‘On the sixteenth day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-nine, I was in Madrid, fresh from the carnage at Valencia. At 10 A.M. Jacopo, at No.– Calle de la Cruz, handed me a telegram: It read, ‘Come to Paris on important business.’ The telegram was from Mr. James Gordon Bennett, jun., the young manager of the ‘New York Herald”. The reporter Stanley states later that two hours were sufficient for him to get ready for the trip. It was the beginning of his great adventure in search of doctor Livingstone, although, truth be told, he did not receive the telegram on the 16th of October, but on the 15th of September. That day he was not in Madrid, but in Valencia, and he did not leave towards Paris until the 27th of October.
Portrait of Henry Morton Stanley
By the way, Jacob was in reality Jacinto, his landlord. Too many lies in such few lines.
That’s what Henry Morton Stanley was: a pathological liar, someone who obscured reality, a man who was utterly insensitive to the pain and tragedy of others and a tale-teller of himself. But the story of this tormented and weak character who hated Africa, despite eventually becoming one of its greatest explorers, cannot be understood without knowing of his difficult origins. If we agree on the premise that childhood becomes the blueprint of adulthood, John Rowlands, his real name, started out in life with a labyrithical cartography of which he was barely able to get out.
Let’s start with his surname, Rowlands: it was bought for a few guineas from one of the town drunkards of Welsh Denbigh, where he was born in 1841. His mother, Elizabeth Parry, wouldn’t possibly work out who in town had fathered her child, so the inscription in his birth certificate reads the following: ‘John Rowlands. Bastard’. She couldn’t provide for him either, so he was allocated to a family member, who, in turn, got rid of the child when he was six by placing him in Saint Asaph’s Hospice, where he lived until he turned 15. ‘The Rowlands child’, wrote an elderly Stanley in the best of his styles, ‘had the Satanic mark of Cain branded in his forehead’. Once he reached the age limit to live in the hospice he stayed in various family homes, working in several trades, until he enrolled as a cabin boy in the ‘Windermere’, destined to New Orleans. It was 1858 and he was only 17.
He arrived in America, the place of promises and opportunities. He was just an immigrant more. By letting go of a family which never loved him and which considered him a burden, he was now free to make himself from scratch. After holding several jobs he stumbled upon the merchant Henry Hope Stanley, for whom he worked for a while. At this point versions differ (incidentally, a constant feature in his life), depending on whether it’s his own in his Autobiography, or whether we read the versions provided by biographers who have taken the time and interest to investigate his real life.
In the former version, he states that this merchant behaved towards him like a true father, giving him affection, support and his surname, eventually adopting him. The latter versions are a different kettle of fish; despite confirming that the kid worked for him, they deny that he behaved like a father towards him. The differences had been so many that even after their working relationship came to an end he would’ve forbidden his family to even mention him. He had not adopted him either: he already had two adopted daughters and did not want a third one.
That is how the young Welsh John Rowlands became Henry Stanley, a pure unilateral act, 100% American. Having said that, this complex conversion process towards a new identity didn’t happen overnight. It would still take some years to completely set itself, for his middle surname, Morton, as if revealing the intimate doubts he had on himself, would vary quite often and become Morelake, Moreland or Morley. This identity split and feeling of rejection were to become his own life-long tyrants. Henry Stanley was the strengthened survivor of John Rowlands’ unhappy childhood. Much to his regret, person and persona would always go hand in hand.
With a brand new surname he started a new, action-packed existence, which saw him become a farmer in the South and later a volunteer in the confederate army,which he deserted as soon as he entered combat. The man who justified his activities in Africa as a spokesperson of a higher civilisation who would eradicate slavery among other evils, was during those years such a Southerner and racist so as to state the following: ‘I could not manage to comprehend how a snouted, soot-skinned being, brought from a far away country, could create so much tensions among white brothers.’ After enrolling in the Marine, deserting once more and attempting to travel around the world, he left, like so many others, to try his luck in the West.
Intuitively, he had already understood a couple of things about himself: first, that he loved action-packed situations and guns, which made him feel the adrenaline rush of his power. The second thing was a consequence of his loneliness and uprootedness: since in his private life there was nobody special listening to him, he had to look for some means of communication. One of them could be journalism. Stanley, through a strange compensation mechanism, developed during those years a writing style that was both light and precise, vibrant and full of colour. He had been born with a gift for narration. Indeed above all, Stanley was a first-class writer. He used to collaborate for several local newspapers, earning a living as a journalist describing war scenes. The main characters of his articles were General Grant, General Sherman and Colonel Custer. Like him and in the same trenches of the Wild West, writers like Joseph Pulitzer and Mark Twain were also setting the foundations of journalism.
One day he decided that he had to aim higher, so he went to the ‘New York Herald’ offices, the newspaper founded by James Gordon Bennett in 1835, which had acquired a vast readership by always searching for the appropriate angle, whatever it might be, to surprise and hook its audience. The perfecting of such a sensationalist style made him become the undisputed leader of the times. Directing the newspaper was his 26 year-old son, incidentally Stanley’s age. Gordon Bennett had already taken notice of him. He had been pleased with his chronicles on the American Natives, and the day Stanley went to ask for a job he greeted him personally.
His first assignment for the ‘Herald’ marked the beginning of a long-lasting relationship. He was sent to Aden to write about a British expedition to punish the Negus in Abyssinia. His British colleagues, who tripped him up more than once for being American, were astounded at finding out that Stanley’s chronicle had become the world exclusive on the resolution of the conflict. As always when he felt the spears of mocking, he displayed a sound capacity for revenge. His colleagues found out afterwards that Stanley had got on board a ship, managing to get ahead of them, had bribed the telegraphist, and by a stroke of good luck, the submarine cable had broken down right after transmitting his chronicle, which prevented anybody else from doing so. He kept this latter fact away from the knowledge of his boss.
His second big mission, after covering several military confrontations in Greece, Turkey and the Near East, took him to Spain. The country was going through a particularly tumultuous period after General Prim’s coup d’état and the overthrowing of Queen Isabel II. All in all, Stanley lived in the country for two periods between 1868 and 1873. The fact that he didn’t leave any written record of this experience does not detract the importance of a situation which proved to be pleasant in personal terms and pivotal from a professional point of view.
Right after arriving in the country he interviewed Prim, who came across as some sort of fussy butler. He attended the drafting of the new Constitution and the steely conflicts between monarchics and federalist republicans, he followed passionately Emilio Castelar’s tirades on freedom of cult, and he was on the scene at Carlist confrontations. In general, he tried to adapt to the strange lifestyle of Spaniards, which according to him was based on being up all night, drinking straight black coffee and taking part in political debates. ‘What time might these people go to bed, if they ever do so at all?’, he pondered, taken aback.
He wasn’t a celebrity yet, but he was about to become one. When he showed up at his boss’ call in Paris he was only a reliable and smart journalist, with good observation skills, who only craved going up a bit higher in the journalistic world. This would allow him to earn more money, be able to marry and become relatively popular among his readership. In turn, this would to mitigate the annoying need for being accepted, one of his obsessions, which took hold of him with the same fixation as a hungry man has towards food.
The fact that his boss was sending him to Africa for the second time in a row with the excuse of finding Livingstone and interviewing him was seen by Stanley as an opportunity to reach his goal faster. Nevertheless, the assignment took his breath away: the whole Livingstone thing would be towards the very end of his mission, because before that he had to attend the inauguration of the Suez Canal, after which he had to go up the Nile, write a touristic guide, gather information about the Bakers and write up a report on his exploring of the area. Next he had to head towards Jerusalem and report on the archeological excavations, continue towards Constantinople in order to write about the tensions between the Sultan and the Jedive (Viceroy) of Egypt and continue towards Crimea in order to report about the Russo-Turkish War (Crimean War). On the way he was to cross the Caucasus until reaching the Caspian Sea to write about a Russian expedition. Later on he was to reach Persia via the Euphrates Valley. From there he was to go to India, where he would board a ship and head on to Africa’s West Coast to find Livingstone. Once done, he would head to China, on a last mission. The bewildered reporter’s answer seems to have been quite simple: ‘I’ll do all that is humanely possible.’
He fulfilled his mission beyond expectations, except the one in China. The international commotion which took place after he met the most mediatic character of the time, the explorer and missionary David Livingstone, prevented him to complete his assigned route. At reaching Zanzibar after an exhausting sailing trip from China, the thought of having to get into deep Africa largely depressed him. In contrast to what other explorers, merchants or missionaries who had chosen their route felt, for Stanley this was an annoying obligation of his journalistic work: ‘I felt dejected. Had I not been given the formal order I received, I would have gladly resigned from the mission.’ From the island he thought about the African continent as ‘an immense swamp.’ Stanley never loved Africa, he merely benefited from it. Whenever towards the end of his days he expressed a nostalgia for the continent, he only referred to an idealised space, a place without norms or restrictions, where nobody could reproach anything to him and where he could let his instincts loose, whatever their nature were.
Leaving Bagamoyo on the 21st of March 1871 he had 191 men with him. He also had the usual necessary gear for an expedition, which included a camping bed, a bathtub, silverware, a Persian carpet and several Sillony champagne bottles so as to be able to toast and celebrate his finding Livingston. The Scottish explorer survived hardships trying to find the last fringes of the start of the Nile, which had been left undiscovered by the explorers Speke and Burton. Livingstone was in fact a sweet-tempered man, who enjoyed a solid popular esteem back in England. He was the exact opposite to Stanley, for whom the African adventure was only a newspaper report to be written. Free from any kind of moral obligations, the journalist advanced through Africa leaving behind a trail of death and destruction. He reached Lake Tanganyika in just 231 days, which was unthinkable at the time: to other explorers it took years to manage to reach their objectives. His return trip was ever faster. As with all his other trips, none of his white colleagues survived the harshness of his methods. It is easy to imagine the desperation of one of them when, crazed with suffering and agonizing, he shot his boss’ tent -the latter being inside. There was never a single witness who could provide an alternative version to the vibrant tales that Stanley used to publish after his trips – which nowadays still arise in the reader conflicting emotions.
Stanley returned to England after spending a few months with Livingston, only to realise that, despite the price he had paid for his efforts the English still held a deep contempt for his feat -due to the fact that he was just a vulgar American journalist, or was he perhaps a Welsh penniless bastard who emigrated to America? The scientific community dealt with the former issue, projecting his arrogance, and the yellow press, just as it does now, commented on the latter, airing the most painful issues for someone of such a fragile personality: his humiliating origins, which he had taken such pains to hide.
His reputation sky-rocketed after that. Interviews here and there, headlines and more headlines. James Gordon Bennett exploded in a jealous fit: ‘Shut up!’, he yelled at him in his telegram sent from New York. It had proven to be too much for such an egocentric and mean personality, as was the New York Herald’s, who was witnessing the unstoppable rise to fame of his journalist. If Stanley was a soulless person, he certainly could be a pupil to his boss: a true fool. Upon the journalist finishing his exhausting mission and reaching Zanzibar he found out that Bennett hadn’t sent the necessary funds to set up the search expedition. The North-American consul in the island had to sponsor it in the end; the documentaries and articles that Stanley was sending to the newspaper were never published with his name, and only when he successfully found the Scotsman did Gordon give the order to add his name to his articles. Gordon Bennett’s bad manners reached paroxysm when he published a terrible criticism of his most brilliant employee’s book (In Search of Dr Livingstone), which as a consequence saw Stanley’s US conference tour cancelled.
Incomprehensibly, their working relationship followed its course. Gordon Bennett sent him on a short mission again to Ghana’s coast, and Stanley, breaking a sacred norm in journalism, was not only happy to write about it: he fought and shot as well. We know it through general Woseley’s comment, in charge of the operation, who unashamedly praised “the sang-froide and good aim of the reporter”.
Undoubtedly, though, his greatest exploit was his third great trip to Africa, where he finished defining the origins of the river Nile, proving, by circling Lake Tanganyika, that it has not only one but multiple beginnings. The expedition had been sponsored between ‘The London Daily Telegraph’ and the ‘New York Herald’, and during its course he travelled toward the riverbed of Lualaba River in order to advance through the centre of Africa until he reached the imposing waters of the Congo River, of which he drew a map. He had spent 999 traveling in Africa from the western to the eastern coast, as he tells in his book Through the Dark Continent, a crazy race that helped him advance at an even more frantic rhythm, for in his tons of equipment he carried a destructive arsenal made up of single- and double-barrelled rifles, as well as small revolvers. His men advanced in record time, true, because they did so shooting to kill and abandoning the ill to their fate.
Criticism worsened at his return to London. Human rights organisations attacked the man, reporting that his effectiveness was rooted in inhuman and intolerable methods used against the native people’s dignity. He was also brought down by the old suspicions on the part of the scientific community with regards to his status as a journalist, and the juicy garbage about his true identity flooded press pages. Fame was a whirlpool which stirred inside him feelings of bitterness, humiliation and loathing. How did his wayward boss react? After taking good benefit of the publicity that befell his newspaper, he proposed Stanley something even more difficult. The ultimate test. Something which would mean an even bigger bomb to his readership, or which would become the most heroic of sacrifices. He commissioned him a docu-expedition to the North Pole! Stanley didn’t take it any longer and angrily resigned from his job. He would never live in the US again.
The disappearance of Gordon Bennett from his life gave way in turn to the apparition of one of the worst villains which humankind has had to suffer: the Belgian King Leopold II, who, according to Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost, turned the Congo region into ‘one of the largest death camps of our contemporary era’.
The King hired Stanley in order to establish the commercial basis which would allow him to take hold of that enormous territory, and commercially exploit it under a slavery regime for his own personal benefit. Under a cunning cover of humanitarian interests, Leopold tricked the European scientific and exploring community for over 21 years (between 1885 and 1906), and committed what Vargas Llosa qualifies as a genocide, comparable to the horrors of the Holocaust and the Gulag. Mark Twain, who was part of the international movement against slavery in that region of Africa, spoke of a horrifying number of deaths: between 5 and 8 million lives.
Yet Stanley set up the commercial bases, earned a generous salary from the Belgian coffers and looked the other way. This time, though, there was a white witness who would live to tell of Stanley’s stony sensitivity with which he treated the African population. This man was Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, an Italian with French citizenship, educated, sensitive and of such refined manners that he used to advance in the Western territories of the Congo basin, named nowadays after him, more with the artificial fireworks and pyrotechnia of a patient negotiator rather than authentic firearms. ‘Make the effort’, he used to harangue his men, ‘to understand the black mentality. Mix with them. No firearms and no bodyguards. Don’t forget that you are the intruder.’ Brazza was repulsed by Stanley’s methods, and for this reason he made his position clear to the press: ‘I travel around the region as a friend, not as a thug.’
After this experience Stanley still carried out a last expedition in Africa in search of Emin Pacha, a German Jew called Eduard Schnitzer who worked as a doctor in the Egyptian army. His biographers say that this was his most violent, cruel and bloody expedition, although in its course he identified the Ruwenzori Range in the famous Mountains of the Moon. He accepted the commission simply because his third girlfriend, Dolly Tennant, had rejected him when he proposed, although she ended up accepting when he returned. They married on the 12th of July 1890. Stanley was almost 50 and it was the first time he was having an intimate experience with a woman. His previous two girlfriends, Katie and Alice Pike, not only had abandoned him while he was writing them steamy love letters from Africa, but on his return he had found them successively married. He died 15 years after his wedding, leaving an unfinished autobiography, so we do not know whether he managed to achieve what we nowadays call internal peace. Did his ghosts leave him alone?
Some definitely didn’t. His old boss, James Gordon Bennett sent a ‘New York Herald’ reporter to Stanley’s door with the mission of finding out if, after being married, there was any truth in the rumour that his most famous reporter and his wife not only slept in separate beds, but that he also abused her. Dolly denied the rumours and the reporter left to cover his next assignment. With regards to Gordon Bennett, he ended up his days like those villains whom life punishes with forgetfulness, abandonment and loneliness.
Translated from “Metiroso patológico”, by Pilar Rubio, published in “El País Semanal”, 5th June 2005 (available in http://www.elpais.com/articulo/portada/Mentiroso/patologico/elpeputec/20050605elpepspor_17/Tes)
