James Jameson

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James Sligo Jameson (17 August 1856 – 17 August 1888) was a Scottish naturalist and traveller in Africa. He identified the black honey-buzzard in 1877. Jameson's antpecker, Jameson's firefinch, and Jameson's wattle-eye are named after him. However, he is most remembered for his role in causing a young slave girl to be killed and eaten by cannibals. A grandson of the founder of Jameson Irish Whiskey, Jameson was in his early twenties when he started to devote himself to travel. He went to Borneo by way of Ceylon, hunted in Southern Africa and the Rocky Mountains, and visited Spain and Algeria before getting married in 1885. Two years later, he decided to join the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition led by Henry Morton Stanley. In August 1888, while still deep in the Congo Basin, he died of a severe fever, a few months after allegedly paying associates of the slave trader Tippu Tip to procure a ten-year-old enslaved girl who was then slaughtered and cooked in front of them. In his diary, Jameson admitted that he paid the charged price, saw the event, and made sketches of it, but claimed that he had considered the whole affair a joke and had not expected her to be actually killed. However, two members of the expedition accused him of having deliberately instigated the murder to satisfy his curiosity about cannibalism, and his diary shows him to be well informed of cannibal customs, making his line of defence doubtful. The occurrence became known as the Jameson Affair. The central character of Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness may have been modelled after Jameson. Some ornithologists have suggested renaming the bird species named after him because of his unethical behaviour in Africa.