Daniel J. Danielsen (1871–1916) was a pioneer of the Brethren movement in the Faroe Islands. Earlier in his career, between 1901 and 1903, he served as an engineer and lay preacher for the Congo Balolo Mission (CBM), a British-run organization that recruited missionaries from Hartley College, London, to serve in various stations in King Leopold II of Belgium's Congo Free State. He also steered the ship that took Roger Casement on his famous consular tour of investigation, which confirmed the widespread existence of colonial abuses in the Upper Congo in 1903. Casement's report initiated the events that would lead to Belgian annexation of the territory in 1908. As its title makes clear, ÓIi Jacobsen's book is mainly focused on the central African part of Danielsen's career, though a shorter second section covers his missionary work in the Faroe Islands. This review centers on Part One, ‘Congo Missionary and Campaigner’ and its accompanying appendices.

Jacobsen brings to light Danielsen's role in the emergence of the Congo reform movement. The book makes two main ‘discoveries’ that are likely to be of interest to historians of the Congo Free State and the campaign against it. First, Danielsen took some of the most famous ‘atrocity photographs’, photographs that were subsequently attributed to other British missionaries. Jacobsen convincingly suggests that the Congo reformers deliberately attributed these images to other more respectable missionaries rather than to Danielsen, who left the Congo under the accusation of violent treatment of African workers on his steamship. Second, Danielsen held the earliest public meetings – in Scotland and the Faroes – to raise public awareness of colonial abuses. The book is not without other insights; Jacobson reveals that Bokwala: The Story of a Congo Victim (1910), an anonymous anti-Leopoldian propaganda text promoted as the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the day by Congo reformers, had been authored by missionary Lily Ruskin. Jacobsen's slim volume is lavished with eighty illustrations, and though many are low resolution and some are of questionable relevance, others are rarely seen in print. Scholars of Casement will find insights in the chapter about his 1903 tour.

Even within its modest confines the book has limitations. There are a number of typographical errors and occasional misspellings. Unfortunately, several endnotes for Chapters Four to Seven are incorrectly sequenced and/or misattributed, which limits the appeal of this work to teachers of undergraduate students and undermines its documentary function. In terms of analysis, the author passes up opportunities to engage in historical debates on violence in the Congo and he glosses the context of Danielsen's work in quite a basic fashion at times. For example, Chapter Two covers the charges of brutality leveled against Danielsen by a West Indian missionary named Terence B. Sawyers. Use of the chicotte whip upon Congo peoples by the very missionaries who later criticised the Leopoldian regime merits further attention. Jacobsen reproduces proceedings from the CBM's in-house inquiry into the matter. However, his analysis of the inquiry, though even-handed, is confined to rather speculative comments. In exploring the grounds for the defense of Danielsen, Jacobsen points to numerous tributes to Danielsen as one who worked hard, sometimes selflessly, to highlight the wrongs of the ‘red rubber’ years. But righteous indignation against a corrupt system does not rule out the witness's own interpersonal cruelty. Atonement for his own roughness may even have been a motive for his speaking out. The ideological positioning of British missions and their workers in the Congo, and the kinds of pressure under which evangelists spoke out against injustices, requires more in-depth analysis than is attempted by Jacobsen.

It is clear nevertheless that Danielsen played an unrecognized role in providing assistance in and documentary materials for what would become the Congo reform campaign. Casement certainly thought highly of him. Jacobsen's study of this obscure Faroese traveler to central Africa is further evidence of the transnational character of both Leopold's colony and the organizations and networks that opposed it.