Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer

by Tim Jeal

  A famous example of this jocose tendency occurs when Stanley describes his attempt to slip past a hostile tribe by night. Unable to bear the tension, the wife of one of his carriers suddenly becomes hysterical and starts screaming. Her distraught husband suggests cutting her throat, but Stanley resorts to the whip. `I asked her to desist after the first blow. "No!" She continued her insane cries with increased force and volume. Again my whip descended on her shoulders ... Louder and louder she cried, and faster and faster I showered the blows for the taming of this shrew.'4' This was improbable behaviour for a man anxious to restore silence, since it could only have resulted in more, rather than less noise. It therefore seems unlikely that the incident ever occurred. Equally damaging was a full page illustration (facing page 642 of the book) showing a man up to his neck in a river, with a box on his head. This was said to contain Livingstone's diaries, and Stanley was depicted pointing a revolver at his head. The caption reads: `Look out, you drop that box - I'll shoot you.' This was equally unconvincing since the threat would only have terrified the man and made him more likely to stumble - and, if carried out, would have led to the certain loss of the diaries. In his desperation to appear masterful, and impossible to thwart, Stanley was responsible for sowing the seeds of his reputation for brutality.

  In this same book, Henry advised every white traveller

  to learn the necessity of admitting that negroes are men, like himself, though of a different colour; that they have passions and prejudices, likes and dislikes ... in common with all human nature ... Though I had once lived among the negroes of the Southern States, my education was Northern, and I had met in the United States black men, whom I was proud to call friends.14L

  Since tribal Africans were commonly called savages and niggers by Stanley's contemporaries, and were written about as such in popular books, his general reflections about Africans seem unusually enlightened, while his heartless passages are no worse than examples to be found in many other books.41 Nor should it be forgotten that corporal punishment was commonplace in British society at large.

  Shortly after his book became a runaway best-seller, Sir Henry Rawlinson and the secretary of the RGS, Clements Markham, gave Stanley a large banquet in Willis's Supper Rooms in St James's Square, at which Rawlinson delivered an apparently heartfelt apology for causing Stanley so much distress. Mark Twain, who was present, described it as `the most manly and magnificent apology ... that I ever listened to'.44 But Stanley was not so easily mollified. `I could forgive the English geographers for their unkind remarks, made when I was absent - if I was not aware that the same principle of hostility still lives, and is busy. 141 His problem with English gentlemen was that he could not believe that when they shook hands and apologized, they really meant it, and so he never gave his former critics a chance to get to know him and change their minds. In the workhouse, enemies had remained enemies.

  But Henry showed his gentler side to two of Livingstone's closest friends, William and Emilia Webb, and to their children, when he went to stay with them in October at Newstead Abbey, near Nottingham, their historic country house (formerly Lord Byron's ancestral home). Livingstone had been the Webbs' guest for eight months during 11864 and 11865, while writing his book about his ill-starred Zambezi Expedition. Despite being rich, the Webbs were open-minded and welltravelled. Emilia and her daughter Augusta described Stanley as `a typical American journalist, almost aggressively so', and `very rough in all his ways, and as unlike the Stanley of his later years as a prickly chestnut burr is to the smooth brown chestnut within'. Augusta and her mother realized that he was defensive because still `smarting and bruised' from his maltreatment by the press and the geographers.

  Emilia noticed how awkward Stanley was with strangers, becoming like `a perfect porcupine', yet being `so very nice' when alone with her family. Stanley was `abstemious in his habits, and rather silent', yet as the days passed, he became much less like `a perfect Ishmaelite with his hand raised against every man and feeling every man's hand raised against him'. Augusta saw him grow steadily `gentler, and happier, whilst the hard lines on his face became less visible'. Emilia took Henry for rides in her pony phaeton and found that he had `a great loneliness of heart', and `under all his roughness one of the most affectionate natures' she had ever encountered. Stanley even confided to Emilia `all his sad early story'. Livingstone had been Stanley's idea of an ideal father and, at Newstead, Emilia seems to have become something approaching his ideal mother.

  Augusta thought Stanley's appearance striking. `He had at this time the most extraordinary and wonderful eyes I had ever seen. They were like small pools of grey fire, but the least provocation turned them into grey lightning ... his whole personality gave out the impression of overwhelming and concentrated force ...' Augusta reckoned that this scared people and made them dislike him without quite knowing why.46 His stay with the Webbs was a brief period of peace before an exhausting series of book lectures. While speaking in Scotland, he met Livingstone's elder daughter, Agnes, who a few days after his arrival in England had sent him a letter of heartfelt thanks, which had comforted him while the RGS was being so insultingly silent.47

  The most stressful lecture of his English tour took place in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, early in November. Many of his Denbigh relatives occupied the best seats, and sent up notes, which he refused to answer. `The truth is: between myself and my countrymen is a great gulf now ... They cannot understand why I should not be proud of the little parish world of northern Wales and I cannot understand what they see to admire in it.' He was staying that night with the president of the local Chamber of Commerce - and to this man's front door came Katie Gough-Roberts, now Mrs Urban Bradshaw, with her husband. She must have realized that Stanley would have been enraged to discover that she had allowed Hotten to reproduce, in his book, a photograph of a page of his long autobiographical letter to her. Katie gave the servant a note to take to Stanley. In it, she offered to return his long letter if he would come down for it in person. But Stanley knew she was with her husband, who would have read all his love letters, so, out of pride, he refused to see her.48

  This incident confirmed his growing conviction that fame was useless to him. It not only made his relatives more grasping, but brought threatening letters, and numerous invitations from strangers. Most days Henry would get thirty or more letters from people he had never heard of. Since he hated being stared at in the street, he felt obliged to take expensive hackney cabs everywhere. He also had to spend money on new clothes in order to dine with important people, and on stamps and stationery to reply to all his mail. And although the £z,ooo paid him in advance by British and American publishers, along with large lecture fees, substantially exceeded his £400 per annum basic income from journalism, his poverty-stricken childhood still made him eager to save money rather than spend it.49

  All the time, he felt he was viewed with `an immense amount of envy': `I can count my friends on my fingers but my enemies are a host.' Certainly he did have friends, such as Marston and Arnold, but neither belonged to his generation. If Edward King, who was working as the Boston Morning Journal's Paris correspondent, had only been living in London in r 87z, Henry would have had someone with whom to talk through his problems. As things were, he only saw him in Paris en route to somewhere else. At their last meeting Henry had given him a gold watch, as a token of their `unwavering' friendship.50 Meanwhile, Madame Tussaud's made a waxwork likeness of the lonely young man.

  The celebrity who interested Henry more than any other while he was in London was Richard Burton, the scholar, author and explorer, whom he met twice. Stanley was fascinated that Burton chose to 'present himself to the public as aggressively as possible'. It seemed that Burton actually `wished to be thought wicked & hard ... No wonder society is shocked by his open defiance and his sneers at what he calls "goody-goodiness".' Stanley's own sensitivity to criticism made him wonder whether Burton could really be indifferent to public opinion, or whether he felt `se
cret pain' at being shunned. Perhaps Burton's determination to present himself `aggressively' helped the younger man decide that the best way to deal with his own vulnerable feelings would be to hide them behind a stern facade.' I

  On the eve of sailing for America, for more lecturing to sell the Scribner's edition of his book, Stanley was in a strange position - he hated `the scavenger-beetles of the press', and detested `the vulgar, even hideous nonsense [and] untruths published' by them." Yet here he was, about to go to New York in part so that he could beg James Gordon Bennett Jr to send him on some journalistic assignment (which in his heart he knew could only be an anti-climax after his finding of Livingstone). His situation was all the more ironic since by early October 187z, his mind was already turning to Africa again. In this month, the press was agitating for the RGS to spend on the good doctor all the £3,750 still remaining of the £5,ooo subscribed by the public for the ill-starred Livingstone Search and Relief Expedition.

  By early October, Henry had decided that his true vocation was as an explorer. On the 5th he wrote telling Clements Markham that all the remaining geographical problems of the central watershed could be solved if the Society sent out an experienced traveller - hinting that he would be the right man. Markham ignored his hint, and in his reply failed to mention that the RGS was about to send a young naval officer, Verney Lovett Cameron, to contact Livingstone and assist him from the east, while a second naval officer would be sent to reach him from the Atlantic coast via the Congo." (Markham had himself once held a commission in the navy.)

  When he imagined these young officers completing Livingstone's geographical work, it seemed to Henry that he had been offered the chance of a lifetime and had tossed it away. All the time Africa had been his destiny, without his realizing it. The memory of his happiness with Livingstone also haunted him. `I seem to see through the dim, misty, warm, hazy atmosphere of Africa, always the aged face of Livingstone, urging me on in his kind, fatherly way.'14 It is clear from a letter Lieutenant Cameron sent to Stanley on z5 October that Henry had written to him humbly, a few days earlier, suggesting that they pool their resources to help Livingstone. Cameron replied coolly: `I regret exceedingly that circumstances have arisen which render me unable to join my expedition to yours. I am very sorry indeed to be unable to avail myself of your experience ...'s' Those unspecified 'circumstances' would have included a direct prohibition from Markham and Rawlinson to co-operate with `the American'. Cameron was `the Protege of the RGS', chosen to eclipse the `damned penny a liner' and avenge the defeat of the RGS Livingstone Search and Relief Expedi- tion.s6 Henry's unnecessary quarrel with the RGS now looked likely to deny him all future exploring opportunities under their control.

  Nothing in Stanley's papers suggests that he ever asked Bennett to pay for him to return to Africa to trace the Lualaba with Livingstone. The mogul would certainly have argued that a great scoop could never be repeated. However, it is likely that during October r 87z Henry suggested to Edwin Arnold of the Daily Telegraph that solving the Nile and Congo mystery with Livingstone could be made into a story as popular as `finding' him. But if Arnold was asked, he must have refused the bait. The unpalatable fact was that another man looked set to solve the age-old mystery of the central African watershed in partnership with Stanley's ideal father, and there was absolutely nothing that he could do about it - except, of course, pray that Cameron would fail. A despondent Stanley sailed for New York, and his wellpaid American lecture tour, on 9 November, three weeks before Verney Lovett Cameron sailed for Zanzibar.

  ELEVEN

  A Destiny Resumed

  On 2-o November 1872-, Stanley's Cunarder, the Cuba, steamed into the Hudson River and was met by a tug dressed overall with flags and flying from her masthead a gigantic banner bearing the words: WELCOME TO STANLEY. She had been hired by the New York Herald to take the returning hero ashore, and was filled with journalists and notabilities. Yet when Stanley arrived at the Herald's offices, James Gordon Bennett Jr granted him a mere ten minutes of his time. It was said that the egotistical proprietor had become insanely jealous because Stanley, rather than himself, had become world famous as a result of the Livingstone mission.'

  Whatever the truth of this, Bennett allowed to be published in the Herald an unnecessarily cruel account of Stanley's first lecture in the Steinway Hall. One of his journalists, George O. Seilhamer, condemned the subject matter as `intolerably dull', the speaker's delivery as fast and hesitant, and his voice as being `pitched in a sing-song and doleful monotone'.' It seemed that Stanley had made the disastrous decision to give in New York the kind of academic talk that would have delighted the Brighton geographers - whereas `the sensational stories' that Mr Galton had hated would have been far better suited to the Steinway Hall. Stanley's second lecture was more entertaining, but the hall was only one-third full. The next talk had to be cancelled when a mere scattering of people turned up. Effectively, Henry's tour had been destroyed by the Herald. Small wonder that this incident fed his suspicion that even people with good reason to be grateful turned against him eventually. Meanwhile, the songs and humorous vignettes of two Broadway extravaganzas, `King Carrot' and `Africa', puzzled and upset him, because they burlesqued Livingstone and himself, and not just the slave traders and the stuffed shirts of the RGS.3

  Although Henry had imagined he needed a period of rest and tranquillity, he felt lonely and neglected now that he had it. He moved from the Fifth Avenue Hotel to rooms on East zoth Street and lived quietly. In the summer, Lewis Noe had sold to the New York Sun his story about his sufferings in Turkey, with details about the joint desertion from the US navy. He also claimed that Stanley was a Welshman called Rowlands and that he had forged Livingstone's letters. This would be repeated across America. For a month or so, Bennett had used these revelations to sell yet more newspapers, before squashing the Sun's story with overwhelming evidence.4 But with many aspects of his rackety past now in the public domain, Stanley's old sense of security in America was gone. Not that he would ever lose his gratitude for what the country had done for him. At least he still had friends to chat with. From time to time, Edward King - working briefly in Boston - visited his old friend in New York.' Finley Anderson also called in regularly. And since both men were bachelors, they talked about women and love. Henry wrote to Anderson about two particular females. Could he put in a good word with one? `I cannot make love for you,' replied the former London bureau chief. `If I should make the attempt, possibly you might not get her.'6

  Even after Bennett's monstrous behaviour, Stanley did not resign from the Herald - though he did investigate whether another paper might send him back to Africa. He certainly tried his utmost to persuade Louis Jennings, the editor of the New York Times, to send him to the Lualaba. But it was Jennings who, early in 11873, effectively delivered the coup de grace to his hopes of aiding Livingstone again: We think on careful reflection, that another African expedition would be like threshing out the beaten straw. A second enterprise of that sort could not possibly equal the success of the first, and the Herald has rather used up the general subject.'' It was a deeply depressing moment for a man who had so recently achieved the century's most enduring scoop.

  While in America, Stanley wrote a curious book, My Kalulu, Prince, King and Slave, which he called a romance for boys, but which was really a strange combination of fantasy and adventure novel. Its heroes were Kalulu and Selim, modelled very loosely on his two youngest servants in Africa. The background is the Mirambo war; many sickening acts of violence are committed, similar to acts that Stanley had witnessed or heard about. Henry implored Edward Marston not to allow `anything vulgar to creep in', but though a reference to slaves being `compelled to attend to a call of nature' was cut, bucketfuls of blood remained.' Not that bloody scenes were anything but commonplace in Victorian adventure fiction. And sentimental relationships, such as that between Kalulu and Selim, were routine in novels of public school life. But Stanley was no novelist, and the book lacked focus and moment
um - the very qualities his travel writing always had. When My Kalulu's sales were poor, he vowed never to attempt another work of fiction for readers of any age.'

  In April 11873, Mr Bennett sent a telegram from Paris summoning Stanley back to work. Though Henry had no idea what assignments he might be offered, he was relieved to be on the verge of resuming his former profession. But first he wanted to place Kalulu in an English school. The young African - now nearly twelve - had lived in London and New York with him, and in both cities had obligingly sung Swahili songs for any visiting journalist, and agreed to be photographed in tribal attire beside Stanley in his exploring outfit of thigh-length boots and pith helmet.'° Back in England, before leaving the boy at a church school in Wandsworth, Henry took him as a treat to stay with the Webbs for a few days." Despite such acts of kindness, Stanley exploited the boy to publicize his book and his lectures. Yet Kalulu's lot, had he remained a slave in Africa, would hardly have been preferable to his peripatetic existence with Stanley.12

  On z May 1873, Stanley met James Gordon Bennett Jr in the Hotel des Deux Mondes in Paris and was told that he must resume his old job in Spain. Faced with the prospect of returning to the very work he had been doing in the Madrid bureau before he became famous, Henry must have been saddened. But his posting was brief, and in October Bennett sent him to cover a British military campaign in West Africa. At least he would be in Africa again, though nowhere near the central watershed. Unless he had asked for a rise before leaving, Bennett would not have raised his salary to £r,ooo per annum from the miserly £400 it had been since 1869.13