Sheppard had stumbled on one of the most grisly aspects of Leopold’s rubber system. Like the hostage-taking, the severing of hands was deliberate policy, as even high officials would later admit. “During my time in the Congo I was the first commissioner of the Equator district,” recalled Charles Lemaire after his retirement. “As soon as it was a question of rubber, I wrote to the government, ‘To gather rubber in the district . . . one must cut off hands, noses and ears.’”
