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unfriendly natives with liberal use of the Maxim until disease and accidents had dwindled his force from 389 to 169. Finally, on 27th April 1888, his starving party met up with Emin, who provided food – in effect, rescuing the rescuers. Showing no signs of starvation or stress, Emin refused to go home.
Finally, Stanley returned to Yambuya to find a solitary European and a few emaciated porters. As Adam Hochschild writes in his account of European abuses in the Congo, King Leopold’s Ghost: ‘Major Barttelot lost his mind. He decided that he was being poisoned and saw traitors on all sides. He had one of his porters lashed 300 times (which proved
fatal)’. The only remaining European, William Bonny, wrote: ‘The least thing caused the Major to behave like a fiend. He would repeatedly stab African workers with a steel-tipped cane, bit a woman and tried to poison a local chief’. Another, Captain John Troup, who had been invalided home, wrote: ‘The Major had an intense hatred of anything in the shape of a black man’. In the end, it was to be Barttelot’s undoing. Woken in the early morning by a woman beating a drum as part of a native ceremony, he threatened her with his revolver – and was promptly shot by her husband.
Edmund Barttelot’s excesses live on, as it is widely believed that he was the inspiration for Mr Kurtz, the native-killing villain of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. More recently, the legend was reprised by Marlon Brando as the psychopathic renegade Colonel Kurtz in the film Apocalypse Now.
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