HENRY MORTON STANLEY

Biography

Chris Sullivan on the 19th century explorer who was ordered to go and find Dr. Livingstone in Africa and ended up serving a much bloodier cause for King Leopold of Belgium

“This was an era when explorers and adventurers such as Richard Burton and James Speke were akin to 20th century pop stars – their exploits known all over the globe – while Frenchman Paul Belloni Du Chaillu brought back skeletons and skins of gorillas and told of how these hairy beasts abducted women and subjected them to ‘purposes too vile to mention’”

octor Livingstone, I presume” is a phrase

Dthat has echoed through the corridors of history for well over a century. But if truth be told, the only person who reported on this legendary epithet is the man himself who is said to have uttered the words – Henry Morton Stanley. An inestimable reprobate, his story is the stuff of fiction, his actions severely questionable while his rendering of his exploits has been scrutinised ever since he first put quill to vellum. Nevertheless, like a character from some bygone Victorian melodrama, the actual life of Henry Stanley was far stranger than fiction. Stanley was born on 28th January 1841 in the town of Denbigh in North Wales; his name registered as John Rowland, Bastard. He was the first of five illegitimate children born to housemaid Betsy Parry and either renowned drunkard John Rowland or a lawyer named John Vaughn. His mother having left in disgrace, the boy, now aged six, was sequestered in St Asaph’s Union Workhouse, where he was sexually abused by both teachers and older inmates, resulting in a fear of physical contact for the rest of his life. Aged 15 when he left the confine, in 1859 he chanced upon a stranger who took him to Missouri, where the boy changed his name to Henry Morton Stanley. From then on, he became a world-class obfuscator who simply created his past life and avoided facts like the Black Death. He claimed for many years that he was American, but

The closest Henry ever got to a smile I presume it’s time to utter your killer line, Mr. Stanley?

“King Leopold offered to pay Stanley 50,000 francs a year ($500,000 in today’s money) to finance an expedition to garner as much ivory as was humanly possible, aided by massive firepower. In the pre-plastic age, ivory was hugely sought after and fashioned into everything from crucifixes to billiard balls and false teeth”

lapsed into a Welsh accent when drunk. He said he ran away in a daring midnight escape over the walls of St. Asaph, but was actually taken to live with his granddad.

Having joined the Confederate cause, in 1862 Stanley fought in the battle of Shiloh, was captured and imprisoned in a typhoid-ridden POW camp, whereupon he enlisted in the Union army, only to fall foul of dysentery and be discharged. He joined the Confederate Navy and promptly deserted. In 1865 he started working as a journalist for a local St. Louis newspaper, travelled to Turkey as a correspondent and his career as a scribe took off. On his return to the US, he began writing sensational accounts of the war against the indigenous American Indians. His pugnacious reports incited hatred among the white readers, which sold newspapers and soon he was made foreign correspondent for the New York Herald. Now based in London, Stanley was able to savour the Scramble For Africa that his writings in part had precipitated.

This was an era when explorers and adventurers such as Richard Burton and James Speke were akin to 20th century pop stars – their exploits known all over the globe – while Frenchman Paul Belloni Du Chaillu brought back skeletons and skins of gorillas, and told of how these hairy beasts abducted women and subjected them to ‘purposes too vile to mention.’

The British saw themselves as bringing Christianity to the “savage natives” of Africa and,

British journalist Edmund Morel, who exposed the horrors meted out by Stanley in the Congo on behalf of King Leopold

even though slavery had only ended in 1838 in the UK and British ships had dominated the slave trade, saw themselves as the nation that had ended slavery. This incentive to storm into the bush as the great saviour gave Stanley formidable impetus. As he wrote in his memoir, “Like a gladiator in the arena… any flinching, any cowardice and he is lost.” Stanley ventured into the interior of the continent in search of lost hero, renowned physician, explorer and prospector David Livingstone. For the last three decades, Livingstone had denounced slavery, searched for the source of the Nile, had been the first white man to cross the African continent from coast to coast and, more importantly, had preached the gospel. He had not been seen in four years, having gone in search of slave traders in 1866.

In 1869, Stanley was, according to his memoir, summoned by his newspaper boss James Gordon Bennet to the Grand Hotel Paris and ordered to go in search of Livingstone. “Go and find him wherever you may hear where he is… FIND LIVINGTONE!” Stanley must have missed the urgency of the order, for he didn’t leave until a year later.

Off he jolly well went to Africa, dressed in pith helmet and jodhpurs, funded by the newspaper to find Livingstone. He first went to the slave island Zanzibar and arrived in West Africa in the Spring of 1871, with a dog named Omar and 190 cooks, porters, guards and guides, in what was the biggest African expedition to date.

He really did find Livingstone and, according to Stanley, they became great chums. Stanley was adored by the French and feted by American generals but the British, having heard of his true past, shunned him, while his fiancé married an architect instead. By 1877 he was back in Africa, crossing the continent from West to East. Always both cognisant and wary of those who might outshine him, out of the 1200 men who applied to join the expedition, he chose three entirely unsuitable cohorts who had never left the British Isles. A hotel clerk named Fed Barker and the Pockock brothers, two Cornish fishermen, one of whom could play the bugle – so all wasn’t quite lost.

A mini army comprising 365 souls, they carried 16,000 pounds of guns, ammunition and explosives and left a bloody trail of hundreds of dead Africans, armed only with spears and bows and arrows in their wake. “We have destroyed 28 large towns and three or four score of villages. One beach was crowded with infuriates and mockers, so I opened on them with the Winchester repeating rifle. Six shots and four deaths were sufficient to quiet the mocking.” Stanley, with the skin of a rhino, reported such victories in both the New York Herald and the

Telegraph, who had funded his enterprise. Others were more condemning. The British Anti-Slavery Society attacked Stanley with venom, and he was also condemmed by Sir Richard Burton for his treatment of the African people.

In his memoir Through The Dark Continent Stanley relished his adventures and, even though it reads like a horror story for anyone this side of the Mediterranean, he attracted international fame. But worse was yet to come.

In 1873, Stanley sat down with King Leopold of Belgium (one of the most despicable murderers in history, right up there with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot). Having read of Stanley’s exploits, King Leopold had designs to expand his personal fortune throughout the Congo. They came to an agreement that the King would pay Stanley 50,000 francs a year ($500,000 in today’s money) to finance an expedition to garner as much ivory as was humanly possible, aided by massive firepower. In the preplastic age, ivory was hugely sought after and fashioned into everything from crucifixes to billiard balls and false teeth.

“It is indispensable,” instructed Leopold, “that you should purchase for the Comité d’Études (ie Leopold himself) as much land as you can obtain.” Stanley was Leopold’s man for five years in the Congo, during which time Leopold cut a bloody swathe through the land, massacring some 10 million Africans while maiming millions more.

Leopold masked his vicious empirical endeavours under the guise of bringing civilisation to the Congo. In 1885 he promised European leaders that the he was duty bound to proceed with his philanthropic and humanitarian mission that would improve the lives of these entirely subjugated Africans. He was granted 770,000 square miles to create what he named the Congo Free State, in fact a private colony run along bloodthirsty lines to cultivate and trade minerals, rubber and ivory.

Stanley ventured forth for Leopold and, under a compassionate guise to rescue Emin Pasha (left), the governor of Equatoria, set off in 1888 looking for new territories for the Belgian King. However, his reputation was soon to be tarnished, after one his fellow ‘saviours’, Army Major Edmund Musgrave, was killed by a porter after almost whipping a man to death. Others witnessed many such brutalities, including British journalist Edmund Morel, who detected a fortune in rubber frequently returning from the Congo, while in return only guns, ordnance explosives, iron manacles and man traps were sent back. The value of the goods coming from the Congo Free State was five times that of the goods coming from Europe, so Morel correctly deduced that this wealth had been garnered through slavery, forced labour and murder, and campaigned relentlessly to expose the abuses meted out by King Leopold. By 1908, the tyrant’s rule was deemed so brutal and genocidal that European leaders, themselves violently exploiting Africa, denounced it and the Belgian parliament forced Leopold to relinquish control of his personal kingdom, AKA The Congo.

In 1908 Belgium took over the colony, but it was not until 1960 that, after a long fight for independence, the Republic of the Congo was founded. When Leopold II died in 1909, he was buried to the sound of Belgians booing. The protests against Leopold and his ugly history in Congo still rage today. In 2019, the cities of Kortrijk and Dendermonde in Belgium renamed their Leopold II streets, with Kortrijk council describing the king as a “mass murderer”.

The atrocities meted by Leopold in The Congo are extremely pertinent, as it was Stanley who really hastened the Scramble For Africa and its overthrow by a litany of European powers. What started as a philanthropic quest to find Livingstone had ignited decades of rape, murder, torture and annihilation in Africa.

The publishing of Stanley’s exploits made him a world-famous writer, even though one tract, The Congo and The Founding of its Free State (1885) was a stack of lies, edited by none other than Leopold himself, which portrayed Stanley and the King as benevolence incarnate. Subsequently, in 1890, even though Stanley had been charged by the British Consul of Zanzibar Dr John Kirk with “excessive violence, wanton destruction, the selling of labourers into slavery, the sexual exploitation of native women and the plundering of villages for ivory and canoes,” he became Liberal Unionist MP for Lambeth North in 1895 and was knighted in 1899. He died in 1904 and is still regarded by many as a hero.

As Reverend J.P. Farler wrote in 1877, after interviewing Stanley’s black porters, “Stanley’s followers give dreadful accounts to their friends of the killing of inoffensive natives, stealing their ivory and goods, selling their captives, and so on. I do think a commission ought to inquire into these charges, because if they are true, it will do untold harm to the great cause of emancipating Africa. I cannot understand all the killing that Stanley has found necessary.” n

www.maitresseclothing.com @maitresseclothing Stewart Atkins photograpahy

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