Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer Read online

  By crossing Africa between 118 5 3 and 118 5 6 and living to tell the tale, David Livingstone demonstrated that quinine aided resistance to malaria. But all Stanley's white companions died during his search for Dr Livingstone, and the same thing happened during his trans-Africa journey. In fact, throughout the century, malaria remained a serious threat to life (as it still is), as did yellow fever and sleeping sickness. The health of survivors was often undermined, and very few saw old age. Lady Burton described her husband after an African journey as being `partially paralysed, partially blind ... a mere skeleton, with brown yellow skin hanging in bags, his eyes protruding, his lips drawn away from his teeth'.' And this degree of ill-health was not unusual.

  Since the late Victorians were fixated by the need for manliness, the astonishing bravery of explorers earned them universal admiration. During my journey I had sometimes wondered how scared I would be if I ever found myself marooned in a truck that had broken down beyond repair in a rarely visited region. I imagined it would be like being shipwrecked on an inhospitable atoll and left to starve unless rescued. And this had been the fate of Victorian explorers deserted by their carriers, who had taken away with them the bales of cloth and sacks of beads with which their employers had hoped to pay for food. A traveller left with only a handful of porters had been utterly helpless with his human ship and lifeline gone.

  While researching my life of Livingstone, I was shown by a collector of African manuscripts a most evocative sheet of paper. It turned out to be an important moment for me. On it was written in Henry Stanley's hand the desperate appeal he made on 4 August 1877, when struggling towards the trading post of Boma on the Lower Congo, just seventy miles from the Atlantic. He had just become the first man in history to have followed that great river r,8oo miles from the heart of the continent, and was now close to completing one of the most dangerous and sublime journeys of all time.

  To any gentleman who speaks English at Emboma

  Dr Sir

  I have arrived at this place from Zanzibar with 115 souls, men, women & children. We are now in a state of imminent starvation. We can purchase nothing from the natives for they laugh at our kinds of cloth.... [he then explained that unless supplies could be sent to him within two days...] I may have a fearful time of it among the dying...' [Stanley ended with a brief postscript]

  P.S. You may not know me by name - I therefore add that I am the person who discovered Livingstone in 1871. H.M.S.Z

  Given that during his extraordinary trans-Africa expedition he had circumnavigated two of Africa's three great lakes for the first time, and had solved the mystery of the central African watershed by separating the Congo's source from the Nile's - not one word of which was mentioned in his letter - I found it immensely poignant that Stanley, the illegitimate workhouse boy, had still needed to attach his name to Livingstone's in order to make himself seem worthy of assistance. It reminded me of just how far he had come from a childhood world of parental rejection and poverty, and how, if he had not emigrated to America aged eighteen, he would never (in class-stratified Britain) have been taken on by one of the world's great newspapers, and so would probably have lacked the self-belief to attempt his unparalleled journey. During it, 113z of his original zz8 expedition members had died, including all three of his white companions, and by the end of it he had lost almost a third of his body weight and looked fifteen years older than his thirty-six years. But at least he had survived, unlike Park, Lander, Clapperton, Tuckey, and Livingstone, to name but a few earlier explorers.

  And now, at last, the huge blank in the centre of the map of Africa, which for a century had exercised a Grail-like fascination throughout Europe, had been filled in, largely thanks to this one stupendous journey. As I read this stained and faded letter, I felt strongly drawn to write Stanley's life. It seemed an incredible irony that he was remembered more for his misjudged attempt at sangfroid - `Dr Livingstone, I presume?' - than for the wondrous journey that had been almost beyond imagining, let alone completing.

  Then, several months before I finished my Livingstone in 11972, the journalist and author Richard Hall wrote to me, explaining that he was writing Stanley's life and suggesting that we meet and talk. We did, and got on well; and I acknowledged to myself that my hopes of writing about Stanley were realistically at an end. Hall had partial access to the Stanley family's immense, uncatalogued collection of journals and letters and, just as significantly, permission to quote from an unpublished 283-page typescript written by Gerald Sanger, a retired film and newspaperman man, friendly with Stanley's adopted son, Denzil, who had shown him many new letters and diaries.'

  Hall's book came out in 1974, a year after my Livingstone, and marked a significant advance on all previous biographies of Stanley, despite the family's decision to deny him the letters of the earliest love of Stanley's life, Katie Gough Roberts, and his letters to his wife after their marriage. Hall therefore had no means of knowing whether Stanley's marriage had been successful, or a sham, concealing homosexual preferences, as would later be claimed. The great journeys were dealt with rather briskly by him, as was the pioneering of the Congo Free State, and Stanley's relations with King Leopold II. But Hall subjected Stanley's so-called Autobiography to its first sceptical examination.

  When I had been working in the National Library of Scotland, researching Livingstone, I had come across Stanley's letters to his close friend and confidant Alexander Bruce - David Livingstone's son-inlaw. I brought back copies to London for Richard Hall, and for myself. They showed a man remarkably different both from the ruthless and obsessively driven explorer - who had nevertheless existed - and from the insecure and bombastic Welshman who had pretended to have been born to American parents, and had antagonized key figures in the British establishment. These letters dated from the period of Stanley's life ten years after he became famous, and they revealed to me an unexpectedly self-effacing man, who was generous and loyal to friends, and seemed to accept that, mainly through his own faults, he was doomed never to attract the type of woman with whom he was prone to fall in love. Stanley possessed a touching, almost childlike faith in Bruce's advice. It seemed as if - lacking a family of his own - he had made Livingstone's son-in-law a kind of revered elder brother. This dependence was so far removed from Stanley's public image that, excellent though Hall's book was, I felt later that the man's complexities had eluded him.

  Seventeen years passed. In Iggo I reviewed John Bierman's wellwritten short biography, Dark Safari, and found it followed Hall closely, without staking out new ground for itself. In 1990 I also read a more ambitious life of Stanley, which had appeared a year earlier and would become the most influential book on the explorer yet written. This was the first volume of Frank McLynn's biography, Stanley: The Making of an African Explorer (1989); volume two, Stanley: Sorcerer's Apprentice, would appear in 1991. McLynn's judgements were largely negative, though not entirely. He certainly acknowledged that his subject was a great explorer, but because he focused primarily on the aggressive side of Stanley's nature, McLynn saw his principal motivation as being `a volcanic rage against the world' as a result of his wretched childhood. According to McLynn, Stanley was `neuter-like' and impotent, and his eventual marriage a sham because he was allegedly a repressed homosexual. The major influence on the second half of Stanley's life, McLynn argued, was King Leopold II, whose `sorcerer's apprentice' he became - the implication being that Stanley was putty in the king's hands, enabling Leopold to carry out his later brutal exploitation of the Congo.

  This, in conjunction with John Bierman's statement that Stanley had `duped' more than 300 chiefs out of their land, and had thus handed to Leopold `the legal basis for his so-called Congo Free State',4 would destroy Stanley's reputation in the r99os, when interest in the atrocities in the Congo became intense. McLynn's suggestion that Africa had been essential to Stanley as somewhere `permitting the exercise of homicidal impulses without incurring lethal social consequences' would contribute to the widespread b
elief that Stanley had been a violent and paranoid mans Bierman's belief that Stanley had used Africa as `an escape ... and a quest for self-esteem' struck me as altogether more convincing.' I was puzzled by how different Frank McLynn's picture of Stanley was from the gentler, sadder person, with a longing to marry and have children, whom I had glimpsed years ago when reading Stanley's letters to Alexander Bruce.

  From McLynn's and Bierman's notes on sources, I learned that a massive amount of new material might one day become available to future biographers. Both men had complained bitterly (and who could blame them?) that they had been denied access to the enormous collection of papers that the Stanley family had sold in r98z for £400,000 to a third party acting for the Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale in Brussels. In the mid-r99os I contacted the museum and was told that nobody would see the papers until they had been catalogued, and this process was not in prospect. Microfilm of some of the papers had been placed in the British Library, but there was no knowing what had not been microfilmed, since the papers that had gone to Belgium had filled six large crates.

  In September zooz I was invited, as David Livingstone's biographer, to give a lecture at Christie's, London, on the famous meeting between Stanley and Livingstone. The occasion was the auctioning of the Stanley family's immense collection of books, maps, spears, presentation caskets, photograph albums, lantern slides, guns, medicine chests, chronometers and sextants - in fact all that remained of the great explorer's possessions after the family's earlier sale of his letters, journals, and exploration notebooks. So my pleasure can be imagined when, before my lecture, I was introduced to Maurits Wynants of the Musee Royal in Brussels, who had come over to bid for items in the sale. I was astonished to hear that Maurits and his colleague, Peter Daerden, were cataloguing not only the 1982 collection, but a slightly smaller archive of intimate family papers that had been sold privately to the museum in zooo for a similar sum to that paid to the family in r98z, without any microfilm or photocopies being demanded by the Board of Trade, despite their historical importance.

  Mr Wynants said that, although the catalogue was not yet complete, I would be welcome to come to Brussels, if I wished, and that he and Peter Daerden would do whatever they could for me. I was told that the museum possessed all Stanley's letters to his wife and hers to him, from the time of their meeting until his death, and also her private diaries, and approximately 5,000 letters written to Stanley from an extraordinarily wide range of correspondents - from members of his own family, from prime ministers such as Gladstone and Salisbury, from cabinet ministers, and from many of Stanley's closest friends, including the first woman he had wished to marry (whose letters had been thought to have been destroyed), as well as from his closest male friend, Edward King, and his valet, William Hoffman. There were also many letters from the one woman whom he would have been ideally suited to wed, if only she had been single. This was the American author and journalist May Sheldon. Other correspondents of immense interest ranged from the members of Leopold's cabinet, to Stanley's publisher, to his close friend and mentor, Sir William Mackinnon, and his sponsors, James Gordon Bennett Jr of the New York Herald and Edwin Arnold of the Daily Telegraph. The inventory, when it was finally completed, was 427 pages long, and listed over 7,000 items, some of which are letter books and journals containing scores of pages.7

  I learned that, apart from an American geographer, James Newman, who was focusing on Stanley's journeys and was not attempting a definitive biography, nobody was writing anything substantial about Stanley. (James Newman's Imperial Footprints was published by an American specialist publisher in 2004 and has not appeared in Britain. While he paints a more benign and fairer picture of Stanley as a traveller, the man's personal life, and his political and colonial ambitions and relationships, are not examined in detail. The authors of two other recent books did not visit Belgium. These were Daniel Liebowitz and Charles Pearson, whose brisk and often patronizing account of Stanley's Emin Pasha Expedition, The Last Expedition, relied solely on printed sources. Martin Dugard's Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone, 2003, was written as a straightforward adventure story and contains many inaccuracies.)

  Several months after meeting Maurits Wynants, I went to Brussels for a preliminary visit of three weeks to see whether, if I wrote Stanley's biography, I would be able to add new dimensions, not only to the story of his life but also to the record of his work and its morality, and to the vexed subject of his colonial influence. During this brief period, I did indeed find a mass of material striking me as both historically important and new. From reading Stanley's letters to his wife and hers to him, it seemed that their marriage, though unhappy at times, had been a sexual one and not a sham. Also, on reading letters to Stanley from some of the young men - to whom it had been suggested he might have been homosexually attracted - I realized how inadequate past surmises had been. I was excited to find that many new insights into his early life were contained in his letters to the first woman he had wished to marry, which had not been destroyed, as had been thought. Many new papers covering his American years led me to wonder whether Stanley had ever met the man whom he claimed had adopted him in America. Other correspondence strongly suggested that Stanley himself, rather than James Gordon Bennett Jr, had come up with the idea of `finding' Livingstone. Lastly, I was surprised to find not hundreds of treaties made by Stanley with Congolese chiefs, but only one - and this solitary treaty in Stanley's hand had not required the chiefs in question to surrender their land. Was it possible that the widespread supposition that Stanley had stolen the Congo for Leopold was wrong? I knew this key subject would require a great deal of research.

  I returned to London feeling that my trip had given me what I had needed. A month later, I signed a contract with Faber & Faber. I felt very lucky, and not a little dazed, that after so many years I had unexpectedly been given a chance (which I had long ago despaired of) to make a major reassessment of a giant in the history of exploration, and in the story of Europe's encounter with Africa. But I had misgivings, too. In 11996, when I was writing the introductory chapter to the catalogue of the National Portrait Gallery's Livingstone exhibition, it had occurred to me that no similar event was ever likely to be mounted for Stanley - a man who had been refused burial in Westminster Abbey, and whose birthplace had been allowed to be pulled down. Since the appearance of Frank McLynn's biography, it had been treated almost as an established fact that Stanley had been the most brutal explorer of the nineteenth century, and remarks to this effect are still dropped into newspaper articles and general books of African history, as if there can be no dispute about them. Stanley's name is more and more often linked with that of King Leopold II, as if he had been responsible, with the king, not only for founding the Congo Free State but also for creating the moral atmosphere in which crimes against humanity were likely to be committed in that country.

  I knew already, from my reading of published sources and microfilm in the British Library, that Stanley was not a racist like Sir Richard Burton or Sir Samuel Baker, so I was puzzled by the confidence with which some authors had characterized him as such. Right from the beginning of his first African trip, Stanley was, he wrote: `prepared to admit any black man possessing the attributes of true manhood, or any good qualities, to my friendship, even to a brotherhood with myself'. Between 11879 and 11884, he repeatedly described Dualla, a Somali, as his most important member of staff - his virtual prime minister - who by 11883 was receiving the same pay as white officers. Two other Africans, Wadi Rehani and Mabruki Ndogo, were also as close to Stanley as were his two favourite whites, Anthony Swinburne and Albert Christophersen. He hated it when any black man was called `nigger' by a white - `that ugly derisive word', he called it.9

  Stanley always found Africans pleasing to look at: `Each age has a beauty of its own ... the skin may be more velvety than velvet, smoother than satin, or coarse as canvas ... but its warm brown colour seems to suit the African atmosphere - the contour of the
body is always graceful."° By contrast, white people struck him as awkward. To get on with Africans, he told his young white officers `to relax those stiff pallid features; let there enter into those chill icy eyes, the light of light and joy, of humour, friendship, pleasure; and the communication of man and man is electric in its suddenness." He adored African children. `The sight of these tender naked little beings following my camp into the wilderness, and laughing in my face, and hugging my knees, just thrilled me."' And if Stanley had really been brutal to the Wangwana - the Swahili-speaking blacks of Zanzibar, engaged as his carriers on all his major journeys - I could not understand why large numbers had elected to serve with him again and again.

  So how was I going to reconcile the discrepancy between Stanley's many positive and even loving statements about Africans, and his statement that he had been obliged to fight with tribesmen many times - something that other European explorers either had not done, or had chosen to conceal? Since he had been a journalist, and his two most successful journeys had been financed by newspapers, it crossed my mind, even before I began my archival research, that he might have exaggerated the number and intensity of his conflicts with Africans in order to make his copy more exciting. I hoped, by comparing the number of Africans whom Stanley recorded as having been killed (in encounters with his expeditions) with the numbers of fatalities quoted in the diaries of his travelling companions, that I might be able to establish whether apparently damning material should be treated as literal truth or journalistic hyperbole.13

  Stanley was hated and envied by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the French for having successfully planted trading stations in the best positions on the Congo, for the benefit of King Leopold's socalled International Association. He himself believed that jealousy accounted for stories of his brutality spread during the 1188os, and repeated again and again over the years. So perhaps I would find evidence one way or the other? As early as 11970, Professor Norman R. Bennett of the University of Boston - an outstanding historian of East Africa - wrote at the start of the introduction to his magnificent edition of Stanley's Despatches to the New York Herald, `There is no apparent reason why, more than three-quarters of a century after his last venture, Stanley should continue to be singled out for his supposed excesses in Africa, while other Europeans often responsible for far more loss of African life than Stanley, receive sympathetic treatment.' Some years ago I noted, in a biography of Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza - an explorer usually acclaimed for his peaceful travels - that the Frenchman had shot Africans (in self-defence, he claimed), even while protesting that he `never was in the habit of travelling round Africa as a warrior, like Mr Stanley'.'4 From earlier reading, I was aware that General Gordon, though seen as a martyr, had killed many members of the Bari tribe in southern Sudan, and had believed that there were times when Africans had to be shot in self-defence: `These things may be done, but not advertised,' he remarked to Richard Burton, with Stanley in mind.'5 Frederick Lugard would be ennobled and become a British colonial governor, despite, as his biographer conceded, shedding far more blood on the shores of Lake Victoria than Stanley ever had. Even Livingstone, as I recorded in my life of him, shot dead several tribesmen, and burned their huts. This had been in 118611, south of Lake Nyasa (Malawi), when these African (Yao) slave traders had attacked the mission village of Magomero.'6