The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition of 1886 to 1889 was one of the last major European expeditions into the interior of Africa in the nineteenth century, ostensibly to the relief of Emin Pasha, General Charles Gordon's besieged governor of Equatoria, threatened by Mahdist forces. The expedition was led by Henry Morton Stanley and came to be both celebrated for its ambition in crossing "darkest Africa", and notorious for the deaths of so many of its members and the disease unwittingly left in its wake.