The Story of the Captives

The Story of the Captives is a memoir by Henry Blanc, the British army surgeon who lived from 1831 to 1911 and who was one of the European captives held by Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia in the years leading up to the British military expedition to Abyssinia in 1868.

The Ethiopian captivity crisis was one of the substantial Victorian colonial episodes of the 1860s. Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia, also known as Theodore in English language sources of the period, had taken a number of British and European subjects captive in the late 1850s and early 1860s, partly in response to his frustration over various diplomatic communications with Britain that he believed had been treated with insufficient seriousness. The captives included the British consul Charles Cameron, various missionaries, and Henry Blanc himself, who had been sent to Ethiopia as a member of a British diplomatic mission attempting to secure the release of the earlier captives and had then been added to the captive group himself.

The captivity lasted several years and ended only with the substantial British military expedition under General Robert Napier that landed at Annesley Bay on the Red Sea coast in late 1867 and marched into the Ethiopian highlands across the early months of 1868. The expedition culminated in the Battle of Magdala in April 1868, in which the British forces stormed Tewodros’s mountain fortress and freed the captives. Tewodros himself committed suicide rather than surrender to the British, and the expedition then withdrew without attempting any substantial occupation of Ethiopian territory.

Blanc’s memoir presents the captive experience from the inside, with substantial detail about the conditions of the captivity, the personality and behaviour of Tewodros himself, the various other captives and their experiences, the political situation in Ethiopia during the years of the captivity, and the eventual British rescue. Blanc had substantial direct contact with Tewodros across the captivity period and his portrait of the emperor is one of the most substantial first hand European accounts of the figure.

The book is essential reading for the Victorian Ethiopian captivity episode and the broader 1868 British Abyssinia expedition. It pairs naturally with the various other Victorian accounts of the episode and with the substantial modern scholarly literature on the Tewodros period in Ethiopian history.