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Schuver in the Sudan (1881 - 1883) The uncertainty surrounding Schuver's death At the beginning of September 1883 it was Anyar, the interpreter, who gave the British governor of the Bahr el-Ghazal Province news of the young Dutchman's death. [43] The governor sent out a scouting party to the place where the disaster had occurred, but the group found no bodies of the expedition members and the authorities failed to arrest the murderers. A German traveller brought the tragic news to Khartoum, and the readers of The Times were the first in Europe to read of it. [44] People in the geographers' world deplored the loss of the explorer. From the first news of Schuver's unhappy end reported in the newspapers (an article written by O'Shea was even entitled 'Another African Martyr'), some people doubted that the explorer was in fact dead. [45] As early as 15 February 1884 a Dutch correspondent for the Aardrijkskundig Genootschap (The Geographical Society) was told that Schuver was still alive and a prisoner of the Mahdi's followers. [46] This was interpreted as a ruse to conceal the fact that Schuver had in fact become a supporter of the Mahdi's cause, something of which he had actually been accused. A Dutch resident of Egypt, Jan Herman Insinger, a photographer and merchant in antiquities who travelled to Wadi Haifa in the winter of 1883 - 1884, was eager to believe that Schuver was a prisoner of the Mahdi and had converted to Islam. In view of the considerable capital sum left by Schuver it was important, from both the juridical and emotional points of view, for the family to be certain of his fate. When rumours arose in 1888 that Schuver had been spotted in Omdurman, his uncle called upon the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to demand clarification from London. A British investigation produced no new evidence, but in 1891 an expensive watch inscribed with Schuver's name came to light in Suakin on the Red Sea. [47] Completion of Schuver's succession had to wait until 1897. [48] | |
