Sleeping sickness / by F. M. Sandwith.

  • Fleming Mant Sandwith
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sleeping sickness / by F. M. Sandwith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    which no other man then living had explored so fully as he had done. In March, 1887, he started with a force of 706 men— Zanzibar porters, Somalis, and Sudanese soldiers—to travel up the Congo to the relief of Emin Pasha, who was known to be somewhere in the Equatorial Province of Upper Egypt. At Yambuya, 1,300 miles from the sea, he divided his forces, leaving Major Barttelot in command of the rear column, while he himself, with five Europeans and a force of 383 porters and attendants, started by forced marches through interminable forests, swamps, hostile tribes, and every conceivable difficulty. Disaster overtook the rear column; Major Barttelot was killed, Jameson died, and only one Englishman, Bonny, survived. For months no news of Stanley reached England, and there was growing anxiety as to his safety, until news came that he had found Emin on the shores of Lake Albert Nyanza. It was a mission of goodwill, but mark what Dr. Mense, a great authority on sleeping sickness, states:—“Stanley’s expedi- tion for the relief of Emin Pasha, which travelled in 1888 from the Congo to the Nile, and which hired carriers from the Lower and Middle Congo, must certainly have brought many infected men along with it to the Lake region, and possibly introduced the disease there. I myself was the witness of sick men regardlessly abandoned, of dead and dying, who mai'ked the way even in the Cataract region.” After Stanley had met Emin at Wadelai, near the north of Lake Albert Nyanza, he took him, after much delay and hesitation on the part of the Pasha, to Zanzibar. But the ex-Sudanese soldiers of Emin’s province remained behind in a district to the west of the great lake. When Captain (now General Sir Frederick) Lugard arrived in Uganda in 1890, as the Pepresentative of the British East Africa Com- pany, he found it advisable to have at his disposal a force of armed men other than local natives. After he had deposed Kabarega, he came to Albert Nyanza in 1891 and recruited a body of Sudanese, the remnants of Emin’s army. From 400 to 500 able-bodied men were enlisted as soldiers, and they, with their rabble of 7,000 wives, children and fol- lowers, were brought into South Toro, and were placed under the newly appointed king Kasagama.
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