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James Jameson: The Whisky Heir That Bought A Girl Just To Watch Her Be Eaten By Cannibals

  • Aug 17, 2023
  • 11 min read

Updated: Aug 18

Vintage photos of men and a child, a portrait of a man over vibrant colors. Text: "James Jameson... Cannibals." Mood is historical.

James Sligo Jameson had money, a title he didn't need to use, and a genuine talent for drawing birds. He was also the grandson of the man who founded Jameson Irish Whiskey, which meant he could afford to buy his way onto one of the most disastrous expeditions in African exploration history. What happened to him there, in a village called Riba Riba in May 1888, turned him from a promising naturalist into a name people still bring up in horrified disbelief on social media more than a century later.


The short version: he handed over six handkerchiefs, and a ten-year-old enslaved girl was killed and butchered in front of him. The longer version, the one that actually matters, involves his own unflinching diary account, a translator who changed his story twice, a second witness who saw the sketches Jameson made that same evening, a widow trying to save her husband's name, and a telegram sent days before Jameson died insisting the worst version of the story was a lie.


Five colonial-era men in formal attire, group portrait.
Henry Morton Stanley with the officers of the Advance Column, Cairo, 1890. From the left: Dr. Thomas Heazle Parke, Robert Henry Nelson, Henry Morton Stanley, William Grant Stairs, and Arthur Jephson.

A rich man's expedition

Jameson signed on to the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition on 20 January 1887 and paid one thousand pounds for the privilege, a huge sum at the time. The expedition was led by Henry Morton Stanley, the explorer already famous for tracking down David Livingstone, and it was meant to rescue a besieged colonial governor deep in what's now South Sudan. Stanley thought Jameson looked physically frail for the job but took his money anyway, and once the party reached the Congo and pushed upriver, that early doubt curdled into something nastier. When Stanley fell ill with dysentery, he blamed Jameson directly, since rations and cooking fell under his responsibility. It's a small detail, but it set the tone for everything that followed: a wealthy amateur, resented from the start, trying to prove his worth to a leader who'd never really wanted him there.


The expedition's own physician, Thomas Heazle Parke, noticed something else about Jameson as the party pushed deeper into the Congo Basin. He wrote plainly that Jameson was fascinated by the subject of cannibalism, a fascination that went well past ordinary scientific curiosity. It's the kind of observation that reads as a throwaway line right up until you know what happened next.


Older bearded man in turban, traditional robe, and ornate dagger.
Tippu Tip, a well known slave trader

Yambuya and the long wait

In June 1887, Stanley split the expedition in two at Yambuya on the Aruwimi River, taking the stronger party ahead to search for the besieged governor while Jameson stayed behind as second in command of the rear column under Major Edmund Musgrave Barttelot. The plan depended entirely on porters the slave trader Tippu Tip had promised and never really delivered. Jameson travelled to Stanley Falls that August to press the matter in person and came back with nothing. No word came from Stanley either. Disease and starvation cut through nearly a third of the camp, and Jameson's diary records the toll in blunt, exhausted language: it was horrible, he wrote, watching men die slowly and being able to do nothing for them.


Food ran out faster than anyone expected, and not by accident. Local villages refused to trade with a column everyone associated with slave raiding, since that reputation had followed the expedition from the moment it arrived. The rear column's answer was to start taking women and children from nearby villages and holding them until food was handed over in exchange. Jameson's own diary lays out the calculation in language that still reads as chilling nearly a century and a half later: with the plantains gone and meat almost finished, he wrote, they would have to catch some more of the women as a last resort.


A curious kind of naturalist

Jameson was there officially to collect birds and insects, and he was genuinely good at it, dedicated enough that three African bird species still carry his name today. But that scientific dedication had what one of his biographers later called a peculiarly cold-blooded dimension. After slavers attacked a nearby village, a local commander brought Jameson the severed head of a man. Jameson salted it for preservation and shipped it back to London to be dressed and mounted by a professional taxidermist. Fellow officer William Bonny later said he'd seen the grisly trophy displayed in Jameson's own house.


In February 1888, Jameson set out again to chase down porters and promises, this time finding Tippu Tip further upriver at Kasongo. It was on the journey back to Yambuya that May that everything else about his life would end up eclipsed by a single afternoon.


Illustration of person sitting, labeled SWAHILI BOY., on a mat.
A slave girl – drawing from Jameson's diary

Six handkerchiefs at Riba Riba

Travelling back with Tippu Tip, Jameson stopped at festivities held at the house of the chief of Riba Riba, a village on the river. Tippu Tip's men talked freely about cannibal feasts, and Jameson said he'd always taken these for the kind of traveller's tales people at home dismissed outright as lies. One of Tippu Tip's associates challenged him directly: "Give me a bit of cloth, and see." Six handkerchiefs happened to be roughly what a young enslaved girl was worth in that local trade at the time, since imported European cloth held real value while a child with little demand except as a meal could be bought cheaply. Jameson sent for the cloth anyway, certain the whole thing was a joke.


It wasn't. Here is what Jameson wrote in his own diary that same evening, in words that have never needed any embellishment to shock:

"I sent my boy for six handkerchiefs, thinking it was all a joke, but presently a man appeared, leading a young girl of about ten years old at the hand, and I then witnessed the most horribly sickening sight I am ever likely to see in my life. He plunged a knife quickly into her breast twice, and she fell on her face, turning over on her side. Three men then ran forward, and began to cut up the body of the girl; finally her head was cut off, and not a particle remained, each man taking his piece away down to the river to wash it. The most extraordinary thing was that the girl never uttered a sound, nor struggled, until she fell. Until the last moment, I could not believe that they were in earnest, that it was anything save a ruse to get money out of me. When I went home I tried to make some small sketches of the scene while still fresh in my memory, not that it is ever likely to fade from it. No one here seemed to be in the least astonished at it."


Jameson recorded that the girl had been captured and enslaved not far from the village. Whatever else is disputed about that afternoon, this part isn't: he paid, a child was killed in front of him, and he went home and drew what he'd seen while it was still fresh in his mind.



Farran's story, and Farran's second story

The scandal only became public two years after Jameson's death, when Stanley leaked it to The Times in November 1890 while under fire himself for how the rear column had been managed. Pointing at other men's failures was, in its way, a pre-emptive strike. His most damaging witness was Assad Farran, Jameson's own interpreter, who swore an affidavit claiming Jameson had actually wanted to see cannibalism performed, and that it was Jameson who prompted Tippu Tip's people to arrange the girl's death rather than simply witnessing it. In Farran's telling, the girl was tied to a tree, stabbed twice in the belly while the blood gushed out, then cut into pieces and washed at the river before being cooked. Farran insisted Jameson sketched the whole sequence as it happened and coloured the drawings afterward at his leisure, describing all six images in detail: the girl being led by the hand, the stabbing at the tree, the cutting up of the body, a man carrying a leg in one hand and the knife in the other, another man with a native axe standing over the head and chest, and a final sketch of a man holding the entrails.


Historical engravings depicting indigenous people's daily life in a tropical environment.
A reconstruction of Jameson's sketches, from James William Buel, Heroes of the Dark Continent (c. 1890). It follows the description of the sketches given by Farran. Bonny described their contents somewhat differently, and Jameson's actual sketches were never published

Farran's story didn't stay put. Questioned privately by two expedition committee members back in September 1888, well before the public scandal broke, he'd already walked most of it back, saying he'd spoken out of bad feeling and that Jameson had actually stumbled onto the killing only after it started, sketching butchery he was helpless to prevent rather than a death he'd arranged. He added that such sights were common in the region and that he'd witnessed similar scenes himself. Those two versions cannot be reconciled. One makes Jameson a purchaser and collaborator. The other makes him a horrified witness who arrived seconds too late. Historians have never fully settled on why Farran reversed himself, whether from pressure to protect the expedition's reputation or plain self-interest, but what's genuinely striking is how closely his details still line up with Jameson's own diary on the price paid, the girl's age, and the fact she was stabbed twice in the upper body, a diary Farran wouldn't have had access to at the time.



The other witness

A third account complicates things further. William Bonny, another officer on the rear column, hadn't been at Riba Riba himself, but he saw Jameson's sketches that same evening and heard him describe the scene directly. Bonny's memory differs from Farran's on some details. He never mentions a tree, but he confirms the same basic sequence, from the girl being presented to the stabbing to the butchery, ending on a final sketch of the feast itself:


"Mr. Jameson showed me the sketches and described the scene in detail. I cannot now describe each of the six sketches; but they begin with the picture of the girl being brought down tied by one hand to the native, who holds in his right hand the fatal knife. He is then represented thrusting the knife into the girl, while the blood is seen spurting out. Then there is the scene of the carving up of the girl limb by limb, and of the natives scrambling for the pieces and running away to cook them, and the final sketch represents the feast."


Bonny wrote that Jameson paid six handkerchiefs for the girl, matching every other account, and that Jameson recounted the events to him in a way broadly consistent with what Stanley later published. Later writers have leaned on this to argue Jameson knew exactly what would happen and sketched it calmly regardless. That's a reasonable reading, but it isn't an airtight one. We don't have Jameson's exact words to Bonny that evening, only Bonny's memory of them decades on. The only words we actually have from Jameson himself are the diary passage already quoted, and that passage insists he believed, right up until the girl fell, that he was watching a cruel demonstration staged purely to relieve him of some cloth.



A dying denial

What almost never makes it into retellings of this story is that Jameson tried to get ahead of it before he died. His last telegram to his wife Ethel, later published in the newspapers, called Farran's reports "false" and told her to stop them being made public if they ever surfaced. He never got the chance to say more. Travelling downriver to report to the expedition committee, he fell ill almost immediately and died of fever at Bangala Station on 17 August 1888, the very same calendar date as his thirty-second birthday. Herbert Ward, the friend he'd been travelling to meet, later remembered Jameson's last coherent words as a warning that something was coming for them both.


African village scene with conical huts, two figures, mountains, trees. S.W.
The entrenched camp at Yambuya – drawing from Jameson's diary

Knowledge, and what he did with it

Strip away the sensational framing and a few things remain true regardless of which version of Riba Riba you believe. Jameson already knew cannibalism was practised in the region. He'd recorded details of it in his own diary before that afternoon. He'd spoken with men who practised it and knew their preferences for victims and methods of preparation. He'd already handled human remains from an earlier attack. His own colleague Herbert Ward knew as much or more, and had reportedly been invited to eat human flesh himself by hosts who saw no shame in the custom at all.


Given all of that, the moment someone said give me a bit of cloth and see, a reasonable man in Jameson's position might have suspected exactly what was coming. He sent for the cloth anyway. He didn't intervene. He sketched the scene later that same day, then sat down with Tippu Tip that afternoon to talk through the ordinary business of the expedition as though nothing unusual had happened. There's no record of him raising a protest afterward, or trying to see anyone held responsible. The diary simply returns to logistics and supplies. That silence carries its own weight, whatever his intentions had genuinely been in the moment the knife came out.



The rest of the expedition fell apart too

Jameson never lived to see the scandal break, and he spent his final weeks dealing with a separate disaster entirely. While he was away trying to secure porters, his commanding officer Barttelot was shot dead at Banalya after a dispute with a local man named Sanga. Jameson rushed to the scene, then on to Stanley Falls, where he was present at Sanga's trial and execution on 7 August 1888. With the column disintegrating around him, he offered to pay twenty thousand pounds of his own fortune to secure a reliable new leader and keep the rear guard together rather than let the whole enterprise collapse. Tippu Tip offered to lead it himself but demanded a price Jameson had no authority to agree to. The talks failed, and Jameson set off downriver to send word to the relief committee in London. He never made it. The same fever that would kill him within ten days had already taken hold.


Sketch of a house with palm trees, a figure, and a dog. Text reads "The House in which Mr. Jameson died at Bangala."
The House in Bangala Station where Jameson died, presumably drawn by Herbert Ward (from Jameson's posthumously published diary)

Three birds still carry his name

Here's the part the older tellings of this story tend to leave out entirely. Jameson was a talented enough naturalist that three African bird species were named after him during his lifetime: Jameson's antpecker, Jameson's firefinch and Jameson's wattle-eye. All three names are still in use by ornithologists today.


In 2021, a campaign called Bird Names for Birds pushed to have his name stripped from all three, arguing that a man remembered chiefly for a child's death shouldn't have his name attached to a small crimson finch that has nothing to do with any of it. The renaming hasn't happened yet, so for now, birdwatchers across sub-Saharan Africa are still logging sightings of a bird named after a man whose most famous act was watching someone die for the price of six handkerchiefs.


None of the surviving accounts agree on exactly what Jameson intended that afternoon at Riba Riba. What none of them dispute is what he did afterward: he paid, he watched, he sketched, and then he sat down with Tippu Tip and talked about the ordinary business of the expedition as if nothing unusual had happened at all. Exploration in that era came wrapped in trade, trade moved on force, and force fed on bodies. Jameson's sketches, lost now, were never the record of one man's failing alone. They were a window onto a system that made failings like his easy to rationalise at the time and easier still to quietly forget afterward.

Sources

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For more on the colonial system that made a scandal like this possible in the first place, see our piece on Belgium's King Leopold II, whose personal rule over the Congo cost an estimated fifteen million lives in the same years Jameson was there.


And for another expedition that ended with a wealthy young man vanishing into a story about cannibalism nobody can fully confirm, read about the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller off the coast of New Guinea in 1961.

 
 
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