What is the most brutal crime to forget?
Jason Coona
Investigative History Buff Mon
"The nameless, little slave girl did not cry out through the ordeal"
There are many horrible atrocities committed throughout history. But, trust me, there are a handful of crimes that defy the imagination.
Sometimes a story can be so disturbing that even retelling events that happened so long ago can be overwhelming.
Painful as it may be, these stories must be told so that we can learn about the monster that lies deep inside every human soul waiting for the opportunity to rear its ugly head at the moment we least expect it.
Once awakened, we are well aware that it is capable of unimaginable atrocities shrouded in many complex layers of justification, from religion to ideology.
It has been proven time and time again that a sense of infallibility and oblivion of the past can easily unleash the hidden, hidden dark side of the merciless human spirit.
Illustration of Heroes' Quest of the Dark Continent by James William Buell (1889).
In the late 19th century, while on an Emin Pasha relief expedition led by famed explorer Henry Morton Stanley to Central Africa, Jameson Jameson, heir to the Irish whiskey empire, expressed his interest in witnessing a much-rumored murder.
James Sligo Jameson
To achieve his psychopathic fantasy, he bought a slave girl as a teenager and coldly handed her over to local tribes who killed her, then ate her flesh while she was still alive.
Even worse, Jameson is said to have painted the gruesome scene later, turning his rough illustrations into a series of watercolors (first image above).
Ostensibly the purpose of the expedition was to bring essential supplies to Emin Pasha, the governor of an Ottoman Turkish province in the Sudan cut off by a bloody rebellion, but in fact, there was a more sinister agenda to annex more land. Belgian Free State Colony of the Congo.
Emin Pasha relief expedition
Despite the varying details of the brutal event, Jameson's diary and his translator's account of the expedition indicate that by June 1888, Jameson was in command of the expedition's rear column at Ribakiba, a trading post deep in the Congo. There was a murderous population. During the journey, Jameson's right-hand man was Tippu Tip, a local slave trader and client.
Tippu Tip, famous slave trader
What happened during the expedition became public when it was published by the New York Times based on the affidavit of Assan Farran (a Sudanese translator on the trip).
An excerpt from the New York Times Magazine, November 14, 1890
According to witnesses, the slave trader Tippu Tip negotiated with the village's tribal chiefs to purchase a young slave girl, for which Jameson reportedly paid six lans.
According to Faran, the Sudanese translator, the chiefs told their villagers, "This is a gift from a white man, who wants to see her eat."
"The girl was tied to a tree," Farran said, "while the natives sharpened their knives. One of them stabbed her twice in the stomach.
In James Jameson's own diary, he wrote, “Three men rushed forward and began to cut up the girl's body. At last her head was cut off, not a particle was left, and every man took his piece to the river to be washed.
Sadly, both Jameson's and his translator's accounts confirm that the little girl never screamed throughout her unimaginable ordeal.
“The most unusual thing is that the girl never made a sound and did not struggle until she fell,” Jameson wrote.
"Meanwhile, Jameson made rough sketches of the horrific scenes," Farad recounted in his testimony. "Jameson then retired to his tent where he finished his paintings in watercolors."
In his own diary, Jameson does not completely deny this drawing, "When I got home I tried to make some small sketches of the scene while it was fresh in my mind."
Shortly after the allegations about Jameson reached Stanley in 1888, Jameson died of a fever, but not before writing a rebuttal of the incident.
Although he admitted to being present at the murders, he denied it. He even admitted giving away handkerchiefs, but instead of paying money, he said they were given as gifts to the chiefs as a token of appreciation for their being such generous hosts. His refusal seems somewhat absurd in retrospect, and other members of the group would later attest to Jameson's rather low profile.
Ironically, James Jameson never faced justice for what he was accused of. Despite the public outcry and the incident becoming a publicized scandal on a global scale, Jameson's family managed to cover up the horrific incident with the help of the Belgian government. One positive outcome of the otherwise bloody crime was that these expeditions became the last in Africa.
Had it not been for the diary of a psychopathic heir and his honest translator, the blood would have blossomed
#blurt #blurtstory #geekpranee #slave #gorilla #flesh #alive #eat