by Tim Jeal
This West African story was not a new one to Britain's colonial authorities. In fact the invasion of the Gold Coast protectorate by the neighbouring Ashanti (Asante) that had just occurred was the seventh of the century. The British government had therefore decided to send a talented general, Sir Garnet Wolseley (later Field Marshal Lord Wolseley), to punish the invaders. Sir Garnet's briskly efficient campaign ended with the sacking of the Ashanti capital, Kumasi, the levying of a fine of 50,000 ounces of gold on the defeated ruler, and the extraction of a promise that he would abandon human sacrifices, keep open the road to Kumasi, and never again attack the Fanti (Fante) tribe on the coast. Stanley chronicled this `little war' with his usual efficiency, from its start to the predictable overkill at its conclusion. British casualties on the fifth and final day of the advance were four killed and 194 wounded. Ashanti casualties may have been as high as z,ooo. After the burning of Kumasi, Stanley was disturbed to be shown, just outside the town, a grove where Ashanti kings had, for at least a century, ritually decapitated slaves, criminals, and enemies at a rate of about a thousand a year. Their blood was kept in a huge bowl and used for fetish purposes. Countless skulls lay in heaps, alongside putrefying bodies. Yet Stanley still praised the cultural achievements of the Ashanti: their extraordinary skill at carving and metalwork, and the artistry of their designs.14
One aspect of Stanley's Gold Coast assignment is of particular biographical interest. On this trip, he reverted to travelling with a heroworshipping teenage servant. Before the campaign proper began, Stanley and the well-known writer of boys' adventures, G. A. Henty, reporting for the Standard, ventured along the coast in a small steamship. The hero of Henty's next boys' novel, By Sheer Pluck, was a teenage boy, resembling Stanley's clerk and valet, Anthony Swinburne, who travelled with them. Stanley did not mention Anthony in any of his writings, until he employed him six years later."
Stanley had first met Anthony Bannister Swinburne in London in September 1873, when the boy was fifteen and had just left Christ's Hospital School to become an apprentice tea broker in the City." His clergyman father had died suddenly in 1866, leaving his widow, Frances, with very little money. She and Anthony had then been constantly on the move from one lodging house to another.'' Mrs Swinburne's struggle to help her boy get on in life moved Stanley, precisely because his own mother had not struggled for him. Fatherless boys aroused Stanley's deepest feelings of compassion, because he himself had never known a father. With Anthony, the older-brother dimension of Henry's relations with young males was replaced by something paternal - a feeling that would ultimately become a longing for fatherhood.
Frances Swinburne had felt, intuitively, that she could trust Stanley to look after Anthony, and she was right. In late December, when the campaign was effectively over, she wrote telling Stanley: `I can scarcely say what he [Anthony] does not feel you are ... I almost believe you are his idol - certainly his beau ideal of all that is good and true."' Henry had never allowed young Swinburne to come near the fighting; but he could not save him from contracting fever. Anthony did not complain, but wrote from his sick bed at Cape Coast Castle: `You have behaved like a father to me and I am sure I cannot express my thanks ... If you are ever in want of anyone ... and you cannot get better than myself, I am at your service."9
Compared with the way in which Stanley had treated Noe and Selim, his kindness to Anthony shows a perceptible softening in his character. Although it would be naive to suppose that his time with Livingstone had fundamentally transformed him, there can be no doubt that it had had a maturing effect. His concern for Anthony would not end with their return to England. Fanny Swinburne sent him pictures of her son as he grew older, and Stanley placed these in his carte de visite album, with those of friends and famous acquaintances."
During his voyage to England, Stanley reached the island of St Vincent on z5 February 1874 to learn that Livingstone was dead.2 Arriving in London on 117 March, he wrote next day to Agnes Livingstone telling her that he was `stricken dumb' by the news. `I cannot give you a description of the misery I felt.' Then he assured her that `no daughter was ever beloved so deeply as you were ... How I envy you such a father. The richest inheritance a father can give his children is an honoured name." Given Henry's earlier fears about Livingstone's ill health, and the immensity of the task he had set himself, Stanley could not claim to have been surprised. Now, in the Herald's London office, as he read about Livingstone's death near Lake Bangweulu, though grieving, Stanley knew that the doctor and his unfinished work was hot news again.Z3 The story of how, after his death, his body had been eviscerated, dried and preserved by his followers before being carried a thousand miles to the coast inside a bale of tarred sailcloth was a remarkable one. Indeed, Livingstone's dogged refusal to give in when facing overwhelming odds, his uncomplaining acceptance of agonizing pain and his lonely death still conjure up powerful images. Coupled with Stanley's picture of saintly Dr Livingstone, his martyr-like death made him an instant myth. Stanley sensed this, not just as a journalist, but as a devoted disciple. To finish the dead man's work now became a sacred trust. As he wrote again to Agnes, `the completion of your father's discoveries ... [is] like a legacy left me by Livingstone'.14 This idea of being bequeathed the task of unravelling the world's greatest remaining geographical mysteries was an inspiring one for Stanley, legitimizing him, rather than Kirk, Waller or even Livingstone's sons, as the great man's true heir.
Livingstone travelling through marshes weeks before his death, from his published Last journals
In his diary for 2.5 February 1874 - the day on which he had first heard that Livingstone was dead - there can be found the kind of devotional entry that would have been sure to appeal to pious contemporaries, and has suggested to all Stanley's previous biographers that it was only after hearing about Livingstone's death that he decided to give up journalism and devote himself to exploration. This was what he wanted them to believe - it seemed to him that his story would gain in drama if it were thought he had decided to return to Africa only after Livingstone's passing. But in fact this diary entry was written when Henry was working on his autobiography in the 18gos, and inserted in his old journal at the appropriate point. It reads: `Dear Livingstone! another sacrifice to Africa! His mission, however, must not be allowed to cease. Others must go forward and fill the gap. Close up boys! Close up Death will find us everywhere. May I be selected to succeed him in opening up Africa to the shining light of Christianity!'ZS (His debts to Henry Newbolt and his famous poem Vital Lampada (1897), with its refrain of `Play up! play up! and play the game', are clear.) To this entry Stanley added - in the late 189os - some sentences that would often be quoted against him in the future: `My methods, however, will not be Livingstone's. Each man has his own way. His, I think had its defects, though the old man, personally, has been almost Christ-like ... The selfish and wooden-headed world requires mastering, as well as loving charity ...'z6 The obituary of Livingstone that Stanley wrote for the Graphic (published 24 April) better reflects his feelings at the time.
Though the heart of Livingstone ... has ceased to beat, his voice rings out loud ... He has bequeathed a rich legacy to fight the evil horror of the slave trade ... and left an obligation on the civilized nations of Europe and America, as the shepherds of the world, to extend their care and protection over the oppressed races of Africa.
At this time Henry received the final letter Livingstone had written to him - it was one of the very last he ever wrote, since, although undated, it was headed `Lake Bangweolo'. Livingstone deeply regretted that, in the chaos of assembling his caravan at Unyanyembe, he had not `expressed half the gratitude that welled up in [his] heart for all the kind and able services [Stanley] rendered [him] at the coast 1.17
While Livingstone's death and burial did not determine the future course of Stanley's life, they certainly strengthened his existing determination to solve the Nile problem. Stanley was one of that select body of officials, friends and family who went to Southamp
ton to see the body brought ashore on a wet and windy mid-April morning." The Royal Horse Artillery's twenty-one-gun salute, at minute intervals, and the military band playing the `Dead March from Saul', gave notice of a great national event in which fate had given the former boy from St Asaph a leading role. As befitted a national hero, Livingstone's coffin lay for two days in the Map Room of the headquarters of the RGS in Savile Row, Burlington Gardens. The prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, and the Prince of Wales were mourners at the funeral itself, and emotional crowds lined Pall Mall and Whitehall. As a pall bearer, Stanley was conveyed to Westminster Abbey in the third of twelve mourning carriages, along with several fellow pall bearers, the detested Horace Waller and two of Livingstone's friends, William Cotton Oswell, the hunter and explorer, and E. D. Young, leader of the first Livingstone Search Expedition.Z9 Kalulu, in a new grey suit, travelled in the second carriage with William Webb of Newstead, Dr John Kirk and Jacob Wainwright, one of the doctor's African followers. Agnes Livingstone had implored Stanley to forgive John Kirk `over the grave of my dearest & best'. 3° If he had only obliged her, he would have saved himself much anguish.
The funeral made a lasting impression on Henry, as it did on many others in the Abbey - among them missionaries who would start new missions in Africa, and two businessmen who would found a great African trading company, along with two shipping magnates who would between them donate a million pounds to African projects." But it was the influence Livingstone had already exerted on Stanley that would have by far the greatest effect on subsequent African colonial history.
On 7 April 11874, Stanley had learned that Lieutenant W. J. Grandy's RGS-sponsored Congo expedition had been recalled, having achieved nothing.32 How Cameron was faring, he had no idea, and so had to live with the possibility that the naval officer might succeed in his mission and thus write him out of history. But this uncertainty did not stop Stanley trying to get a new African expedition off the ground. Nor, fortunately, did it stop newspaper editors seeing that Livingstone's death changed everything. Finishing his uncompleted work would now be a great story. Henry's friend, Edwin Arnold, the idiosyncratic editor of the Daily Telegraph, wrote to him saying: `this great question [the identification of the Nile's source] is a subject in which my heart & soul are engaged'.33 Arnold set up a meeting on 114 June with the paper's proprietor, Edward Levy-Lawson, who was understandably sceptical when Stanley said he meant to find the answer to all the great geographical questions of the central watershed left unsolved by Speke, Burton, Grant, Baker and Livingstone. Yet, in the end, Henry persuaded Lawson to offer a magnificent £6,ooo, conditional upon James Gordon Bennett Jr contributing the same. Rather than allow himself to be left out of an enterprise promising substantial newspaper sales, Bennett telegraphed a grudging one word reply: `Yes'. But that single word spelled the difference between a viable mission, and no mission at all.34
To say that at the age of thirty-three Stanley stood on the brink of greatness would be true. But in the summer of 11874, the most likely possibility was that he would die long before finding out central Africa's remaining secrets.
TWELVE
Love and the Longest Journey
Before his crucial meeting with Edward Levy-Lawson and Edwin Arnold, Stanley had gone to stay at Newstead Abbey to finish his book, Coomasie and Magdala, which combined in a single volume his accounts of the campaigns he had reported on in West Africa and in Abyssinia.' Though suspecting that the book would not sell well, he did not brood on this. He had all the preparations for his next great journey to attend to, and out of the blue he fell in love for the first time since his relationship with Katie Roberts. On 113 May 11874, shortly after returning from Newstead, Henry wrote in his diary: `This day I first got acquainted with a young lady called Alice Pike, daughter of Mrs S. N. Pike of 6113, Fifth Avenue.' Three densely written pages followed, describing this meeting with Alice and her family at a dinner table at the luxurious Langham - Henry's favourite London hotel.
On that momentous evening, Alice - the youngest of three daughters - was the only one to whom he felt drawn. The eldest daughter, Nettie, who was also there, he dismissed as `rather fast', and also because she wore her hair in fashionable `frizzles', and talked too loud. But as for Alice, he was at once struck by her `soft girlish profile' and `self-contained way'. He liked her blue-grey eyes and soft, large mouth, and thought `the carriage of her head indicated that she was cool and self-possessed'. His only criticism - a serious one in his eyes - was that she wore too many diamonds, which made him fear 'inordinate vanity with over-much wealth to gratify it'. She was also, he said, `very ignorant of African geography, & I fear of everything else'.'
Three days later, Stanley went driving in the park with the girls. Though he was twice Alice's seventeen years, and knew all her foibles, he sensed that he was on the brink. `I fear if Miss Alice gives me as much encouragement as she has been giving me lately, I shall fall in love with her, which may not perhaps be very conducive to my happiness, for she is the very opposite of my ideal wife.'3 When Henry called the following morning, the 117th, Alice read him a love letter she had just received from a French count, laughing at his flowery sentiments. Stanley resolved never to write affectionately until she `had first made a declaration ... However pretty, elegant etc. she may be, she is heartless, and a confirmed flirt.'4 Yet this did not save him from himself.
Now, almost every day, the distinguished, cigar-smoking, moustachioed thirty-three-year-old explorer, with his dark wavy hair, greying at the temples, and the pert, self-confident daughter of Samuel N. Pike, the recently deceased owner of the Cincinnati and New York Opera houses, met each other. Alice's father had also owned numerous hotels and several of America's largest whisky distilleries, and had had an annual income of $3,000,000. It seems most unlikely - despite Stanley's apparent disdain for ostentation - that Alice's staggering wealth was not fascinating to him. Perhaps this compensated for her ignorance and immaturity, which would normally have repelled a serious-minded man who had worked so hard to educate himself.
On 113 June, Alice sailed home to New York, and Stanley went to see her off at Liverpool docks, where he had once delivered meat to the ships. `This day,' he wrote, `I saw my fiancee, Alice, for so I must call her, depart from Liverpool.'' Two months later, Henry himself sailed for New York, ostensibly to see Gordon Bennett but really to be with Alice. At his two meetings with Bennett, the proprietor's arrogance and hypocrisy were as bad as before. At their first appointment, he simply dismissed Stanley, saying he was too busy to see him. `This is rather an unkind way to receive one whom he is about to send to Africa,' noted Stanley with amazing restraint.
Given what he had already done for the New York Herald's sales, and what his new journey promised to do, Bennett's ingratitude was staggering. On r r July Bennett, who had shamelessly exaggerated the amount he had spent on the Livingstone search, now refused to sign a contract committing himself to spend the full £6,ooo he had promised for the new trans-Africa expedition. Instead, he said he would deposit a smaller sum at a bank - to be topped up `as the necessity of the case demanded it'.6
Henry's meeting with Alice next day, at 6113, Fifth Avenue, was far more pleasing. During it, they both pledged themselves in writing to get married when Henry returned from Africa.7 On his last night in New York, Alice again promised to marry him `whether her mother were willing or not', he wrote, for `in deference to her mother she had postponed our marriage for two years'. Before they parted, Alice `raised her lips in tempting proximity to mine and I kissed her on her lips, on her eyes, her cheeks, and her neck, and she kissed me in return'. But, as Stanley reflected anxiously, `two years is such a long time to wait, & I have so much to do, such a weary, weary journey to make before I can ever return. No man had ever to work harder for a wife.' And what if he should fail to get back in two years, which Alice declared was the longest she would wait? 8
Their farewell took place on the r 8th on pier 52, with all three Pike sisters coming to wave th
eir handkerchiefs from the dock. Stanley could not bear to prolong the scene and gestured to them not to stay any longer: `Alice kissed her hand to me and resolutely turned away ...'9 When Alice's letters started to arrive, her failure to ask questions about his expedition, or to express anxiety about his very real chances of dying, must have disturbed him. She had told him to sign himself Morton in his letters to her, since she preferred that name to Henry. He did not demur.
When it became public knowledge that he was about to mount an expedition, Stanley received scores of applications to accompany him - i,zoo in all, from America and Europe as well as from Britain. Those volunteering included several high-ranking army officers and many junior ones'° but, as with the Livingstone expedition, Henry chose young men from his own social background. They would be less likely to challenge his leadership than self-confident officers. But this was not his only rationale. Stanley enjoyed giving a helping hand to men like himself, born with few if any advantages. Whatever his reasoning, there is something impressively daring about his choosing, as his first recruit, a clerk working at the Langham Hotel. According to Henry, young Frederick Barker had badgered him for weeks to be taken, and had remained adamant despite repeated warnings about the dangers of Africa. His job would be to keep an up-to-date record of the expedition's stores. Francis and Edward Pocock, also in their early twenties, were the fishermen sons of the skipper of Edwin Arnold's yacht, which the Daily Telegraph's editor kept on the river Medway in Kent." To circumnavigate vast lakes, Stanley would need experienced boatmen. However, no member of this trio had ever been abroad, let alone to Africa. Henry would describe his white companions as servants, rather than colleagues. Kalulu was taken out of school so he could return to his homeland as his master's page and butler.
