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

  While Henry Morton Stanley never knew where Henry Hope Stanley's grave was, he knew exactly where Speake was interred, having been present at the burial. In fact, he revisited the grave in October 1189 5 as a matter of personal sentiment. James Speake seems to have been the only man, from that period of his life, whom he truly mourned.Z" This contrasts with his attitude towards the alleged death of the rich cotton broker. In the Autobiography, H. M. Stanley claimed to have been overwhelmed with grief at parting from his new `father' but, unaccountably, he did not describe his emotions on hearing about the man's death - an event that his early versions of the adoption story had all included. In his first and original manuscript of the Autobiography he had not mentioned the death either, but his widow, Dorothy, added in her own hand, writing as if she were her late husband: `He died quite suddenly in 118611 - I only heard of his death long after.'22 In fairness to her, this may have been what Stanley had always told her had happened in 118611 - although the real Mr Stanley would not die until 11878. If John Rowlands had only been satisfied to have been highly regarded, and even loved by the humble James Speake, and had not surrendered to his tormenting insecurity and substituted a more impressive man, his true account of this period of his life would have moved everyone who read about it.

  The fact that James Speake was John Rowlands's only benefactor is proved beyond doubt partly by the contents of the earliest discarded drafts of the Autobiography'3 [see this note for examples], and partly by H. M. Stanley's extraordinary mistakes and omissions in describing his `adoptive' family. Mr Stanley's second forename, Hope, is never mentioned by him, nor did he ever record that the unforgettable Mrs Stanley was called Frances, and was Henry Hope Stanley's second wife, and had been a Miss Miller from Cheshire, in England, and had been only fifteen when she met and married Mr Stanley in 1847 .14Nor is it stated anywhere that Mr Stanley also came from Cheshire - surely a noteworthy fact, being so close to north Wales - and had remained a British subject. When describing Mr Stanley as childless - which was strictly true, since he had no natural children - it was strange not to mention that living with Mr and Mrs Stanley in 18 59 was an adopted daughter, Annie, then aged thirteen" [see this note for further striking omissions]. If John Rowlands had really lived with Mr and Mrs Stanley, he would have known many of the above details and would have felt bound to include them in the draft manuscript of his Autobiography to give it verisimilitude. Furthermore, even if he had parted from the Stanleys after a bitter quarrel, as has been claimed by three of his most recent biographers,26 some friend or relation of Henry Hope or Frances Stanley would have been bound to contact him - there being no difficulty about locating such a famous man - to tell him when they had died and where they were buried.

  Both Frances and Henry Hope Stanley died in 11878, and not in 11859 and 118611 respectively, as was claimed in the Autobiography. So why did he tell this particular lie? 17 He killed off Mr and Mrs Stanley suddenly and prematurely, first to explain why he had not kept in touch with his adoptive parents after he left New Orleans; second, to explain why neither parent, both of whom had supposedly loved him, had found time to change their wills in his favour; and third, and most importantly, because these incorrect dates of death would prevent subsequent researchers from identifying his Henry Stanley with Henry Hope Stanley. Indeed, all the omissions of correct facts about Henry Hope Stanley must have been deliberate, enabling him, if relatives of Henry Hope Stanley should ever have challenged his claims to have lived with the cotton magnate, to say that he had lived with another Mr Stanley. This desire not to identify himself in any precise way with Henry Hope Stanley also explains why he claimed that his Henry Stanley had lived in a St Charles Street boarding house - although any street directory would have told him that Henry H. Stanley had lived at 904, Orange Street, opposite Annunciation Square.z8

  So how was it ever supposed that Stanley once lived in Orange Street, New Orleans, with his `father' - something stated as fact in the most recent biography with any pretensions to being definitive? The idea derives from an anonymous article in the principal New Orleans newspaper, the Daily Picayune (z8 December 118go), in which it was stated that Rowlands passed `many days in play in hall and balcony and in the square', and that `men who were children of the neighbourhood then, remembered him ...'. The author also stated that Rowlands and the Stanleys' adopted daughter, Annie, had played together as children at 904, Orange Street. This was repeated in an influential article in the Roosevelt Review in June 11944, and thereafter crept into most subsequent biographies.z'9 But this must be wrong, since there is documentary census evidence to show that Rowlands could only have lived in Orange Street for six weeks in i 86o, when he was nineteen years old - hardly the right age to be playing with 'children of the neighbourhood'.3° Strangely, no author, or journalist, would remark, until the 1940s upon the very puzzling differences between the Henry Hope Stanley of the Daily Picayune and the Henry Stanley of the Autobiography. 3z Even when, in 19go, John Bierman expressed his scepticism about the extent and intensity of the relationship between Rowlands and Henry Hope Stanley, he did not question that there had been a genuine link between the two. I can only assume that this link has not been challenged until now because it seemed impossibly audacious for Rowlands to have appropriated another man's name and claimed a close relationship, not simply without his knowledge or consent, but without ever having known him.

  Yet no one was harmed by the story. James Speake died before knowing that Rowlands had assumed the name of a stranger, rather than his own. Henry Hope Stanley had himself been dead a dozen years before any connection was made between him and Henry Morton Stanley and, as already noted, ten years before he died Stanley abandoned any idea of completing or publishing his Autobiography. If the first third of the book (which was all that he ever managed to complete) had remained unpublished - as he had imagined it would - the manuscript would have constituted private therapy, rather than public record. Yet his `lies' have led his critics to treat him with disdain and condescension ever since. His private lies to his mother were made public by her without his knowledge, thus making it all but impossible for him to be honest later. Young people who lie usually do so because they feel bad about themselves and need to enhance their selfesteem. That Stanley should have been trapped for the whole of his life by what he had said to his mother during his twenties was a personal tragedy for him, and for his subsequent reputation.

  The death of James Speake, in October 1859, was not only a great personal loss, but threw John out of work, without any means of support. Yet the reassurance he had gained from being praised by the goodnatured storekeeper was not all lost." Nor were his orderliness, and the phenomenal memory that had made him `a walking inventory' of the store's contents, going to be anything but assets in the future.i3 However, the first work he found was not in a store but as assistant to the cook on a Mississippi riverboat. This job did not last long. According to the New Orleans census taken on r June 1186o, a seventeenyear-old clerk called J. Rolling (a variant of Rowlands, and similar to John Rollins, the name by which several friends knew him) was living in a boarding house in St Thomas Street with various sailors and clerks. But he left again not long afterwards by riverboat for the Arkansas River, 400 miles to the north.34 In St Louis, he had found nothing after ten days of constant tramping.

  So he travelled on to Cypress Bend, fifty miles south of Little Rock. Here, he came to a decision, comparable in significance with the one he had made in Liverpool docks eighteen months earlier, at another low point in his life. In the Autobiography, he writes only a single sentence about arriving at Isaac Altschul's store for the first time: `I had no sooner introduced myself than I was accepted by the family with all cordiality.'

  It is a great shame that his commitment to his tale of a spurious adoption prevented him from writing an accurate account of this turning point in his life. In all probability this was the moment when he introduced himself as Stanley for the very first time. How do I know? Because he l
eft New Orleans sometime in June or July calling himself Rowlands or Rollins, and arrived at Altschul's store about a month later. He was sleeping there on 22 August when a census taker called. Apart from listing the names of all the Altschuls, this official added the name of a seventeen-year-old clerk called William Henry Stanley. (In fact, Rowlands was nineteen but did not then know the date of his birth.)3s William would be gone within a year, but Henry would survive - though Stanley would not add the `M', as in Henry M. Stanley, until 11868 and would not finally settle on Morton until 1187z, after trying, and abandoning, other names: Morelake, Morley, Moreland, etc., etc.36

  What can have been John's feelings when he knocked on the storekeeper's door and gave, as his own surname, a name he had chosen for himself? He could hardly have guessed that, just ten years later, it would be famous throughout the world. By leaving Britain he had distanced himself from his illegitimacy and the grim world of his childhood. Now, by giving himself a new name, he felt that he was completing the process. If he hated the baggage of his past, why should he be condemned to carry it always? It had long been his desire to `wash out the stains ugly poverty had impressed upon [his] person since infancy', and to rid himself `of the odium attached to the old name and its dolorous history'.37 To associate himself with the name of New Orleans's best-known cotton broker clearly appealed to him, as may have done the word's decisive sound. Yet not for half a dozen years would he fix on a story to tell people to account for his namechange. Many years later, a local female friend who had known John well in New Orleans was quoted in a local newspaper as saying that up to the time when he `suddenly disappeared' from the city in mid- 186o, he had been called John Rollins. This woman later moved to New York, and Stanley saw her there on several occasions during 1864, at which time he was calling himself Henry Stanley. She discovered this because the friend who came with him called him Henry. What she then told the journalist destroys any notion that the Stanley name was `given' to Rowlands.

  I asked him (Rollins) whether he had two names. He said no; but that his mother had recently married again, and that the name of her second husband was Henry Stanley, and that he had taken this name.

  So in 1864, it is clear that Stanley was still experimenting with the details of the adoption story. The quality of the information this unnamed woman gave in a long article, entitled `Stanley's Early Life', published in the New Orleans Daily States in mid-April 1891, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had known John well.38 As with many of Stanley's fictions, there was a grain of truth in what he said. His mother had indeed recently been married (in 186o), but for the first time, and not to a man called Stanley, but to one called Jones.

  From the summer of 1186o, while living in America, Rowlands would call himself Stanley, although when he paid brief visits to Wales in 1186z and 11866, he would revert to the Rowlands name. But at the very end of December 11866, when he was staying near St Asaph, at the public house kept by his mother, letters arrived addressed to him as Henry Stanley, and so he was rushed into telling the adoption lie that would entrap him forever - not just as an American (when that worked against him in England), but as a man who always feared any scrutiny of his past.

  Because Henry was not his baptismal name, biographers after the name change have called him plain Stanley, without exception, all the time. I mean to call him Henry, as well as Stanley, from now on.

  THREE

  A Terrible Freedom

  The country store where Henry worked from August 1186o was a riverside log cabin containing a combination of those things sold by gunsmiths, drapers, stationers and ironmongers. Mr Cronin, the Irish salesman, could talk the women from the back-country into buying almost anything, and his charm dazzled the envious Henry. However, Stanley learned from Cronin all there was to know about Ballard, Sharp and Jocelyn rifles, and the comparative merits of Colt and Smith & Wesson revolvers.

  The local planters lived like princes, with power of life and limb over hundreds of slaves, and did not tolerate being checked by anyone. It shocked Henry, after the civilities of the city, to witness gunfights and to hear about murders and disappearances. With so many vain and violent men around him, possessing natures `as sensitive as hairtriggers', he was careful not to argue with any backwoodsman or planter who might draw a gun on the least provocation. `However amiable they might originally have been, their isolation had promoted the growth of egotism.' These southern `gentlemen' talked endlessly about their `honour' and often acted to avenge it. In this environment it was every man for himself. So, in case of trouble, Henry bought a Smith & Wesson revolver, and practised with it until he could `sever a pack thread at twenty paces."

  So what sort of a man was the nineteen-year-old Stanley when he arrived at Cypress Bend? In New Orleans, one female friend had described him as `burly ... undersized, and yet well proportioned, and one of the smartest and biggest talkers I ever met'. Yet he became tongue-tied if ever asked about his family, typically muttering: `There is a mystery about my birth.'z A Swiss clerk, Anton Schumacher, who worked at a doctor's surgery near Speake's store, had found Stanley friendly and sympathetic. Both young men were lonely, and together looked after a bulldog for an absent vet. They also shared their cigarettes and sweets. Schumacher recalled Stanley's `melancholy look', his cleanliness, and his neat straw hat and check neckerchief.3

  Unlike most young men living in boarding houses frequented by sailors, Stanley had avoided brothels. However, on one occasion only, he had been taken to `a gilded parlour', where he saw `four young ladies, in such scant clothing' that he was, he wrote, `speechless with amazement ... When they proceeded to take liberties with my person, they seemed to me to be so appallingly wicked that I shook them off and fled ... My disgust was so great that I never, in after years, could overcome my repugnance to females of that character.'4 Abandoned by a promiscuous mother, Henry's mistrust of prostitutes was not hypocritical. Another incident confirmed his sexual naivety. In his overcrowded boarding house, bed-sharing was not unusual. Once, Stanley slept in a four-poster with a youth called Dick Heaton, who had also jumped ship. Although Dick was `so modest he would not retire by candle-light', and walked in a suspiciously female manner, Stanley only twigged `his' true sex at the end of three days.' Dick was no fantasy figure, indicative of sexual ambiguity, but was real enough to be mentioned in a letter written to Stanley by a friend from his New Orleans days.'

  Although Stanley would say that his trusting nature had inclined him to obey authority, he also had a rebellious streak. So this sexual innocent and teetotaller, who had brought to America a Bible he had been awarded by the Bishop of St Asaph as a prize for good conduct, was hard to fathom. `Self-willed, uncompromising, deep', he had been called by a teacher at Brynford in Wales.' And he was all those things, as well as innocent and sensitive.

  At Cypress Bend, Henry first suffered from malaria - about three attacks a month - and despite taking quinine, his weight was soon a puny ninety-five pounds. This did not stop Mr Altschul sending him out to collect bad debts - a dangerous duty. But greater danger was looming, as he learned from Dan Goree, the son of the store's most important customer. According to Dan, `the election of Abe Lincoln, in November previous, had created a hostile feeling in the South, because this man had declared himself opposed to slavery; and as soon as he became President in March, he would do all in his power to free the slaves. Of course, said he, in that event all slave-holders would be ruined.' Dan predicted that the South would fight to stop men like his father being robbed. Dr James L. Goree was a medical doctor, who, besides his practice, also owned a plantation, and r zo slaves worth from $500 to $r,zoo a head. In May r86r, Arkansas seceded from the Union, joining other Southern states.' The North's seizure of the forts at the mouth of the Mississippi persuaded Henry that a blockade would ruin a riverside shop boy like himself, just as it would a plantation owner. Though Henry expressed no revulsion towards slavery in the Deep South - which was legal and accepted by everyone he knew - he was not prejudiced aga
inst black people. Indeed, he had lived in a New Orleans boarding house that was owned by a freed black woman and had been recommended to him by two of James Speake's slaves.'

  A frenzied desire to fight the `Yankees' inflamed most of the young men Stanley knew - and most of the young women urged them on. Many customers of the store joined up after Captain Samuel G. Smith raised a local company called the `Dixie Grays'. Because Henry felt the quarrel was not really his, and was puzzled that whites meant to fight one another over the rights of blacks, he did not enlist. But on receiving, in a parcel, `a chemise and petticoat, such as a negro lady's-maid might wear', he felt compelled to act, not least because suspecting that the sender was one of Dr Goree's beautiful daughters. Later, he would think his standing on his `honour' a ludicrous mistake. But in 118611 `it was far from being a laughing matter' to be called a coward.'° Overwhelmed by his old insecurity, on 11 June 118 Henry enlisted as a private soldier under the name of William H. Stanley. Confederate records state that he was a member of Captain Smith's company, the Dixie Grays, when it was mustered into the 6th Arkansas Infantry at Pocahontas, near Little Rock, on z6 July. Stanley's account of the war, when tested against contemporary accounts and the records of individual soldiers mentioned by him, proves to be remarkably accurate."

  Henry's military career started in Little Rock in early August with bands playing and crowds cheering. `We raised the song, "We'll live and die for Dixie," and the emotional girls waved their handkerchiefs and wept ... The facets of light on our shining muskets and bayonets were blinding ... We strode down to the levee with "eyes front," after the manner of Romans when reviewed by their tribunes!' Only days later, the straps of Henry's kit bit into his flesh, and his feet became so sore and blistered that he was compelled to rest at the roadside before limping after the column. A diet of fried, or raw, bacon and horsebeans made men ill, as did the heat and lack of shelter on the boo-mile march to Columbus. It was not long before `the poetry of the military profession had departed under the stress of ... squalid camp life'. Yet though regretting his folly in devoting himself `to be food for powder', Stanley was determined to do his duty because he loved his `Southern friends'.IZ