or came too few and too late. Tippu Tip, who held that he had not been given the ammunition needed to recruit them, never delivered, and the Rear Column waited at Yambuya through 1887 and into 1888 in a camp that could not feed a thousand idle men. Food ran short, and the Zanzibari, Sudanese and Manyema porters who made up the bulk of the party began to die of malnutrition and untreated disease, or to desert. Into this Barttelot's command brought a deliberate cruelty: he resorted to repeated and savage floggings of African men — in at least one case a man was given hundreds of lashes and died of it — and to chaining and other abuses. The discipline he imposed was not order but terror, and it killed.

The most notorious act belonged to Jameson. By his own posthumously published diary, the naturalist paid six handkerchiefs for an enslaved girl and handed her to Manyema men, who killed and ate her while he watched and sketched the scene. He claimed he had thought it a joke and not expected her to be killed; the claim does not survive the fact that he paid for her, watched her die, and drew it. She was a child or young woman whose name is not recorded — destroyed for a European's curiosity. When word reached Europe it produced revulsion: the veteran explorer Samuel Baker called the Rear Column story the most horrible and indecent exposure he had ever known in print.

The command then collapsed. With about 560 Manyema finally brought up, Barttelot set out from Yambuya on 11 June 1888 to find Stanley, but on 19 July he was shot dead by a Manyema man named Sanga during a camp ceremony, after threatening a woman with his revolver. Jameson, gone downriver for more porters, died of fever at Bangala in August. When Stanley reached Banalya on 17 August 1888, only William Bonny remained in European charge of a column reduced from 271 men to about 132 by death and desertion — roughly 139 gone.

The reckoning of the relief

The outcome can be stated plainly. Stanley reached Emin Pasha near Lake Albert in April 1888, at the cost of an Advance Column cut from 389 to 169 men in the Ituri forest, and found Emin unwilling to be rescued; after long delays he marched survivors and refugees to the east coast, arriving in December 1889. The venture half-succeeded in its stated aim, but measured by its human cost it was a catastrophe whose victims were overwhelmingly African — the porters dead of hunger and disease on both columns, the men flogged to death, the enslaved girl killed for a sketch, and the people of the regions it crossed, some of whom it raided and fought.

Stanley's reputation did not survive the Rear Column intact, and it should not. He chose the murderous Congo route, left the rear party dependent on a slave-trader's promise, and selected and commanded the officers whose conduct disgraced the venture; his own methods elsewhere were brutal. The expedition is best remembered not as an adventure but as an indictment of a mission that wrapped commercial empire in the language of relief and left, in the Congo basin, a trail of African dead.

The Five Factors

01
Dependence on an unreliable promise
The Rear Column's survival was staked on porters that the slave-trader Tippu Tip had agreed to supply and never did. Building a plan on a single external party's promise, with no fallback if it is broken, hands the venture's fate to someone outside its control.
02
The longer, deadlier route chosen for other reasons
Stanley took the Congo line across the Ituri forest rather than the shorter eastern approach, partly to serve Leopold's interests and his own. Choosing a route for political advantage over the party's safety treats the men as expendable; the forest then killed more than half the Advance Column.
03
A waiting camp that could not feed itself
Roughly a thousand men were left idle at Yambuya in country that could not sustain them, with no margin for the months they waited. Stationing a large party where the land cannot supply it, for an open-ended time, guarantees hunger and disease will do the rest.
04
Cruelty as a substitute for command
Unable to hold the column together, Barttelot ruled by flogging, chaining and terror, killing men in the process. A leader who meets indiscipline with brutality rather than competence accelerates the collapse he means to prevent.
05
The dehumanizing logic of the venture
The expedition treated the African people it employed, crossed and encountered as instruments, culminating in Jameson's purchase of a girl to be killed for a drawing. An enterprise that does not regard the people of the country as fully human produces atrocity as a matter of course; the moral failure was not an aberration but an expression of how it was conceived.

Aftermath

The Rear Column became a public scandal in Britain on the expedition's return in 1890. The surviving officers and the families of the dead fought a bitter war of memoirs and published diaries — Jameson's own among them — over who bore the blame, and the revelations of floggings, starvation and the killing of the enslaved girl turned much of the initial acclaim for Stanley into condemnation. The affair damaged his standing and stained the wider project of "opening" Africa that he embodied.

The Emin Pasha expedition was the last great privately organized march of its kind; thereafter the European penetration of Africa passed increasingly to governments and chartered companies. It exposed, in unusually documented detail, the human cost that triumphalist exploration narratives habitually concealed — borne above all by the African porters, the flogged, the starved and the murdered, whose deaths were the real ledger of the venture. What remains is not a tale of rescue but a record of atrocity and waste, and an obligation to count the dead honestly and to name those it destroyed where the record allows.

Lessons

  1. Never stake survival on a single outside party's promise; a plan with no fallback surrenders the venture's fate to others.
  2. Choose the route by the safety of those who must travel it, not by political or commercial convenience that treats them as expendable.
  3. Do not station a party where the land cannot feed it for the time required; a static camp in barren country is a slow disaster.
  4. Brutality is not command; a leader who answers indiscipline with cruelty hastens the collapse and adds atrocity to the toll.
  5. Regard the people of the country as fully human, or the enterprise will generate the suffering it claims to relieve — and the dead it leaves must be counted and named.

References