Henry Morton Stanley with the officers of the Advance Column of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, taken in Cairo 1890 after the expedition. From the left : Dr. Thomas Heazle Parke, Robert H. Nelson, Henry M. Stanley, William G. Stairs, and Arthur J. M. Jephson

The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition of 1886 to 1889 was one of the last major European expeditions into the interior of Africa in the nineteenth century, ostensibly to the relief of Emin Pasha, General Charles Gordon’s besieged governor of Equatoria, threatened by Mahdist forces. Led by Henry Morton Stanley, the expedition came to be both celebrated, for its ambition in crossing “darkest Africa”, and notorious, for the bloodshed and death left in its wake.