Sir Henry Morton Stanley
Documents
Document One
Sir Henry Morton Stanley
Anglo-American journalist and explorer
Born: John Rowlands, 1841, Wales
Died: 1904 in London
John Rowlands, born January 28th 1841, was the illegitimate child of a woman from Wales. His mother and everybody else deserted him completely in his childhood, and in his early teens he left for America on a ship. He found work as a servant in New Orleans and was more or less adopted by the family he worked for. He took his new name from his employer and now became Henry Morton Stanley. He is notorious for making his own life story look different than it was, and he changed many facts in his autobiography and other of his books. He even lied about his heritage and claimed to be born in USA. Stanley fought for the south in the American Civil War from 1862, but was soon captured by enemy forces. To avoid staying in prison he changed side and became soldier for the North.
Stanley developed to become a young and ambitious journalist. He frequently improved his stories or simply made them up; but he was good at it and it kept the editors happy. In 1870, he was assigned by New York Herald to search for the missionary David Livingstone in Africa. Livingstone had been reported missing for some time. Rumors were that he had been killed giving out prayers and medicine somewhere near Lake Tanganyika. Livingstone was already world famous and a best selling author. Any news about him could sell newspapers. Gordon Bennet Jr., the owner of the New York Herald, was ready to pay a high price for the Livingstone-story. Bennet employed Stanley to find the missing adventurer -dead or alive, so to speak.
After preparing for almost a year, Stanley and his crew of around 170 men followed the same route as Livingstone. They started from the island Zanzibar out of the East African coast. An official expedition led by Verney Cameron had already been sent out, but the Americans (Bennet/Stanley) wanted to prove that they were superior to the British Empire. Livingstone was a legend and it would be a scoop for any journalist/newspaper to find him. A race for Livingstone had started. Cameron had a bad start, fighting diseases - and after several months of trekking it was Stanley who caught up with Dr. Livingstone.
Following in the footsteps of Livingstone
On November 10, 1871Stanley approached Livingstone in the village of Ujiji. The village is on the eastern coast of Lake Tanganyika in what we today know as Tanzania. Stanley had found the only other white man in this remote part of the "dark continent". He greeted him with the famous words: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Livingstone was old and troubled by diseases, but with help from Stanley, he came back on his feet and continued his search for the source of the Nile. In the next four months, they explored the northern part of Lake Tanganyika together. While Livingstone continued his search, Stanley returned to London to tell his story about how the two explorers became friends. It is important to notice that the only source to these events are Stanley himself, as Livingstone did not return from Africa alive.
Stanley wrote a book about their meeting and he was present when the remains of Livingstone were buried a few years later. He probably enjoyed seeing how the British said goodbye to a hero, but did he really understand what Livingstone had done to deserve this honor? Livingstone cleared the way for many years of brutal exploitation of Africa - but his aim was different. He was loved by his African followers when he preached his way through the jungle. He shared his knowledge of medicine and wanted progress for Africa. First, all he hoped to stop the inhumane slave trade once and for all. Stanley, on the other hand, clearly despised the black Africans (and any other non-Caucasian). Stanley was hard on his helpers and often whipped or chained them as punishment for being "lazy".
In the following years, Stanley returned to Africa exploring deeper into today's Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. This expedition was different. Stanley traveled with several hundred men, modern equipment, a ship(!) and plenty of weapons. He was still in competition with Cameron and other explorers, so he used guns to force his men forward at high pace. Livingstone did not kill anyone on his expeditions, but Stanley destroyed everything in his way and fought wars with the local tribes. He managed to navigate on Lake Victoria and finally followed the Congo River all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. He became the first European to map these areas. In 1878, he went back to Europe loaded with ivory and eager to tell of his findings.
A dirty job for the King of Belgium
King Leopold II of Belgium wanted his own colony abroad. He probably already owned everything else and his only aim was to increase his own personal wealth and power. The small country of Belgium had no fleet and was relatively isolated in the middle of Europe. Neither the Belgium government nor the other European countries would give the King what he wanted, so he decided to take it himself. He heard about Stanley's discoveries in Congo and was intrigued by the promises of this rich country far away. The King hired Stanley as his personal head of a colonization project with almost unlimited resources. The official story was that the King had formed the "African International Association for development in Central Africa" - and Stanley was expected to make local contacts on his expedition. Stanley had become famous from his meeting with Livingstone, and this story probably gave the expedition some credibility, but compared to Livingstone, Stanley suffered from a complete lack of morality.
Stanley was in Africa once again. This time he started his expedition from the Atlantic coast and he brought with him hundreds of workers. He struggled his way into Congo, put ships in Congo River, constructed roads and railways at an amazing speed. Stanley cleared all obstacles for the greedy ambitions of the Belgian King. When moving forward, he was very efficient in cheating or forcing the local chiefs to sell their land and submit to horrible conditions of the new owner. Stanley became more and more brutal in his methods and did not hesitate to shoot the Africans. Soon he had conquered the country. King Leopold had complete control over what was now called the "Congo Free State". Free trade of course, certainly not free for the people living there. The horrors and tragedies in Africa during colonialism are endless, but it is probably safe to assume that no place were as evil a place as the huge Belgian colony.
The King personally owned Congo! The colony was not the property of the Belgian state. The King earned a giant fortune from selling concessions for rubber and mining in the Free State. By taking women and children as hostages, men were forced to work for King Leopold. The King's soldiers also used torture, killing and started a horrible tradition of cutting off hands to prove that their bullets were spent well. The navigator and author Joseph Conrad wrote his famous novel Heart of Darkness after seeing with his own eyes what Leopold II was doing to Congo.
In 1908, the colony was finally turned over to the Belgian government and became the "Belgian Congo". Some reforms were made; but at very slow pace. For the Congo, it was just a new chapter in the tragedy.
Stanley did an outstanding job for King Leopold II. When he had finished his deeds in Africa, he went to London and was offered a seat in the Parliament. He died in 1904.
Document Two
Sir Henry Morton Stanley
(1841-1904)
(originally John Rowlands)
American journalist and adventurer, who took New York Herald’s mission ”to go and find Livingstone”. In his diary HOW I FOUND LIVINGSTONE (1872), Stanley presents his story with stoicism, without magnifying his epic adventure of hardships of the journey. He traveled 700 miles in 236 days before he found the ailing Scottish missionary-explorer David Livingstone on the island of Ujiji. At meeting Livingstone, Stanley tried to hide his enthusiasm and uttered his famous greeting: “Doctor Livingstone, I presume!” Stanley was considered the most effective explorer of his day, who led expeditions along the Congo and the Nile in 1874-77 and at the same time paved the way for colonial rule in these areas. He helped create Belgian King Léopold’s Congo Free State, ruled by the Belgian monarch as a personal domain, and British possessions on the upper Nile in the 1880s.
“I would have run to him, only I was a coward in the presence of such a mob—would have embraced him, but that I did not know how he would receive me; so I did what moral cowardice and false pride suggested was the best thing—walked deliberately to him, took off my hat, and said,
“DR. LIVINGSTONE, I PRESUME?”
”Yes,” said he, with a kind, cordial smile, lifting his cap slightly. (from How I Found Livingstone)
Henry Morton Stanley was born at Denbigh in North Wales, the illegitimate son of John Rowlands and Elisabeth Parry - on the birth register of St. Hilary’s Church he was entered as “John Rowlands, Bastard”. Stanley spent his early years in the custody of his two uncles and his maternal grandfather. After his grandfather died, he was consigned at the age of six to the St. Asaph Workhouse, where male adults “took part in every possible vice,” as an investigative commission reported in 1847. However, Stanley received a fair education and he became a voracious reader. At fifteen, Stanley left St. Asaph’s and stayed some years with his relatives. At seventeen, he ran away to sea and landed in New Orleans. There Stanley gave himself a new name - first he was known as “J. Rolling”, but eventually he settled on Henry Morton Stanley after the cotton broker Henry Stanley, for whom he worked in New Orleans.
After the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, Stanley joined the Confederate Army, but later he enlisted in the Union Army. In 1864, he served as a clerk at the frigate Minnesota. During the following years, Stanley led a roving life in America, working mostly as a free-lance journalist. He also went to Turkey and Asia Minor as a newspaper correspondent. In 1867-1868, he was a special correspondent for the New York Herald.
In 1871, Stanley started his expedition to East Africa. To Katie Gough-Roberts, a young woman living in Denbigh, he sent a number of letters, and planned to marry her after the journey. However, she married an architect. He was deserted by his bearers; plagued by disease and warring tribes but he found Livingstone near Lake Tanganyika in Ujiji on November 10, 1871. Together they explored the northern end of LakeTangayika - Richard Francis Burton claimed LakeTangayika as the source of the River Nile. Livingstone had journeyed extensively in central and southern Africa from 1840 and fought to destroy the slave trade. Livingstone died in 1873 on the Shores of Lake Bagweulu. His body was shipped back to England and buried in Westminster Abbey - Stanley was one of the pallbearers. On hearing of his hero’s death, Stanley decided to follow up Livingstone’s researches on the Congo/Zaire and Nile systems, and at the same time examine the discoveries of Burton, Speke and Grant.
“Two weeks were allowed me for purchasing boats - a yawl, a gig, and a barge - for giving orders for pontoons, medical stores, and provisions; for making investments in gifts for native chiefs; for obtaining scientific instruments, stationery, &c., &c. The barge was an invention of my own.” (from, Through the Dark Continent, 1878)
Before the journey, Stanley fell in love with Alice Pike, a seventeen year old American heiress. She married Albert Barney in 1876.
On his second African adventure, which started in 1874, Stanley journeyed into central Africa. Stanley’s three white companions, Frederick Barker and Francis and Edward Pocock, died during the expedition - Stanley
himself was nicknamed Bula Matari, “the rock breaker”. Stanley circumnavigated Victoria Nyanza, proving it to be the second-largest freshwater lake in the world, and discovered the ShimeeyuRiver. After sailing down the Livingstone (Congo) River, he reached the Atlantic Ocean on August 12, 1877.
When David Livingstone combined geographical, religious, commercial, and humanitarian goals in his exploration journeys, Stanley created the direct link between exploration and colonization, especially in the service of Leopold II of Belgium. Stanley represented Leopold in signing treaties with bewildered African chiefs. The first expeditions of the Belgians he led to “prove that the Congo natives were susceptible of civilization and that the Congo basin was rich enough to repay exploitation”. Stanley’s revelation of the commercial possibilities of the region resulted in the setting up of a large trading venture and led to the founding of the Congo Free State in 1885. Leopold II’s ruthless exploitation of the country’s natural resources - “the rubber atrocities” - were protested by the international community and the Belgian parliament forced the king to give up personal control of the region.
In 1877, Stanley made the first complete traverse of the IruriRiver, whose waters flow some 800 miles before joining the Congo in the vicinity of present-day Kisangani. By the time he abandoned the river to go directly for Lake Edward, fifty-two of his men were so crippled by leg ulcers and malnutrition, that he had to leave them on the riverbank at a place he named Starvation Camp.
In 1886, Stanley conducted a successful lecturing tour in the United States. The writer Mark Twain introduced him to the audience in Boston in November by comparing Stanley to Columbus:
“Now, Columbus started out to discover America. Well, he didn’t need to do anything at all but sit in the cabin of his ship and hold his grip and sail straight on, and America would discover itself. Here it was, barring his passage the whole length and breadth of the South American continent, and he couldn’t get by it. He’d got to discover it. But Stanley started out to find Doctor Livingstone, who was scattered abroad, as you may say, over the length and breadth of a vast slab of Africa as big as the United States. It was a blind kind of search. He was the worst scattered of men.”
Stanley organized the relief expedition in search of Emin Pasha, whom he met on the Albert Nyanza in 1888. In 1890, Stanley was in England. His story about his struggle to find Emir Pasha was published in 1890, the year that Joseph Conrad went to Congo, and later returned to his experiences in Heart of Darkness. In the following year, Stanley visited the United States and Australia on lecturing tours. In 1899, Stanley was knighted and in 1895-1900 he sat in Parliament.
He died in London on May 10, 1904.
Stanley’s publications include fiction and nonfiction.
His diary, How I found Livingstone, and his account of his journey to the sources of the Nile, THROUGH THE DARK CONTINENT (1878), has been reprinted several times. IN DARKEST AFRICA (1890) is a story of Stanley’s 1887-89 expedition, and depicts among others pygmies who were still mysterious to the outside world. In adventure books of the nineteenth century, they were usually pictured as dwarfs. Stanley also wrote about the slave trade, but on the other hand he believed in the superiority of the white race. KALULU, PRINCE, KING, AND SLAVE (1874), is Stanley’s only novel. The story, set in Central Africa, was about Selim, a young Arab boy from Zanzibar. Selim is taught to accept slavery, but on his journey in the Central Africa Selim himself is captured as a slave. He escapes, befriends an African prince, Kalulu. During his adventures he learns a new, critical view of his family’s values and attitudes to slavery. - The story was based on Stanley’s observation made during his historical search for Livingstone. In true-life Kalulu, ex-slave acquired in this journey, visited the US and Britain but was drowned on Stanley’s second expedition in 1874.
Selected works by Henry Morton Stanley:
HOW I FOUND LIVINGSTONE: TRAVELS, ADVENTURES, AND DISCOVERIES IN CENTRAL AFRICA, INCLUDING FOUR MONTHS’ RESIDENCE WITH DR. LIVINGSTONE, 1872
COOMASSIE AND MAGDALA: THE STORY OF TWO BRITISH CAMPAIGNS IN AFRICA, 1874
MY KALULU, PRINCE, KING, AND SLAVE, 1874 - Kalulu: Prinssi, kuningas ja orja
THROUGH THE DARK CONTINENT, OR, THE SOURCES OF THE NILE AROUND THE GREAT LAKES OF THE EQUATORIAL AFRICA AND DOWN TO THE LIVINGSTONERIVER TO THE ATLANTIC OCEAN, 1878
STANLEY’S FIRST OPINIONS; PORTUGAL AND THE SLAVE TRADE, 1883
THE CONGO, AND THE FOUNDING OF ITS FREE STATE, 1885 - Kongo