In Limbo : The Story of Stanley's Rear Column

IN LIMBO The Story of Stanley's Rear Column. Tony Gould. Hamish Hamilton, London 1978 First Edition ISBN 0241101255 270pp Illustrated Hardback. In June 1887 Henry Stanley marched the advance column of his Emin Pasha Relief Expedition out of Yambuya Camp in the Congo Free State and put Major Barttelot in charge of the rear column. Stanley was leaving five Englishmen at Yambuya with 250 porters and the bulk of the Expedition’s supplies, to be safeguarded for his return in four months’ time. When Stanley returned fourteen months later, he found only one of his officers still there. Two were dead, a third invalided home, and there were over a hundred graves at Yambuya. It was an unmitigated disaster and whilst Stanley was in no doubt that the responsibility lay with the officers of the rear column, it wasn’t long before England was demanding to know why Stanley had virtually abandoned the rear column, had not kept greater contact, and why he had chosen as unsuitable an officer as Major Barttelot. His reputation at stake, Stanley retaliated with nothing short of a smear campaign against his own officers. The Victorian public, avid for more salacious details, quickly lost sight of the original argument and transformed it into a generalised discussion of the pernicious efforts of contact between ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ races. This is the first account of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition to take the episode of the rear column as the main narrative and in doing so an entirely new perspective unfolds. This copy is in FINE condition in a FINE unclipped dustwrapper. Ref L5.…