Whereas the senior Dumas infused his work with fantasy and high adventure, Alexandre chose to focus on realism. His preoccupation with love, sexuality, and morality is evident in almost all his works. His “dramas are remarkable for the fine drawing of characters, the pathos of many scenes, the skill with which he brings out the denouement,” French critic Rosine Mellé remarked. “Few among the best psychologists have shown a more perfect knowledge of the customs of our times, a greater keenness of observation, and a deeper study of passions and of human nature.”
As a result of his work in the theater, Alexandre was admitted to the Académie Française, a prestigious organization devoted to the study and preservation of the French language. In 1894, he received the Légion d’honneur, the highest award in France. Alexandre Dumas fils summed up his philosophy as such: “I start with the prophylactic assumption that all men are scoundrels, all women trollops. Then, if I find that I have been wrong about some of them, my surprise is pleasurable rather than painful.” He died on November 27, 1895.
CHAPTER 10
HENRY STANLEY
THE ILLEGITIMATE WELSHMAN WHO FOUND DR. LIVINGSTONE
1841–1904
A YOUNG BASTARD WHO GREW UP IN A WELSH WORKHOUSE LED AN EXPEDITION INTO AFRICA TO FIND A MISSING MISSIONARY. HE EMERGED A HERO AND BECAME BOTH AN ACCLAIMED EXPLORER AND ONE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY’S TOP CELEBRITIES.
“DR. LIVINGSTONE, I PRESUME?” IT MAY HAVE BEEN THE MOST FAMOUS greeting in history, learned, memorized, and mimicked by generations of schoolchildren in America and Britain. One afternoon in 1871, two white men met in an African tribal village on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, in what is now Tanzania. The older man, gray-haired and frail looking, stepped forward and lightly lifted his cap. He held out his hand, nodded, and answered the question in one word. “Yes,” he said.
The other man swept off the pith helmet he had specially cleaned up for the meeting. He bowed. He was much younger, just reaching thirty, short, stocky, with a carefully tended mustache. Behind him waited a long line of native bearers, balancing packs and supplies. Speaking with what Queen Victoria, with a contemptuous wrinkle of the royal nose, would later characterize as “a strong American twang,” the young man explained that the outside world had become concerned about the revered medical missionary who had devoted his life to exploring and charting “darkest Africa,” with an eye to identifying the most propitious locations for mission stations and the peoples most in need of Christianity. The sainted Livingstone was feared lost in trackless jungles, deathly ill of virulent tropical disease, maybe dead, perhaps even eaten by cannibals.
Tipping his polished pith helmet under a billowing U.S. flag, Henry Stanley greets the revered “missing” missionary David Livingstone, with the famous words, “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” in this 1872 engraving. The Granger Collection, New York
With the emphatic two-word command, “Find Livingstone!” the young man’s employer, James Gordon Bennett Jr. of the New York Herald, had sent him halfway around the world to ascertain the truth. He was most pleased, the young man said, to be greeted by a healthy Livingstone who was very much alive. The world would be overjoyed with the good news, and so would Bennett.
Livingstone smilingly protested that he had not been lost at all, knew his whereabouts perfectly, and had been in touch with his wife and family. He was gratified that so many people had taken an interest in his whereabouts and welfare, and surprised that a leading American newspaper, particularly one with a reputation for sensationalism, would have mounted such an expedition and not some august organization like the Royal Geographic Society. He was too polite to ask the young man’s name. Instead he suggested his unexpected visitor might be tired from the arduous trek and would like to rest.
Not until the next day over tea did the young man identify himself. He said he was an American named Henry Morton Stanley. But that was a name he had been given by another Henry Stanley, an American businessman who, he was to repeat many times, had informally adopted him in his teens. Nor was he an American citizen. He had been born in the small village of Denbigh, in northern Wales, on January 28, 1841. The Denbigh parish register noted the baptism of John Rowlands Jr., bastard, born on that date to Elizabeth Parry, unmarried, and John Rowlands. Even the name of the father may have been a fiction. Elizabeth, eighteen, was “no better than she should be,” in the local vernacular; John Rowlands was the town drunk. Denbigh gossip said the real father was a prominent local attorney, James Vaughan Horne, who had paid Rowlands to swear paternity for the price of a few drinks. A century later, a Stanley biographer conducted a lengthy investigation and concluded that the gossips were probably right.
“WHERE ARE WE GOING, DICK?”
The teenage mother had little interest in either matrimony or motherhood. (She would eventually bear five more children, apparently by several fathers, all but the last out of wedlock.) Rather than be subjected to the taunts of the townspeople, she left her newborn in the care of her seventy-year-old father and fled to London. Moses Parry was a kindly retired butcher who had come upon hard times and was now living in a two-room cottage with two grown sons. Still, he welcomed the boy, played with him, dandled him on his knee, took him for walks and to church, and taught him to trace the letters of the alphabet on a slate.
Then, suddenly the old man died, almost literally in little John’s arms, in 1846. Decades later he could describe tearfully how the old man had cried out, clutched both hands to his chest, collapsed, and died. Custody now fell to Moses’s two unmarried sons. They shortly decided that raising a five-year-old was too much of a burden and farmed him out to a middle-aged couple, the Prices. After six months, they stopped paying the caregivers.
One day the Prices’ twenty-seven-year-old son Richard scooped up the boy and, first carrying him on his shoulders and then prodding him along, hurried him through the town. “Where are we going, Dick?” the boy plaintively cried out in Welsh. “To see your Aunt Mary,” Dick lied. Instead, the two stopped in front of a giant iron gate. When the gate opened, Dick shoved the five-year-old inside. Eager hands clutched him, and the gate closed as the boy screamed and wailed.
STANLEY’S TEENAGE MOTHER HAD LITTLE INTEREST IN EITHER MATRIMONY OR MOTHERHOOD. (SHE WOULD EVENTUALLY BEAR FIVE MORE CHILDREN, APPARENTLY BY SEVERAL FATHERS, ALL BUT THE LAST OUT OF WEDLOCK.)
St. Asalph’s workhouse was a dumping ground not only for unwanted children but also for the detritus of Welsh society—those too old to work, the feebleminded, the very ill, the disabled. Males and females, even husbands and wives, were scrupulously separated. They subsisted on a diet of bread and gruel, and were dressed uniformly—men in coarse-woven, dun-colored suits and women in striped dresses, making them easily recognized if they managed to escape.
They slept two to a bed, and Stanley was to report later that he had been exposed to “all manner of depravity,” as well as frequently beaten by the teacher, James Francis. In truth, however, flogging was routine at many English schools, even premier institutions like Eton. And St. Asalph’s Francis gave him a solid education. He learned to read and love reading, and he had access to many books, many of them sappy morality tales but including classics such as Robinson Crusoe.
One dinner hour just before his tenth birthday, Francis called John aside and pointed to “a tall woman with an oval face, and a great coil of dark hair behind her head.” Francis asked John whether he knew the woman.
“No, sir,” I replied, Stanley wrote years later in his autobiography draft.
“What, do you not know your own mother?”
“I started with a burning face, [Stanley wrote] and directed a shy glance at her and perceived her regarding me with a look of cool, critical scrutiny. I had expected to feel a gush of tenderness toward her, but her expression was so chilling that the valves of my heart closed with a snap.”
Elizabeth Parry was not there to see her son; she and two of her other illegitimate children had been consigned to the workhouse as des
titute paupers.
Mother and son were not to meet again until he was twenty-two years old, but he obviously yearned for such a relationship. He made several trips to Wales to see her, but he was not accepted until later, when he was prosperous.
At age ten, John made an attempt to escape, according to Stanley’s questionable autobiography, climbing over the workhouse wall and walking 8 miles (13 km) to his uncle Moses’s home. He spent a day and a half laughing, chattering, and playing with his young cousins. Then Uncle Moses returned him to the workhouse. What would the neighbors think if he housed a workhouse refugee?
By the time John left the workhouse at age fifteen, he had high marks in arithmetic and geography, and Francis was pushing to have him admitted to a major public school. The teacher even called on John’s uncle Moses to help, saying John was “an excellent scholar and endowed with extraordinary talents.” Moses ignored the plea.
But in 1856, fifteen-year-old John got a chance to further his education, and another taste of freedom and family life. Moses Owen, twenty, was the second son of Elizabeth Parry’s older sister, Mary. Just appointed headmaster of a school in Brynford, he volunteered to take in the obviously bright boy and tutor him. John remained in Moses’s household for nine months, over the objections of Moses’s wife.
When summer came, Moses sent the boy “temporarily” to a farm owned by Mary Owen. John enjoyed the fresh air and the farm work, even the plowing and weeding, after the confinement of St. Asalph’s. And that taste of freedom was enough. When he was not invited back to Moses Owen’s household, he tried another relative, his mother’s oldest sister, Maria, in Liverpool. Maria and her husband brought him to Liverpool and found him a clerkship in an insurance office. When the insurance company failed, he followed the “boy wanted” signs and successively worked as errand boy for a haberdashery and a butcher.
One day, delivering meat to a vessel at the Liverpool docks, he was asked whether he would like to sign on as a ship’s boy. He immediately accepted, only to learn on a seven-week voyage that the workhouse beatings and harassment were mild compared to those he endured on the ship. The day the Windermere docked in New Orleans, he jumped ship.
JOHN BECOMES HENRY
From the moment the seventeen-year-old Welsh boy stepped onto the New Orleans dock in 1858, he fell in love with America. To begin with, there was the boom and buzz of a great city, humming with life, its polyglot mixture of faces and tongues from everywhere, lively music, spicy aromas, and beautiful, well-dressed women. Most of all was the sense of freedom and a new life. Here he was not the discarded waif of the workhouse or the lowly deckhand of the Windermere. No one bossed him or pushed him around; no one snubbed him or looked down on him for his supposedly disgraceful origins. No one knew anything about him, or his illegitimacy or workhouse days. For the first time in his life, he wrote later, he was treated as a reasonable and worthy human being. It was nothing like Wales, and certainly not like the workhouse.
The first night he slept on a cotton bale on the docks. When morning came he set out looking for “boy wanted” signs or other opportunities. He also began the metamorphosis from John Rowlands to Henry Morton Stanley.
How this was accomplished, if not the stuff of myth, is at least arguable. According to Stanley’s initial stab at autobiography in 1890, he accosted a man sitting outside a wholesale grocery, reading a newspaper. “Do you want a boy?” he asked the man, whom he assumed was the store’s owner. The man asked him to read a sentence in the newspaper to prove he was literate, then engaged him on the spot. The man was named Henry Stanley, said to be an itinerant cotton broker who had a desk inside the grocery, which was owned by one James Speake.
The enterprising youth was to spend the next two years with Stanley, traveling with him on business calls along the Mississippi and its tributaries as far as St. Louis. Stanley came to treat him as his own son and even conducted a mock baptism in which he rechristened the boy “Henry Morton Stanley,” the “Morton” because that was the maiden name of Stanley’s late and beloved wife. “Mister Stanley” made plans to formally adopt him. Then his benefactor/foster father went to Cuba to visit an ailing brother, while John was sent to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to explore the possibility of opening a store there. Here he learned that “Mister Stanley” had died in a Cuban yellow-fever epidemic, Speake had also died, and his store had burned to the ground. Meanwhile, John, now using the name Henry Stanley, was clerking in a grocery in Cypress Bend, Arkansas, when the Civil War caught him in 1861.
Various authors and critics have cast doubt on aspects of Stanley’s story, and in his masterful 2007 biography, author Tim Jeal, after some astute and painstaking investigation, concluded that much of the tale was fiction. The 1860 census showed only one Henry Stanley in New Orleans—Henry Hope Stanley. He was indeed a prosperous cotton broker with a posh office near the Customs House and scarcely in need of rented desk space in the rear of a wholesale grocery. This Henry Stanley did not die in Cuba but lived until 1868 as a prominent New Orleans business leader. There was no evidence that he had ever intended to adopt the youth; no adoption papers had ever been drafted. If anyone had been the boy’s benefactor, it was Speake. Records showed John Rowlands worked for Speake for two years and was indeed treated as a family member.
When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in November 1860, Cypress Bend, like much of the South, was caught up by war fever. Seven Southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederacy. Arkansas, a slave-holding state but a poor one, hung back until Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor in April 1861 and Lincoln called for troops to put down the insurrection. Then Arkansas joined three other earlier holdout states in declaring secession. The young men of Cypress Bend rushed to enlist in the glorious cause, cheered on by wives and girlfriends. Stanley held out. As a British citizen, he felt it was not his quarrel. (“I could never understand,” he once said, “why white people were killing each other over the rights of black people.”)
Then one day he received a package addressed by a feminine hand. The package contained a young woman’s chemise and slip, clearly mocking his supposed cowardice. He believed the “gift” had come from one of the “beautiful” daughters of James L. Goree, a wealthy physician and plantation owner who was one of the store’s best customers. Deeply stung by the sender’s derision—it was “far from being a laughing matter to be called a coward,” especially by a young woman—he promptly enlisted in a local militia unit, the Dixie Grays, using the name William H. Stanley.
SERVING THE “BONNY BLUE FLAG”
On April 4, 1862, carrying an antique flintlock musket and wearing an ill-fitting Confederate uniform, he found himself one of ninety thousand Union and Confederate troops locked in the decisive Battle of Shiloh, or Pittsburg Landing, on the Tennessee River. It was the battle that brought the victorious Major General Ulysses S. Grant to national attention. The battle also cost the Confederacy its commanding general, Albert Sidney Johnston.
For Private William H. Stanley, the Battle of Shiloh was also mercifully brief but grisly. As the Grays advanced against the Union lines, he saw his best friend killed, torn apart by a fusillade to his midsection, and others from Cypress Bend wounded or killed. Then the Union troops counterattacked, scattering the Confederates. Stanley was caught between the lines and captured.
He was taken first to a prisoners’ holding pen and then to Camp Douglas near Chicago, a camp overflowing with cases of dysentery and typhoid. More than two hundred men died the first week he was there. The death toll and misery, the conviction that, in the old Southern adage, he “didn’t have a dog in this fight,” and the belief that the Confederacy was doomed to defeat persuaded him to switch sides and join a Union artillery regiment as a “writer,” or clerk. He became ill again, then was sent home until his health improved (or simply deserted, as some authors have written). After a quick trip back to Wales in which he was inhospitably received by his mother, he returned to the United States and began to
shape a career as a journalist.
First, though, Stanley enlisted in the Navy, again serving as a “writer,” on the frigate Minnesota. One official duty was to write accounts of the vessel’s actions. When the Minnesota participated in the bombardment and subsequent capture of Fort Fisher, which protected the port of Wilmington, North Carolina, the creative Stanley wrote a glowing account of the Minnesota’s role that he sold to several newspapers. After the war ended, these clippings convinced the Missouri Democrat in St. Louis to sign him as a freelance correspondent, covering the turbulent Colorado gold fields.
Stanley briefly left the United States in 1866 for another trip to Wales. This time his mother accepted him as a respectable member of the family; he was wearing an American naval officer’s uniform (which he had “borrowed”). A foray into Turkey followed, where he and a companion were robbed, beaten, and briefly jailed in a hideous Turkish prison, all of which he wrote about for papers back home.
When he returned, he was hired by the Missouri Democrat as a full-time employee. His first assignment was to travel with and report on an expedition against Indian tribes led by the Civil War hero General Winfield Scott Hancock. His blood-and-gore reporting caught the eye of other editors and he was soon selling his reporting on the Indian wars to several of them, including James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the nation’s largest newspaper, the New York Herald. When Hancock’s expedition ended, he went to New York and on December 16, 1867, approached Bennett for a job.
Great Bastards of History Page 13