Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer
Page 1
STANLEY
by the same author
Non-fiction
LIVINGSTONE
BADEN-POWELL
SWIMMING WITH MY FATHER
Fiction
SOMEWHERE BEYOND REPROACH
CUSHING'S CRUSADE
THE MISSIONARY'S WIFE
DEEP WATER
STANLEY
The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer
TIM JEAL
To my sister, Thomasina
... away from people who had already made up their minds about me, I could be different. I could introduce myself as ... a boy of dignity and consequence, and without any reason to doubt me people would believe I was that boy. I recognized no obstacle to miraculous change but the incredulity of others ...
Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life
CONTENTS
Illustrations ix
Plates xi
Maps xiv
Introduction i
i Dreams of Love and Freedom 17
z In the Name of the Father 31
3 A Terrible Freedom 42
4 An Accident-prone Apprenticeship 57
5 War Correspondent 6z
6 How are we to be Married? 73
7 The Long-imagined Quest 91
8 `I Cannot Die!' ioi
9 Canonizing Dr Livingstone 1' 7
1o `Fame is Useless to Me' 133
z i A Destiny Resumed 149
i z Love and the Longest journey 157
13 The Island of Death 117 1
14 `The Great Struggle with this Mystery' 193
15 `I Hate Evil and Love Good' zzo
16 A Colony fora King 233
17 A Banquet in Paris 257
18 After the Slave Raids z66
r9 Who Stole the Congo? z8o
zo A Pawn in Great Power Politics z89
21 `A Kind of Innocence' 298
zz Why Rescue Emin Pasha? 3113
23 A Fateful Decision 329
24 The Enigma of Emin Pasha 336
z5 `Evil Hangs over this Forest...' 354
z6 Keeping Emin Pasha's Secret 365
27 The Shape of Things to Come... 384
z8 Dorothy's Other Love 3 911
z9 Was the Emin Pasha Expedition Piratical? 407
3 o Africa or a Child 4115
3 r An End to `Noble Objects' 423
3z Stanley, Leopold and the Atrocities 443
33 `Before it is Too Late' 453
Afterword 464
Acknowledgements 476
Sources 478
Bibliography 48z
Notes 488
Index 547
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
i Stanley's birthplace, an engraving in Cadwalader Rowlands Henry M. Stanley: the Story of his Life (187z) 18
z Civil War - Camp Douglas, a pencil drawing in Hermann W. Williams The Civil War: The Artists' Record (119611-1196z) 47
3 James Gordon Bennett Jr, a line drawing in H.M. Stanley How I Found Livingstone (1187z) 86
4 John Kirk, a photograph in Richard Hall Stanley, an Adventurer Explored(1974) 96
5 John Shaw and William Farquhar, a line drawing in H.M. Stanley How I Found Livingstone (1187z) 97
6 Dr Livingstone, I presume? an engraving in H.M. Stanley How I Found Livingstone (1[872.) 1[16
7 Dr Livingstone travelling through marshes weeks before his death, an engraving in The Last Journals of David Livingstone ed. Horace Waller (11874) 1154
8 View from Mr Sparhawk's - F. Pocock, F. Barker, Zanzibar boy, E. Pocock, Kalulu from the engraving (based on a photograph) in Stanley's Through the Dark Continent vol i (1878) 161
9 Reception at Bumbireh, an engraving in H.M. Stanley Through the Dark Continent vol i (11878) 176
io Tippu Tip, an engraving in H.M. Stanley In Darkest Africa vol i (189o) r9o
ii Death of Kalulu, an engraving in H.M. Stanley Through the Dark Continent vol ii (11878) zo5
iz `Lady Alice' over the falls, an engraving in H.M. Stanley Through the Dark Continent vol it (1878) 207
13 The women who completed the Trans-Africa journey, an engraving (based on a photograph) in Through the Dark Continent vol ii (1[878) z1[8
114 Leopold II from a photograph in the Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale 23 5
1[5 Stanley in self-designed hat, a photograph in The Autobiography of Henry M. Stanley ed. Dorothy Stanley (1[909) 2-42-
116 A steamer on the Upper Congo, an engraving in H.M. Stanley The Congo and the Founding of Its Free State Congo vol i (11885) 2-44
117 Count Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, an engraving in H.M.Stanley The Congo and the Founding of Its Free State Congo vol i (1[885) 247
118 Dualla, a photograph in the Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale z56
1[9 Emin Pasha, a line drawing in H.M. Stanley In Darkest Africa voli(1[890) 31[3
zo Yambuya Camp, a line drawing in James S. Jameson The Story of the Rear Column and the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (11890) 335
z1[ `Fight with cannibals', an engraving in In Darkest Africa vol i (1[890) 338
zz The relief of Captain Robert Nelson, an engraving in In Darkest Africa vol i (11890) 343
23 Stanley meets Emin, an engraving in In Darkest Africa vol i (1[890) 349
2-4 Climbing the plateau slopes, an engraving in In Darkest Africa vol ii (11890) 367
z5 'Rescued'- Punch cartoon reproduced in Roger Jones The Rescue of Emin Pasha (1[972) 379
z6 Sir Alfred Lyall, a photograph in Sir Mortimer Durand The Life of Sir Alfred Lyall (119113) 395
27 Edward Glave, frontispiece of Glave's Six Years of Adventure in Congo-Land(11895) 432
LIST OF PLATES
11 Bowling Green Cottage, Denbigh, a photograph in the Stanley Family Archive (SFA), Christie's Images
z St Asaph Workhouse, a photograph in The Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley (11909 )
3 Stanley's mother, Elizabeth Jones (nee Parry) in middle age, from the collection of Robert Owen
4 Stanley's first love, Catherine Parry, a photograph in the West Glamorgan Archives
5 John Rowlands aged fifteen, a photograph in SFA, Christie's Images
6 The first photograph of Stanley taken in America, SFA, Christie's Images
7 Stanley aged twenty shortly before fighting in the Civil War, a photograph in The Autobiography of Henry M.Stanley (r9o9)
8 Lewis Noe, a photograph in Richard Hall Stanley: An Adventurer Explored (11974)
9 Stanley in his bogus American naval officer's uniform in 11866, a photograph in the Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale
11o Stanley photographed in Alexandria in June 11868, a photograph in the estate of the late Quentin Keynes, sold Christie's 7 April 2004
r r David Livingstone in England in 118 6 5 before his final return to Africa
112 Stanley wearing Arab dress on the Somali coast in 11869, photograph in SFA, Christie's Images
113 The hats Stanley and Livingstone were wearing on the day of their meeting, now in the Royal Geographical Society
14 Stanley's carriers crossing the Makata swamp, a hand-painted glass lantern slide based on an engraving in Stanley's How I Found Livingstone (1872.), Christie's Images
1 5 A bearded Stanley photographed on Zanzibar with Selim and Kalulu after the Livingstone meeting, in SFA, Christie's images
16 Stanley aged 31 after `finding' Livingstone, a studio portrait by the Stereoscopic & Photographic Co., of Regent Street and Cheapside
117 'Lookout, you drop that box - I'll shoot you.' A lantern slide based on the engraving facing page 642 of Stanley's How I Found Livingstone
18 The je
wel-encrusted snuff box given to Stanley by Queen Victoria in 1872
19 Emilia Webb of Newstead Abbey, a wash drawing at Newstead Abbey owned by Nottingham City Council
zo Alice Pike at the time of her engagement to Stanley, SFA, Christie's Images
zi A romantically dressed Stanley in 1874, a photograph in The Autobiography of Henry M. Stanley ('909)
zz Stanley on the South Downs near Brighton with the journalist J.C. Parkinson, a photograph in the RGS
23 Some of Stanley's principal Wangwana carriers and their headmen on his great trans-Africa journey, a photograph in the Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale
24 Stanley in Paris in August 1884 with friends of Edward King, from the photograph in Richard Hall Stanley, an Adventurer Explored (1974)
z5 Stanley with Uledi and Manwa Sera in 1877, a photograph in the Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale
z6 Stanley in Paris with old friend and colleague, Anthony Swinburne, late January 1887, a photograph in the Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale
27 Stanley's Emin Pasha Relief Expedition officers: Major Edmund M.Barttelot, James S. Jameson, Arthur J. Mounteney Jephson, Sergeant William Bonny, Dr Thomas H. Parke, Lieutenant William G. Stairs, from plates in The Life of Edmund M. Barttelot ed. W.G. Barttelot (ii 89o), Story of the Rear Column ed. Mrs J.S. Jameson (189o), and The Diary of A.J. Mounteney
z8 Stanley lecturing about the Emin Pasha Expedition, from The Graphic io May 1890
z9 Dorothy Tennant in 1189o, taken by Eveleen Myers, photograph in the Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale
30 Stanley in r89o, the year of his marriage, a photograph in the Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale
311 Stanley, Jephson, Nelson and Stairs after the Emin Pasha Expedition, a photograph in the Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale
32 Stanley and Dorothy on a lecture tour in America, 1891, a photograph in the Musee Royal de 1'Afrique Centrale
33 William Hoffman, Stanley's former valet, 1895, a photograph in the Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale
34 Stanley and Sir William Mackinnon in 189z, a photograph in the Musee Royal de 1'Afrique Centrale
3 5 Furze Hill, near Pirbright, Surrey, a photograph in The Autobiography of Henry M.Stanley (11909)
36 Stanley with his adopted son, Denzil, a photograph in the Musee Royal de 1'Afrique Centrale
37 Stanley at his desk, a year before his death, a photograph in the Musee Royal de 1'Afrique Centrale
38 Stanley's grave, a photograph in The Autobiography of Henry M. Stanley (1909 )
39 Stanley's adopted grandson, Richard, in 11954, at his grandfather's statue in Leopoldville, a photograph in the Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale
40 Stanley's fallen statue lying on one of his old steamers, a photograph by Guy Tillim
INTRODUCTION
How I came to write the life
of Africa's least understood explorer
When I contrast what I have achieved in my measurably brief life with what Stanley has achieved in his possibly briefer one, the effect is to sweep utterly away the ten-storey edifice of my own self-appreciation and to leave nothing behind but the cellar.
Mark Twain writing in 1886
In January 11963, when I was a few days short of my eighteenth birthday and waiting to go to university the following October, I set out overland from Cairo to Johannesburg on a zigzagging journey which I expected to last about four months. I made my way south, at first by Nile steamer and then in a succession of decrepit buses and trucks that juddered along roads at times resembling riverbeds, or sped along rust-coloured laterite tracks from which their tyres flung up clouds of choking dust. In small out-of-the-way places, a few care-worn travellers seemed always to be waiting anxiously at dusk, hoping to persuade our exhausted driver to take them on with him next day for whatever money they could afford to pay.
Such roadside staging posts would typically boast a single shop or duka, stocking cigarettes, matches, Coca-Cola and canned fish, with perhaps a bicycle repair shed nearby, and a single fuel pump, and someone selling steamed green bananas or cornmeal porridge under a tree. For a while those waiting would scan the road eagerly for a distant plume of dust, but would sink into a fatalistic reverie after a day or so. Until a vehicle appeared they could go no further, and with the nearest village perhaps a hundred or more miles away, there was absolutely nothing they could do about it.
Away from the `main' road, a maze of faint single-file paths, which only locals knew, fanned into the bush. A guideless stranger would soon be lost and in real peril when his water ran out. In fact if anyone became separated from his fellows far from a village, he or she was likely to die in the bush, if not from thirst or exhaustion then in the jaws of a wild beast. In regions where the tsetse fly killed horses and oxen, riding and travelling by cart were impossible, leaving walking or cycling as the only remaining options. But who would try to walk hundreds of miles across uncharted country, when the rains could turn a road into a muddy morass within hours, and in high summer the heat could kill anyone without water and a shady place to rest? So the next truck, with its drums of extra fuel, spare tyres and life-saving food and water, offered the only chance.
Night comes rapidly in Africa, with twilight hardly existing, and the blackness seeming darker on account of its sudden arrival. For a while lamps and candles glow in huts and shacks, and adults talk and children play, but rarely till late in small wayside places. After that, on starless nights, the darkness is almost tangible, and when the crickets fall silent, the barking of a dog or the distant growl of some unidentified beast merely serves to emphasize the eerie silence that blankets the endless bush for miles around. At such moments, when I was not fretting over whether there was a snake or scorpion on the earth floor somewhere near my sleeping place, or whether my paludrine tablets, my insect-repelling creams and rarely used mosquito net would save me from malaria, I reminded myself that the Victorian explorers had possessed none of these things and yet had crossed the entire continent, not on known roads and tracks but through virgin bush and jungle, and along those dangerously illusive, vanishing paths that I would never consider using unless riding in a sturdy vehicle with someone who knew the area well.
During my trip, it first dawned on me why nineteenth-century explorers had needed a hundred or more African porters to accompany them into the interior. How else, lacking wheeled transport and draught animals because of the tsetse, could they have carried with them enough food and water, and sufficient beads, cloth and brass wire to buy fresh food supplies? And since their highly visible trade goods would have been a constant incitement to theft (a bit like carrying a bank around everywhere), I understood why expeditions had routinely been protected by armed Africans. As I passed slowly through recently independent Uganda, and soon to be independent Tanganyika, I was well aware that the great explorers were considered anachronistic embarrassments in this era when Africa's future, rather than its colonial past, rightly claimed our attention. Even so, from that time onwards the realities of earlier exploration fascinated me, and in the early 197os, a few years after I left Oxford, I wrote a life of David Livingstone that is still in print today.
Thirty-five years on, it is still hard for us to appreciate the immensely powerful hold that exploration exerted on the public imagination in nineteenth-century Europe and America. Then, the world had not yet been shrunk by the automobile and the aeroplane, and the planet's remotest places seemed as inaccessible as the stars. From mid century, successful explorers were revered in much the same way as the Apollo astronauts would be just over a hundred years later. Very few achieved fame after 1187 r - the year in which Stanley `found' Livingstone - since by then, apart from apparently inaccessible central and sub-Saharan Africa, the only significant parts of the planet left unexplored were the equally daunting polar regions, along with northern Greenland and the north-east and north-west passages. But for the rapidly increasing populations of Europe's and America's factory towns, the romantic appeal of the world's wilde
r outposts grew stronger. Stanley wrote in the r 870s that, in Africa, he felt freed from `that shallow life which thousands lead in England where a man is not permitted to be real and natural, but is held in the stocks of conventionalism'.
In an untamed land, a man was imagined to be free to cut down trees at will, kill game and navigate rivers, and to assume total responsibility for his own life. And that was what the explorers were imagined to be doing in Africa, with little account being taken of the appalling problems that overwhelmed most of them. In the novels of Fenimore Cooper, and those by Stanley's friend Mark Twain - especially his two great novels of boyhood - the values of the frontier were exalted above those of the city. American adulation of frontiersmen like Boone and Crockett, and the heroes of the Wild West, was paralleled in Britain by a passion for African explorers, and a revival of interest in the Elizabethan seafarers. Then came Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines and She, and novels by Ballantine, Mayne Reid and Stevenson, which together completed the romantic (as opposed to the economic) underpinnings of the imperial impulse.
As an adventure-loving boy, Joseph Conrad had been entranced by ,the blank spaces [on the map] then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent'. Yet romantic longings were so far removed from the realities of African travel that it is hard to imagine why so many men entertained them for so long. Really there was no mystery about why Conrad's `blank spaces' persisted, and why none of the great lakes had been `discovered' by 11850, and why the continent's two longest rivers, the Nile and the Congo, were still uncharted twenty years later. The awesome problems besetting Africa's explorers began at the coast. Most rivers were harbourless and obstructed by surf-beaten sand bars, and blocked upstream by impassable rapids. In 118o5 Mungo Park, a Scottish surgeon, and forty of the forty-four Europeans he had engaged to find the source of the river Niger, perished in the attempt. Park himself was murdered, while most of his men died of malaria. In 118116, the British naval officer James Tuckey was one of fourteen men to die on the Congo out of thirty who had volunteered to go on with him beyond the first cataracts. They travelled only 1170 miles from the sea. Thirtyeight men died of fever out of forty-seven Britons on the Niger Expedition of 11833 to 11834, and Richard Lander, their leader, was murdered.