Henry Morton Stanley is known to the world as the American journalist
who, in November 1871, issued the immortal greeting:’ Dr
Livingstone I presume’ when he located the missing explorer
at Ujiji. In fact he was neither ‘Henry’, ‘Morton’,
‘Stanley’ nor American and it is arguable whether
his journalism was based more on fact or on fiction. He was born
in Wales in 1841, one of several illegitimate children of Betsy
Parry, and christened ‘John Rowlands - Bastard’, the
first of many indignities which contributed to the character which
King Leopold II was to find
so useful. The first six years of his life were spent with his
grandfather who did not believe in sparing the rod and, when he
died, John was deposited in the St Asaph Union Workhouse. Here
he seems to have been the recipient of the worst kinds of Victorian
sexual and physical abuse but gained a passion for geography,
an elegant script and a bible as a prize from a local bishop.
At fifteen he left St Asaph’s and for two years lived as
the ‘poorhouse boy’ with various relatives before
shipping to New Orleans. In a series of moves which would be recognised
by any psychiatrist today he then began a process of re-invention,
taking on the name of the merchant who befriended him when he
landed and inventing a whole new autobiography. There is no doubt
that his early childhood left him with what would today be called
sexual hang-ups and it can be no coincidence that, in years to
come, he departed on two of his African journeys soon after becoming
engaged. Neither lady waited for him.
After a stint in the American Civil War – fighting for
the Confederates at the battle of Shiloh and then for the Union
navy, bombarding Confederate ports in North Carolina - he started
his journalistic career writing freelance articles. He then covered
the Indian wars for a variety of eastern papers. The conflict
between the papers’ desire for stories of blood and thunder
and the fact that the wars were virtually over and that Stanley’s
time was spent covering peace missions was easily resolved as
his fictional reports of the Indians on the warpath showed. His
reports and style were appreciated by the publisher of the New
York Herald, James Gordon Bennett Jnr., who hired him to cover
the British-Abyssinian war. Here, foresight and luck played equal
parts in his advancement. He had already bribed the telegraph
operator in Suez to send his dispatches before all others and,
just after his report of a British victory, the telegraph cable
out of Suez broke so no more dispatches could be sent. This scoop,
in June of 1868, resulted in his being given a permanent position
as a roving reporter on the Herald but it took until the end of
1871 for him to become a household name, as famous as the explorer
whom he had found. This mattered to Stanley who never regarded
exploration as anything more than the establishment of a factual
framework within which he might weave his arguably fictional tales
of daring-do and thus obtain the riches he never had as a child.
His books were so popular that it would be fair to identify him
as the first of a long sequence of professional travel writers
but, once again, he was fortunate, Livingstone died in Africa
and did not return to Britain where his story might well have
conflicted with that of Stanley’s as told in ‘How
I found Livingstone’. Stanley was now thirty years old.
Yet again his past returned to haunt him as the ‘upper
crust’ Royal Geographic Society refused to acknowledge his
exploring abilities and rumours about his birth began to spread.
This could be professionally damaging to an ‘American’
writing for an anti-British paper in the US. His insecurity was
further increased when he discovered that his fiancée had
married whilst he was away. His answer - to return to Africa -
could be considered escapism or a need for more background for
his next book. Finance was available from Gordon Bennett, Levy-Lawson
of the UK Daily Telegraph and others for an Anglo-American expedition
to solve a number of geographical problems relating to the land
west of Lake Tanganyika and, particularly, to establish the relationship
between the rivers Lualaba, Nile, Niger and Congo. Livingstone
had thought that the Lualaba formed the headwaters of the Nile
but Lovatt Cameron believed it fed the Congo. Stanley initially
favoured the Niger but slowly came to prefer the Congo. The world
wanted to know and he could see money in a book.
The expedition set off in 1874 with Stanley, three other whites
whose lack of experience suggested that they had been chosen so
that they would not detract from Stanley’s glory, and their
main means of transport, the Lady Alice, a forty foot steam launch
which divided into five sections for portage. The boat was named
after Stanley’s second fiancée, the seventeen-year-old
Alice Pike. The expedition also contained over 300 Africans.
Stanley’s was perfectly happy to fight his way past any
tribal opposition, particularly when it consisted of bows, arrows
and spears with the occasional antique muzzle-loader. He noted
that ‘we have attacked and destroyed twenty-eight large
towns and three or four score villages’. However, when necessary,
he was capable of a more subtle approach, illustrated in his conversion
of the Emperor of Uganda to Christianity. This was brought about
by making him aware of the church’s eleven commandments,
the one we would not recognise being that man must ‘honour
and respect kings as they are envoys of God’.
Starting down the Lualaba, Stanley travelled several hundred
miles before the first portage round ‘Stanley Falls’
and then he had a clear run of almost 1,000 miles to ‘Stanley
Pool’. Lest it be thought that his egotism was running a
little high, he named Mount Gordon Bennett, the Gordon Bennett
River, the Levy Hills and Mount Lawson after his main sponsors.
The naming of ‘Stanley Pool’ was at the insistence
of one of the other whites, Frank Pocock, or so Stanley claimed
but as Mr Pocock, like Stanley’s other two white companions,
died on the expedition we can only take his word for that. The
final 200 or so miles west of Stanley Pool to the coast were a
continuous string of rapids and waterfalls which made Stanley
realise that he was on the River Congo. The boats were abandoned
and a desperate four-and-a-half months of marching through the
jungle was needed to arrive at Bomba.
The epic ’Through The Dark Continent’, published
by Stanley in 1878, tells all from his point of view in his established
and popular style, although one fact which is missing is the number
of native survivors. We know that Stanley, alone of the four whites
who set out, survived and that the death toll amongst the natives
was massively high. Perhaps Stanley’s failure to record
this detail just reflected his lack of interest in the trivia
of his successful expedition.
The only sour note was to be sounded when he discovered that
his second fiancée had preferred the ‘bird in the
hand’ and had married an American railway heir a few months
after they had separated. He would have been more distressed to
know that in later years, after his death, she claimed remorse
that she had not waited for him and professed that it was her
spirit, together with the physical presence of the Lady Alice,
which had motivated and carried him across Africa.
Leopold had been watching Stanley.
Earlier, Lovatt Cameron had annexed the Congo in the name of Queen
Victoria – only to have the British Government reject the
annexation as soon as it heard of it! Leopold’s
immediate problem now was how to recruit Stanley without alerting
the British. He therefore resolved to employ Stanley to explore
the Congo basin for his ‘front’ body, the AIA. A little
early discussion with Stanley seemed a good idea so he sent two
emissaries to meet him at Marseilles, where his train had stopped
en route to Britain from Italy. Stanley was not interested; he
wanted plaudits from his countrymen (the British) and time to
write his book. By June 1878 Stanley had become tired of the negative
attitude of the British Government, which was too tied up in Egypt
and the Nile to consider further African undertakings, so he travelled
to Brussels for a meeting with Leopold.
The two got on well but Stanley emphasised that the first stage
of any useful opening-up of the Congo required a railway round
the lower falls and rapids. Funding was a problem but a proposal
from the Dutch traders at the mouth of the Congo for a ‘Study
Syndicate’ fitted nicely into the ostensible ‘charitable’
purposes of the AIA and a group of European financiers agreed
to support this. The syndicate came into being as the ‘Comité
d’Etudes du Haut-Congo’. Leopold
wrote to Stanley: ’It is a question of creating a new State
as big as possible and running it … there is no question
of granting political power to Negroes … the white man will
head the stations which will be populated by free and freed Negroes.
Every station would regard itself as a little republic The work
will be directed by the King (Leopold)
who attaches particular importance to the setting up of the stations
… the best course of action would be to secure concessions
of land from the natives for the purposes of roads and cultivation
and to found as many stations as possible …should we not
try to extend the influence of the stations over the neighbouring
chiefs and form a Republican Confederation of native freedmen.
The President (of the Confederation) will hold his powers from
the King.’
The emphasis on ‘freed men’ fitted in with the aims
of the AIA and gave Leopold
the time he needed to implement his real schemes, more honestly
set out in a private letter to Stanley in August 1878. Stanley
was to acquire as much land as possible by purchase or concession
on behalf of the Comité which would set out the laws of
this ‘Free State’ with Leopold,
as a private citizen, at its head. Although Stanley obtained close
to 1,000,000 square miles of the Congo for Leopold,
the latter was not happy as the French, through Count Savorgnan
de Brazza, established a camp at Stanley Pool, the site of the
future Brazzaville.
What Stanley did not know was that the Comité d’Etudes
du Haut-Congo no longer existed! In November 1878 Leopold
announced to his shareholders that most of the money used to found
it had been spent and the rest was committed to contracts already
underway. The Comité d’Etudes du Haut-Congo was immediately
replaced by the Association Internationale du Congo (AIC) with
100% funding from Leopold. With
his land and position reasonably secure he could nopw concentrate
on transport and infrastructure. In 1890 Stanley’s railway
was started at Matadi. Three years later it had advanced 14 miles
at a cost in African life which is, even now, unknown. The official
figures claimed 1800 non-whites and 132 whites but less official
(and more reliable?) sources suggest that the 1800 figure only
relates to the first two years of its construction. Nevertheless,
the line was extended to Stanley Pool over the next five years
and was then open for business. Three weeks of portage were reduced
to two days of steam-powered transportation.
By now people were beginning to take note of Leopold’s
ambitions and activities. One of the earliest attempts to bring
him to some accountability was initiated by a black American soldier,
lawyer and preacher, James Washington Williams. Williams was already
known in America as a proponent of black civil rights and in1889
he wrote to Leopold suggesting
that he could recruit black Americans to work in the Congo where
they could advance themselves in a way impossible in the US. He
came to Europe, met and was initially impressed by Leopold
but in 1890 he set out for Africa where he spent six months touring
the Congo. He was a civil rights activist and what he saw sickened
him. His response was to write an ‘Open Letter to His Serene
Majesty Leopold II’ which
was also published as a pamphlet and widely distributed throughout
Europe. He wrote a similar letter to the President of the United
States of America, President Harrison. In the ‘Open Letter’
he accused Leopold on eight
major points. Those relevant to Stanley were:
“Stanley used a range of crude
conjuring tricks to persuade the natives that he had supernatural
powers and to induce them to sign over their tribal lands for trivial
recompense.”
“Stanley was not a hero but
a cruel foul-mouthed tyrant.”
However, in 1890 Stanley was safe in England. His story about his
struggle to find Emir Pasha was published in 1890, the year that
Joseph Conrad went to the Congo and later recaptured his experiences
in 'Heart of Darkness'. In the following year Stanley visited the
United States and Australia on lecturing tours. He was knighted
in 1899 and in 1895-1900 he sat in Parliament. He died in London
on May 10, 1904 and is buried at Pirbright, Surry.