Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minkie. Listener discretion is advised. In eighteen eighty nine, an American journalist named George Washington Williams was granted an opportunity to sit down informally with King Leopold the second of Belgium. Williams was a groundbreaking published historian, but his life was a done fascinating history. He was a black man born free in Pennsylvania who enlisted to fight for the Union during the Civil War when he was just fourteen years old. From there, he went to Mexico and joined the army fighting to overthrow the European Emperor Maximilian. Later, he became a college graduate of Baptist minister and the first black man to serve in the Ohio State legislature. By this point, Leopold Drain he had become an expert in the trappings of monarchy. He was a master of charm. He was friendly, self effacing, modest, and above all diplomatic. He remembered names of wives and children, and he always asked after them. He welcomed Williams into his palace in Brussels and told him with obvious relish about all of the philanthropic work he had been doing in the Congo Free State. The meeting went incredibly well. One side note, one has to imagine that maybe William's youthful military service in Mexico didn't come up. After all, the imperialist queen he had been fighting against, Carlotta of Mexico, was Leopold's sister. But for Williams, it was difficult not to be impressed with Leopold and with Belgium It's clean, wide, sweeping avenues and open national parks and the stately facades of palaces. It was a new country and a new monarchy. The Belgian people had installed Leopold's father as the first king, imported him from a line of German royals back when Belgium had gained its independence from Holland in eighteen thirty. But under Leopold the Second, the nation had become a center of international affairs in Europe, thanks a note small part to Leopold's passion for developing the Congo. What had been a blank spot on the map of Africa just a few decades ago was now, as Leopold told Williams, a quote benevolent enterprise of local programs seeking to increase the knowledge of the natives and secure their welfare. And so, as Williams left the meeting and strolled down the marble steps of the palace, he reflected on what an impressive man the young king was. Leopold the Second was a paradig for a new kind of compassionate modern imperialism. Out of his own pocket, the king had funded stations along the Congo River that were stocked with scientists, linguists, and researchers. He built infrastructure to help missionaries spread Christianity, all while helping establish a system in which black tribal leaders could establish their own local dominions as part of a larger organized coalition. At least that's what Leopold said he was doing. Fascinated by Leopold's description of the Congo Free State George Washington, Williams decided to visit for himself. What he found both sickened and outraged him. It was a slave state in all but name. Men, women and children who had had their land stolen from them, either by trickery or by violence, who are then forced to work grueling hours gathering rubber that would be shipped back to Europe to pay for Belgium's beautiful roads and parks. Men, women and children who failed to meet their quota for rubber production were either whipped or killed under the capricious and brutal authority of black soldiers also enslaved. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away sat civilized Leopold the Second charmingly asking about your wife by name. George Washington Williams became the first person to interview Native Africans about the horrific abuses they were suffering under imperialism. From an outpost at Stanley Falls, he wrote an open letter which he addressed to his serene Majesty Leopold, the second King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State, in which will Ms wrote in clear detail every one of the atrocities in the so called Congo free State that he came across. He consulted his notes and echoed back the very words that Leopold had used to describe his endeavor, the so called fostering care and benevolent enterprise and effort to ensure the native's welfare. Williams wrote against the deceit, fraud, robberies, arson, murder, slave rating and general policy of cruelty of your Majesty's government. To the natives stands their record of unexampled patience, long suffering and forgiving spirit, which puts the boasted civilization and professed religion of your Majesty's government to the blush. Leopold had not claimed the Congo as a colony for Belgium. Using smoke screens of shell corporations and meaningless charity committees, he became the sole owner of the largest private landholding in history. Belgium did not own the Congo. Leopold did. It was banal, bureaucratic evil, ignored and then accepted by the rest of the world out of sheer apathy. Leopold exploited the flimsiness of the institutions that hold up the civilized world and the veneer of respectability that comes from a royal title. Williams's open letter sparked the first wave of international interest in Leopold's Congolese endeavor, But of course Belgian officials would attempt to discredit Williams, and Williams would die of disease before returning home to America. It would be decades before the international community reckoned with the stress machine of Leopold the Second, congo, if indeed it ever really has, I'm Danis Schwartz, and this is noble blood. Leopold the Second was not a boy of great promise. He was gangly and awkward boy who looked like a scarecrow in his military uniform. He has such a nose, said Benjamin Disraeli, the British Prime Minister, as a young prince has in a fairy tale, who has been banned by a malignant fairy. From an early age, Leopold's parents decided not to bother with much affection for him. In a letter while he was off at military school, his mother wrote, I was disturbed to see in the colonel's report that you had again been so lazy, and that your exercises had been so bad. Your father was as disturbed as I by this last report. Leopold had no expectation that he would hear directly from his father. If you wanted to speak with his father, the King, he was required to request a formal audience and go through his father's secretary. When Leopold was eighteen, he was married to Marie Henrietta and Austrian Habsburg archduchess. They hated each other almost immediately. Marie Henrietta was athletic and an active horsewoman, and Leopold was well, in the words of Queen Victoria, very odd and in the habit of saying disagreeable things to people. He was narrow minded, interested in geography, and fastidious about keeping track of money, and exactly as fun of a person as those two interests make him sound. The pair honeymooned in Venice, and Marie Henrietta wept in public because her new husband refused to let her ride in a gondola. If God hears my prayers, she wrote to a friend, I shall not go on living much longer still, Even though by all accounts they barely tolerated one another, the royal couple managed to have four children, though their one son died at age nine from pneumonia after falling in a pond. At his son's funeral, Leopold broke down publicly for the first and only time, although he did regain enough composure to ask members of Parliament to make sure that the funeral costs would be handled by the state. Leopold was so uninterested in his daughters that he tried to make himself an exception to the law in Belgium that requires one's assets to be passed on to one's children. From that point on, Leopold simply had no use for his wife, or really for the Belgian government Petipe petition. Leopold would say, small coun tree, small people. He would have no more sons, and so his legacy would need to become something greater. Leopold became king at thirty years old, but being king in Belgium in the nineteenth century wasn't anything close to the power a king would have had in Europe a few hundred years earlier. Their family was a symbolic monarchy who served at the pleasure of parliament, not because they were granted absolute authority by God. Even Leopold's title was restrictive and awkward. He wasn't the King of Belgium technically, he was the King of the Belgians, a formality that just reinforced the notion that his leadership was more for show than anything else. And so Leopold decided to turn his gaze beyond his small country and begin to focus his energy on his earliest passion profits, but not just any prophets the profits that came from owning a colony. Even before he had become king, Leopold's interest in colonialization bordered on obsession. He spent a month in Spain going through the dusty archives in the old Exchange Building page by page to calculate the revenue they made from their colonies in America. Unfortunately, the people of Belgium didn't really share their king's imperialist dreams. Their nation was new and small, Focusing on a colony seemed like an expensive luxury, especially when they didn't have a merchant fleet, let alone in navy. But Leopold wouldn't be deterred, even as they elected officials with the real power in the country continued to demure when Leopold approached in the halls of the Palace with a new idea for a place to plant the Belgian flag. After returning from one of his many scouting trips, Leopold brought the finance minister two gifts, a piece of marble from the Acropolis and a locket with his portrait. Inside the locket, Leopold wrote, Belgium must have a colony if Belgium was ever going to be a world power. If Leopold was ever going to have any real power, he needed to claim land from somewhere else on the globe. The power was by the end of the eighteen hundreds, unclaimed land would become harder to find. Leopold scoured maps of the world. Could someone buy those tiny islands off the coast of South America is Fiji for sale? Could he buy the Philippines from Spain. Leopold even floated the idea of buying lakes in the Nile Delta so that he could drain them and claim the land. For the moment, he wrote, neither the Spanish, nor the Portuguese, nor the Dutch are inclined to sell. I intend to find out discreetly if there's anything to be done in Africa. It's at this point in the story that we need to introduce another character, a writer turned explorer born in Wales with the name John Rowlands. Rowlands had a miserable childhood, born out of wedlock, abandoned by his mother, and bounced around among extended family until he landed at a workhouse for the poor, like a character in a Charles Dickens novel. But as soon as he turned eighteen, like a character in a Mark Twain novel, John Rowlands made his way to the Mississippi River. He eventually settled in New Orleans, and this is where Rowland's story becomes more myth than fact. According to him, he saw the wealthy trading magnet, Henry Hope Stanley, sitting on his porch and boldly asked if he could have a job. The man became such a mentor to the younger boy that he eventually adopted him, and Rowlands took on his new father's name, rechristening himself Henry Morton Stanley. Henry Morton Stanley wrote all about his unconventional upbringing in his autobiography. He wrote about how tragically the senior Stanley died just two years after his adoption, but Henry Hope Stanley wouldn't actually die for another twenty years, and there are no records of any adoption. In fact, Henry Morton Stanley gets so many strange details wrong that some historians argue that he didn't even meet the wealthy trader, let alone become his protegee. But the truth didn't matter as much as a good story. That was the real lesson learned Henry Morton Stanley would be come a master of reworking and mythologizing his own narrative until the truth was unknowable. Stanley would go on to fight on both sides of the American Civil War, first for the South and then for the North, and then after the war was over, he began to work as a journalist. It was an assignment for the New York Herald in that catapulted Henry Morton Stanley to international fame. You see, four years earlier, Europe had lost touch with a Scottish geologist by the name of doctor David Livingston. Stanley made it his mission to go find Livingston, alive or dead, all while sending back columns to be published in the New York Herald. It took two years and a seven hundred mile trek outfitted with one hundred and eleven porters, but in present day Tanzania, Stanley found the scientists and, according to Stanley, greeted him with a line that is now iconic. Dr Livingston. I presume it's a great line, but in all actuality, not one that he actually said at the time. It doesn't appear anywhere in his contemporary journals, but that doesn't matter. Stanley was a writer, and he knew that the most important part of a story was the way you tell it. In a way, He's right, we all remember that line a hundred and fifty years later. In some ways, Stanley was the prototype for the type of self conscious travel on luxury blogs and outdoorsy Instagram accounts, in which the experience itself only exists through its presentation to the outside world. Stanley's accounts of his adventure and the book he wrote about the experience, turned him into an overnight international celebrity. He also got a lucky break, its Livingstone, dying of malaria and dysentery before they both returned to Europe, so there wouldn't be another white man who could contradict any of his accounts. It was Stanley's word against no one's, and the world loved it. They devoured his tales of rebellious porters and vicious barbarian African tribes, wild animals, and most terrible of all, the brutal quote Arab slave trade, which Europe was free to Scoff and gas Bat having mostly banned their own massive industrial transatlantic slave trade operations. Oh about thirty years earlier after his incredible Livingston mission, Stanley set out again, this time to trace the Great Lakes of Africa, the unmapped heart of what he Stanley called the Dark Continent, and to trace the Lualaba River to see if it fed into the Nile or if it horses shoot around and became the Congo River. This time, Stanley was sponsored by both the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph in London, and his caravan was more than twice the size of the one that had accompanied him to find Livingstone. There were over three hundred people traveling with him, although only three other white men and Henry Morton Stanley being Henry Morton, Stanley didn't want anyone with him who might upstage him, so the men he chose to accompany him had no experience exploring, and all three of them died before the journey was complete. For his hundreds of Zanzibari porters, the trip was months of carrying incredibly heavy loads on their heads and backs, while Stanley riddled them with abuse. If they mutinied or attempted to flee, he punished them either with lashes or by keeping in chains to humiliate them. But the natives that Stanley ran into fared if possible. Even worse villages armed only with spears, arrows, or a few ancient traded for muskets were no match for Stanley, outfitted with rifles and an elephant gun. Unfortunately, the only source we have to go on about these encounters is Stanley himself, Yet reading his words, he doesn't mask his own pettiness or brutality. Attacked and destroyed twenty eight large towns and three or four score villages, he wrote. He went on to describe a river coast where mockers shook their spears at him. Stanley opened fire with a Winchester repeating rifle. Quote six shots and four deaths were sufficient to quiet the mocking. Stanley's columns did lead to shock and criticism from anti slavery society and humanitarians around the world, but James Gordon Bennett, his newspaper editor, dismissed their criticisms as the pearl clutching of elites who had never been in the metaphorical trenches. Critics, Bennett wrote, are safe in London philanthropists whose impractical view is that a leader should permit his men to be slaughtered by the natives and should be slaughtered himself and let discovery go to the dogs, but should never pull a trigger against the species of human vermin. One European read every single update from Stanley with rapturous fascination. King Leopold the Second who asked his servants to bring any newspaper with any dispatch from Henry Morton Stanley up to his chambers right away. When Stanley finally completed his mission, emerging at the Portuguese settlement at the mouth of the Congo River, he became the second white man ever to traverse Africa from east to west, and the first white explorer to trace the source of the Congo. The Congo was perfect for Leopold's purposes. It was a massive area laced with waterways for easy transportation once roads were built to traverse the most dangerous sections of rapids. Best of all, as Stanley's writings had made clear, the local inhabitants were no military threat. Thanks to centuries of slave raids from both coasts, the few large kingdoms around the Congo were significantly weakened. The diverse population consisted of two hundred different ethnic groups who spoke over four hundred languages and dialects, which meant that the risk of them uniting against colonialists was small. Leopold had found the answer to the question he had been asking his entire adult life, but actually claiming the undeveloped region encircled by the Congo River would be more challenging than just willing it. The Belgian people were completely uninterested, and any European country that put down a flag could ignite the scrambling of other jealous countries who could simply refuse to recognize their neighbor's colony or claim it for themselves. And so even before Stanley's mission was over, Leopold had begun to orchestrate a meticulous global propaganda campaign that, through a combination of subterfuge, flattery, and sheer force, would make him the sole owner of a piece of land over seventy six times larger than the tiny nation in which he was The King. Leopold would rule a new population with an iron, merciless fist, claiming the blood soaked profits from his comfortable throne on the other side of the world, all while white men praised him. In eighteen seventy six, King Leopold the Second organized a geographical conference to be held in Brussels. Being a monarch at the end of the nineteenth century meant that Leopold had a very specific type of capital, the magnetic allure of the monarchy itself and all of the legitimacy it provides in a vacuum. The formalities of the monarchy are arbitrary and useless, but in Leopold's hands they became very weapons he would use to conquer the congo. So decorum and formality were the chief objectives of his Geographical Conference. The goal was to dazzle his visitors, the redozen of the world's most famous explorers and military men, including a rear admiral and the president of the Paris Geographical Society. Leopold sent Belgian ships to pick up British guests in Dover, who were then escorted onto an express train to zip them the rest of the way to Brussels, with special instructions for them to pass through the Belgian border without customs. Leopold knew how impressive it would be for his guests to stay at the Royal Palace. The only problem was the Royal Palace in Brussels wasn't actually really a residence. It was more of an administrative office. Leopold and his family actually lived in a chateau on the outskirts of the city, but that wouldn't do, and so for the weekend the royal Palace was transformed into a residence. Servants frantically converted offices into guest bedrooms. In the end, everything to draper, the betting, the ink, even the toilet paper was read. As each guest entered, Leopold greeted them in French, German or English, and one by one they filed up a white marble staircase to the throne room, which glistened in the flickering light of seven thousand candles. Leopold opened the conference with an effusive speech about the importance of their purpose to open to civilization the only parts of our globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire people's is dare I say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress. The practical purpose for the conference was for the experts to work together to select locations for bases along the Congo, which could serve as hubs or scientists, linguists, and artisans. These bases, Leopold said, would be non political, working only to abolish the slave trade and established peace among chiefs, and each one would be well equipped with medicine and extra supplies for explorers passing through. At the end of the weekend, the men in attendance voted to establish the International African Association. Leopold, of course, would be the association's first chairman, but he modestly promised to step down after a year. The association gave itself a flag, a yellow star on a blue backdrop, meant to represent the bright hope of civilization in the darkness of Africa. Each new member of the Association was awarded the Cross of Leopold. Throughout Europe, prominent men began to send me a called donations, including the Viscount Ferdinando Lessons. Leopold was undertaken to less Us declared the greatest humanitarian work of this time. A side note, if the name Count de Lessup sounds familiar, it's because he is an ancestor of the man who would go on to marry Real Housewives star Countess lou An. The idea with the International African Association was that the men would return back to their home countries and start their own national chapters and that there would be a big meeting in Brussels every year. In actuality, the organization fizzled after its bombastic inauguration. It only ever had one more meeting, where they elected Leopold as chairman for the second time despite his earlier pledge, and then the group all but disappeared forever its purpose had been served. Leopold had established the foundations for legitimacy where his future endeavors in the Congo. The great men of Europe were behind him. After Henry Morton Stanley had completed his truck along the Congo and floated back to Europe on a raft of acclaim and medals and book money, Leopold dispatched one of his officers to get Stanley to come to a meeting in Brussels. King Leopold had a proposition for the explorer, a five year contract in which Leopold would pay the equivalent of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, plus the cost of an expedition for Stanley to go back to Africa and begin to establish Leopold's foothold in the Congo. The plan that was for Stanley to first set up a base and then build roads around the most dangerous parts of the Congo River, where they would be able to take a steamboat apart, carry it on land, and then bring it back to the river. Leopold's goal was to stay out several stations along the thousand mile main stretch of the Congo River so he could claim the land profit. Ben would be easy. The Congo was incredibly resourced tents, especially with regards to valuable ivory, which could be shaped into anything from chess pieces to piano keys to fake teeth. African elephants had tusks far larger than their Asian counterparts. Stanley had reported that ivory was so accessible in Africa that it was used for door posts. Who exactly was Stanley claiming the land for even Stanley wasn't sure. He thought at first it was the International African Association, or was it the vaguely named Committee for the Study of the Upper Congo, which was a private business whose shareholders included a Belgian banker secretly acting as Leopold's proxy. Leah Pold would go on to buy out the other shareholders and the company would legally cease to exist, but both he and others would continue to refer to it as if it did still exist. Even Stanley didn't realize that the company had folded. The subterfuge was deliberate. All of Stanley's European staff on the ground in Africa were required to sign a contract of secrecy. And it was around this time that King Leopold organized something called the International Association of the Congo. If that sounds similar to that pointless but idealistic International African Association, that was on purpose. The former even adopted the exact same flag as the latter, a gold star against a blue backdrop. Care must be taken, Leopold said, not to let it be obvious that the Association of the Congo and the African Association two different things. The public doesn't grasp that. Leopold framed the Association of the Congo a sort of a new Red Cross, and wealthy men all over the world sent donations. Leopold was an expert at manipulating the message depending on his audience. Two Germans, he framed the enterprise as akin to the divine mission of the Night of the Crusade. Two Americans, he stressed that he would establish in Africa a union of free cities, each led by local African tribe leaders, not dissimilar to the Union of American States. But in his letters to Stanley, Leopold dropped the facade. There is no question, he wrote of granting the slightest political power to Negroes. That would be absurd. The white men heads of the stations retain all of the powers. While continuing to promote his smoke screen charity organizations, Leopold reached out to an Oxford scholar and a lawyer to handle the legal details of acting as a corporation and claiming sovereignty of territories for individuals in Africa. Henry Morton Stanley worked not only as a brutal taskmaster, berating his crews of workmen as they filled ravines, built trails, and put together steamships, but also on Leopold's behalf, tricking African leaders into signing treaties that gave Leopold their land and gave him an exclusive trading monopoly. Using trick bullets and small electric buzzers, Stanley convinced leaders who hadn't interacted with Western technology that white men possessed superhuman strength and invulnerability, and then it was only a matter of some clothes, a few left over uniforms, and a couple of bottles of gin to trade, and the leaders signed the treaties that Stanley put in front of them. As historian Adam Hopeshelled writes in his excellent biography King Leopold's Ghost, the concept of signing your land away would have been completely for it. The tribe leaders would have been familiar with the idea of a contract of friendship, but someone across an ocean owning their land was absurd and outside the realm of contemplation. They just put an x where they were told at the bottom of a contract in a foreign language they didn't understand. And these contracts also included a clause even more sinister than you can imagine. They granted not just the land, but an agreement that the tribe would quote assist by labor or otherwise any works, improvement or expeditions which the said associations shall cause at any time to be carried out in any part of these territories. In short manpower. The Congo would become, in effect a slave state. The United States became the first to recognize Leopold's claim to the land of the Congo and in his speech the Secretary of State conveniently confused the International African Association and International Association of the Congo. The dominoes were falling into place. The next year, Leopold formally declared his landholdings to be the Congo Free State, operating under his exclusive private control. King Leopold of the Belgians was now the owner of the world's largest private landholding in history, seventies six times larger than the country you ruled over. From this point on, the details become horrific. It turns out the real profit to be made in the Congo wasn't in ivory, it was in a rubber. Leopold established a private army, the Force Publique, to enforce rubber gathering quotas in the native populations through brutal torture. The police force would arrive in a village, hold the women and children hostage, and whip workers with a bull whip called the chicot made from dried elephants hide. The penalty for not gathering enough rubber was death. In order to make sure that the police officers were using their bullets on people and not on animals to hunt for food, the hands of victims were required as trophies. Hands and feet of children would be severed if parents weren't productive enough. Even the act of gathering the rubber was violent. Once the viands were split open, the worker would slather his body in the soft latex, which would then harden. Once hard, the latex would be stripped painfully from the body, taking hair along with it. Men were worked to death, hostages starved. Some estimate that as many as ten million people were killed during King Leopold's bloody twenty three year long reign in the Congo. Ten million people slaughtered in his name as the rubber and ivory came on chips back to Belgium, and he gleefully sent only soldiers and bullets back. In Europe, they called him the Builder King for the urban projects and buildings and parks he erected using his profits. Leopold never actually went to the Congo himself, but he did bring the Congo to him in and when he opened a temporary exhibition at his country estate that would become the Royal Museum for Central Africa. The heart of the exhibit was a human zoo where two hundred and sixty seven Congolese men, women, and children were kidnapped and brought to a mock African village set up on the Royal Estates grounds. When the prisoners got sick because of visitors throwing candy over the fences, they put up a sign that said the blacks are fed by the organizing Committee. In other words, don't feed the animals. For twenty three years, Leopold was the sole owner of the Congo Free State, and his atrocities were largely ignored by the rest of the world out of convenient apathy. How much easier was it to believe that charming Leopold actually was fronting a pilanthropic endeavor. It would only be through the tireless work of missionaries that things would eventually change, people like George Washington Williams, who wrote his open letter, and like Alice see Lee Harris, a documentary photographer who captured the gruesome dismemberments on film. It would actually be a shipping officer named Edmund Dinney Morrell who would provide one of the largest public pushes for the world to recognize Leopold's horrific exploitation. Morrell noticed that it was ivory and rubber arriving on ships from the Congo, but only bullets going back. He realized there was no trade happening, and so he enlisted thinkers and celebrities of the day like Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain, and eventually, in night, Leopold the Second was forced to sell the Congo Free State to Belgium to make it actually an official bell Rgian colony. Let that sink in the Congo wasn't actually made free, it was just not personally owned by Leopold anymore. That was the humanitarian victory. Leopold died the next year at age seventy four. His funeral procession was met by booze from Belgian people. But as soon as Leopold was gone, his legacy in the Congo began to be whitewashed. He was dead, so the international fervor died out. Statues of Leopold were erected in the parks he helped build. They taught in school that colonialism might have gotten too violent under the Builder King, but colonialism was always bad. People in other European countries try to make Leopold look worse to make themselves feel better, you see. Besides, sure, there was some blood, but he was bringing civilization to Africa. It's so easy sometimes to believe the lies and to enjoy the pretty statues, the comforting facade of authority and dignity and civilization. And the statues of Leopold remained in Belgium until June twenty twenty. During the international Black Lives Matter March following George Floyd's death in the United States, protesters in Belgium coated statues of Leopold the Second in red paint in Antwerp and in Ghent and in Brussels. Some of the statues have already been taken down, but I think it's worth asking ourselves what had been keeping them up for so long? All this time. That's the story of King Leopold the Second and how he used the symbolic power of his monarchy to enact horrific realities. Keepless ning after a brief sponsor break, to hear a little bit more about the legacy he left in literature. After Henry Morton Stanley built the roads and base camps along the Congo, steamboats began to appear on the river, delivering supplies and taking rubber and ivory off to the coasts. One of those steamboats a boat called the King of the Belgians was piloted by a man named Joseph Conrad. Conrad's experience in the Congo and all of the horrors he saw first hand, would lead him to write his most famous novel, Heart of Darkness. If you haven't read it yet, you might have at least seen the movie adaptation. Although the movie doesn't take place in nineteenth century Africa, Francis Ford Coppola decided to set it in Vietnam. The movie, of course, is a acalypse. Now there's another important literary legacy from the Congo worth pointing out. Remember George Washington Williams, the Civil War soldier turned journalists who wrote the open letter to King Leopold. He also wrote a pamphlet for the international community advocating action, and he coined a phrase to describe what Leopold had done, a phrase that we still use to this day, Crimes against Humanity. Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minkey. The show was written and hosted by Dani Schwartz and produced by Aaron Manky, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minkie. Listener discretion is advised. In eighteen eighty nine, an American journalist named George Washington Williams was granted an opportunity to sit down informally with King Leopold the second of Belgium. Williams was a groundbreaking published historian, but his life was a done fascinating history. He was a black man born free in Pennsylvania who enlisted to fight for the Union during the Civil War when he was just fourteen years old. From there, he went to Mexico and joined the army fighting to overthrow the European Emperor Maximilian. Later, he became a college graduate of Baptist minister and the first black man to serve in the Ohio State legislature. By this point, Leopold Drain he had become an expert in the trappings of monarchy. He was a master of charm. He was friendly, self effacing, modest, and above all diplomatic. He remembered names of wives and children, and he always asked after them. He welcomed Williams into his palace in Brussels and told him with obvious relish about all of the philanthropic work he had been doing in the Congo Free State. The meeting went incredibly well. One side note, one has to imagine that maybe William's youthful military service in Mexico didn't come up. After all, the imperialist queen he had been fighting against, Carlotta of Mexico, was Leopold's sister. But for Williams, it was difficult not to be impressed with Leopold and with Belgium It's clean, wide, sweeping avenues and open national parks and the stately facades of palaces. It was a new country and a new monarchy. The Belgian people had installed Leopold's father as the first king, imported him from a line of German royals back when Belgium had gained its independence from Holland in eighteen thirty. But under Leopold the Second, the nation had become a center of international affairs in Europe, thanks a note small part to Leopold's passion for developing the Congo. What had been a blank spot on the map of Africa just a few decades ago was now, as Leopold told Williams, a quote benevolent enterprise of local programs seeking to increase the knowledge of the natives and secure their welfare. And so, as Williams left the meeting and strolled down the marble steps of the palace, he reflected on what an impressive man the young king was. Leopold the Second was a paradig for a new kind of compassionate modern imperialism. Out of his own pocket, the king had funded stations along the Congo River that were stocked with scientists, linguists, and researchers. He built infrastructure to help missionaries spread Christianity, all while helping establish a system in which black tribal leaders could establish their own local dominions as part of a larger organized coalition. At least that's what Leopold said he was doing. Fascinated by Leopold's description of the Congo Free State George Washington, Williams decided to visit for himself. What he found both sickened and outraged him. It was a slave state in all but name. Men, women and children who had had their land stolen from them, either by trickery or by violence, who are then forced to work grueling hours gathering rubber that would be shipped back to Europe to pay for Belgium's beautiful roads and parks. Men, women and children who failed to meet their quota for rubber production were either whipped or killed under the capricious and brutal authority of black soldiers also enslaved. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away sat civilized Leopold the Second charmingly asking about your wife by name. George Washington Williams became the first person to interview Native Africans about the horrific abuses they were suffering under imperialism. From an outpost at Stanley Falls, he wrote an open letter which he addressed to his serene Majesty Leopold, the second King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State, in which will Ms wrote in clear detail every one of the atrocities in the so called Congo free State that he came across. He consulted his notes and echoed back the very words that Leopold had used to describe his endeavor, the so called fostering care and benevolent enterprise and effort to ensure the native's welfare. Williams wrote against the deceit, fraud, robberies, arson, murder, slave rating and general policy of cruelty of your Majesty's government. To the natives stands their record of unexampled patience, long suffering and forgiving spirit, which puts the boasted civilization and professed religion of your Majesty's government to the blush. Leopold had not claimed the Congo as a colony for Belgium. Using smoke screens of shell corporations and meaningless charity committees, he became the sole owner of the largest private landholding in history. Belgium did not own the Congo. Leopold did. It was banal, bureaucratic evil, ignored and then accepted by the rest of the world out of sheer apathy. Leopold exploited the flimsiness of the institutions that hold up the civilized world and the veneer of respectability that comes from a royal title. Williams's open letter sparked the first wave of international interest in Leopold's Congolese endeavor, But of course Belgian officials would attempt to discredit Williams, and Williams would die of disease before returning home to America. It would be decades before the international community reckoned with the stress machine of Leopold the Second, congo, if indeed it ever really has, I'm Danis Schwartz, and this is noble blood. Leopold the Second was not a boy of great promise. He was gangly and awkward boy who looked like a scarecrow in his military uniform. He has such a nose, said Benjamin Disraeli, the British Prime Minister, as a young prince has in a fairy tale, who has been banned by a malignant fairy. From an early age, Leopold's parents decided not to bother with much affection for him. In a letter while he was off at military school, his mother wrote, I was disturbed to see in the colonel's report that you had again been so lazy, and that your exercises had been so bad. Your father was as disturbed as I by this last report. Leopold had no expectation that he would hear directly from his father. If you wanted to speak with his father, the King, he was required to request a formal audience and go through his father's secretary. When Leopold was eighteen, he was married to Marie Henrietta and Austrian Habsburg archduchess. They hated each other almost immediately. Marie Henrietta was athletic and an active horsewoman, and Leopold was well, in the words of Queen Victoria, very odd and in the habit of saying disagreeable things to people. He was narrow minded, interested in geography, and fastidious about keeping track of money, and exactly as fun of a person as those two interests make him sound. The pair honeymooned in Venice, and Marie Henrietta wept in public because her new husband refused to let her ride in a gondola. If God hears my prayers, she wrote to a friend, I shall not go on living much longer still, Even though by all accounts they barely tolerated one another, the royal couple managed to have four children, though their one son died at age nine from pneumonia after falling in a pond. At his son's funeral, Leopold broke down publicly for the first and only time, although he did regain enough composure to ask members of Parliament to make sure that the funeral costs would be handled by the state. Leopold was so uninterested in his daughters that he tried to make himself an exception to the law in Belgium that requires one's assets to be passed on to one's children. From that point on, Leopold simply had no use for his wife, or really for the Belgian government Petipe petition. Leopold would say, small coun tree, small people. He would have no more sons, and so his legacy would need to become something greater. Leopold became king at thirty years old, but being king in Belgium in the nineteenth century wasn't anything close to the power a king would have had in Europe a few hundred years earlier. Their family was a symbolic monarchy who served at the pleasure of parliament, not because they were granted absolute authority by God. Even Leopold's title was restrictive and awkward. He wasn't the King of Belgium technically, he was the King of the Belgians, a formality that just reinforced the notion that his leadership was more for show than anything else. And so Leopold decided to turn his gaze beyond his small country and begin to focus his energy on his earliest passion profits, but not just any prophets the profits that came from owning a colony. Even before he had become king, Leopold's interest in colonialization bordered on obsession. He spent a month in Spain going through the dusty archives in the old Exchange Building page by page to calculate the revenue they made from their colonies in America. Unfortunately, the people of Belgium didn't really share their king's imperialist dreams. Their nation was new and small, Focusing on a colony seemed like an expensive luxury, especially when they didn't have a merchant fleet, let alone in navy. But Leopold wouldn't be deterred, even as they elected officials with the real power in the country continued to demure when Leopold approached in the halls of the Palace with a new idea for a place to plant the Belgian flag. After returning from one of his many scouting trips, Leopold brought the finance minister two gifts, a piece of marble from the Acropolis and a locket with his portrait. Inside the locket, Leopold wrote, Belgium must have a colony if Belgium was ever going to be a world power. If Leopold was ever going to have any real power, he needed to claim land from somewhere else on the globe. The power was by the end of the eighteen hundreds, unclaimed land would become harder to find. Leopold scoured maps of the world. Could someone buy those tiny islands off the coast of South America is Fiji for sale? Could he buy the Philippines from Spain. Leopold even floated the idea of buying lakes in the Nile Delta so that he could drain them and claim the land. For the moment, he wrote, neither the Spanish, nor the Portuguese, nor the Dutch are inclined to sell. I intend to find out discreetly if there's anything to be done in Africa. It's at this point in the story that we need to introduce another character, a writer turned explorer born in Wales with the name John Rowlands. Rowlands had a miserable childhood, born out of wedlock, abandoned by his mother, and bounced around among extended family until he landed at a workhouse for the poor, like a character in a Charles Dickens novel. But as soon as he turned eighteen, like a character in a Mark Twain novel, John Rowlands made his way to the Mississippi River. He eventually settled in New Orleans, and this is where Rowland's story becomes more myth than fact. According to him, he saw the wealthy trading magnet, Henry Hope Stanley, sitting on his porch and boldly asked if he could have a job. The man became such a mentor to the younger boy that he eventually adopted him, and Rowlands took on his new father's name, rechristening himself Henry Morton Stanley. Henry Morton Stanley wrote all about his unconventional upbringing in his autobiography. He wrote about how tragically the senior Stanley died just two years after his adoption, but Henry Hope Stanley wouldn't actually die for another twenty years, and there are no records of any adoption. In fact, Henry Morton Stanley gets so many strange details wrong that some historians argue that he didn't even meet the wealthy trader, let alone become his protegee. But the truth didn't matter as much as a good story. That was the real lesson learned Henry Morton Stanley would be come a master of reworking and mythologizing his own narrative until the truth was unknowable. Stanley would go on to fight on both sides of the American Civil War, first for the South and then for the North, and then after the war was over, he began to work as a journalist. It was an assignment for the New York Herald in that catapulted Henry Morton Stanley to international fame. You see, four years earlier, Europe had lost touch with a Scottish geologist by the name of doctor David Livingston. Stanley made it his mission to go find Livingston, alive or dead, all while sending back columns to be published in the New York Herald. It took two years and a seven hundred mile trek outfitted with one hundred and eleven porters, but in present day Tanzania, Stanley found the scientists and, according to Stanley, greeted him with a line that is now iconic. Dr Livingston. I presume it's a great line, but in all actuality, not one that he actually said at the time. It doesn't appear anywhere in his contemporary journals, but that doesn't matter. Stanley was a writer, and he knew that the most important part of a story was the way you tell it. In a way, He's right, we all remember that line a hundred and fifty years later. In some ways, Stanley was the prototype for the type of self conscious travel on luxury blogs and outdoorsy Instagram accounts, in which the experience itself only exists through its presentation to the outside world. Stanley's accounts of his adventure and the book he wrote about the experience, turned him into an overnight international celebrity. He also got a lucky break, its Livingstone, dying of malaria and dysentery before they both returned to Europe, so there wouldn't be another white man who could contradict any of his accounts. It was Stanley's word against no one's, and the world loved it. They devoured his tales of rebellious porters and vicious barbarian African tribes, wild animals, and most terrible of all, the brutal quote Arab slave trade, which Europe was free to Scoff and gas Bat having mostly banned their own massive industrial transatlantic slave trade operations. Oh about thirty years earlier after his incredible Livingston mission, Stanley set out again, this time to trace the Great Lakes of Africa, the unmapped heart of what he Stanley called the Dark Continent, and to trace the Lualaba River to see if it fed into the Nile or if it horses shoot around and became the Congo River. This time, Stanley was sponsored by both the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph in London, and his caravan was more than twice the size of the one that had accompanied him to find Livingstone. There were over three hundred people traveling with him, although only three other white men and Henry Morton Stanley being Henry Morton, Stanley didn't want anyone with him who might upstage him, so the men he chose to accompany him had no experience exploring, and all three of them died before the journey was complete. For his hundreds of Zanzibari porters, the trip was months of carrying incredibly heavy loads on their heads and backs, while Stanley riddled them with abuse. If they mutinied or attempted to flee, he punished them either with lashes or by keeping in chains to humiliate them. But the natives that Stanley ran into fared if possible. Even worse villages armed only with spears, arrows, or a few ancient traded for muskets were no match for Stanley, outfitted with rifles and an elephant gun. Unfortunately, the only source we have to go on about these encounters is Stanley himself, Yet reading his words, he doesn't mask his own pettiness or brutality. Attacked and destroyed twenty eight large towns and three or four score villages, he wrote. He went on to describe a river coast where mockers shook their spears at him. Stanley opened fire with a Winchester repeating rifle. Quote six shots and four deaths were sufficient to quiet the mocking. Stanley's columns did lead to shock and criticism from anti slavery society and humanitarians around the world, but James Gordon Bennett, his newspaper editor, dismissed their criticisms as the pearl clutching of elites who had never been in the metaphorical trenches. Critics, Bennett wrote, are safe in London philanthropists whose impractical view is that a leader should permit his men to be slaughtered by the natives and should be slaughtered himself and let discovery go to the dogs, but should never pull a trigger against the species of human vermin. One European read every single update from Stanley with rapturous fascination. King Leopold the Second who asked his servants to bring any newspaper with any dispatch from Henry Morton Stanley up to his chambers right away. When Stanley finally completed his mission, emerging at the Portuguese settlement at the mouth of the Congo River, he became the second white man ever to traverse Africa from east to west, and the first white explorer to trace the source of the Congo. The Congo was perfect for Leopold's purposes. It was a massive area laced with waterways for easy transportation once roads were built to traverse the most dangerous sections of rapids. Best of all, as Stanley's writings had made clear, the local inhabitants were no military threat. Thanks to centuries of slave raids from both coasts, the few large kingdoms around the Congo were significantly weakened. The diverse population consisted of two hundred different ethnic groups who spoke over four hundred languages and dialects, which meant that the risk of them uniting against colonialists was small. Leopold had found the answer to the question he had been asking his entire adult life, but actually claiming the undeveloped region encircled by the Congo River would be more challenging than just willing it. The Belgian people were completely uninterested, and any European country that put down a flag could ignite the scrambling of other jealous countries who could simply refuse to recognize their neighbor's colony or claim it for themselves. And so even before Stanley's mission was over, Leopold had begun to orchestrate a meticulous global propaganda campaign that, through a combination of subterfuge, flattery, and sheer force, would make him the sole owner of a piece of land over seventy six times larger than the tiny nation in which he was The King. Leopold would rule a new population with an iron, merciless fist, claiming the blood soaked profits from his comfortable throne on the other side of the world, all while white men praised him. In eighteen seventy six, King Leopold the Second organized a geographical conference to be held in Brussels. Being a monarch at the end of the nineteenth century meant that Leopold had a very specific type of capital, the magnetic allure of the monarchy itself and all of the legitimacy it provides in a vacuum. The formalities of the monarchy are arbitrary and useless, but in Leopold's hands they became very weapons he would use to conquer the congo. So decorum and formality were the chief objectives of his Geographical Conference. The goal was to dazzle his visitors, the redozen of the world's most famous explorers and military men, including a rear admiral and the president of the Paris Geographical Society. Leopold sent Belgian ships to pick up British guests in Dover, who were then escorted onto an express train to zip them the rest of the way to Brussels, with special instructions for them to pass through the Belgian border without customs. Leopold knew how impressive it would be for his guests to stay at the Royal Palace. The only problem was the Royal Palace in Brussels wasn't actually really a residence. It was more of an administrative office. Leopold and his family actually lived in a chateau on the outskirts of the city, but that wouldn't do, and so for the weekend the royal Palace was transformed into a residence. Servants frantically converted offices into guest bedrooms. In the end, everything to draper, the betting, the ink, even the toilet paper was read. As each guest entered, Leopold greeted them in French, German or English, and one by one they filed up a white marble staircase to the throne room, which glistened in the flickering light of seven thousand candles. Leopold opened the conference with an effusive speech about the importance of their purpose to open to civilization the only parts of our globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire people's is dare I say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress. The practical purpose for the conference was for the experts to work together to select locations for bases along the Congo, which could serve as hubs or scientists, linguists, and artisans. These bases, Leopold said, would be non political, working only to abolish the slave trade and established peace among chiefs, and each one would be well equipped with medicine and extra supplies for explorers passing through. At the end of the weekend, the men in attendance voted to establish the International African Association. Leopold, of course, would be the association's first chairman, but he modestly promised to step down after a year. The association gave itself a flag, a yellow star on a blue backdrop, meant to represent the bright hope of civilization in the darkness of Africa. Each new member of the Association was awarded the Cross of Leopold. Throughout Europe, prominent men began to send me a called donations, including the Viscount Ferdinando Lessons. Leopold was undertaken to less Us declared the greatest humanitarian work of this time. A side note, if the name Count de Lessup sounds familiar, it's because he is an ancestor of the man who would go on to marry Real Housewives star Countess lou An. The idea with the International African Association was that the men would return back to their home countries and start their own national chapters and that there would be a big meeting in Brussels every year. In actuality, the organization fizzled after its bombastic inauguration. It only ever had one more meeting, where they elected Leopold as chairman for the second time despite his earlier pledge, and then the group all but disappeared forever its purpose had been served. Leopold had established the foundations for legitimacy where his future endeavors in the Congo. The great men of Europe were behind him. After Henry Morton Stanley had completed his truck along the Congo and floated back to Europe on a raft of acclaim and medals and book money, Leopold dispatched one of his officers to get Stanley to come to a meeting in Brussels. King Leopold had a proposition for the explorer, a five year contract in which Leopold would pay the equivalent of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, plus the cost of an expedition for Stanley to go back to Africa and begin to establish Leopold's foothold in the Congo. The plan that was for Stanley to first set up a base and then build roads around the most dangerous parts of the Congo River, where they would be able to take a steamboat apart, carry it on land, and then bring it back to the river. Leopold's goal was to stay out several stations along the thousand mile main stretch of the Congo River so he could claim the land profit. Ben would be easy. The Congo was incredibly resourced tents, especially with regards to valuable ivory, which could be shaped into anything from chess pieces to piano keys to fake teeth. African elephants had tusks far larger than their Asian counterparts. Stanley had reported that ivory was so accessible in Africa that it was used for door posts. Who exactly was Stanley claiming the land for even Stanley wasn't sure. He thought at first it was the International African Association, or was it the vaguely named Committee for the Study of the Upper Congo, which was a private business whose shareholders included a Belgian banker secretly acting as Leopold's proxy. Leah Pold would go on to buy out the other shareholders and the company would legally cease to exist, but both he and others would continue to refer to it as if it did still exist. Even Stanley didn't realize that the company had folded. The subterfuge was deliberate. All of Stanley's European staff on the ground in Africa were required to sign a contract of secrecy. And it was around this time that King Leopold organized something called the International Association of the Congo. If that sounds similar to that pointless but idealistic International African Association, that was on purpose. The former even adopted the exact same flag as the latter, a gold star against a blue backdrop. Care must be taken, Leopold said, not to let it be obvious that the Association of the Congo and the African Association two different things. The public doesn't grasp that. Leopold framed the Association of the Congo a sort of a new Red Cross, and wealthy men all over the world sent donations. Leopold was an expert at manipulating the message depending on his audience. Two Germans, he framed the enterprise as akin to the divine mission of the Night of the Crusade. Two Americans, he stressed that he would establish in Africa a union of free cities, each led by local African tribe leaders, not dissimilar to the Union of American States. But in his letters to Stanley, Leopold dropped the facade. There is no question, he wrote of granting the slightest political power to Negroes. That would be absurd. The white men heads of the stations retain all of the powers. While continuing to promote his smoke screen charity organizations, Leopold reached out to an Oxford scholar and a lawyer to handle the legal details of acting as a corporation and claiming sovereignty of territories for individuals in Africa. Henry Morton Stanley worked not only as a brutal taskmaster, berating his crews of workmen as they filled ravines, built trails, and put together steamships, but also on Leopold's behalf, tricking African leaders into signing treaties that gave Leopold their land and gave him an exclusive trading monopoly. Using trick bullets and small electric buzzers, Stanley convinced leaders who hadn't interacted with Western technology that white men possessed superhuman strength and invulnerability, and then it was only a matter of some clothes, a few left over uniforms, and a couple of bottles of gin to trade, and the leaders signed the treaties that Stanley put in front of them. As historian Adam Hopeshelled writes in his excellent biography King Leopold's Ghost, the concept of signing your land away would have been completely for it. The tribe leaders would have been familiar with the idea of a contract of friendship, but someone across an ocean owning their land was absurd and outside the realm of contemplation. They just put an x where they were told at the bottom of a contract in a foreign language they didn't understand. And these contracts also included a clause even more sinister than you can imagine. They granted not just the land, but an agreement that the tribe would quote assist by labor or otherwise any works, improvement or expeditions which the said associations shall cause at any time to be carried out in any part of these territories. In short manpower. The Congo would become, in effect a slave state. The United States became the first to recognize Leopold's claim to the land of the Congo and in his speech the Secretary of State conveniently confused the International African Association and International Association of the Congo. The dominoes were falling into place. The next year, Leopold formally declared his landholdings to be the Congo Free State, operating under his exclusive private control. King Leopold of the Belgians was now the owner of the world's largest private landholding in history, seventies six times larger than the country you ruled over. From this point on, the details become horrific. It turns out the real profit to be made in the Congo wasn't in ivory, it was in a rubber. Leopold established a private army, the Force Publique, to enforce rubber gathering quotas in the native populations through brutal torture. The police force would arrive in a village, hold the women and children hostage, and whip workers with a bull whip called the chicot made from dried elephants hide. The penalty for not gathering enough rubber was death. In order to make sure that the police officers were using their bullets on people and not on animals to hunt for food, the hands of victims were required as trophies. Hands and feet of children would be severed if parents weren't productive enough. Even the act of gathering the rubber was violent. Once the viands were split open, the worker would slather his body in the soft latex, which would then harden. Once hard, the latex would be stripped painfully from the body, taking hair along with it. Men were worked to death, hostages starved. Some estimate that as many as ten million people were killed during King Leopold's bloody twenty three year long reign in the Congo. Ten million people slaughtered in his name as the rubber and ivory came on chips back to Belgium, and he gleefully sent only soldiers and bullets back. In Europe, they called him the Builder King for the urban projects and buildings and parks he erected using his profits. Leopold never actually went to the Congo himself, but he did bring the Congo to him in and when he opened a temporary exhibition at his country estate that would become the Royal Museum for Central Africa. The heart of the exhibit was a human zoo where two hundred and sixty seven Congolese men, women, and children were kidnapped and brought to a mock African village set up on the Royal Estates grounds. When the prisoners got sick because of visitors throwing candy over the fences, they put up a sign that said the blacks are fed by the organizing Committee. In other words, don't feed the animals. For twenty three years, Leopold was the sole owner of the Congo Free State, and his atrocities were largely ignored by the rest of the world out of convenient apathy. How much easier was it to believe that charming Leopold actually was fronting a pilanthropic endeavor. It would only be through the tireless work of missionaries that things would eventually change, people like George Washington Williams, who wrote his open letter, and like Alice see Lee Harris, a documentary photographer who captured the gruesome dismemberments on film. It would actually be a shipping officer named Edmund Dinney Morrell who would provide one of the largest public pushes for the world to recognize Leopold's horrific exploitation. Morrell noticed that it was ivory and rubber arriving on ships from the Congo, but only bullets going back. He realized there was no trade happening, and so he enlisted thinkers and celebrities of the day like Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain, and eventually, in night, Leopold the Second was forced to sell the Congo Free State to Belgium to make it actually an official bell Rgian colony. Let that sink in the Congo wasn't actually made free, it was just not personally owned by Leopold anymore. That was the humanitarian victory. Leopold died the next year at age seventy four. His funeral procession was met by booze from Belgian people. But as soon as Leopold was gone, his legacy in the Congo began to be whitewashed. He was dead, so the international fervor died out. Statues of Leopold were erected in the parks he helped build. They taught in school that colonialism might have gotten too violent under the Builder King, but colonialism was always bad. People in other European countries try to make Leopold look worse to make themselves feel better, you see. Besides, sure, there was some blood, but he was bringing civilization to Africa. It's so easy sometimes to believe the lies and to enjoy the pretty statues, the comforting facade of authority and dignity and civilization. And the statues of Leopold remained in Belgium until June twenty twenty. During the international Black Lives Matter March following George Floyd's death in the United States, protesters in Belgium coated statues of Leopold the Second in red paint in Antwerp and in Ghent and in Brussels. Some of the statues have already been taken down, but I think it's worth asking ourselves what had been keeping them up for so long? All this time. That's the story of King Leopold the Second and how he used the symbolic power of his monarchy to enact horrific realities. Keepless ning after a brief sponsor break, to hear a little bit more about the legacy he left in literature. After Henry Morton Stanley built the roads and base camps along the Congo, steamboats began to appear on the river, delivering supplies and taking rubber and ivory off to the coasts. One of those steamboats a boat called the King of the Belgians was piloted by a man named Joseph Conrad. Conrad's experience in the Congo and all of the horrors he saw first hand, would lead him to write his most famous novel, Heart of Darkness. If you haven't read it yet, you might have at least seen the movie adaptation. Although the movie doesn't take place in nineteenth century Africa, Francis Ford Coppola decided to set it in Vietnam. The movie, of course, is a acalypse. Now there's another important literary legacy from the Congo worth pointing out. Remember George Washington Williams, the Civil War soldier turned journalists who wrote the open letter to King Leopold. He also wrote a pamphlet for the international community advocating action, and he coined a phrase to describe what Leopold had done, a phrase that we still use to this day, Crimes against Humanity. Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minkey. The show was written and hosted by Dani Schwartz and produced by Aaron Manky, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.