Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer

by Tim Jeal

  On the morning of her marriage, Dolly told her mother that Henry was `determined to be married and go [on his honeymoon]. He says if he remains he will die.'38 Only at breakfast-time did Dolly know that the ceremony would go ahead.39 Decked out in a dress of white silk and satin, the seams sewn with pearls, Dorothy - for all her horror of vulgarity - flashed with as many diamonds as a Bond Street jeweller's shop. There were diamonds galore in Sir William Mackinnon's tiara (which she wore inverted, as a necklace); there were thirty-eight large stones surrounding the miniature of Victoria given to Stanley by the Queen herself (and now worn by Dorothy as a locket); diamonds galore sparkled in the bracelet bought by her husband-to-be, and even more glittered in the bracelet from King Leopold. As if this were not enough, on her left arm Dorothy wore `the bracelet given [her] by Sir Alfred Lyall - the gold coins of Chandra Gupta (300 AD) discovered in Oudh and mounted by him in a bracelet'.

  Like a royal princess, she drove along Whitehall to Westminster Abbey in a closed carriage, past cheering crowds, and was married to her explorer by the Bishop of Ripon, assisted by the Dean of Westminster, and the Master of Trinity, Cambridge, who gave the address. Present at the signing of the register were Mr Gladstone, the ubiquitous Sir Alfred Lyall, Colonel Grant (Speke's companion) and two of the most famous artists of the day, Sir John Millais and Sir Frederick Leighton. The Lord Chancellor and the Speaker of the House of Commons were present at the ceremony, along with a brace of dukes and numerous peers.

  For almost the entire service Stanley was seated, and looked ill enough to die. Close by sat his five Emin Pasha officers, and Sall (Saleh bin Osman) his remarkable Wangwana servant boy. On his way down the nave after the ceremony, Stanley was obliged to lean heavily on a stick. Passing Livingstone's grave, as Stanley had requested, Dorothy paused a moment to lay her bridal bouquet on the polished stone, with its inscription from the Last journals, conferring `heaven's rich blessing' on any enemy of the slave trade.

  The King of Belgium had sent as his representative the Comte d'Assche, with the request that the courtier should be the explorer's best man. Though Stanley must have thought this royal command presumptuous, he may also have felt relieved by it. He would have found it hard to settle on any particular person for the role of best man, if the king had not commanded. William Mackinnon - his honorary father - was too old. Edward Marston, his publisher, and Henry Wellcome, the millionaire chemist, would have been possibilities. But Agnes Livingstone's husband, Alexander Bruce, who had come out to Cairo to be with him and was a regular correspondent, would very likely have been his first choice. Edward King would have been another candidate, as would Anthony Swinburne, if he had not died a few months earlier on the Congo. Not a single member of his own family had been invited.

  When Stanley was a young journalist, Katie Roberts had suggested a fashionable London wedding, but his response had been scathing. Why spend money, simply so fools could come and gape? Maybe he recalled this on leaving the Abbey, when he and Dorothy were halted in their carriage by a great press of people, whose white faces were pressed up against the windows. The marooned couple were only rescued by a detachment of mounted police after several frightening min utes. No sooner was Henry inside the house in Richmond Terrace, than he staggered to his wife's painting room `and laid himself down on the sofa, looking very pale and suffering'. And there he remained while Dorothy greeted their guests alone.41

  Several hours later, the married couple, with Dr Parke and Sall, left Richmond Terrace in an open carriage, bound for Waterloo Station and a honeymoon in the New Forest. They had been lent Melchett Court, a large country house near Romsey, formerly the seat of the znd Lord Ashburton, whose family owned Baring's bank. His widow, Louisa, Lady Ashburton - the house's present owner - was a patron of many female artists, one of whom (Harriet Hosmer, an American) was her lover - a fact unknown to Dorothy, whose paintings (and possibly her person) had also aroused Louisa's interest.4' Though feeling woozy after shots of morphine, Stanley managed to write in his diary on arriving in Hampshire: `I was too weak to experience anything save a calm delight at the fact that I was married, & that now I shall have a chance to rest.' But the following morning he was visited by Dolly and felt `rapture & wonder that she was my own from this time forth'. He then committed to the pages of his diary his greatest hope for the future: `During my long bachelorhood I have often wished that I had but one tiny child to love.'42 Dorothy echoed this in her diary on the same day, admitting to `a longing which amounts to anxiety ... the intense hope that our union may produce a child - That his love will find me fruitful.'43

  In the full satisfaction of being Mrs Henry M. Stanley, Dorothy's first letter written from Melchett was to the supplanted Mrs Sheldon. In it, she reassured her that Stanley was on a milk and arrowroot diet and that `the inflammation of the stomach seems to have passed'. She described for May the glories of a honeymoon at Melchett: with the old master paintings, the tapestries, and `the gardens like Eden', and said that the beautiful dressing gown Mrs Sheldon had sent was `such a comfort to him'. If Mrs Sheldon was upset not to hear from Stanley himself, she gave no indication of it, and soon Dorothy was writing again thanking her for sending so many `fragrant gifts'.44 Inevitably, Dorothy did not want May Sheldon to continue her close friendship with her husband, and would soon use her alleged fear of journalists as a reason to see a lot less of her.45 Upset by the possibility of a rift, Stanley warned his old friend against ever admitting to Dorothy that she was still working as a journalist - though he conceded that this was `an amusing request', given his own years as a newspaperman.

  Reviews of his recently published In Darkest Africa began to appear in the week of his wedding, and most were favourable. Even the patrician Spectator pronounced: `The writing is always clear and rises into passages of high literary merit ... it leaves a fresh impression of the task accomplished: the grandeur of that heroic march, with its permanent hunger, its attacks of horrible disease, its seeming endlessness.' The equally demanding Athenaeum and the Edinburgh Review also praised the book, with only minor cavils, and unquestioningly accepted Stanley's account of the disaster that had overtaken the Rear Column. The shortcomings of Emin Pasha were also taken on trust.46 The Saturday Review's critic thought Stanley wrong to have appointed the inexperienced Barttelot to a post requiring him to deal with the wily Tippu Tip. Yet all else in this review was praise.

  In no other expedition of Mr Stanley's has his strength better appeared. The mere struggle, three times repeated, through forest and famine was a great thing ... But greatest of all was the manner in which, despite his own health, despite the Pasha's vacillation, despite the treachery of the Egyptians ... he brought safely out from one of the least accessible spots in the whole world, by routes almost unknown, the mob of recalcitrant refugees who were committed to his care.

  At this very time the negotiators of the latest Anglo-German Agreement were finalizing the boundaries of the new protectorates of Uganda and Zanzibar and adding to Uganda the land to the west of Lake Victoria that, without Stanley's agitation, would have been placed in the German sphere. In deference to his influence, the Saturday Review declared that `it has been Mr Stanley's good fortune and good deed ... to give English statesmen reason to insist, that no other nation shall enter into the fruit of these English labours. And for this he deserves the perpetual thanks of all good Englishmen.'47

  In the Whitehall Review's notice, Stanley was described as `the great harbinger of trade'. This reviewer sensed (as did many thinking people at the time) that a moment in history had arrived comparable with the white settlement of America.

  It is almost too vast to imagine what it really means, and what those millions of miles of African field and flood and forest are destined to become. But the work has begun in earnest. It will not be long until the steamer shall plough the lake, and railways scour the plain; not long ere savagery will have ceased, and a truer type of humanity have regenerated the old ... The book must always live ... a history whic
h, hundreds of years hence, will tell of the babyhood of Africa.48

  The Leeds Mercury summed up: `The voice of criticism becomes dumb in the presence of the simple record of the work he has accomplished.' Each week brought more reviews.

  For Dorothy, to walk in Melchett's beautiful gardens with a husband who was history's harbinger, and a literary lion to boot, was a heady experience: `I didn't think it was given to people to be so happy.'49 Evie Myers came to stay and thought the newlyweds were `so strange together!! & odd and happy ... Mr Stanley is so wonderfully charming, so boyish and so loving'. s° As for Stanley himself, he told his friend Alexander Bruce rather stiltedly: `I shall always regard this stay at Melchett as the most exquisitely enjoyable of any portion of my life ... A beautiful home life could not fail to impress one, who like myself, had no idea of what lay within the portals of domestic felicity."'

  As a long-standing bachelor, he really did have no idea about domestic relationships, having spent his time exactly as he chose, passing the greater part of it working. When he and Dorothy began to have their first quarrels a couple of months later, they would be about Dolly's refusal to leave him alone for an hour or two every day. `She will not understand how essential a little quietness is to me.' He needed it psychologically, and to write the numerous lectures that he would be delivering in America that autumn. `It really is very hard with Dolly's determination to monopolize my time.'S2 Dorothy shocked him by weeping when she could not persuade him to her point of view. `It struck me that if married life was to be a conflict of this nature, between marital duty, and that which one owes to the public, there will be little happiness in future. The utter hopelessness of compatibility between her ideas and mine, [was] revealed to me so suddenly that I was speechless for a time ...'S3

  Another bone of contention was that Dorothy loved to be the focus of public attention when walking in cities and visiting art galleries - whereas Stanley hated being stared at and craved anonymity. `I do not consider it wifely to procure these pleasures at the cost of making me feel like a monkey in a cage. I detest these staring crowds, & would prefer my African fever and privations to enduring them ... I get no pleasure in cities in consequence.'54 One biographer has used the first of these sentences (without quoting the second and third) to argue that Stanley was repelled by his wife's sexual pleasures, which made him feel like a monkey in a cage! 15 In fact, as Stanley's health improved, it would be physical attraction that made them more tolerant of one another's foibles.

  Dolly wrote later that year, while Stanley was away for a few days: `I miss you very, very much ... I long for your dear face and your dear voice and all that goes to make up my Bula Matari ... I am very impatiently looking forward to next Wednesday when I shall have you to hug ....'S6 `How thankful I am to be your wife ... At will I can see your lips and put my forefinger just under the lower lip and look into your eyes and I can hear your laugh when it bursts forth.'57 Not that she ever learned to resist interrupting him when he was working.

  Often, darling, when I just look in on you - it is because I love you so - I want only to look at your dear face and just to stroke the back of your neck ... If you were in the next room [now], do you think it would be possible to resist going in to you and giving you just one kiss?

  Dorothy made a joke of her interruptions, calling herself Xantippe, after the shrewish first wife of Socrates, who had spoiled the philosopher's peace of mind.'s

  Stanley certainly loved Dorothy, though she often vexed him: `Dorothy, sweet Dorothy, how I love that name - Angel of my soul, my thoughts are with you ... I love you loyally & truly and do not care for any person in comparison with my own.'59 `My darling wife, I quite realise the depth & truth of your love and I respond to it with heart & soul. To me you are more beautiful & precious each day.'6o

  That Dorothy's possessiveness was going to stop Stanley using his unique abilities to open up Uganda for Mackinnon was even apparent at Melchett, when he refused, in deference to her wishes, to accept any formal connection with the Imperial British East Africa Company.6i At this early stage, it was not yet a source of unhappiness to him that he might never be able, because of his marriage, to return to Africa. For the present, Henry was preoccupied with his forthcoming American tour, which he owed to Major Pond as compensation for the lecture series abandoned in 11886.

  Before leaving for America in the autumn, Stanley and Dolly continued their honeymoon in Belgium, France, Italy and Switzerland, where they met up briefly with Sir Richard and Lady Burton. The elderly traveller and scholar was engaged in writing what he described as `an anthropology of men and women', which Stanley predicted would be `cursed with cynicism'. He advised Burton to be charitable about people in his memoirs. `I don't give a fig for charity,' exploded Sir Richard. `If I write at all, I must write truthfully of all I know.' There the discussion stopped, without Stanley pointing out that seeing a little virtue in people could be as truthful as seeing none at all." Already he was writing in a small notebook about incidents from his early life and worrying about how truthful he could bear to be. `Will you read some more to me of the pocket book,' begged Dorothy, early inr89r. `That history will be your greatest literary work."I

  Still in Switzerland, Stanley, Dorothy and Sall walked along the Engandin Valley onto the magnificent Forno glacier accompanied by the Revd J. E. C. Welldon, the headmaster of Harrow, and Oscar Browning, then teaching undergraduates as a fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Welldon was one of those late Victorian `muscular Christian' public school heads, who sought, in his own words, to inspire boys `with faith in the divinely ordered mission of their country' and the desire to `carry into the world the great principles of truth and religion'. Stanley felt at home with this late Victorian talk of mission, and its Livingstonian coupling of moral virtue with the right to power. As `citizens of the greatest Empire under heaven', headmaster Welldon told his boys, they owed it to themselves to become `bright examples of personal morality'.64 Unknown to Stanley and to the virtuous Welldon, Oscar Browning, who was walking with them, had been clandestinely dismissed as an Eton housemaster for molesting the boys in his charge. This was the sort of detail that would have amused the cynical Richard Burton, had he observed the little party wending its way along the glacier.

  The Stanleys returned to England via France and Belgium, where King Leopold welcomed them warmly at the Chalet Royal, Ostend, making a considerable fuss of Dorothy." The king feared that Stanley was more likely, from now on, to work for Mackinnon, than to agree to take charge of pet projects of his own, such as extending the Congo Free State's boundaries to the Nile. But Sir William did not fancy his chances of employing Stanley. Dorothy still seemed dead against it. So, on her return from Belgium, Mackinnon wrote begging her to bring Henry to stay with him.

  I have a great deal to tell him about East Africa. I do wish he could have given himself to the work there. I am sure he would have kept us out of many mistakes & our progress would have been threefold or tenfold ... I count so much on his cooperation and advice. The work is a great one & it needs men like Stanley to carry it on.66

  But there was nothing the shipping magnate could do when Dorothy refused to come to Scotland. Shortly before leaving for his American tour, Stanley wrote to his friend of his `deep unwavering love' for her, and added: `Having fulfilled all my engagements, I might think European life too dreary to be endured.'6'

  Three days before Henry was due to leave on his American tour, Major Barttelot's edited diaries and letters were published in book form by his family, and it seemed that Stanley's entire reputation might be too badly damaged to make him useful to anyone.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Was the Emin Pasha Expedition Piratical?

  Two sentences written by Stanley - one in his best-seller In Darkest Africa, and one in a private letter inadvertently published in the Standard - so enraged the families of Major Barttelot and James Jameson that they published a memoir of each man consisting of diary extracts connected by a commentary full of bi
tter criticism of Stanley. They also flung themselves into a frenzy of letter-writing to the press. The sentence in Henry's book that so distressed them was: `My conclusion was that the officers at Yambuya had manifestly been indifferent to the letter of instruction [which Stanley had handed to Barttelot before leaving with the Advance Column], and had forgotten their promises." And the sentence in the letter published in the Standard was that the Rear Column had been `wrecked by the irresolution of its officers, their neglect of their promises and their indifference to their written orders'.' To their relations, this was the equivalent of saying that the dead men had behaved dishonourably.

  On finishing his chapter on the Rear Column in In Darkest Africa, Stanley had been convinced that he had bent over backwards to be fair. Barttelot had committed shocking crimes such as flogging a man to death, despite fierce remonstrations by his officers and men, and Jameson had made a payment that had led to a young girl being killed and eaten by cannibals. Yet instead of mentioning such horrors, Stanley had written of the major as being `a generous, frank, and chivalrous English officer'; and had praised the Irish whisky heir for `his alacrity, capacity, and willingness to work'.' Nor did he make an issue of the crime that had upset him most of all, the collective failure of the officers at Yambuya to pay any attention to the diet of the Wangwana and to stop them poisoning themselves by not properly preparing their manioc tubers. His silence on this matter had not been due to generosity alone. He had known that to admit that they had thrown away 115 o lives needlessly would have led the public to ask how such callous men had ever been selected to serve under him. So, rather than let them off entirely, Stanley had chosen to pillory them for lesser shortcomings that were not entirely their fault - such as their failure to march. In the course of fewer than twenty pages of his immense twovolume book, Stanley had sown seeds that now threatened to destroy him.