In those days, while on a trip down the Platte River to the Missouri, through hostile Indian Territory (this never bothered Stanley, for he was handy with a Colt revolver and loved to practice his aim, shooting birds out of the sky), he, with his own great ambitions, hatched a scheme to travel the world. Confident that he could recoup his expenses by writing an account of it, he arranged to set out with several companions by way of Omaha and St. Louis to New York, then to Boston, toward Asia Minor. Paying for his passage to Smyrna (modern Izmir), in western Turkey, as a hand aboard the ship, he planned his route during the fifty-one-day voyage: He would cross the expanses of Anatolia into Georgia, then go through Kashmir toward China and ultimately Tibet, where few foreigners had ever traveled.
Unfortunately, not some few days out from Smyrna, as this small party—a seventeen-year-old former shipmate of Stanley’s aboard the Minnesota named Louis Noe; a journalist whom Stanley had met during his Central City days, William Cook; and Stanley himself—was crossing the mountains east of that city they were waylaid and taken captive by a band of twelve Turkish brigands. They might have lingered in that place indefinitely or been killed were it not for the intercession of a Turkish banker sympathetic to their plight who secured their release and safe passage to Constantinople.
Some months afterward, in mid-February, Stanley, late of Constantinople, Athens, Marseille, Liverpool, and Denbigh, Wales, arrived at the offices of the Missouri Democrat in St. Louis. Received gladly by the editors, and put on a staff salary of fifteen dollars a week, he counted among his first duties, during his renewed tenure with the newspaper, an assignment to report upon some dreary legislative proceedings in Jefferson City. Later on in that early April of 1867, he was on hand at the Mercantile Library in St. Louis to cover a lecture by the latest literary sensation, Mark Twain—whom Stanley remembered, as he always would, as Samuel Clemens.
BY THEN, IN THAT CLIMATE of a recovering post–Civil War America whose public was hungry for amusement, Clemens had achieved much renown for his humorous, homespun writings and for his cheerful and rather theatrical public presentations of his works. The first gleanings of his fame came with the publication of a short story called “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” in the New-York Saturday Press in 1865. In much demand, his reputation preceding him, and wildly popular for his travel articles, Clemens, somewhat bemused by his ability to draw a crowd, had packed the auditorium. For several hours, Clemens, as Mark Twain, ever resplendent and dapper, held forth from the stage about his recent six-month stay in the Sandwich Islands—Hawaii. His written lecture and improvised asides filled the premises with laughter, and the fine quality and detail of his prose much impressed Stanley, who stood quietly in the back observing him. While dutifully recording in his notebooks the contents of Twain’s lecture, Stanley had somewhat jealously studied his friend’s techniques at stagecraft, for, upon his own initial return from Turkey some months before, Stanley himself had tried his hand at lecturing. He had rented a hall in Jefferson City, printed flyers and tickets, and advertised the subject as the adventures and perils encountered by the American traveler in Asia Minor. He had promised to recite aloud the Islamic call to prayer, which he had memorized in Constantinople and heard from every mosque, to sing Turkish songs, and to speak of other cultural eccentricities. (When that night arrived, Stanley—dressed in a Turkish naval officer’s uniform and with props and souvenirs to display, among them a scimitar and a Saracen coat of chain mail—mounted the stage to find that only four people had shown up. He later burned the box full of remaining tickets in a stove.) So while attending the St. Louis lecture, he had perhaps envied Clemens’s popularity with the audience—but he showed no signs of it. He sought out Clemens backstage.
Sipping a glass of warmed whiskey and smoking a cigar to relax before heading out to greet the crowd of well-wishers, Clemens, lounging in a chair, looked up and, through the swirls of smoke, saw a much-changed Stanley approaching. When he got up, Clemens said, “My God, Henry, is that you?” in apparent surprise over the very fact that Stanley was still alive. They briefly embraced, neither man prone to overt expressions of affection. Later, after Clemens had partaken of a salon reception and fulfilled his duties to the crowd, he and Stanley repaired to a hotel bar, where, with the abundant enthusiasm of youth—clocks were irrelevant then—they stayed up until three in the morning recounting the events of their recent pasts to one another, for they had been long out of touch.
In the years since they had parted in New Orleans, Stanley, never knowing of Clemens’s meandering whereabouts, had managed to send but two brief letters to him, in care of Clemens’s sister in St. Louis, but these, apparently because of the war, Clemens had never received. For his part, Clemens had never known Stanley’s transient addresses, though he had over the past several years occasionally read some of Stanley’s dispatches in the Missouri Democrat (often signed with a simple S) and admired them without knowing their authorship. Mainly, he was grateful that Stanley had not been killed in the Civil War, and to that sentiment they toasted.
That same evening, Stanley, in his cups, knowing that Clemens, as Mark Twain, was turning into something of a prolific memoirist, broached the subject of their journey to Cuba. “What was it but a disappointing journey for me? Can you, Samuel, knowing me as your friend, agree to forgo any mention of it in your prolific writings, simply because it is a friend’s request?”
“Well, to be truthful, Henry, I had not thought about it one way or the other, our journey being so old.
“Though I much enjoyed our brief travels there, Henry, and though I found many a fascinating thing about the place, I have come to know where my bread and butter comes from. My stock seems to remain in the presumed charm of an ironically determined small-town southerner who grew up along the banks of the Mississippi and happens to describe his surroundings in a humorous way—an endlessly humorous way that does not allow too easily for seriously intended digressions. Our time in Cuba resulted in my own longing for home, and while I have considered writing about it—A Southerner in the Land of Mosquitoes being a title I considered—I have long decided against it.”
About three in the morning, they, filled with drink, and, practically leaning on one another, parted.
IT WAS ONLY A FEW DAYS LATER, however, that Clemens, while perusing a copy of the Missouri Democrat, found that Stanley had published, nearly word for word, the entire contents of his lecture on the Sandwich Islands, thereby ruining the freshness of it for the local public. Clemens was left so peeved that, despite his warm feelings for Stanley, he withdrew his friendship for a very long time, choosing not to answer any of Stanley’s notes of apology—“I had been put under much pressure by my editors to report it”—and forestalling any meaningful continuation of their professional or private relationship for some five years, when they would be reunited again in Brighton, England, in 1872.
ABOUT STANLEY’S PROGRESS in the years after that St. Louis event, we can learn from his own words—an address he gave before a gathering of the Anti-Slavery Society in 1890:
“My dear and gracious friends,” he began, his eyes a little teary, his voice fluctuating from strength to weakness. “Gathered dignitaries, brothers of the letter, brothers of the cloth, my fellow explorers, lords and ladies of the realm… For a man like myself, who’s come up in the hard ways of life, to be standing here before so august a gathering is a very great honor indeed—and something of a miracle, if you ask me. I stand before you having already lived enough for several lifetimes. I have known the life of common Welsh farmers and the loathsome trials of the workhouse, to which I was remanded as a boy. I have known the life of a butcher’s assistant, a schoolteacher, a sailor, a shop clerk. I have lived in America for many years. I have traveled the Mississippi River and have fought in the American Civil War…. As a journalist I have traversed the great American plains to report on the Indian Wars—I have even ridden alongside the famous Wild Bill Hickok over plains still brimming with
vast herds of buffalo. I have accompanied the very great General William Napier in pursuit of King Theodore during the Abyssinian campaign and witnessed the bloodshed of the antiroyalist insurrections in Spain…. I have journeyed up the Nile to Philae, in the ancient land of Kush, then across Persia, where, following the example of many illustrious men before me, I carved my name upon one of the monuments of Persepolis. At Jerusalem, I descended into the excavations of the Temple of Solomon, then walked in the malarial marshes by the Sea of Galilee, in the footsteps of Jesus. I have been no stranger to the Russian realm, nor am I unfamiliar with the vast distances and peculiarities of India. In short, like the proverbial Hebrews of the Bible, I have wandered widely to places that I could never have imagined as a young boy. Along the way, Africa was placed on my plate of experiences.
“My challenges began there with a great task, which was to find the devoted missionary Livingstone. Took me a bloody and arduous year, but I bloody well succeeded where others had not. [Applause] And with Livingstone, I undertook an exploration of the northerly reaches of Lake Tanganyika with the aim of determining it as the source of the Nile. We made many good discoveries, but nothing was greater than my contact with that saintly man, who became something of a father to me…. Upon my return to England from the company of that gracious soul—whose pious life my efforts had extended by some years, I do believe—I was received with much skepticism by our most prominent geographical and exploratory bodies. That a lowly reporter, sent on assignment by the illustrious James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald to a place he did not know, without any prior exploring experience beyond his morning searches for a comb [laughter], had indeed succeeded, against all odds, seemed, on the face of it, an improbability. And yet because few believed me, the savor and delight of my exertions were so much tainted by petty jealousies that for a very long time it was difficult for this humble servant to bear foremost in his mind the nobler fruits of those travels. And these, as I think must be by now well known, were in regard to my revulsion over the evil practice of slavery….
“It was during the flourishing of this ravishing and immoral practice that Dr. Livingstone first undertook his meandering missionary wanderings through the region. Mind you, he witnessed much of these natives’ sufferings—for the Arabs at that time were putting in neck and ankle chains some eighty thousand or one hundred thousand Africans a year, and that is counting only the ones who survived. By the time I reached Ujiji on my historic encounter, Livingstone, after more than a decade of witnessing such evils, emaciated and forlorn as he was, thought first of only two things: the glory and immanence of God and the deliverance of the poor souls thusly afflicted. He was a saint, I should say again. [Applause]
“It is an irony that I found him in an Arab slave-trading town, Ujiji, along the shores of Lake Tanganyika, but however he had settled there, it was surely from desperation. He was nearly dead then, suffering much from malnutrition and malaria: He had very little food, other than the scraps the slave traders would throw him, but his lack of medicine, particularly quinine, a box of which had been lost or stolen by one of his porters during his travels, was worse. We had marched in, my armed Zanzibaris sending off a fifty-gun salute; we had a drummer beating on a snare, another bloke blowing on a trumpet; we held up two flags—the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack—and, as for myself, though I had barely survived the great march, I appeared in a clean white uniform and sparkling boots, a pith helmet upon my head. That I take relish in reciting this to you, please forgive me, but on that day, November tenth, 1871, as I moved through a tumultuous crowd of Ujiji inhabitants to reach him, at my first sight of Livingstone—thin and feeble, with gray whiskers on his haggard face—I had my first moment of encountering true greatness.
“In a trunk I had brought along three pint bottles of Champagne for the occasion, and though he was weak from some six years of travels and from illness, after his first civilized meal in a long time—we had cooked a hen and other victuals—we sat drinking for a bit in his hut. Faces were always peering in at us through the mosquito-netted windows. He nearly fainted a few times, but then, with nourishment, he revived, and on that first night he recounted to me the many sad things he had seen in his travels—the slaves’ solemn marches through the jungles, their burned villages, their rotting corpses lining the trails. And, I should say, he seemed to appreciate my efforts to reach him, for few white men had traversed the climes I had (Burton and Speke were the only two I knew of, and they had stopped short of that place). But mainly he spoke of his gratitude at the thought that he was the object of such universal concern…. Then, after he shared his thoughts about the Bible and the solace it had brought him in the most desolate places, we spent the evening discussing the criminal disregard for human life that the slave trade represents.
“‘Either you are the sort who truly believes in the Good Book, or you are helplessly entangled with the avaricious mind of the devil,’” he told me.
“I could go on… but as I am here to introduce a greater program of speakers, far more informed about the history of that trade and, perhaps, more dedicated than I, I should end my brief statement with this. Even though I was once perceived by the preeminent geographical bodies of this land as a self-serving adventurer, the five months I spent with Livingstone not only made me feel a great personal affection for the man, they also strongly amplified my religious beliefs. And regardless of the passing indifference I previously had to the slave trade in Africa, the practice of which I first witnessed in America (and over which that war was fought), my travels with Livingstone stirred me awake—not just to the geographical mysteries of the region but also to a greater concern: the betterment and freedom of our fellow man. [Applause]”
THAT STANLEY, INEXPERIENCED IN AFRICAN TRAVELS and a mere American “penny-a-liner,” had overcome the dangers of that tropical clime to find Livingstone—tall, pale, thin-limbed, and sickly (from malaria), but still alive—in a remote village called Ujiji before other expeditions could do so had inspired not only much jealousy among the members of the Royal Geographical Society, but their professional skepticism as well. Even if Stanley had gone on to spend five months in the company of the saintly and kindly Livingstone, exploring by small boat the upper reaches of Lake Tanganyika, which Livingstone believed to be a possible source of the Nile, and even if he had endured many bouts of malaria along the way and could speak with much affection and intimate personal knowledge about the man who, in those months, had, by his lights, become like a father to him. After Mr. Stanley of New Orleans, and despite the compelling changes that had taken place within his own soul—Stanley, as Livingstone’s disciple, became a full-fledged antislavist then, and his hunger for exploration, with Livingstone’s geographical passions aflame within, had been aroused from the moment his first dispatches were carried by native runners to the coast and then sent onward to Zanzibar and Europe to be published.
While Stanley had been making his way back to England, most of the Fleet Street press was publishing articles that called into question the veracity of his stories. At hearings held by the Royal Geographical Society, a parcel of letters written in Livingstone’s hand for publication in the New York Herald, which Stanley had sent off before him from Zanzibar as proof of his achievement, were called forgeries; and his own detailed descriptions of his travels with Livingstone and of the man himself, also published in the Herald, were dismissed as the wishful inventions of a glory-seeking, ambitious journalist.
By the time certain members of Livingstone’s family—his son Tom and his daughter Agnes—had come forward to authenticate the letters, Stanley, arriving in England, was already put off and full of resentment by the way he had been treated. Even after the Royal Geographical Society had, as a way of reticently recognizing his achievements, invited Stanley to address a conference held by the British Association that August, instead of taking the opportunity to ingratiate himself to his hosts—among them Sir Henry Rawlinson, head of the RGS, and Francis Galton, pres
ident of the British Association’s geographical section—Stanley, incensed that no formal public apology had been made, took to the stage and in two separate speeches made his lack of respect for those bodies clear to all.
IT HAPPENED THAT SAMUEL CLEMENS, newly famous as Mark Twain by then, and in Britain on a lecture tour, had been among the three thousand people who had packed the hall that morning. Despite not having seen Stanley since their last meeting back in St. Louis in 1867, and even though, like many an American and Englishman, he had followed with admiration Stanley’s much-publicized exploits, despite the controversies surrounding them, and was quite anxious for Stanley to do well, he was disappointed by his friend’s performance that day.
From Clemens’s notebook:
Watching him floating further adrift from the good graces of the audience, I had to remind myself that Stanley was still a reasonably young man of thirty-three, though a quite different sort from the boy I once knew in New Orleans—somewhat more high-strung than I remembered and, in those days, way too bitter for his own good. As his friend I resolved to sit him down and have a good chat with him before he did himself more harm. Unfortunately, I only had a few moments to speak to him that morning, as he was in the company of the very miffed Galton; but when I greeted Stanley, he seemed genuinely relieved to see me, as I was glad to see him, my own annoyances with him, going back to 1867, having passed.
“How did I do?” he asked me, and I, of course, told him that he had performed splendidly, though given Stanley’s skeptical expression he seemed to know otherwise. Parting, we made an arrangement to meet a few days later in London.
THEN THIS, ANOTHER ENTRY:
Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise Page 16
