MILITARY HISTORY GENERAL History Africa –

Emin Pasha, born in 1840 in Prussian Silesia as Eduard K.O.T. Schnitzer, was appointed Governor of the Equatorial Province in southern Sudan in 1876. When it became known in Europe in 1886, one year after the death at Khartoum of General Gordon, that Emin Pasha, the last of Gordon’s lieutenants, had somehow survived the carnage wrought by the hordes of the Mahdi and was holding out in Equatoria with a small force, the cry went up that another good man must not be left to share Gordon’s fate. At the beginning of 1887 Stanley set out in a blaze of publicity on his mission to rescue Pasha. Three years later he brought a reluctant Emin back by the ear to a triumphant welcome at Zanzibar. This book tells the story of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition and shows that the main motive behind the philanthropic exercise was to seize Emin’s province – abandoned by Egypt – as the nucleus of a British commercial empire based on the headwaters of the Nile.

The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition of 1887 to 1889 was one of the last major European expeditions into the interior of Africa in the nineteenth century. Led by Henry Morton Stanley, its goal was ostensibly the relief of Emin Pasha, the besieged Egyptian governor of Equatoria (part of modern-day South Sudan), who was threatened by Mahdist forces.

Stanley set out to traverse the continent with a force of nearly 700 men, navigating up the Congo River and then through the Ituri rainforest to reach East Africa. The arduous journey caused Stanley to split the expedition into two columns; the advance column eventually reached Emin Pasha in July 1888. A series of mutinies, disagreements, and miscommunications forced Stanley and Emin to withdraw from Equatoria in early 1889.

The expedition was initially celebrated for its ambition in crossing “Darkest Africa”. However, soon after Stanley returned to Europe, it gained notoriety for the deaths of so many of its members and reports of brutality. It was the last large-scale private expedition undertaken as part of the Scramble for Africa.

pp. xi 465 illusts fold-out map #250425 (bookplate on fep)

Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904)

Emin Pascha (1840-1892) is Eduard Carl Oscar Theodor Schnitzer