MAJOR BARTTELOT AND MR. JAMESON.
WE believe the Barttelot story—though we hold the Major irresponsible—and we do not believe the Jameson story ; and as the evidence is pretty much the same in both cases, we will take some pains to explain in what we conceive the difference to consist. There is very little in the charge against Major Barttelot which is in se incredible, even if he were sane, a point upon which we shall have a word to say by-and-by. Though a gentleman by birth and education, and an officer by training, Major Barttelot is admitted to have been a man of tyrannical temper and harsh views of duty, and he was placed by circumstances in command, not of a sort of Sepoy regiment—which is the idea of the average London reader—but of a camp which is best likened to a ship, merchant ship, pirate ship, or privateer, which you will, manned by unruly Soudanese and half-savage Negroes, whom he held in detestation, and at the same time in supreme contempt. The heat at Yambuya was awful, the air sickening, the food indigestible or insufficient, the chances of mutiny con- stant, and the work a weary waiting for months in a mid- African swamp for news which in his belief would never arrive. That under such circumstances a man of Major Barttelot's temperament should degenerate into a tyrant dangerous to every one who approached him, savage in all his sentences, suspecting everybody of latent hostility, and intent on cowing the hostile into obedience by sheer terror, is neither unnatural nor infrequent. The same thing has been recorded over and over again of captains even of men-of war, and is being recorded of merchant captains in every port of the world in every year of our present lives. We venture to say that no month passes in which charges nearly or quite as bad as those alleged against Major Barttelot are not made by sailors against some captain of a cheap or overworked ship ; and in a definite proportion of such cases, the charges are -either proved to be true, or, as happens in some Asiatic ports, are known by juries to be true, though they acquit "in the general interest of marine discipline." The worst captains do not flog to death, because they can seldom get quartermasters to assist them in such dangerous freaks of will; but they cause death by blows, by needless resort to the revolver, and, in the ease of ship's boys, by long-continued persecution. Even the perpetual prodding with a steel-pointed stick attributed to Major Barttelot, is no worse than the perpetual rope's-ending constantly proved in marine trials, and is, curiously enough, attributed to himself by a humane African explorer, the German doctor Werne, who accompanied an Egyptian expedition up the Nile despatched to reduce some Negro tribes to order. He was nicknamed the "Father of the Iron Stick," though he used it on the oppressors, not the oppressed. We hate to believe it, but we see nothing incredible in the charges of tyranny, more especially if we strip them of their accidental but unfair colouring. A boy may have died of a kick without the kicker intending murder, and it is quite possible, we should say most probable, that the horrible floggings were made more horrible by the evil zeal the Soudanese put into their strokes, and by the nature of the flogging instruments employed, which were, we imagine, of hide, not whip-cord, and cut far deeper into the flesh. Major Barttelot did not intend to kill, for he remitted half his worst sentence when he heard of its effect. Major Barttelot was, we believe, at Yambuya what he is described by Mr. Stanley, Mr. Troup, and Mr. Bonny to have been, that is, a tyrant ; but he was also something else, which relieves him of moral responsibility for that odious offence. If the stories about him are true at all, we do not doubt, and no jury in England would, we believe, doubt, that he was, during the greater part of his life at Yambuya, insane,—insane, we mean, in the ordinary medical sense. Just read the evidence. Unless Mr. Bonny, whose motives are unimpeached, is lying out of pure malignity and for no conceivable end, Major Barttelot showed the most ordinary signs of madness, suspected his chief, Mr. Stanley, of intending to poison him, stated to Mr. Bonny that he intended to poison a great Arab—Mr. Bonny, be it observed, humouring his delusion—suspected insolence in everybody, ran about grimacing horribly at his own men, and actually took to biting negresses in sheer cruelty, an act, we venture to say, simply impossible to a sane European. We hold it impossible to believe the narratives at all—and re- member, if they are baseless concoctions, at least one living man is responsible—without believing also that Major Barttelot, naturally a stern or even harsh man who detested Negroes, haxl lost his head under the miseries of his situation and the burning climate, and that moral blame, if it attaches anywhere, attaches to Mr. Bonny, who, as he acknowledges, suspected, or rather, we should say, knew the truth, and did not at once place him under physical restraint. He had the force to do it, for every man in camp hated Major Barttelot, and his excuse, though, we doubt not, conscientiously and truthfully offered, is totally inadequate as an argument against arrest on the ground of insanity. He says his act would have been mutiny, and would have cost Major Barttelot his life, he being so hated that, once seized, he would have been torn to pieces. That is probably true ; but nobody asked Mr. Bonny to rise on his superior officer. His duty was to restrain his patient,—in sleep, if necessary,—and his patient, once proclaimed mad, would have been protected by every Mabommedan in camp. Nothing will induce a Mussulman to hurt a madman, he being in the immediate grip of Allah, not even if he is regarded as madman, infidel, and blasphemer all in one, as the devoted and eccentric missionary Wolff was, when he proclaimed the truth of the Christian Gospel at the very gate of Mecca. England would then have been spared a needless and abhorrent scandal, and Major Barttelot's life would probably have been saved.
We turn to an infinitely worse story, originally related by Mr. Stanley in the words of a witness whom he does not name, but who was the interpreter, Assad Farran, a Levantine : —" Mr. Jameson, returning from Kason, got into a conversa- tion with Tippoo Tib and another Arab about cannibalism. He informed them that he did not believe there was such a thing as cannibalism, because, although he had beard much, he had never seen it, and no white man had ever seen it done. Tippoo Tib replied that it would be easy to prove it if he liked. Jameson asked how that was possible, and it was answered, If you will pay for a slave, and give it to those men there, they will show you.' Twelve cotton handkerchiefs were then given in exchange for a little girl, aged ten or twelve years. She was given to the cannibals, and Jameson is said to have then exclaimed Now let us see what you can do.' The girl was tied up, and Jameson took his sketch-book in his hand. The witness to this stood a few feet behind him. When all was ready a knife was plunged into the girl's heart, and Jameson stood still sketching while her life-blood spurted over her body. He made six sketches during the different stages of the affair from the murder to the eating of the body." Mr. Bonny, who is not even suspected of malignity towards Mr. Jameson, declares that this story is true, except that only six pieces of
handkerchief were paid, and that its hero himself related it to him in so many words. Moreover, he states, and it appears to be beyond question, that the sketches were made, and exist. That narrative, if true—Assad Farran, minute as his narrative is, recanted his testimony—surpasses in the ghastly criminality it imputes to Mr. Jameson, anything in the modern, perhaps even the ancient, history of crime. Parrhasius, who in the legend crucified a slave in order to paint his dying agonies, would have shrunk from the taint of cannibalism ; and the Sultan who ordered a death in order to prove an anatomical. theory, probably selected a criminal, and certainly believed that the Mussulman who died submissively under the direct and per- sonal order of the Khalif passed at once to bliss. There is no need of condemnation, however, for we do not believe that any such crime as that alleged ever occurred. That Mr. Jameson, a naturalist full of morbid curiosity, may have wished to be certain that the Mamyuema were cannibals, may have desired to prove the fact to Europe by his sketches, and may have overcome the African reluctance to let any European see such a horrible mystery—a reluctance to which Mr. St. John testifies in his chapters on Vaudooism in Hayti—by a bribe of .cloth, is possible enough ; as it is also possible that, finding the use to which his bribe had been turned, he, in a passion of self-condemnation, accused himself to Mr. Bonny as author of the little girl's death : but the deliberate purchase of the child for the purpose of murdering her in order to sketch the consequent feast on her remains !—we should not have believed that accusation if we had heard Mr. Jameson, a man believed by all his friends to be gentle, relate it of himself. We do not, in fact, care one straw about the evidence. No evidence is sufficient to prove such a charge against any educated European whatsoever. It is nonsense to say moral evidence is of no value against testi- mony ; we all know instinctively that it has every value. There are plenty of men in the world—take the late Lord Iddesleigh, for example—of whom, if they were accused of stealing, and convicted on their own confession, no human being would believe the charge. Their friends might inquire into the evidence if the accusation were murder, for the temptation to murder is a mystery to us all; but for the
• charge of stealing they would have only an immovable dis- belief. So have we for the charge of suborning cannibalism when brought against any European who does not him- self intend, in the delirium of hunger, to eat the victim. We know absolutely nothing of Mr. Jameson, his character, his history, or his ways of expressing himself ; but that he did not do this thing we do know. That he was guilty of evil callousness in pursuing an investigation which may have been philanthropic, but was certainly inex- cusable, lies on the face of the story, if it is true at all ; but the original criminal act, the murder of the child, we utterly disbelieve. It is not true, for exactly the same reason that it is not true that Lord Beaconsfield worshipped the (Greek) gods of the Ansayrii, whom he so eulogistically described. It is not true, because moral impossibilities exist, and the crime alleged in this story is one of them, and one of the least believable we ever remember to have seen. We shall be told next that an Englishman himself killed and ate an English comrade, to see if his body was really as salt and as nicotised as the Feejeeans used to say. It is nonsense ; and the one thing that we cannot forgive Mr. Stanley is, that he should have raised the discussion. It was entirely needless, and can, whether false or only exaggerated, have no possible effect except to raise in the public mind a feeling that Africa is a sort of tropical hell where any crime is possible, and that as the Arctic Regions seem to freeze wickedness out of their explorers, so Africa seems to heat every evil passion into a blazing fire. It would have been far better to submit in silence to any imputations, just as Kings do, and trust to the common- sense of mankind, or, if that was too hard for an ambitious man, to submit all the evidence in secret to men of such unquestioned character and station that their verdict would instantly have been accepted by the community.
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