Very rare ALS, two pages on two adjoining sheets, February 28, 1894. Written from Richmond Terrace, Whitehall, a letter to Major James B. Pond, in full: "It is very kind of you to take such trouble to notify me of what is going on in New York. Your last letter, as doubtless you were assured of, is most surprising and the clipping from the 'New York Sun'—re Westmark—is still more so. You ask me who he is, and what I know of him. I had quite forgotten the name, but I looked into the Congo & the Founding of its Free State, published by Harpers, into my Congo Correspondence, official & private, and closely examined my private journals of the period he seemed to refer to.
Westmark is not mentioned in the book, nor could I find any allusion to him in my private journals. In the official correspondence from Brussels I ascertained that he left Liverpool April 4th, 1883 to take service on the Congo with six other officers, that he had previously been an attaché of the Consulate General at Brussels—& that he was to be appointed as a junior assistant on one of our stations.
I next discovered that he must have arrived on the Congo on or about the 17th May 1883 and that on reporting himself to Lieut. Valcke—the acting chief on the Lower Congo—he was appointed to Lutete Station—about a hundred miles below Stanley Pool.
On reaching Leopoldville (Stanley Pool) from the Upper Congo on the 5th July 1883, Lieut. Valcke notified me of his appointment of Westmark to Lutete's. Without having disturbed the appointment, I returned to the Upper Congo a few days later and did not return to Leopoldville until the 20th January 1884. I next examined the general report sent to Brussels January 29th & I came across the mention of Westmark's name as being at Leopoldville with 18 other officers, and in the following report I found a notice that Lieut. Westmark had been ordered by me to proceed to Mowata Station—90 miles above the Pool.
In March 1884 I left Leopoldville on my way to England, but in December of that year I received a private letter which stated that Westmark had been removed from Mowata to Bangala as a subordinate to young Lieut. Coquilhat. The above is all I have been able to gather about him from the documents in my possession, but they prove that the only period during which I could possibly have met Westmark was between January 20th & February 10th 1884—just 21 days—many of which were so occupied with five months correspondence, that it was not likely I should have become acquainted with a Sub-Lieutenant. For the remainder of the period, say 12 days, that he stayed at Leopoldville, my memory is a positive blank as regards Westmark.
Consequently if the above facts are true, and the records are open to the inspection of anyone, Mr. Westmark cannot have been three years in my service—and during these 12 days that we appear to have been at the same station—nothing—in connection with him, occurred of sufficient consequence to merit any record either privately or officially. For the rest of the romance contained in your clipping—Why, 'though you should bray a fool among wheat in a mortar yet will not his foolishness leave him.'" In fine condition, with a few small repairs to fold splits.
On April 7, 1894, the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle ran with an article bearing the headline: ‘Libels on Stanley, A Lecturer Says He Was a Cannibal, Poor Record of Lieutenant Westmark, No Authority for His Claims That He Explored the Congo Region.’ The report follows a narrative told by Lieutenant Theodore Westmark of his time spent with Stanley in the Congo a decade earlier, impressing upon several lecture halls of Stanley’s trading of native women in the European exploration camps, and then to Stanley’s desire to sample human flesh. The second half of the article, with subhead ‘Westmark’s Record, A Petty Officer Who Was Exposed as a Fraud,’ references the earlier New York Sun story and, as does Stanley within this letter, discredits Westmark’s timetable and various haughty claims. To sum up the matter, Stanley quotes Proverbs 27:22, which asserts that no course of extreme action can purge the fool of his inherent folly.
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