Richard Mohun

Richard Dorsey Loraine Mohun (April 12, 1864 – July 13, 1915) was an American explorer, diplomat, mineral prospector and soldier of fortune. Mohun worked for the United States government as a commercial agent in Angola and the Congo Free State. During his time as commercial agent, he volunteered to command a unit of Belgian artillery in a campaign to force Arab slavers from the country.

Mohun remained in the service of the US government during this time and was subsequently posted as consul to Zanzibar. In this capacity, he was called upon to act as an intermediary between the combatants in the Anglo-Zanzibar War. Following the conclusion of his three-year posting, Mohun returned to the Congo to prospect for minerals, and later worked with the Belgian authorities.

His most ambitious undertaking was a three-year expedition, beginning in 1898, that laid a telegraph line from Lake Tanganyika to Stanley Falls. He then spent some time prospecting in South Africa before returning to the Congo to reform the Abir Congo Company on behalf of Leopold II of Belgium.

Early life
Richard Dorsey Mohun was born in Washington, D.C. on April 12, 1864, and was the grandson of the Catholic writer Anna Hanson Dorsey, and was privately tutored at home. Mohun's forebears had a history of involvement with Africa—his grandfather, William McKenny, had been a prominent figure during the colonisation of the continent and left the family a comprehensive collection of photographs taken during this time. Mohun was particularly concerned with the slave trade, which continued under Arab control in Eastern and Southern Africa, and became the fourth member of his family to campaign for its eradication. Mohun served as an officer in the Pay Corps of the United States Navy from 1881, being promoted to the rank of lieutenant in 1889 before resigning later that year to join the United States Department of State.

United States agent in the Congo
Mohun's grandmother, Anna Hanson Dorsey, was close friends with the mother of the American Secretary of State James Blaine and Blaine and Dorsey shared ties with Notre Dame University. Dorsey was able to use this influence to arrange the appointment of Mohun as US commercial agent to the Congo Free State on 22 January 1892, filling a vacancy caused by the death of US Navy Lieutenant Emory Taunt the previous year. The US had maintained an agent in the Congo ever since it had first formally recognised the state and the commercial agent also acted as the diplomatic representative in the country. The post came with a $5,000 annual budget and a remit to investigate the commercial potential of Congo and to promote trade between the two countries, which previously had been almost non-existent. Mohun was appointed ahead of his rival, the missionary Samuel Norvell Lapsley who had been championed by a state senator from Alabama.

Mohun travelled to Africa via Belgium, the European colonial overlord of the Congo, where he met King Leopold II who, in spite of his callous reputation, impressed Mohun with his apparent ambition to bring peace and western civilization to the Congo. Mohun's post in the Free State was at Boma on the Atlantic coast. He spent much of his time in exploration of the country's interior, visiting several areas where no white man had ever ventured. He frequently came into conflict with the native tribesmen. When his mail bag and personal papers were stolen and a local chief refused to return them he proceeded to wage war on the chief accompanied by four gunmen and a steamboat. Mohun attacked and burnt at least ten villages before he captured the chief's son who he threatened to hang. In return for his son's life the chief returned the mail bag, alongside a second that Mohun had not noticed was missing.

Another time, seeking to view the native method of making cloth, he visited a remote town accompanied by only six followers covertly armed with revolvers and came under attack by spears and poisoned arrows. Having fought off their assailants he captured the town and "burned it to the ground to teach them a lesson". Mohun was always conscious of his public image, and wrote a diary, with a view to later publication. Mohun's diary contains little in the way of self-criticism and he reflects upon his responsibility for this incident by stating that he was "satisfied in my own conscience that I had rid the country of a brute and unnecessary member of society." On another occasion he witnessed the funeral of a local chief who had four of his wives and 10 slaves buried alive with him. Mohun was unable to intervene as he had only a small escort and was heavily outnumbered.

Mohun had come under attack five or six times within six months, the east of the country being particularly dangerous as it was under the control of Arab slavers who Mohun claimed had killed all of the white men in the area and allowed their bodies to be eaten by cannibals. The slavers, who originated from the East coast of Africa, were in conflict with the heavily-outnumbered Belgian authorities in the Congo Arab war. Francis, Baron Dhanis, vice-governor general to the Free State, had been leading an expedition against slavers led by Sefu, the son of Tippu Tip and his representative in Central Africa, since July 1892.

Chaltin Expedition
In 1893 Mohun was appointed commander of the artillery attached to a Belgian expedition, commanded by Louis Napoléon Chaltin, sent against the slavers led by Rumaliza. Mohun had risen to the position owing to the illness of the original Chief of Artillery, a Belgian Army officer, and joined the expedition via the steamer Bruxelles sometime after it had started off from Basoko. Just prior to his joining the expedition had destroyed entirely the 1,200-house village of Tchari. Mohun accompanied the expedition to Bena-Kamba where the party suffered an outbreak of smallpox before 555 of the survivors continued on towards Riba Riba. The expedition passed through Ikhamba, entirely deserted except for an array of 16 severed heads left as a warning by the slavers. Around this time Mohun led part of the expedition into a village where he disturbed a cannibal feast, he arrested the village chief ho was tried and hanged. On another occasion he was traversing the jungle alone when he came across 6 armed Arab slavers in a clearing. In the subsequent fight he killed four of the slavers before the remaining two fled.

On March 29 the Chaltin Expedition reached a deep stream and, in searching for a fording place, came across a large group of Arab slavers. The expedition launched a surprise attack on the camp, supported by an artillery piece, and routed them after several hours fighting. The expedition found only one dead body left on the field, though it was supposed that the Arabs had lost more men and carried the bodies away with them in retreat. Mohun was with a force of 150 men sent over the stream to Riba Riba with the intention of reaching the town before the retreating slavers could give warning. Once again they encountered a deserted town, except for two hands nailed to a flagstaff taken from the corpses of two European men killed the week before. Mohun's group burned the town to the ground before returning to the main party of the expedition. The force suffered another outbreak of smallpox and it was decided to send the sick back to the steamer at Bene-Kamba. The main force rested for a number of days before following on. During the three-day march the expedition encountered the bodies of the sick that had died on the return journey and a roll call at Bene-Kamba revealed some 104 men had died in the first 2 weeks of the expedition.

The expedition proceeded by the steamer to Stanley Falls and split into two detachments. One attacked the slaver's factory and the other their nearby Boma under supporting artillery fire from the steamer. Some 75 slavers were killed, including their chief, and a further 100 slaves, soldiers, women and retainers taken prisoner. The slavers, comprehensively defeated, were driven from the country and the war effectively brought to a close. Mohun accompanied a force sent to investigate the slavers town of Romie and discovered it to already be in the hands of Congo State forces. At Romie Mohun encountered several of the Belgian native troops engaging in cannibalism of the dead Arabs. This practice had been outlawed by Chaltin and was punishable by death. Mohun recorded that he fired a single shot which put an end to the matter.

Mohun then marched 500 miles with the expedition to Kasongo, the former home of Tippu Tip, in January 1894. There his force of 1,400 native auxiliaries and porters and 150 soldiers joined with Dhanis' 26,000 men for an assault on the fortified town. In the subsequent fighting the Belgian forces, assisted by artillery, killed 3,000 of the slaver's men, blew up their powder magazines and burnt the town. Still in Kasongo by February Mohun had intended to take a force of some sixty soldiers, 100 porters and 90 others to Tanganyika where he planned to catch a steamer to South Africa to arrange passage to the Congolese coast. From there he planned to settle his affairs, resign his post and return to America. He hoped in the process to intercept a slave caravan that had been fleeing eastwards from the expedition loaded with slaves, ivory and gold.

Instead Mohun, recognised for the leading role he played in many of the engagements, was in March 1894 appointed by Dhanis to be second-in-command of an expedition to determine whether there was a navigable watercourse between Lake Tanganyika and the upper Lualaba River. The expedition encountered difficulties in traversing the terrain and waterways of the country and with hostile natives. Mohun discovered the confluence of the Luabala and Lumbridgi rivers and was able to disprove the existence of Lake Lanchi, which had been marked on many maps at this location. The river itself proved to be highly variable ranging from 2500m to just 90m in width, contained in gorges up to 1,200m deep and with one 110km stretch proving entirely unnavigable by canoe. Mohun recorded that the soil in the valley was highly fertile, the local Barua people quite numerous and named two new peaks Mount Dhanis and Mount Cleveland.

The expedition reached as far as Mount Buli on the Lukuga River when its commander, Dr Sidney Langford Hinde, fell ill with an abscess on the liver, Mohun assumed command from 11 April and successfully completed the remainder of the task. Mohun delivered Sidney, who was incapable even of sitting upright or eating, through native attacks to Kasongo on 25 April. Sidney's abscess, which could not be treated as there was no other doctor nearer than Basoko, successfully resolved itself by bursting during travel and saved his life.

In April 1894 whilst at Kasongo Mohun's sergeant Omari bo Hamise, who had been Stanley's chief sergeant in the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, identified two men who had murdered Emin Pasha on the orders of the slaver Kibonge. Mohun questioned the pair, garnered their confessions and sent them for trial after which they were hanged. During his time in the Congo Mohun also took part in big-game hunting killing 20 elephants and 50 leopards within two years.

Mohun had remained US commercial agent throughout this time, and insisted on drawing no pay from the Belgian government for his services, though he did receive $5000 from the Société Anonyme Belge pour le commerce du Haut-Congo. He is quoted as saying, of the reason for choosing to assist the Belgian military operations, that "I prefer killing Arabs in the interior to killing time at Boma". In 1894, he was awarded honorary membership of the Société Royale Belge de Géographie (Royal Belgian Geographical Society), and Leopold I appointed him a chevalier of the Royal Order of the Lion for his accomplishments in the slaver war. Mohun also received decorations from the United Kingdom and France for his work in the Congo. Mohun's stated priority in the Congo was to improve conditions for the inhabitants by bringing them within the Belgian sphere of influence. He also claimed that the popular image of Belgian brutality in the region was a lie spread by missionaries—a statement contradicted by evidence of unnecessary cruelty by Belgian troops.

Zanzibar
Due to the frequent expeditions Mohun carried out in the Congo, Mohun was unable to spend much time on his duties as commercial agent. The US State Department was, perhaps surprisingly, pleased with Mohun's undiplomatic conduct in assisting the Belgians. This may have been because he did not receive a salary for his work and assisted in making the Congo more commercially stable. Mohun left the Congo and, after a period of leave spent in the US, was appointed Consul to Zanzibar on May 24, 1895. His appointment, which he then held until November 22, 1897, may have been a reward for his work in the Free State. Mohun was not replaced as commercial agent and the office ceased to exist on July 1895 - the next US government appointment to the Free State was not until 1906 when a consul-general was appointed. Mohun arranged a period of five minutes between his resignation as commercial agent and acceptance of the post of consul so that he could accept his Order of the Lion without contravening the US constitutions Title of Nobility Clause that prohibits those holding public office from accepting gifts from foreign powers.

During his time on the island, he became involved in the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 27 August 1896, as an intermediary between the Sultan of Zanzibar and the British authorities. He reported the outcome of the war and the safety of all American subjects to the State Department on the same morning. In return for his services and conduct during the engagement, he was decorated by the new Sultan. During the course of the war Mohun compiled a portfolio of photographs that he later published. On 6 July 1897 he informed his superiors of an outbreak of smallpox on the island among the Indian and native population and that an English missionary had been attacked for carrying a victim around in his arms. Mohun was concerned that the outbreak might spread to the white population and noted that vaccination doses had been ordered from Marseilles for the native population. Mohun's appointment as consul ended in November 1897.

During his time in Africa Mohun had acquired a leopard cub after killing its mother, who was attacking the livestock of a native village. He named the young male Dijini ("Devil") and raised him in his house. During a visit to Europe Dijini accompanied his master in his carriage. After terrifying the staff and residents of a hotel in Antwerp Mohun was forced to cage the leopard. Despite receiving several bids from menagerie-owners Mohun made a gift of the animal to the Washington Zoo and arranged to have him shipped to his hometown. Mohun returned to Washington six months layer, upon completion of his posting in Zanzibar, and visited his former pet. Mohun amazed staff at the zoo by jumping the railings and passing his hand between the bars of Dijini's enclosure to allow the animal to lick his hand.

Belgian government work
Following the expiration of his contract with the US government, Mohun returned to Congo to work as a mineral prospector. Mohun was thereafter contacted by the Belgian government, which had been impressed by his work on behalf of the United States, and Dhanis appointed him district commissioner (1st class). In this role Mohun was given responsibility for the government of some five million natives and tasked with improving internal markets in the country. He led several expeditions into the Katanga region to ascertain the mineral wealth of the area, which had been rumoured to be great.

Mohun continued his work to eradicate the slave trade, made several surveying expeditions, established new trade markets, and assisted in the suppression of cannibalism. He estimated that there were 20 million cannibals in the Free State, and spoke of witnessing both a cannibal feast, and the practice of burying people alive. Mohun's work in the Congo has been described as the last "spectacular contribution" by an American in opening up the country.

Tanganyika-Nile telegraph expedition
In 1899 Mohun was involved in an expedition to lay a telegraph line from Lake Tanganyika to Wadelai on the White Nile for the Belgian government. This was in spite of his stated opinion they year before that criticised expeditions into this "wretched country in the heart of Africa". Mohun left Antwerp, Belgium for Africa at the end of August 1898.

The overhead telegraph may have been intended as a link in the proposed line from the Cape to Cairo and was to be supported by 7m-high poles at 150m spacings and had been allocated a budget of three million francs. Mohun was provided with five electricians, a military escort commanded by Belgian Captain Verhellen and Dr. Castellote as medical officer. He advertised among the Askari of Zanzibar for volunteers to provide the escort required by the expedition, and received more than one thousand responses. From these, he selected one hundred men to accompany him, twenty of whom had served with him in the Congo expedition of 1894. The work was hoped to have been completed by 1900.

In order to negotiate with the local population along his route, Mohun took "100 boxes [of] trade goods consisting of bells, knives, locks, mirrors, music boxes, watches, clocks, fezzes, and other odds and ends". His diary also notes that spectacles, Arab-made incense and American-made cloth were popular, and that he used the latter to pay his Askari escort. The expedition also included porters to carry the equipment and to lay the telegraph line. A ship named Sir Harry Johnson took them from Zanzibar to the African mainland in the German colony of Tanganyika. The expedition then proceeded to the settlement of Fort Johnston at the southern tip of Lake Nyasa where they replenished their food stocks with fish from the Shire River. Mohun's party then proceeded along the western bank of the lake to the settlement of Karonga in North-Eastern Rhodesia. The expedition probably used the Stevenson Road which connected Karonga to Zombe at the southern tip of Lake Tanganyika.

From there, they began laying the telegraph line (starting at Albertville), heading north along the western bank of the Lake and entering the Congo Free State before turning west to meet the River Congo at Kasongo. Shortly after they had entered the Congo Free State in July the party, then comprising just ten European men, came under attack by a force of cannibal tribesmen. Mohun estimated that his opponents numbered some 1,500 men and claimed to have inflicted 300 dead and 600 wounded in exchange for 9 men killed and 47 wounded in his party. Mohun was said to have contributed much to the party's defence with his Winchester rifle and was reinforced part way through the engagement by three companies of native infantry sent by Dhanis. The cannibals subsequently fled towards Lake Tanganyika. In December 1900 Mohun's family contacted the US ambassador to Belgium, Lawrence Townsend, to ask him to investigate rumours of his death which had been announced at a lecture in Washington.

Mohun's party followed the river north to Stanley Falls where, after three years, the expedition ended the line some distance short of the Nile. Mohun was the only white survivor of the party and his task was disrupted by the ongoing Batetela Rebellions that caused Mohun to launch operations against the rebel forces. Construction of the telegraph was completed and Mohun's appointment came to an end in October 1901. As a result of this endeavour Mohun claimed to be known amongst the indigenous peoples along the route as "Big master of the telephone". The cable enabled telegraph messages to be transmitted from the west of Africa to the east.

Having returned via the Congo, Mohun claimed to be the first American to cross the African continent, a credit usually given to Henry Morton Stanley. Mohun's claim may have been due to knowing Stanley was born in Wales. Mohun is considered to be one of three Americans who played key roles in opening the Belgian Congo to outsiders, alongside Stanley and William Henry Sheppard.

After the expedition
Towards the end of his contract with the Belgian authorities Mohun wrote to former State Department official Thomas W. Cridler who was then commissioner for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Mohun indicated his desire to leave Africa and requested employment at the exposition. He suggested the inclusion of an anthropological exhibit with "a few pygmies, from the Congo. Cannibals of course would be amongst the Congo lot, as it would be impossible to bring natives from interior Africa without finding a large percentage of man eaters amongst them ... I am not proposing any dime Museum, or Midway Plaisance sort of show. Make it a part of the Equatorial African Section, an integral part of the Exhibition itself". Mohun was unsuccessful and never received a formal position with the exposition, though his suggestion might have led to the inclusion of the pygmy Ota Benga and other African tribesmen as part of the exhibition. He is believed to have written to Roger Casement during this time in an attempt to counter the accounts of Belgian abuses in the Congo that Casement was then compiling for publication in his 1905 Casement Report.

In December 1905, on the recommendation of King Leopold, he was appointed director of the Abir Congo Company. The Abir Rubber Company was the only company mentioned by name in a Congo Commission report, which reported: "the imprisonment of women as hostages, flogging to excess, and various acts of brutality are not contested. It is the black spot on the history of Central African settlement." Mohun was appointed to institute reforms addressing these practices. He also devoted much time to an attempt to exterminate the tsetse fly and in 1906 successfully proposed that Leopold II buy out Abir and take the concession under direct control of the crown.

Mohun was selected, in May 1907, by Thomas Fortune Ryan and Daniel Guggenheim, founders of the Forminière company to undertake a prospecting operation on the Uele River. The result was the 1908 Ryan-Guggenheim Expedition, a rubber and mineral prospecting party funded by American capital and accompanied by a member of the US Geological Service. This was in two parts, a scientific expedition led by SP Verner for the American Congo Company that sought to trial the "Mexican Process" of utilising acetone for rubber extraction in the Congo, and a mineral prospecting party, the Mohun-Ball Expedition (also known as the Mission de Recherches Minières), with mineralogist Sydney H. Ball and mining engineer Alfred Chester Beatty, that sought out new gold, copper and coal deposits. The expedition was also tasked with capturing a live specimen of the Okapi for which a wealthy resident of Paris had offered a $5,000 reward. Mohun was appointed chief of the Mohun-Ball expedition when it set out in 1907.

Late that year the party came under attack by a force of flintlock-armed cannibals and, with the assistance of a 25-strong unit of Belgian native soldiers, repelled the attack—inflicting 125 dead for the loss of five native porters. In press reports of the time Mohun was described as an ex-US Army officer who had been involved in revolutions in several South American countries. The incident became locally known as the "Battle of Ball's Run". A further attack in January 1908 was more successful, causing the party to flee the area. Mohun's men eventually reached safety at Kamgamyka in March.

The expedition ended in 1909, by which time it had uncovered valuable diamond deposits at Tshikapa, the first such to be located in the country, and recommended the mineral-rich Kasai region to Forminière for further investigation   Mohun's contract with Forminière expired in November 1909 and he returned briefly to his family in the USA. In 1910 he was commissioned by the Rubber Exploration Company to inspect rubber concessions in South Africa, Rhodesia, Mozambique, Madagascar and Equatorial Africa and to negotiate their purchase on behalf of the company. Mohun left the company early the next year.

In August 1911 Mohun returned to his home at Royal Oak, Maryland to recover from wounds he had received during his twenty years service in Africa. His convalescence included a period spent in the Virginia mountains. He served as on officer on an American Red Cross ship sent to Belgium during the first year of World War One. Aged 50 and without any prior signs of illness, he died of a fever on July 13, 1915. Although he was alone when he fell ill at two o'clock in the morning a non-Catholic woman made a 26 mi journey to fetch a priest to conduct the Last Rites. Mohun's funeral service was held at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle and he was interred in the family plot at Oak Hill Cemetery. During his postings in Africa he had returned to the USA only three times.

Personal life
Mohun was married to Harriette Louise Barry from New York, who accompanied him to Zanzibar but spent much of her time in Belgium where communications with Africa were very quick. He had two sons (Reginald Dorsey Mohun and Cecil Peabody Mohun), one of whom was born in Zanzibar and the other in Belgium. Harriette died on October 6, 1942. Mohun was fluent in Arabic and Swahili.

Mohun received honours from the British, French and Belgian governments and—though never employed directly by their armies—often wore a uniform to maintain discipline amongst his followers. Mohun was a member of the Royal Geographical Societies of Britain, France and Belgium. A sizeable collection of ethnographic information and objects that Mohun collected in Africa is now held in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum and many of his papers are held by the Belgian Royal Museum for Central Africa and the US National Archives and Records Administration.