3-057-369 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

James Sligo Jameson, c1870s. Woodburytype portrait of Scottish naturalist and traveller James Sligo Jameson (1856-1888), who was a grandson of the founder of Jameson Irish Whiskey. In 1887 Jameson joined the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition as a naturalist, under the direction of Henry Morton Stanley. This was a journey into the interior of Africa. While there he was presented with the head of a killed villager, which he salted to preserve it, and had it sent to London "to be dressed and mounted" by a taxidermist. Fascinated by tales of a 'banquet of human flesh', Jameson paid for a ten-year-old enslaved girl and watched as she was murdered, butchered and eaten. He later claimed he had not believed the Africans would go through with it and that he had thought it was a joke. The event became known as the 'Jameson Affair'. The central character of Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness may have been modelled after Jameson