Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer

by Tim Jeal

  In the French capital, Stanley saw his old friend Edward King, who called him `my dear celebrity' with affectionate irony.12 But Stanley's fame had a less pleasing effect on another American journalist, Edward Virnard, whom he had known in Egypt in 118 68, and who had saved his life in a sea-bathing incident. Virnard was not prepared to wait outside his hotel room while Henry was seeing someone else, and left muttering that Stanley was `too full of conceit now to think of early friends'. Stanley noted: `This remark hurts me very much."' Worse difficulties lay ahead.

  There is no evidence in his diary that Stanley was thinking at this time about the female adulation that would very likely be in store for him in Britain as the rescuer of Dr Livingstone. He had known before setting foot on the African continent that he would never marry Katie Gough Roberts - and so he was not about to receive a painful shock. Yet his memory of sending her a long and revealing autobiographical letter preyed on his mind, especially when he thought of the sizeable sum a London newspaper might offer her, should she decide to sell. That letter could end his pretence to be an American. The press had been full of his `finding' of Livingstone since the early summer, and Stanley suspected that Katie and his Welsh relations would certainly be considering how best to cash in on his fame.

  Already, an enterprising London publisher, John Camden Hotten, was preparing for the press a book about Stanley's Welsh childhood and his years in America. His research had included interviews with Elizabeth Jones, who, despite Stanley's pleas to her to keep silent, had been massively indiscreet. Stanley knew it would now be harder to suppress the story of his Welsh connections, which were being referred to in local papers like the Rhyl Journal. He lost no time in writing to The Times to repudiate `anything and everything he [Hotten] may relate concerning me and mine ...'.14 The book came out a few months after Stanley's arrival in England and contained an account of his reception at Dover - an event that Stanley himself found too upsetting ever to describe in print.

  Mr Stanley's appearance in this country was anxiously awaited, and although he knew quite well that he would be the hero of the hour, it is pleasant to record the satisfaction he manifested at meeting his half-brother, Mr Robert Jones, and his cousin, Mr [Moses] Parry on the pier at Dover, when he landed. They then travelled in company to London, and before their departure to Denbigh, they spent a considerable time in his company."

  Stanley's twenty-four-year-old half-brother, Robert, and his twentyfive-year-old first cousin, Moses Parry, were indeed on the pier to greet him. But far from being pleased to see the enterprising duo, who had travelled all the way from Wales to congratulate him, Stanley was aghast. Both young men were drunk. `I was utterly unprepared for the scene that met me,' he recalled. `All the railway porters were there, not merely to see the Finder of Livingstone, but also to see the brother of the loud-spoken & intoxicated young men who had revealed so much family history to them.' Robert had been born in 11848, but Stanley had not seen him until his own brief and humiliating overnight stay with his mother early in 1186z, when Robert had been thirteen and he twenty. In 11869 he had seen his half-brother again, this time for three weeks. His meetings with his cousin Moses had been just as infrequent. Hotten's claim that they all travelled to London together is fanciful. Stanley wrote of being `utterly disgusted' and having travelled in a compartment where `I could be free from them ... At the station I had an opportunity to say a few words to the effect that they had taken an unwarrantable liberty with me in public etc., etc. ... Robert Jones Jnr & his cousin returned home. 1,6 `I never felt so ashamed and would have given all I was worth to have been back in central Africa.' 117

  A few days later, Robert senior - whom Henry suspected had sent his young relations to Dover - appeared at his hotel, the Langham, in Portland Place, London. Stanley treated his step-father to an angry tirade.

  You remember in 186z when I was poor ... weak & needy, you refused to speak to me, because as your wife said, `I was a disgrace to her & to you in the eyes of your neighbours.' Six years later, when I had gold and I freely parted with it, you were glad to see me. Now that my name is boomed in the press, you come to seek me. I was sick & poor & I disgraced you. Your son was drunk - beastly drunk and he disgraced me. Now I want to know by what right you seek me at all? Have you, or any connection of yours ever done anything for me that you can claim a right to send your son reeling drunk on a public platform at Dover, and there proclaim that I am related to you? Have you or your wife any right to follow me to a hotel of this kind, and to draw me out of my privacy in order that I may acknowledge you as my step-father? ... You may have arrived at that age that you can bid defiance to public opinion - but I have not. It is only now that I have begun life, and as there are no favours in the past, no protection, no kindness, no paternal or maternal love ... I shall be obliged to you if you would not pursue me in this fashion ...'s

  Jones had come to London to ask for money, and accepted his stepson's verbal lashing philosophically. He knew that Henry wanted to keep him quiet, and would pay. A few days later, Stanley sent £11oo to his mother - Jones's wife. 'I Most of the family had far worse money problems than Elizabeth Jones. Moses Parry, Henry's young cousin who had come to Dover, was on the verge of bankruptcy.z" `I discover a disposition among all the members of mother's family to indicate to me very plainly that having acquired this wearying newspaper fame, I must pay in cash handsomely to all & every member.'2' And if he would not satisfy them, the thinly veiled threat was always there: maybe some obliging newspaper might.

  Yet on his arrival in London, Stanley became aware that his family might not be the worst of his problems. Far from being treated to a civic reception for saving a British national hero, nobody from any official quarter came near him. This was partly because his Kirk-bashing speech in Paris had appeared in the press. But a significant section of the press were against him for other reasons. The Standard's leader writer first gave credence to an idea that was gaining ground: that Stanley had forged Livingstone's letters. This owed something to the fact that Livingstone, for the benefit of the New York Herald's readers, had rhapsodized about the beauty of Manyema women and had shown an improbable knowledge of American politics and poetry. It was rumoured that Stanley had not been within a thousand miles of Livingstone but had simply acquired his diary and letters by robbing an African messenger and carrying them to the coast. The story of the meeting - so went this canard - had then been invented to explain his possession of the letters. `The general opinion,' wrote an anguished Stanley in his diary, `is that I am a fraud." A communication from the foreign secretary stating that there was `not the slightest doubt as to the authenticity of Dr Livingstone's despatches' put an end to the charges of forgery, at least in England.2j Nevertheless, the whole idea of a newspaperman's turning explorer was anathema to many journalists. The Spectator's editor found it ludicrous for a reporter to risk his life `in the regular exercise of his profession, moved neither by pity, nor love of knowledge, nor by desire of adventure, but by an order from Mr Bennett'.14

  But derision hurt Stanley less than the frosty silence of the RGS, which, within a week of his arrival, issued a public statement signed by its president, Sir Henry Rawlinson, to the effect that the Society did not hold functions in the summer and so could not entertain Mr Stanley. However, the journalist would be invited to address the geographical section of the British Association at its annual conference in Brighton later in the month." Sir Henry had sent the Livingstone Search and Relief Expedition to Africa, and had been shaken to the core by Stanley's success, even suggesting in the press that `if there has been any discovery and relief it is Dr Livingstone who has discovered and relieved Mr Stanley ....'.z6 Though the publication of Livingstone's letters scotched this self-deluding idea, Rawlinson kept Stanley waiting six days before sending an insultingly brief letter of thanks on behalf of the country's geographers.17

  One leading RGS council member was the Revd Horace Waller, who had got to know Livingstone in Africa during the Zambezi E
xpedition in the 1186os, when he himself had been a missionary. Now a leading light in the campaign against the East African slave trade, Waller had somehow stayed on good terms both with Livingstone and with Dr Kirk. His friendship with the latter had led to the marriage of Kirk's brother to Waller's sister. This connection caused Waller to call on Stanley at his hotel and reproach him for his attacks on Kirk. Waller also wrote to Sir Henry Rawlinson denouncing Stanley's attempts to ruin his brother-in-law. The result was an English upperclass closing of ranks against `the American'.2s

  Punch had some splendid fun with the president of the RGS as the man `who discovered that Livingstone had discovered Stanley ... and [who] has at last discovered that Stanley is in England'," but Rawlinson continued to deny Henry the official praise he deserved. This created an impression that there was indeed something questionable about Stanley's achievement. He himself felt hurt and bewildered:

  All the actions of my life, and I may say all my thoughts since 1872, have been strongly coloured by the storm of abuse and the wholly unjustifiable reports cir culated about me then. So numerous were my enemies that ... I had to resort to silence as a protection against outrage.30

  As Stanley's hopes of praise and acceptance faded, his remaining optimism was crushed. He had at least expected sympathy from his fellow journalists, but most laughed at the absurdly formal words of greeting he claimed to have addressed to Livingstone. Dressmaker's dummies asked one another, `Dr Livingstone, I presume?' in the pages of Tailor & Cutter, and strangers called out to Stanley the fatal words that insecurity had led him to invent. Then there were jokes about the good doctor himself. Even the loyal Edward King said it was a shame Stanley had not brought home `the d-d old missionary ... and chained him to a Scottish crag with strict instructions never to hide himself again, not even though he may sometimes madly recall the dusky beauties'.3i

  On 1 16 August, in Brighton, when Stanley spoke to the geography section of the British Association, he was asked to confine himself to the only original geographical achievement of his trip, namely his and Livingstone's `Discoveries at the North End of Lake Tanganyika'. But arriving at the concert room in Middle Street to find nearly 3,000 people packed into the zoo-foot-long hall and its gallery, Stanley rebelled against shrinking the most important emotional experience of his whole life into a series of scientific facts about Lake Tanganyika. There were not many geographers there, among numerous local ladies and a sprinkling of celebrities - such as the exiled Emperor Louis Napoleon and his Empress, and the philanthropist Baroness Burdett-Coutts.

  'When I rose,' recalled Henry, `my head was in a whirl and ... I was speechless. I directed my eyes around & saw only a sea of faces, darkened by bonnets & heads. A dead silence prevailed. I managed to say, Mr President, your Imperial Majesties, my Lord, ladies and gentlemen, I ... I ... I and then stopped ...' Then jettisoning his prepared script, Henry blurted out: `I consider myself in the light of a troubadour, to relate the tale of an old man who is tramping onward to discover the source of the Nile.' Pure adventure was what most of his audience wanted, and they applauded loudly when they got it. But the meeting's chairman, Francis Galton, FRS, traveller, anthropologist and secretary of the Livingstone Relief Expedition, rebuked those who cheered. `I must beg to remind you that this is a serious society constituted for the purpose of dealing with geographical facts and not sensational stories.'

  After this rude rebuff, Stanley heard speaker after speaker assert that Livingstone's Lualaba was the Congo, and not the Nile. Henry had his own doubts about the river because of its altitude, but his admiration for Livingstone made it very painful for him when Colonel Grant, Sir Henry Rawlinson, Francis Galton and many others all dismissed Livingstone's conclusions. Enraged by their complacent upperclass voices, Stanley disparaged them as `easy chair geographers'. In his opinion, he declared to the hall, a great explorer, `who after thirty years of African travel' locates a mighty river, and follows it for 500 miles due north, should be taken seriously when he says he thinks it is the Nile.

  When Galton asked Stanley whether he had found the waters of Lake Tanganyika sweet or brackish, Stanley decided he was being mocked, and replied that there could be no sweeter water for making a cup of tea. This earned him laughter and applause, as did his attack on the chairman: `Our most worthy President, Mr Francis Galton, FRGS, FRSXYZ and I do not know how many other letters, with an elongated smile, and exceedingly bland accents, has said that you have not met to listen to sensational stories but to serious facts.'3' Well, he had some `serious facts' about Mr Galton. As an explorer, he had turned back before reaching Lake Ngami and had then been awarded the Society's gold medal for his failure. Galton counter-attacked by raising the subject Stanley most dreaded: `The public would be very grateful to Mr Stanley if he would be so good as to say ... whether ... Mr Stanley was a Welshman?' Stanley dashed this aside as `idle curiosity', though shaking with indignation. Stanley had already sent denials that he was Welsh to national newspapers; and the Illustrated London News had just published a description of him as `a Missourian, z8 years of age', as had Harper's Bazaar and the New York Herald.33 Yet though, incredibly, he was winning the battle to be thought of as an American, he felt anything but safe.

  I am constantly apprehensive as though some great calamity impended over me, for I really do not know to what length my greedy stepfather will drive his wife ... I offered to settle on her £5o as long as she lived but she laughed at it ... I have smacked my lips over the flavour of fame - but the substance is useless to me - as it may be taken away at any time.34

  Before leaving Brighton, an overwrought Stanley walked out of a banquet at the Royal Pavilion given in his honour by the Brighton and Sussex Medical Society. He thought his speech had been mocked by several guests. J. C. Parkinson of the Daily News, who interviewed Henry next day after riding with him on the Downs, recalled that most of the diners had been enjoying his talk when the incident occurred, and that Stanley had been much too thin-skinned.'' Stanley would forgive and forget these doctors, but not the British establishment. Instead, he threw down his gauntlet at the feet of the well-heeled luminaries of the RGS.

  If the Saturday Review wishes to know what I do resent, let it be understood that I resent all manner of impertinence, brutal horse-laughs at the mention of Livingstone's name, or of his sufferings; all statements that Livingstone is either insane or irritable ... all statements that I am not what I claim to be - an American; all gratuitous remarks such as `sensationalism', as directed to me by that suave gentleman, Mr Francis Galton ... and all such nonsense ...'6

  Stanley next became embroiled in an acrimonious correspondence with Clements Markham, the secretary of the RGS, who had taken Galton's part at Brighton and was now determined to deny `the American' the Society's gold medal on a technicality. Markham did not question the importance of the journey to the north end of Lake Tanganyika, but disqualified Stanley because he had not taken scientific observations for longitude and latitude in the time-honoured scientific manner with a sextant and chronometer watch. Recording the number of hours he had marched on particular compass bearings was just not good enough. Henry, however, got the better of Markham by leaking the text of his patronizing letter. In the end, public opinion swung in Stanley's favour, and he learned in October that he would, after all, receive the gold medal. This was after the Queen had expressed her own view of the matter by giving Stanley an audience, and presenting him with a gold and lapis lazuli snuff box embellished with her VR cipher in rubies and diamonds."

  During this unhappy period, Stanley made several good friends who helped him for many years to come. The first was Edwin Arnold, the forty-year-old editor of the Daily Telegraph, who was also a poet and distinguished Orientalist. Unlike the exclusively educated Markham and Rawlinson, Arnold was a grammar school boy, who was disgusted by how Stanley had been treated. From now on, while Arnold was in the editor's chair, Henry could depend upon the Daily Telegraph's support. Another important friendship was with Edward
Marston, a partner in the London publisher Sampson Low - the firm that, for an advance o f f r,ooo and a generous royalty, had bought the British rights to his book about the Livingstone quest. Stanley began writing in mid-August, having moved from the Langham Hotel to a flat in nearby Duchess Street, off Portland Place. Amazingly, he delivered a 700-page manuscript in late September - thanks to his outstanding capacity for hard work. Marston sensibly advised him to tone down his preface, cutting phrases such as `I was hooted at, reviled and calumniated', and any other passages that would be seen as `a general challenge to all creation'." Against his publisher's advice, Stanley included some niggling criticisms of Kirk and a reprise of his grievances against the RGS.

  The book was published in November 11872, under a title invented by Marston, How I Found Livingstone, which Stanley's critics would say was typical of his conceit. It received mixed reviews, The Times describing it, a little unfairly, as `not so much a book as a series of letters from a special correspondent', and accusing Stanley of 'displeasing egotism ... and still more displeasing sensitiveness and acrimony'.19 Despite the book's hasty composition, Stanley's lasting achievement was to have written a portrait of the Scottish missionary and explorer that would form the basis of the myth of saintly Dr Livingstone, transforming the way future generations saw him. In many episodes, including the fight against Mirambo, and almost every scene with Livingstone, Stanley showed that he was a master of narrative and could depict character with ease and economy.

  His book was an extraordinary feat for someone of his background, yet was marred because his editor did not prevent him foolishly including episodes of corporal punishment, some of which seem to have been invented. As a result, Stanley misrepresented his real attitude towards the men he called his `dark companions', most of whom served with him again in Africa. Such passages enabled his enemies to describe his dealings with Africans as the very opposite of Livingstone's gentle proceedings. Because Livingstone's journals were heavily edited, it was imagined that he never resorted to the whip or cane. This was not so, although he disliked using corporal punishment. By writing about beatings in a jocular fashion - something commonplace in soldiers' memoirs - Stanley shocked humanitarians in Britain, and earned Florence Nightingale's famous criticism of How I Found Livingstone as `The very worst book on the very best subject'.4°