He plunged a knife quickly into her breast twice, and she fell on her face, turning over on her side. In a letter home to his wife, he claimed it was all a misunderstanding: “I sent my boy for six handkerchiefs, thinking it was all a joke, and that they were not in earnest, but presently a man appeared, leading a young girl of about 10 years old by the hand, and then I witnessed the most horribly sickening sight I am ever likely to see in my life. The story goes that Jameson, while in conversation about cannibalism with a local chief, offered six white handkerchiefs to see someone being killed and eaten so that he could sketch the scene. I won’t rehash my own travails here, but what happened to Jameson belongs to an incident so unsavoury that it’s unlikely the whiskey company will ever seek to promote its intrepid ancestor the way that Guinness appropriated the Antarctic explorer Tom Crean. We both became ill and faced starvation, and had to resort to inhumane behaviour just to stay alive. We found ourselves abandoned within three kilometres of each other on the Congo River, 103 years apart. A lot of slave drivers of the old school would have done it much better, for that – slave-driving – is what it often resolved itself into".Īfrica in its wisdom managed to exact its revenge on both of us in the exact same location. Truck Fever, I admit to buying up all the food in poor villages, while Jameson writes candidly about a forced march he led, which was "one of the most disgusting pieces of work I have ever had to do. “Ever since my childhood, I have dreamt of doing some good in this world, and making a name which was more than an idle one.”īoth of us ended up haunted by remorse at some of the things we did on the trip. “The last six months have been the most miserable and useless I have ever spent anywhere,” Jameson wrote. We both paid £1,000 to a British company for our respective journeys, and both found ourselves completely out of our depth. I had his diaries with me while on a trip following in his footsteps in 1990, and was surprised by how similar our experiences were. James Sligo was Henry Morton Stanley's only Irish officer on his ill-fated expedition up the Congo River, the first to penetrate the heart of Africa, in 1887. MAGAN'S WORLD:THE FLAUNTING by Guinness of the memory of auld Arthur so prominently last month brought to mind the ancestor of another of our great alcohol dynasties, James Sligo Jameson, grandson of the man whose signature appears on the whiskey bottles.
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