In Darkest Africa Vol I & Vol 2

The account of the Emin Pasha relief expedition, 1887-89, led by Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), Welsh-American journalist and African explorer, who apparently wrote it in fifty days in Zanzibar at its end.  It was the last of the great nineteenth European expeditions into the interior of central Africa.  Equatoria (now divided between south Sudan and Uganda) was established as a quasi state by the British explorer, Sir Samuel Baker in 1970, and later administered as an Anglo-Egyptian province from Khartoum before the city fell to the Mahdi in 1885.  Emin Pasha (1840-92), a German physician later in Ottoman service, the governor of the state, was threatened by the Mahdist uprising to the north and the expedition was sent to relieve him.  It is considered that Stanley may have had other agendas, including the annexation of territory for Britain with concerns about German expansionist ambitions from its East African colony.  The expedition set out via the Congo river and hostile Ituri Forest but failed to achieve its aim of relieving Emin Pasha.  The Mahdists had overrun most of the province and he was subsequently deposed by his officers.  The expedition had lost some two thirds of its members and the survivors retreated towards the east African coast.