STANLEY: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer
by Tim Jeal
Faber ₤25, 496 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤20
The greatest irony of Henry Morton Stanley’s life is that he became famous for “finding” the famous British missionary and explorer David Livingstone. His best-selling account of the meeting, How I Found Livingstone, almost single-handedly created the myth of the doctor as a saintly figure.
Yet, as Livingstone’s reputation rocketed, Stanley’s plummeted. In writing about his own feats, Stanley’s remarks about his treatment of Africans caused outrage. He was scorned by Britain’s scientific and geographical establishment. He was ridiculed by the press. His ill-advised entanglement in Belgium’s colonial enterprises in Congo disgraced him. The ultimate snub was to be denied burial in Westminster Abbey (unlike Livingstone). Recent biographers have conveyed the impression that Stanley was “the most brutal explorer of the nineteenth century”.
Tim Jeal is the author of a thorough biography of David Livingstone. In it, he proved that the good doctor was hardly as virtuous as conventional wisdom suggested. In Stanley, he has set out to do the opposite: establish that the journalist and explorer was not as exploitative as historians have led us to believe.
Stanley, Jeal claims, should be known not only as the man who secured one of history’s most extraordinary scoops, but as Africa’s greatest explorer. It is a bold claim, and one that Jeal, who had access to previously undisclosed archival material, goes a long way in bearing out.
Stanley was born John Rowlands, the illegitimate son of a promiscuous woman in the Welsh market town of Denbigh. Unable to look after him, his mother left him with his maternal grandfather, who died when John was five. He was put into foster care, but was sent to St Asaph workhouse when he became a financial burden to his foster family. The future explorer would spend the rest of his life trying to distance himself from his beginnings.
Among the most outstanding aspects of Stanley’s life was his constant need for reinvention. In a posthumously published autobiography he claims to have escaped St Asaph’s after beating an abusive guardian unconscious. This was a fantasy, as was his supposed adoption by an American cotton trader whose name, Henry Stanley, he took for himself.
Stanley was a 20-year-old clerk in Arkansas when the American civil war broke out. He enlisted with the Confederate army, and was captured at the battle of Shiloh. In exchange for his allegiance, he was offered freedom, and he enrolled in the Union’s artillery service.
Later, he stumbled into journalism, and persuaded the editor of the New York Herald to sponsor his mission to locate Livingstone. In this enterprise, the 30-year-old Stanley succeeded (although his famous words: “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” were probably invented, too).
After Livingstone’s death, Stanley took it upon himself to finish the old man’s work of geographical exploration. But his relationship with the British scientific establishment was strained. That a hack for an “American” paper had trounced the Royal Geographic Society’s efforts to find Livingstone was hard to swallow. That he now intended to become a professional explorer was intolerable.
The bad press Stanley received was partly his own fault. In dispatches and autobiographical accounts, Stanley exaggerates episodes in which he whipped his African carriers, or fired at hostile natives. The exaggerations, Jeal suggests, stemmed from his lifelong need for self-aggrandisement.
Critics decried his association with slave merchants, but more problematic was his decision to become an agent in Congo for Leopold II of Belgium, by which Stanley made himself vulnerable to the charge of being the worst kind of imperialist. For a man who had solved Africa’s most important geographical riddle by the age of 36 - establishing that Lake Victoria was the main source of the river Nile - and for whom no other support was forthcoming, there were few other options. This unfortunate episode, Jeal suggests, occurred through Stanley’s naivety rather than his lack of scruples.
Jeal’s main purpose is to rehabilitate Stanley’s reputation. His tone is often defensive, and he is prepared to explain away his subject’s worst excesses. Yet he succeeds in demonstrating that, as an African explorer Stanley was no worse than many of his famous contemporaries - and was often much better.