by Tim Jeal
To get rid of the unwanted boy, Aunt Mary now enlisted the help of her older sister, Maria Morris, who lived in Liverpool. Maria delighted Mary by announcing that her husband, Tom, knew the manager of a Liverpool insurance office, who would definitely be able to offer work to John. Mary now instructed her nephew to write a grovelling letter to his uncle in case he failed to come up with a firm invitation to Liverpool. John began by apologizing in case he had displeased Tom Morris in any way (though it is hard to imagine how he could have done) and told him about his aunt's and his anxiety. `Dearest Uncle, I sue to you for kindness. I have nowhere to go unless I procure a place ... Hoping sincerely you will return me an answer by return of post. I shall feel extremely obliged to you, so I remain, Your very humble nephew, John Rowlands.'47 His uncle Tom, a soft-hearted man, wrote back swiftly, summoning him to Liverpool. The plan was that he should arrive there in a month's time, in August 118
Though John was relieved that the uncertainty was over, when the moment to leave finally came he felt nostalgic and emotional. He had spent his entire life at one end or other of the beautiful Vale of Clwyd, and it was his attachment to the landscape, rather than to his aunt and cousins, that made the leaving difficult. Years later, he quoted Wordsworth to explain:
But like Childe Roland, the seventeen-year-old knew that he had to be bold and leave. From his first sight of Liverpool, as he stood on the deck of the packet steamer, John was dazed by `the masses of houses, immensely tall chimneys, towers, lengths of walls, and groves of ships' masts'. The press of drays, carts and carriages in the streets, and the grinding sound of their metal wheels, were all new to him. His aunt Mary escorted the future explorer through the teeming city, and before parting gave him a guinea, with the words: `Be a good boy and make haste to get rich.'49
Initially, John found greater kindness in the back streets of Liverpool, living with the Morris family, than he had at Fynnon Bueno.s° He liked his bluff and hearty uncle and, to start with, had few problems with his younger cousins. But his genial uncle was overextended. He had been a railway official, but for some reason never explained had lost his job and now earned a pound a week checking cotton bales. When Uncle Tom's insurance contact failed to produce the hoped-for job, Aunt Maria asked her nephew for his suit and his overcoat so they could be pawned. She also took the guinea he had been given by his aunt Mary. John was left with no illusions about the straitened circumstances of his hosts.
After tramping the streets for days, he found a job as a shop boy in a haberdasher's, trimming lamps, sweeping floors and polishing windows from seven in the morning till nine at night. A week of illness cost him this job. And now he could contribute nothing to the family's expenses. As hungry for affection as ever, Stanley was disillusioned to find that even bluff Uncle Tom was cooling towards him. After more weeks of tramping, Stanley found work as a butcher's boy in a street close to Brambley Moor Dock. `It was then,' he recalled later, `that I came across the bold sailor-boys, young middies, gorgeous in brass buttons, whose jaunty air of hardihood took my admiration captive.' Delivering meat to ships in the docks, he `marvelled at their lines and size and read with feelings verging on awe the names Blue jacket ... Pocohontas, Sovereign of the Seas. The perfume of strange products hung about them. Out of their vast holds came coloured grain, bales of silks ... hogsheads, barrels, boxes, sacks.'
One day John delivered meat to an American packet ship, the Windermere, 11,1107 tons, registered at the port of Boston. The captain, David Harding, invited him into his cabin and showed him its fine furnishings and gilded mirrors. Harding promised John five dollars a month and a new outfit if he joined the ship's company as a cabin boy. Numerous other boys before him had been lured by the same bait, only to endure such terrible treatment on their passage that they deserted at the first American port, enabling the captain to pocket their wages. Knowing nothing of this, the butcher's boy accepted the offers'
Although John felt again the terror of impending change, he was on the verge of making one of the bravest and most crucial decisions of his life. Even when his aunt and uncle tried to dissuade him, he refused to change his mind. He could not bear to continue his `slavish dependence on relatives who could scarcely support themselves'.'
A few days before Christmas 1858, a month before his eighteenth birthday, John gazed back at Liverpool from the foredeck of the Windermere as she was towed out from the docks into the river Mersey through flurries of snow.
TWO
In the Name of the Father
Two days after the Windermere docked in New Orleans in February 11859, after a passage of seven weeks, John Rowlands `jumped ship', having been outraged to be treated not as the cabin boy he had signed on to be, but as the lowest deckhand. When the ship was tied up alongside the famous levee (the principal flat-topped embankment that extended along the river acting as a dike and quay), John strode ashore and was filled with the `blissful feeling that rises from emancipation ... at last the boy was free!" In the workhouse, and then at Fynnon Benno, he had known `scarcely an hour free from the supervision of someone'. But America was different. `For the first time I was addressed as a reasonable being ... We seemed to stand in the relation of youth to age, not as pupil or servant ... The only difference between us was of years.' In New Orleans, he wrote later, `I felt that my person was sacred & inviolable."
This democratic sense of the value of everyone (at this date, provided their skin was white) was America's great gift to him, easing the humiliation of having occupied, as a workhouse bastard, the lowest conceivable position in a society worshipping rank and class. Between r 8zo and 1186o more than half a million people came from Europe as immigrants to New Orleans. Many continued on up the Mississippi to the interior, but enough settled in the city to ensure that the majority of its citizens were foreign born. Because very few claimed their social standing by right of birth or length of residence, newcomers were accepted without many questions asked.
After spending his first night ashore in the open air on some bales of cotton, John walked along the waterfront past immense warehouses smelling of fermenting molasses, green coffee and Stockholm tar. What happened next is debatable, and I will give what I believe is a true version of events, after repeating Stanley's account, given in Chapter Four of his Autobiography. This starts with him suddenly spotting a man in a dark alpaca suit and a tall hat, sitting outside a wholesale store and warehouse, near the Custom House. This geniallooking man was reading a newspaper, and his name, John claimed later, was Henry Stanley. Needing work to feed and house himself, John came to the point with Oliver Twist-like succinctness: `Do you want a boy, sir?' The man in the tall hat asked him to read a few lines from his newspaper, and then to mark some letters on a sack with a paintbrush. Having passed this simple literacy test, John was introduced by Mr Stanley to his friend James Speake, in front of whose business premises he (Henry Stanley) had just been sitting. On Mr Stanley's recommendation, Mr Speake offered Rowlands a job as a clerk at five dollars a week.' Soon afterwards, the Autobiography account has Henry Stanley leaving New Orleans on a month's business trip up the Mississippi. In the meantime, John spent his days taking groceries on trolleys from the depths of the store to the sidewalk, or rolling barrels of flour or liquor to the quayside where he marked them for shipment to sundry Mississippi ports. At the end of his week's trial, he was engaged at twenty-five dollars a month, and would prove himself a model employee - never arguing or contradicting, and on one occasion exposing the petty thefts of two slaves. His salary would soon be raised by another five dollars.4
According to the Autobiography, Henry Stanley had `a desk in the store, which he made use of when in town, and did a good deal of business in produce both with Mr Speake and other wholesale merchants'.' The next time John saw him, Mr Stanley invited him to call at St Charles Street, where he lived with his beautiful young wife in a highly respectable boarding house with pillared porticoes and cool verandas. It was evident to John Rowlands that Mr Stanley was a rich a
nd successful businessman. But the real revelation was Mrs Stanley. Her refinement captivated John - in fact, he wrote, `kindled as much reverence as I ever felt in my life'. In Mr and Mrs Stanley's rooms, the Autobiography has John hearing, for the first time, well-informed conversation on politics, literature and other subjects.'
Just when John's new life in America seemed to be progressing so well, an epidemic of yellow fever and dysentery visited New Orleans. One of the victims was James Speake (John Rowlands's employer) who died in October 18 59, eight months after John had started working for him. According to the Autobiography, Mrs Stanley also succumbed while Mr Stanley was said to have been absent on business in St Louis. The beautiful woman's last words to John were just what he might have wished an ideal surrogate mother to breathe to him at the end: Be a good boy. God bless you!''
After James Speake's death, his widow sold the business, and left for Louisville with her two daughters, never to be seen again - at least by Rowlands, who was now out of a job. He acted as paid carer to an ailing sea captain for a few weeks, and later, failing to find any work beyond odd jobs, decided to ask Mr Stanley's aid. Although the rich businessman had made no effort to find his young protege, he seemed deeply moved to see John when he turned up in St Charles Street. Not many days later - or so it is stated in the Autobiography - Mr Stanley declared that he wanted to make himself responsible for John's future. This was the moment John had dreamt of in the workhouse - a rich and cultivated man declares himself ready to be his father, and embraces him. Yet that was not the end of it; Henry Stanley, having once been a religious minister, enacted a quasi-Christian ritual of adoption, re-baptizing John Rowlands with water and the sign of the cross, and telling him: `in future you are to bear my name, "Henry Stanley"."
After this life-changing event, young Henry claimed that he travelled for two years with his father on riverboats between New Orleans, St Louis and Louisville, and more frequently on the lower Mississippi tributaries. Henry Stanley is described in the Autobiography as `a kind of [cotton] broker who dealt between planters up-river and merchants in New Orleans'.9 But, strangely, Mr Stanley's plans for his new son's future career did not involve cotton or its transport. Instead, unaccountably, all this voyaging was said to be preparing the former John Rowlands for a life among these up-river planters as the owner of a country store at Pine Bluff on the Arkansas River - a place 400 miles away from New Orleans by river.
In September 1186o, it is claimed that Mr Stanley left young Henry to serve a kind of apprenticeship with a landowner friend in Saline County, Arkansas. Then Mr Stanley left for Havana where his brother was said to be dangerously ill. About eight months later - say, June 118 - young Henry, by now living and clerking in a store at Cypress Bend, learned that his `father' had died suddenly in Cuba. Later still, he heard that no provision had been made for him, and that he was once more on his own.'°
If only because of his long-standing desire to find a new family, John's adoption by Mr Stanley can only set alarm bells ringing. As late as the 118gos, the fifty-year-old Stanley would write of how often he had thought, during childhood, `What ecstasy it would be if my parent came to me, to offer a parent's love, as I had enviously seen it bestowed on other children." Indeed, the `adoption narrative' has the quality of a fairy tale in real life - a heart-warming sense that even lives afflicted by the worst privations and unhappiness can change for the better by a happy chance, dealing out rewards commensurate with the deserts of those who have hitherto been unfairly disadvantaged. So what really happened to John Rowlands in New Orleans? Of Stanley's recent biographers, John Bierman gives the most realistic assessment of the `adoption'. He rules it out and concludes: `Mr Stanley did, indeed, take an interest in the young Rowlands, but it was not nearly so intense an interest as the lad had hoped for."' But even this, in my opinion, misses the mark. Because what truly happened in New Orleans is essential for forming an understanding of the man who emerged as Henry Morton Stanley, I mean to lay out some of the evidence.
I first suspected that John Rowlands had never met anyone called Mr Stanley because there are so many discrepancies between the accounts of his adoption given by him verbally to his relatives in late December 11866, and the marvellously detailed draft chapters he wrote in the mid-118gos for his Autobiography, not long before he finally abandoned the whole project. In 11866, when aged twenty-five, John Rowlands would describe the man he had met at the grocery store on that first morning after he had `jumped ship' as having been encountered inside, rather than outside, and not wearing a tall hat and alpaca suit. In reality nobody had been sitting outside the store. So John, who had in fact seen a sign on the door bearing the words `Boy Wanted', had entered and asked a bespectacled man, whom he found deep in the store, whether he might have a job. `The shopkeeper', John Rowlands told his mother in 11866, gave him a literacy test and then employed him. After that, `he was treated always by that shopkeeper with every kindness, and he adopted his name as his own. The shopkeeper was elderly, childless, and his relatives became fiercely jealous of the little Welsh boy.' John did not tell his family that the real name of this man was James Speake. Instead, he told them he was a Mr Henry Stanley. John claimed that after he had spent several years with him, Mr Stanley dropped down dead, without having made a will.
This story was told to the Welsh journalist Owen `Morien' Morgan, in 11886, by Stanley's mother, Elizabeth Jones (nee Parry), shortly before her death." She had relayed it almost verbatim in 11872 to the author and publisher John Camden Hotten, who quoted her at length in that same year in his Henry M. Stanley: the Story of his Life, issued under the insinuating pseudonym of Cadwalader Rowlands.14 These almost identical versions of the adoption story would be lifted, in later years, from Owen Morgan's newspaper accounts, and from John Hotten's book, by the authors of many different lives of Stanley that began to appear from 118go onwards.I"
So, instead of feeling that he could abandon the untruths that he had told his family as a young man, Stanley in his maturity would feel compelled to repeat them in his Autobiography manuscript and to iron out their many inconsistencies. He therefore changed his earlier claim that there had been one man responsible for both employing and adopting him. Even in the 118gos there had been too many people still alive in New Orleans who knew that James Speake, of Speake & McCreary's store, had been John Rowlands's first employer for it to have been safe for the great explorer to claim that he had worked for Mr Henry Stanley.16 To get round this problem, Stanley in his r 89os manuscript claimed that Speake had been his employer, and Mr Stanley had been Speake's close friend, with an office desk in the shop. In this clever scenario, Speake maintained a role in John's life, but Mr Stanley became his original benefactor. It was a most attractive solution to the problem of how to give Speake - his real benefactor - some credit for helping him too.
But was there any truth in it? Did Mr Stanley often come to Speake's store and do business there? It seems very unlikely. There was only one Henry Stanley in the cotton trade in New Orleans at this date: Henry Hope Stanley, who had the controlling interest in the largest company in town compressing and baling raw cotton mechanically, and who was also the lessee of six shipping wharves with offices in Exchange Place. For two reasons this made him a most improbable candidate for having a desk in a grocer's store. In the first place, his extraordinarily lucrative business, and Speake's more mundane one, were very differ ent; and in the second, Mr Stanley's offices at 24, Exchange Place were only three blocks away from Speake's store at 3, Tchoupitoulas Street - so why should he have needed a desk there ?17 That Speake was only a wholesale grocer is recorded in Charles Gardner's New Orleans City Directory. So, even if he sold produce for other suppliers on commission, this would not have made him a credible business partner for a real entrepreneur like Mr Stanley. In reality, James Speake had been the only person who treated Rowlands well - employing him, giving him promotion and agreeing two raises in salary, and suggesting to him that, if he wanted to get on in life, he sh
ould aim to open a store on the Arkansas River."
Before John Rowlands chose to claim as his adoptive father the richer and much more influential Henry Hope Stanley, whom he had heard about only by repute, he had been thinking of casting the humbler Speake in that role. Very revealingly, Henry Morton Stanley wrote in his large diary for 115 October 1189 5, when visiting New Orleans for the last time: `Father's house is between Common [Street] and Canal St - No. 3 ...' But this was not where Henry Hope Stanley, his supposed adoptive father, had lived. On the same day, he wrote truthfully in a small notebook: `Speake's house was between Common & Canal St - No. 3 ...' James Speake's store and dwelling were indeed at 3, Tchoupitoulas Street, which is in the block `between Canal Street and Common Street'.
Among Henry M. Stanley's earlier drafts of the Autobiography is a touching passage entitled `Death of father', in which he stares at the dead man's face - he never names him - and asks himself whether he had behaved to him as well as he ought to have done. Then, `a craving wish to hear him speak but one word of consolation, to utter one word of blessing made me address him as if he might hear, but no answer ever came and I experienced a shiver of sadness, & then wished that I could join him."9 Nothing identifies this effecting piece with Mr Stanley - though it has been said to be a description of his invented death, proving that the writer suffered from serious neuro- sis.zO But it seems to me much more likely to be a description from life of an actual corpse, and John's intense feelings towards a real man who had just died. Indeed, James Speake had done exactly that while John Rowlands was still working for him. That was in late October 1859. One indication that John's relationship with Speake had been close enough for him to have written a moving piece about his death is the fact that Speake's widow, Cornelia, asked John Rowlands to watch over her husband's body for the whole night prior to his funeral - surely a most unusual privilege for any ordinary employee.