by Tim Jeal
So how did he do it? Initially, by introducing himself as Henry Stanley when applying for that job at Cypress Bends. Then, in August 1860, a census-taker called at the store, and nineteen-year-old John Rowlands gave his name as William Henry Stanley. William would be dropped within a year, but Henry Stanley would survive, only finally to be augmented with Morton as a second name in 1872.10
When the American Civil War started, the other shop boys at Cypress Bends at once enlisted to fight for the South. Being a foreigner, Stanley did not think of it as his war, but the arrival of an anonymous gift of female underwear – the equivalent of a white feather – changed his mind. In April 1862, he fought in the bloody battle of Shiloh, was captured, and taken to a federal prison camp outside Chicago. Large numbers of men were dying of typhoid. So when the camp commandant offered to release him on condition that he joined the Union Army, Stanley changed sides to save his life. But after a spell in hospital recovering from dysentery, he deserted once more.
Sick and penniless, he headed east, intent on working his passage back to Britain. He had heard that his mother was now the licensee of two public houses, and so was in a position to help him at last. On docking in Liverpool, he walked fifty miles to the village where his mother kept one of her pubs. On arriving, worn out and emaciated, Stanley knocked on the side door.
My mother opened it, aghast at seeing me. She said little – but what she did say will never be forgotten … ‘Never come back to me again unless you are in far better circumstances than you seem to be in now.’11
Back in America, Stanley risked joining the Union Navy, calling himself Henry Stanley, under which name he had deserted from the Union army. Captured deserters were imprisoned, or even shot or hanged. On board ship, he made friends with a sixteen-year-old ship’s messenger, Lewis Noe, who remembered that Stanley spent many hours every day reading travel books by authors like Richard Burton and Alexander Kinglake, and said that he would have adventures of his own. As the navy’s part in the Civil War fizzled out, Noe and Stanley deserted and set about saving money from a bizarre assortment of temporary jobs – including gold prospecting and clerking for a judge – so they could go travelling. Stanley’s aim was to journey through Turkey, then on to India and China. On his return he meant to write a bestselling book. But nothing went to plan. From the day of their arrival in Turkey, they were short of money and equipment. After attempting to steal a horse from a Turkish merchant, the adventurers were themselves robbed, kidnapped, beaten up, and in Noe’s case raped. They would have been destitute and helpless had not the American consul in Constantinople lent them money.
Their expedition had failed spectacularly, but Stanley still meant to impress his mother. Before leaving Turkey, he paid a tailor with part of the consul’s money to make a copy of a US naval officer’s uniform which, on arrival in Denbigh, he wore for the best part of a month.12 Now that he appeared to have money and rank, his mother, Elizabeth Jones, invited him to spend Christmas at the larger of her two pubs with his half-siblings and with the man she had recently married. These were the first days Stanley had ever spent with his mother, and his family.13
Noe had been left behind in Liverpool to await Stanley’s return, and, while there, he wrote several letters to his friend, addressing him as Henry Stanley on the envelopes. Stanley had resumed calling himself John Rowlands while in Wales, but was now obliged to explain the unfamiliar name. His mother accused him of having changed his name to mask a life of crime. Because he could not admit that he had voluntarily abandoned his original Welsh name without offending his mother and other local people, he came up with the adoption story, which in any case held a deep emotional appeal for him. He said he had been treated like a beloved son by Henry Stanley, the owner of the warehouse where he had first worked in New Orleans. Indeed, he went on, Mr Stanley had given him his own name and had made him his heir – dying just too soon to give expression to his wish in a new will. When Stanley became famous, his mother told several journalists about her son’s ‘adoption’ and how he had acquired his name. This invention then appeared in newspapers and in a number of books, so Stanley was saddled with the lie for life. He made matters more complicated for himself by taking the fib a step further, claiming that he had been raised as an American in Missouri – thus concealing his illegitimacy and workhouse background, but denying himself the admiration and support he would have enjoyed in Britain had his British identity been acknowledged.
Re-united with Lewis Noe in Liverpool in January 1867, Stanley told his young friend something that amazed him. One day, said the man whose Turkish expedition had been a complete fiasco, he would track down Dr Livingstone in Africa, and interview him for the New York Herald, making himself rich and famous in the process.14
Although Livingstone had returned to Africa only a year earlier, the British press was full of speculation about his whereabouts just when Noe and Stanley were in Liverpool.15 Stanley told his incredulous friend that, between leaving Wales and returning to Liverpool, he had been to London for a meeting with Colonel Finley Anderson, the New York Herald ’s bureau chief in the capital. Incredibly, this turned out to be true, although because Stanley lacked experience as a traveller, Anderson had rejected the idea. But the bureau chief had been mildly encouraging and had asked Stanley to keep in touch.16 Stanley himself would later attribute the brilliant idea of finding Livingstone to James Gordon Bennett Jr, the evil-tempered millionaire owner of the world-famous New York Herald, but this would be because by then his entire career seemed to depend upon this autocrat’s continuing patronage. Nor would Stanley ever wish to have it known that the inspiration for finding Livingstone had been due to his craving for fame, rather than to a philanthropic desire on his part to bring succour to the embattled explorer.
Back in America in 1867, Stanley succeeded in getting the Missouri Democrat to send him to report on the Indian Wars in Nebraska. While serving in the navy, he had sold war stories to various mid-western papers, and had been told that he showed promise as a journalist. His reports on the Indian Wars would be striking enough to change his life. Other newspaper editors and owners became aware of his vivid descriptions of General Hancock’s campaign. This enabled him, early next year, to travel to New York and to persuade James Gordon Bennett to send him to Africa to report on a British punitive expedition in Ethiopia. Through bribing a crucial telegraph clerk Stanley would break the news of the Ethiopian emperor’s defeat and suicide days before any other correspondent had even filed his copy. Stanley next convinced Bennett that to find Livingstone in the heart of Africa would be an historic scoop. This was no mean achievement since in Bennett’s opinion Americans cared nothing for Africa. In addition, Bennett feared that Stanley, after spending many thousands of dollars, would fail to find his man, and would very likely die in the wilds of the Dark Continent. Some sixth sense led Bennett to delay Stanley’s departure for over a year until the autumn of 1870 – by which time Livingstone had been in Africa and seen no white face for four and a half years. No letter had been received at the coast from the missing man in eighteen months. So if Stanley could find him, it would be sure to create a sensation.
In 1869 Stanley became engaged to Katie Gough Roberts, a Welsh girl, whom he had got to know during visits to Denbigh between assignments. Stanley longed for the security of marriage but he also needed to escape his old persona through travel and adventure. In the end, Katie’s solicitor father forced him to choose between the two by saying he could not marry Katie unless he began staying in Britain for long periods of time. Since this choice was forced on him at the very moment when his great idea, the Livingstone mission, was getting off the ground, Stanley chose his African quest. ‘My great love for you cannot blind me; it cannot lead me astray from the path I have chalked out,’ he told Katie.17 Yet he did not give up hope that he might be able to find Livingstone and marry Katie on his return. She, however, was not prepared to wait, and married a Manchester architectural student in September 1870 while Stan
ley was still abroad and sending back stories for the New York Herald.18 At last, after he had reported on the opening of the Suez Canal, and visited Jerusalem, Odessa and the battlefields of the Crimea, Stanley was allowed to travel to Bombay, and from that city set sail for Zanzibar, the gateway to Africa.
On 6 January 1871, three weeks before his thirtieth birthday, he sighted the masts and rigging of the ships at anchor in the harbour, and the Sultan’s blood-red banner streaming out over his unfinished palace. In Zanzibar, Stanley was horrified to find that James Gordon Bennett had sent no money as agreed, obliging him to ask the US Consul to pledge his personal credit. Stanley would only be able to spend £1,000 on his mission -half as much as Livingstone had spent on his and had thought totally inadequate. Finding it too humiliating to admit that Bennett had treated him so disrespectfully, Stanley later claimed that his boss had spent £4,000 on his journey, enabling him to engage 192 porters, whereas in fact he had only managed to hire about a hundred. Thus his insecurity led him to diminish his real achievement.19 Bennett’s perfidy told Stanley that if he failed to find Livingstone, the magnate would probably leave him to repay the US Consul, Francis Webb. Failure would therefore mean financial ruin.
Luckily, Stanley did not know about Livingstone’s most recent geographical plans. Had he done so, he would have realised how slender his chances were of finding him. But when he went to see Dr Kirk on Zanzibar, Stanley found it reassuring to be told that the doctor was somewhere to the west of Lake Tanganyika and would probably return to Ujiji at some time in the future. In fact, at the very time when Stanley and Kirk were having this chat in January 1871, Livingstone was preparing to leave Bambarre for the Lualaba, and had no intention of returning to Ujiji. Blissfully unaware of this, Stanley was euphoric as he set out for Ujiji from Bagamoyo on 21 March.
Livingstone and Stanley.
The former workhouse boy rode into the bush on his thoroughbred stallion, resplendent in pith helmet and white flannels, while at the head of the caravan fluttered the Stars and Stripes. For a man like Stanley, who needed to prove himself after the trauma of parental rejection, Africa was a test of character that could scarcely have been bettered. His examination began within days, when the tsetse started killing his animals, including his fine stallion, and when his porters either fell ill with fever, or deserted the column. Stanley could see just how easily he might be deserted by all of them and then be left to starve, lacking the food and trade goods they had been carrying. Few Victorian explorers made greater efforts to instil discipline and to track down deserters than did Stanley, but his caravan’s numbers dwindled nevertheless. Soon he quarrelled with his two white companions, John Shaw and William Farquhar, both of whom were former merchant seamen – one of them drank and the other was addicted to whores, a serious crime in Stanley’s eyes, given his detestation of his mother’s promiscuity. Stanley had read Speke’s and Burton’s books and had consequently chosen Bombay and Mabruki as his African captains because they had been Speke’s most highly valued ‘faithfuls’. Having studied the performance of Speke’s and Burton’s porters, Stanley chose mainly African Zanzibaris or Wangwana. Though they would suffer heavy casualties on all his journeys, many of the survivors would volunteer to travel with him as many as three times more – a great tribute.
John Shawand William Farquhar.
On the way to Unyanyembe, Stanley suffered many bouts of fever, his horse and his donkeys died, and the rainy season made travel a nightmare. Farquhar died, and Shaw was so ill that he seemed certain to follow him, which he did. And worse was to come. Shortly before arriving at Tabora, only 250 miles from Ujiji, Stanley heard from members of an Arab-Swahili caravan who had been in Manyema that Livingstone was dead. Though badly shaken by this news, Stanley refused to believe it.20 If it was true he would be ruined. But would he ever get to Ujiji or Manyema to learn the truth?
At Tabora he became enmeshed in a war being fought between the Arab-Swahili slave traders, who ran the town, and Mirambo, the marvellously named, charismatic African ruler of the Nyamwezi, who was determined to snatch control of the slave caravan route to Lake Tanganyika. Since Stanley’s caravan was down to thirty men, he saw no way of getting to Ujiji unless Mirambo’s warriors could be driven away from the path ahead. So, he agreed to join the Arabs in an attempt to achieve this. His Arab allies seriously underestimated Mirambo, who ordered a tactical retreat, and then ambushed them as they rushed after his warriors in hot pursuit. A few of Stanley’s men were stabbed to death, and 500 Arabs were massacred in like fashion, with many of their corpses being mutilated. Stanley heard that faces were cut away, along with genitals and stomachs, and then boiled and eaten with rice. He himself had been suffering from fever at the time of the ambush, and would have been killed if his young translator, Selim, had not lifted him onto a donkey and led him back to Tabora.21
In late August, Mirambo attacked Tabora and burned a quarter of the town. Stanley, who had managed to add another twenty followers to his thirty, cut loopholes in the clay walls of his stockaded Arab tembe, and waited for what seemed sure to be a fight to the finish. Fortunately for him, Mirambo mysteriously chose to back off just when his enemies were at his mercy. Grateful to be alive, Stanley rededicated himself to his task, writing by candlelight in his diary:
I have taken a solemn, enduring oath, an oath to be kept while the least hope of life remains in me, not to be tempted to break the resolution I have formed, never to give up the search until I find Livingstone alive, or find his dead body … No living man or living men, shall stop me, only death can prevent me. But death – not even this; I shall not die, I will not die, I cannot die!22
He now planned to avoid the war entirely, by marching south and south-west for ten days and only then starting to head north to Ujiji. On 21 September 1871, with thirty-four men, most of whom had spent the night before in ‘one last debauch’, Stanley left Tabora, suffering from malaria, yet again. Apart from the shakes and aches and sweats, he saw hideous faces and experienced shockingly rapid changes of mood. It still tormented him to think that Livingstone might be dead. His column passed through forest and marshland, and then over hills. In late October at the Malagarasi river, Stanley was overjoyed to hear that a white man with grey whiskers had just arrived at Ujiji. Nearing Lake Tanganyika, with mounting excitement, he told Selim to lay out his flannel suit, oil his boots and chalk his pith helmet. He was determined to look his best for what was destined to be the greatest day of his life so far. In truth, Stanley was very nervous, since he was haunted by John Kirk’s statement that Livingstone detested other explorers – so much so that if Burton, Baker or Speke were ever to come near him, he would rapidly put a swamp between them and himself. Stanley forced himself to confront the ghastly possibility that he might refuse to be interviewed.23
Entering Ujiji on 10 November 1871,24 Stanley’s men fired repeated volleys – the usual ritual when a caravan entered a town – and he ordered the Stars and Stripes to be unfurled and borne aloft at the head of the column. An animated crowd surged around the advancing newcomers, and Susi, one of Livingstone’s longest-serving followers, greeted Stanley ecstatically, and then ran off shouting: ‘An Englishman coming! I see him!’25 Approaching Livingstone’s house, Stanley felt so excited that he longed ‘to vent [his] joy in some mad freaks, such as idiotically biting [his] hand, or turning a somersault’.26 He clambered down from his donkey’s back, and saw, standing only a few paces away, a man of about sixty with a grey beard. He was wearing an old red waistcoat and tweed trousers. This was the scarcely imaginable moment that he had nevertheless dreamed about ever since making his impossible prediction to Lewis Noe five years earlier. He knew that he would be famous now for the rest of his life and possibly rich too. But he had not the faintest premonition of the immeasurably more important consequences which would spring from this extraordinary meeting, affecting himself and even the history of Africa.
The meeting in the famous engraving in Stanley’s book How I Found Livin
gstone.
TWENTY
The Doctor’s Obedient and Devoted Servitor
At the point in Stanley’s diary where he advances towards Livingstone, three pages have been torn out, just where he ought to be saying: ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ The only reason for tearing them out would seem to be because they had not confirmed the words of the famous greeting. Nor is the historic question to be found in Livingstone’s diary, or in his notebooks, or in any of the dozen or so letters he wrote during the next couple of weeks.1 Because Livingstone repeated Susi’s far less memorable words in most of his contemporary letters, the greeting would appear to have been invented by Stanley at some point during the six months that followed the meeting. Indeed, ever since leaving Zanzibar he had been trying to work out what laconic, understated greeting an English gentleman would be likely to come up with on such a momentous occasion. With ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ he believed he had finally found the perfect formulation. It would be a great shock when people laughed at him for not managing to say something heartfelt and spontaneous.2