Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer

by Tim Jeal

  AFTERWORD

  `How can I ever make anyone understand what he really was?'

  Mounteney Jephson May 1904

  On the day Stanley died, Henry Wellcome approached the Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Armitage Robinson, to acquaint him with the great explorer's wish to be buried in the Abbey, close to Dr Livingstone's grave. The dean's decision was made public three days later: `It is officially announced that only the first half of the funeral of the late Sir Henry Morton Stanley will take place in Westminster Abbey." Although members of Stanley's family were never told Dean Robinson's reasons for denying him burial in the Abbey, the dean was more forthcoming with the king's private secretary: `One of our highest geographical authorities lays stress on the violence and even cruelty, which marked some of his [Stanley's] explorations, and contrasts this with the peaceful successes of other explorers. This chiefly weighed with me in giving my decision to restrict the honour done to him to what I may call second honours, i.e. burial refusal but the first part of the funeral service granted.'z

  Dorothy strongly suspected that the dean had been got at by Sir Clements Markham, the former secretary of the RGS, who had loathed Henry ever since he had made a fool of him on his return from finding Livingstone.' The current Secretary of the RGS, Sir John Keltie, had no such reservations, and agreed at once to be a pallbearer. The king showed his disapproval of Robinson's decision by sending the Duke of Abercorn, his Special Envoy to various European courts, to be a pall-bearer. Sir Harry Johnston also gladly accepted an invitation. He had seen Stanley negotiate with the Congolese, and con curred with Jephson's statement that he `never saw him do a cruel or wanton thing'.4 Livingstone's daughter, Agnes, felt the greatest indignation. `Your dear Stanley,' she told Dorothy, `was so associated with my father and my husband [Alexander Bruce] that I seem to have lost them again by his passing from us ... I shall do my utmost to protect my dear friend's memory.'s

  `When we married,' Dolly told Henry Wellcome, `he wanted nothing from the world.'6 And this was true. Stanley's desire to avoid being recognized in public, and to have no contact either with London society or with the establishment, was entirely genuine. Yet Dorothy had longed for him to be respected, more than he had wanted it for himself; so it hurt her deeply that, after his long-delayed knighthood, he had received this posthumous snub. Eight-year-old Denzil, who followed his father's coffin on foot from Richmond Terrace to the Abbey, never forgot his mother's anguish. It amazed him that his loving father could be considered cruel by anyone important. The problem, as Mounteney Jephson pointed out, was Henry's public image. `The side of him generally known to the public was that of a hard, unsympathetic, self-contained and apparently self-seeking man; the other side - that which his intimate friends saw and loved - was absolutely simple and affectionate.''

  That Stanley should have presented a tough and indifferent outer shell to the world was hardly surprising, given his treatment in childhood. But Dorothy was ideally placed, when she assembled the Autobiography, to show the vulnerable private man whom `his intimate friends' knew. Yet she did not understand that Stanley's best defence was the truth. Far from emphasizing the wrongs done him in childhood, she gave the press an incorrect date of birth solely in order to direct historians away from documents that would have proved him illegitimate.' When newspapers stated that his parents had been unmarried, she sent denials to the editors.' By the time she brought to Pirbright from Dartmoor the huge monolith that would mark her husband's grave, she had decided that the correct date should at least appear on this stone, but she also chose to cut into the granite (nature's hardest rock) the words Bula Matari - a symbolic error as unfortunate as her choice of stone.

  This marked the beginning of a long and misguided process by which she, and then Denzil, sought to protect Henry's memory, not by being more open, but by strengthening his defences - in her case with lies, and in Denzil's by denying historians precisely those personal papers, such as Stanley's letters to Katie Gough Roberts and to Dolly herself, that would have enabled them to present the man not as an unfeeling martinet, but as a man who had longed all his life to experience the love denied him in childhood. That the supposed `Breaker of Rocks' had been long-suffering enough to allow Dorothy - who had never loved him as she had loved Sir Alfred Lyall - to force him into politics, shows how inappropriate his African nickname had long since become.

  Sadly, the concealments and omissions made by Dorothy, and later by Denzil, played a significant role in delaying Stanley's rehabilitation. It is a truism that no man is a hero to his valet, and Dorothy would have done well to publish the fact that W. J. Hawkes - Stanley's valet from 118911 to 11897 - had begged to be allowed to follow his master's body on foot to its final resting place, `if Lady Stanley will allow'." Whether Hawkes ever received a ticket for the funeral is unknown, but poor William Hoffman definitely did not. `It nearly broke my heart not to have a ticket,' he told Dorothy. So instead, the man who had walked through the Ituri Forest with Stanley recalled: `[I] stood at Richmond Terrace Gate to see my dear good master's coffin ... and it gave me such pain that I fainted." This anecdote, if used, would have spoken volumes about the affection Stanley inspired in servants.

  Dorothy also omitted to mention that Henry's only bequests in his will (other than those to her, to Denzil, and to Jephson) were to William Hoffman, the former shoe black, and to his mother's favourite son, James William Jones, who worked on a railway station. But Dorothy found no place at all in the Autobiography for Stanley's humbler friends - not even for Edward Glave, whom Stanley had idolized. She granted only a single sentence to Anthony Swinburne, who had kept de Brazza out of Stanley Pool, and had first worked for Stanley as a teenager. Mrs Sheldon was excluded entirely, as was her fellow American Edward King, though both had been intimate friends, as well as exceptional people. Nor did Dorothy remark upon the numerous letters of recommendation Henry wrote on behalf of colleagues who had fallen on hard times." Henry's hatred of the needless slaughter of wild animals was also left out - though this too would have shown his gentler side. He had felt strongly enough to beg Sir Francis de Winton to ignore Leopold's orders and stop shooting elephants on the Congo. `Do not murder any more, for sheer pity ... Let the ground of the Association [the Congo] be sacred to the elephants."3

  The decisions made by Denzil, and his adopted son, Richard, about the custody of his papers also did much to prevent Stanley's appearing in a favourable light. It was Denzil who decided that the Stanley family archive ought never to be owned by a British institution. This was because on the fiftieth anniversary of his father's death, there had been no official commemoration anywhere in Britain - whereas, in the same year, Denzil and Richard were welcomed warmly at the Congo Museum by the Belgian government's Minister of the Colonies, who eulogized Stanley before an audience of a thousand people.14 Denzil vowed several years later to sell his house and all his father's papers to the Belgian state." After his sudden death, it was left to Richard to carry out his wishes and sell more than half the papers to Belgium. That was in 1982 - and after Richard's death, his widow and her sons sold the rest in zooo. Because access to these papers was denied to historians from r98z until zooz, Denzil's preference for Belgium above Britain as the final destination for his father's papers denied to both Frank McLynn and John Bierman many documents that would have ensured that they wrote more sympathetic biographies.

  Stanley had fallen out badly with Leopold, so if he had ever been able to travel in time and stand outside the neo-classical `Stanley Pavilion' beside the lake that flanks the king's chateau-like Congo Museum, and be told that his papers were within, his thoughts would have been unprintable. Nor would he have been comforted to hear that his archive had been flown to Brussels in a Belgian air force jet, almost as if bearing away from morally superior Britain the corpse of his reputation. But there the archive rests, close to a museum containing scores of beautiful African artefacts, as well as Stanley's selfdesigned tropical hat and the Stars and Stripes he took t
o his meeting with Livingstone. Nearby is a room called `The Gallery of Remembrance', which is not dedicated to the millions of Africans who perished during the 118gos and early moos, but to the 11,5o8 Belgians, who died in the Congo during Leopold's reign.

  So where does this leave Stanley, and his papers and other possessions? I fear it leaves them as part of the history of Belgium's most unprincipled king's efforts to steal the resources, the labour, and indeed the lives of his `subjects' in Africa's largest country. Given Stanley's very different hopes and aims, and his feelings for the Congolese, it would have amazed him that this should be his permanent memorial.

  Yet the facts of Stanley's life, and the truth about his personality, can (and I believe will) rescue his posthumous reputation. In 1878, after his greatest journey, Mark Twain declared: `Stanley is almost the only man alive today whose name and work will be familiar one hundred years hence.' Twain, like most of his male contemporaries in America, valued above all other human virtues courage, physical endurance, and the goal of increasing man's knowledge of the planet, at whatever personal cost. And this feeling spanned continents. Anton Chekhov, the master of understated artistry, saw Stanley's `stubborn invincible striving towards a certain goal, no matter what privations, dangers and temptations for personal happiness are entailed ... [as] personifying the highest moral strength ... One Stanley is worth a hundred good books.' " Stanley had gone back to Africa again and again, apparently indifferent to the increased risk of death on each return. His courage, and his unparalleled geographical feats, had certainly not grown less remarkable as the years had passed. But technological and medical progress made the nature of his achievement harder to appreciate for succeeding generations. Today, outside the field of sport, such qualities are not so highly regarded in a world in which sexual equality has made many purely masculine pursuits seem chauvinistic, or simply masochistic. The fact that African explorers could not avoid terrible sickness and privation is largely forgotten.

  By another of the many ironies that constantly afflicted Stanley, the press - which had made him famous after he found Livingstone - destroyed him after the Barttelot and Jameson families had taken exception to his restrained criticism of their relatives. Because Stanley was seen as an American criticizing British officers, it scarcely registered in editors' minds that he himself had been innocent of the appalling acts perpetrated by members of his notorious Rear Column. He had not bought a young girl and sketched her being killed and eaten, nor had he flogged men to death, and starved them when copious preserved food was in store. Yet because of the Rear Column scandals, from late r 890 onwards Stanley's very name seemed to summon up images of cannibalism, brutality and moral disintegration. Then from the mid-nineties this damage had been compounded by the increasingly stomach-turning revelations emanating from the Congo.

  Ask a dozen people who was the greatest land explorer in the greatest age of exploration since the voyages of the Portuguese and Spanish navigators, and maybe one (but more likely none) will name Stanley - and not just on account of his undeserved `conquistador' stereotype. Because of the power of the numerous visual depictions of his meeting with Livingstone under the folds of the Stars and Stripes, he is often thought of as an American journalist, rather than as an explorer. `Dr Livingstone, I presume?' has been remembered, but not his wretched Welsh childhood and the workhouse, not the suffering, not the working class companions, his Civil War fighting, his gold rush failures, Turkish fiasco, enlightened reporting of the Indian wars, triumph in Abyssinia - virtually none of the elements that made Stanley such a unique British hero, though of course he is not acknowledged as such. He had packed more into his life before he set out to find Livingstone, aged twenty-nine, than many adventurers could claim to have experienced in their entire lives.

  Still in his early thirties, between 11874 and 11877 Stanley circumnavigated Lake Victoria in a small boat crewed by only eleven men, proving that it was a single body of water and not several, which made Speke's northern outlet almost certain to be the primary source of the Nile. His circumnavigation of Lake Tanganyika established that the only outflow from the lake flowed into the Lualaba to the west. By making regular observations for latitude and longitude at noon on clear days, using a sextant and a chronometer, he made the first reliable maps of the two largest northern lakes, and the river system of the central African watershed. He also mapped the course of the Congo, joining a series of dots that recorded each of the positions obtained by his regular midday observations. He took boiling-point readings to establish heights above sea level and used a theodolite to estimate the height of distant hills. By following the Lualaba north and then west, he proved that it had no connection with the Nile, or the Niger, and was therefore the Congo, and he mapped its entire course to the Atlantic from Nyangwe. Despite his problems with hostile tribes, with rapids, and with lack of food, he managed to take nineteen observations between 4 February and z March 11877, during which time he delineated the entire top of the river's majestic hoop-like curve. His original map of the Congo was sold as Lot 3 8 at Christie's Africa Sale on 24 September zooz for £78,ooo, almost four times its minimum estimate of £zo,ooo. This unique map was bought by an American private collector. It should surely have been bought for the British nation.'7

  In 1 [876 Stanley had stated that he thought the Kagera River was `the true parent of the Victoria Nile', which is exactly what has just been claimed in zoo6 by the members of a New Zealand and British expe- dition.i8 In 118 89 Stanley established that Lake Edward fed the Semliki river, which flowed on into Lake Albert - proving that this lake was a secondary source of the Nile, and no rival to Lake Victoria (or to the Kagera that fed it). Also in 11889, Stanley established the role of the rain-making Ruwenzori mountains in feeding the Nile. Stanley was not inferior to Livingstone in scientific observation, and made no mistakes as serious as the elder man's miscalculations at Lake Bangweulu; nor did he leave the Congo at a vital point, as Livingstone had done for almost 300 miles east of Victoria Falls when mapping the Zambezi. That one omission had wrecked Livingstone's subsequent Zambesi Expedition.

  To have been a great leader of African exploring expeditions in the anarchic last three decades of the nineteenth century required very unusual personal qualities - characteristics, in fact, that sensible, wellbalanced modern men and women, leading safe lives, tend to find alarming: such as being inspired, fearless, obsessed, able to frighten, able to suffer, but also able to command love and obedience. Such men tended to be haunted by their longing to solve mysteries, by their dedication to a cause, or by the belief that God had sent them, or by their need to earn love and respect through the strength of their will. They are an extinct species, and all the more remarkable for that.

  After Freud linked human behaviour with unconscious desires and unmasked the self-deception inherent in Victorian `will-power', the well-informed came to mistrust other nineteenth-century virtues like `duty' and `sense of mission'. `I was not sent into the world to be happy ... I was sent for a special work,' wrote Stanley, and believed it.' What was wrong with those explorers, we ask, knowingly, these days. And even if we acquit them of being the masochistic victims of their own thwarted impulses, books with men of action as their protagonists remain out of favour with sophisticated people. Failure to understand the mindset of a lost era has done much to limit our appreciation of Homeric lives like Stanley's. Disapproval of the adventurous hero began with the birth of English seriousness in the eighteenth century, and despite the subsequent popularity of Scott and Stevenson (and their less talented B-movie successors), the adventurer would never appeal to intellectuals of later generations. Only a blighted, selfdoubting fictional specimen, like Conrad's eponymous Lord Jim, stood any chance. But Stanley was blighted too, very like Jim, by his inability to live up to his ideals. More modern still, Stanley failed to deny himself the fame he both craved and detested. For Stanley, adventure was not a secret failing, like reading pulp fiction in bed (which he sometimes did), but a Nietzschean
confrontation that was the breath of life to him, a breaking away from the daily self he knew and could not endure, into a persona in which he could escape past humiliations, and stretch the boundaries of the human condition in denial of his own mortality.

  A few days after Frank Pocock's and Kalulu's canoes had hurtled into a foaming maelstrom of rocks and white water, drowning them both, Stanley was himself close to death, by starvation rather than drowning.

  This poor body of mine has suffered terribly [he wrote], it has been degraded, pained, wearied & sickened, and has well nigh sunk under the task imposed on it; but this was but a small portion of myself. For my real self lay darkly encased, & was ever too haughty & soaring for such miserable environments as the body that encumbered it daily.2°

  Indeed, there was an unearthly quality about the man, which people noticed. Major James Pond, his lecture agent, was one of them. When the explorer returned from his pioneering on the Congo in the mid- 188os, Pond was surprised, on first meeting Stanley, to find him small, reticent and surprisingly gentle. Yet the man's pale and extraordinarily penetrating blue-grey eyes fascinated him. They had lunch at the Cafe Royal and afterwards, when they had parted at the end of a short walk, the hard-bitten agent, who represented ex-presidents and kings, found himself hurrying after his guest as if impelled by an unseen force. `I cannot tell why it was but I could not help following him. He had produced a most remarkable impression on me. I kept saying to myself: "That is Stanley! Stanley the wonderful explorer! What a life he has had!""'

  In a photographic exhibition in London, in August zoos, there was a photograph of a broken statue of Henry Stanley, lying on the rotting deck of the AIA , one of his own steamers launched on the Upper Congo in November 1188z. The man and the little ship have lain together since the 1970s in a public works lot in Kinshasa. Both are popular with photographers, since the fallen figure of Stanley in his solar topee (regulation wear for imperial officials) speaks eloquently of the absurdity of white supremacist ideas and the fate that had always awaited them. I doubt whether Stanley would have been surprised by the fall of his effigy, or by the fact that the government of Zambia is trying to get Zimbabwe to hand over to them the statue of a man, whom `the Zambians have a great deal of affection for'. It is not Stanley, of course, but the much-photographed one of striding Dr Livingstone that overlooks Victoria Falls."