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

  The 6th Arkansas Infantry arrived at Corinth, Tennessee, on 25 March 1186z. Private William H. Stanley was about to fight in the most significant engagement of the war to date - the Battle of Shiloh. General Ulysses S. Grant and almost 50,000 Federal troops were held up at Pittsburgh Landing, on the Tennessee River, awaiting the arrival of reinforcements before they marched on Corinth. General Albert S. Johnston decided to attack Grant before he was reinforced, and marched his 40,000 men out of Corinth on 4 April.

  Shortly before dawn on the 6th, the Confederate army prepared to hurl the Federals into the Tennessee River. The 6th Arkansas Infantry were deployed at the centre of a three-mile line, advancing through thin woods. Alongside Stanley, his seventeen-year-old friend Henry Parker put some violets in his cap, hoping that the enemy would take this for a sign of peace and not kill him. Stanley placed flowers in his own cap too. The Dixie Grays were armed with obsolete muzzle-loading flintlocks, much inferior to the Union soldiers' Minie and Enfield rifles. In the grey morning light, the Dixies blundered into the enemy line.

  I tried hard to see some living thing to shoot at, for it seemed absurd to be blazing away at shadows ... at last I saw a row of little globes of pearly smoke streaked with crimson, breaking out ... from a long line of bluey [sic] figures in front ... After a steady exchange of musketry, which lasted some time, we heard the order: `Fix bayonets! On the double-quick!' ... The Federals appeared inclined to await us; but, at this juncture, our men raised a yell ... It drove all sanity and order from among us.

  The Dixie Grays charged through the tented camp of their adversaries, killing men who had just woken and were still half-dressed.

  As the light grew brighter, Henry saw more tents ahead. Bullets hummed past him, and men began to drop. An officer yelled at them to get down. As Stanley heard `the patter, snip, thud and hum of the bullets', it amazed him that anyone could live `under this raining death'. He turned to the man beside him `and saw that a bullet had gored his whole face, and penetrated into his chest. Another ball struck another man a deadly rap on the head, and he turned on his back and showed his ghastly white face to the sky.' Stanley heard

  a boy's voice cry out: `Oh, stop, please stop a bit, I have been hurt, and can't move.' Henry Parker, with the violets in his cap, was staring at his smashed and bleeding foot. Newton Story, a regular at the store, strode forward waving the Dixies' banner, and called out, `Why don't you come on boys? You see there is no danger!' His smile and words acted on us like magic.

  A quarter of the men in the Confederate army were under twenty years old.

  Although the Dixie Grays, and their neighbouring regiments, captured the second Federal line, they could not drive their enemies into the river. The sun was up by now, and Stanley would never forget what he saw. One dead face had upon it `a look similar to the fixed wondering gaze of an infant'. It shocked Stanley `that the [human] form we made so much of should now be mutilated, hacked and outraged; and that life, hitherto guarded as a sacred thing ... should be given up to death'. Everywhere he could smell blood. `I cannot forget that halfmile square of woodland.' The thousand or so dead were buried in long trenches, side by side, `all their individual hopes, pride, honour, names, buried under oblivious earth'. Among the dead was General Albert S. Johnston, commander-in-chief of the Confederate army.13

  Next day, as the fighting was starting, Henry's pride was stung when Captain Smith called out: `Now, Mr Stanley, if you please, step briskly forward!' This made Henry rush forward `like a rocket'. He was not alone. Colonel Thomas C. Hindman's brigade, which included the Dixie Grays, and a brigade to their left, advanced too far and were outflanked before being broken up in hand-to-hand fighting. During this brutal process, Henry became cut off from his companions and was captured.14

  First he was taken to St Louis, and then by railroad car to Camp Douglas on the outskirts of Chicago, and confined in a huge cattle shed where he slept on a wooden plank bed. The battle's outcome would filter through to him in time. The Federals had been pushed back three miles but not as far as the river. Of General Grant's five divisions, one no longer existed, and four had received a mauling, but he had been reinforced by zo,ooo fresh troops. So Grant gave no ground on the second day. Consequently, General P. G. T. Beauregard (Johnston's successor) had to withdraw to Corinth. The Union had 113,047 casualties and the Confederates 1111,694 in two days' fighting. The dead were shared equally and amounted to more than 3,500. Brought up on the Ten Commandments, Stanley was shaken to hear killing loudly applauded. But this was war, and there was nothing to be done. The Battle of Shiloh gave warning that the Confederacy in the West would soon be defeated - though three years of fighting lay ahead in the East. One letter survives from a soldier who fought alongside Stanley. He was Private James Slate, and after the battle he regretted seeing `our boyish-looking Stanley no more'. `We all loved you,' he wrote, explaining that his personal gratitude was because `you have wrote many letters for me'.I"

  In Henry's first week at Camp Douglas almost 2-2-o of the 8,ooo prisoners in the camp, died of dysentery and typhoid." Each day Stanley watched the dead rolled in their blankets and `piled one upon another, as the New Zealand frozen-mutton carcases are carted from the docks'. The vermin, the stench of the latrines and the constant fear of falling sick filled Henry with a sense that `we were simply doomed'. He did not blame the camp commandant, Colonel James A. Mulligan, or the civil commissioner of the camp, Mr Shipman, for the deaths, and later admitted that he and other Confederate prisoners were better fed than Union prisoners were in Southern camps.'7 After Stanley had been at Camp Douglas a few days, the apparently kindly Mr Shipman told him, and a few other prisoners, that they would be released if they agreed to become Union soldiers. Why stay, and risk dying of disease, when the South's cause was morally rotten? Despite the continuing deaths, Henry held out for six weeks before changing sides. He had been through hell with his fellow Southerners and felt disloyal. But as a foreigner embroiled in the war by chance, and having little understanding of the conflict's true significance, Stanley's behaviour was not unforgivable. To save his life, as he saw it, he enrolled in the Union's Artillery service on 4 June 186z.I8

  A contemporary drawing of Camp Douglas

  There has been some dispute about whether Stanley was ever at Camp Douglas, or ever joined the Union army. 'I However, the records of the Adjutant General's Office in the National Archives in Washington confirm his capture at Shiloh, his imprisonment at Camp Douglas, Illinois, and his enlistment for three years in the 1st Illinois Light Artillery, `L' Battery. Federal records also show that he dropped the forename William while a prisoner in Camp Douglas, since he enlisted in the artillery as Private H. Stanley. Henry gave his age as twenty-two, his height five foot six, his eyes light blue, his hair auburn, his place of birth New York, and his place of enlistment Chicago.2O Apart from the place of birth, which moved him closer to claiming to be an American, the other details were not far out. His regiment left almost at once by railroad car for Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. Soon after arriving there, Stanley collapsed, suffering from the same dysentery and fever that had been carrying men off by the score in the prison camp. He was admitted to the local hospital, and was left there on zz June when the regiment moved on.21

  In his Autobiography manuscript, Stanley claims that he was discharged by the Federal army at this point. In fact, he was ordered to report for duty when in better health. For over a year, Battery `L' remained in West Virginia, at New Creek, so his rejoining would have been perfectly straightforward. His failure to do so led to his being listed a deserter on 311 August r 86z.22 Soon after the zznd he discharged himself from hospital, having decided that he would not fight for the North. Having been coerced into joining up, he probably felt that desertion was not dishonourable. Yet he did feel he had been corrupted by the fighting: `Only thirty minutes sufficed to drive out all that we had ever heard of goodness, love, charity, all memories of church, God, heaven';Z" every day in the army, `a host of influences
was at work sapping moral scruples', and `all that was weak, vain, and unfixed in my own nature conspired to make me as indifferent as any of my fellows to all sacred duties.124

  Free of the army at last, he headed for the east coast, hoping to work his passage to Liverpool. Undoubtedly, he had failed to prosper during his two and a half years in America. But he hoped his relations would accept that this had not been his own fault. Surely they would rejoice with him for his having survived a great battle, though he owned no more than the clothes on his back? It took a week to walk a dozen miles eastwards along the Hagerstown road. Weak and emaciated, Henry had to rest every few hundred yards. Four miles from Sharpsburg, he collapsed. A farmer, called Baker, rescued him and spread some straw as a bed in an outhouse. For a month this good Samaritan fed him on milk and light food, until he was well enough to help with the last days of the harvest. In mid-August, Mr Baker drove Henry into Hagerstown and paid his railroad fare to Baltimore." Stanley worked for a few weeks on an oyster schooner in Chesapeake Bay, and then, in late September, sailed from Baltimore to Liverpool.

  The E. Sherman entered the river Mersey early in November with H. Stanley among her complement of deckhands. On landing at the once familiar Liverpool docks, Henry went to see his uncle Tom and his aunt Maria Morris, and spent his first night in Britain with them. His plan was to travel the following day to Bodelwyddan village, near St Asaph, where his mother and her husband, Robert Jones (they had married two years earlier), kept the Cross Foxes public house. Jones had been a plasterer, and had only recently become a publican under his wife's influence." Tom Morris told his nephew that his new stepfather was `a scamp' for having deserted Elizabeth Parry after she had given birth to his son, Robert, in 1184 8. What kind of man would let the mother of his children spend three months in the workhouse, and then wait another four years before marrying her? Tom said that Jones was the type of man who only married a woman `better able to look after herself, than he was'. 17 And Elizabeth was indeed capable - being the landlady of a second pub in Denbigh. Uncle Tom warned Stanley (who resumed his Rowlands name for this trip) that his mother's youngest son had died in the summer from meningitis, at the age of six, leaving her grief-stricken.

  Exactly how high Stanley pitched his hopes of succeeding with his mother is unknown. With the income from two pubs, she was prosperous; and with a settled domestic life, perhaps she was at last in a position to help her firstborn. Yet nothing should detract from the immense courage it must have taken to seek her out after being ignored for twenty-one years. Many adults rejected in childhood prefer the pain of loneliness to risking a new experience of annihilation. And Henry knew little about his mother. Suffering can harden people as often as it can make them more sympathetic, and he had no idea which effect it had had on her. Years later, he wrote: `With what pride I knocked at the door, buoyed up by a hope of being able to show what manliness I had acquired, not unwilling perhaps to magnify what I meant to become ...'z8

  In a recently discovered letter, Stanley gave a graphic account of what happened when he arrived, ill and exhausted, at his mother's pub near St Asaph, having walked the last fifteen miles of his journey. He knocked at the side door as night was closing in.

  My mother opened it, starting back, aghast at seeing me. The couple were at supper when I had thus appeared. My mother said very little - but what she did say will never be forgotten. Her husband merely looked up but uttered no word ... I was very hungry - and as it was a matter of necessity I took a plateful of rice pudding and slept that night - but at 5-30 a.m. next morning I was off again, not having exchanged a word with R. Jones."

  What Stanley's mother had said to her sick and penniless son was: `Never come back to me again unless you are in far better circumstances than you seem to be in now.'3° And to make sure that there could be no misunderstanding, this mother of five illegitimate children added with breathtaking hypocrisy and cruelty that he was `a disgrace to them in the eyes of their neighbours' and that he ought to leave `as speedily as possible'. No one who has not been gripped as a young adult by an unsatisfied hunger for parental love will find it easy to imagine how Stanley could have endured such treatment and still have longed to be accepted by this mother who had wronged him all his life. But, despite his humiliation, Stanley was far from finished with his family, and he knew, even then, that he would be impelled by his neediness to try again, as soon as he had made some money. For him, an utterly indifferent mother was still better than no mother at all. But his awful experience at the Cross Foxes had the effect of driving the tenderness in his nature further below the surface.3i

  As Stanley started the long walk to Liverpool, his misery was intense. Unloved and deeply sensitive, but angry too, and understandably self-pitying, he knew that, for the present, there was nothing to keep him in Britain. But what could he possibly do that might one day gain him the position and money that might soften her heart towards him? Riches could never be achieved by mundane clerking, or work as a glorified shop boy.

  On leaving north Wales, he stayed briefly with Tom and Maria Morris, the kindliest of all his relations," and sailed from Liverpool docks in December 1186z. Between then and July 11864, little can be said of his movements. He returned to seafaring for at least six months, on one occasion deserting his ship in Barcelona and begging his way through Catalonia to the French border, before sailing from Marseilles as a deckhand in another vessel. Most of the ships he sailed on plied between Liverpool and the ports on North America's eastern seaboard. Sometimes he was hired as a deckhand, sometimes as an assistant cook.33

  A shipmate, Thomas Nisbet, sailed with him on a Nova Scotia vessel, the Burmah, taking a cargo of gas, coal and machinery to New Orleans, and then on to the Caribbean islands. Nisbet wrote to Stanley later:

  We were off Jamaica with the Blue Mountains in sight, do you remember going out on the studding sail boom in the dusk ... and catching an eagle, bringing it down and giving it to the captain on the quarter deck? You used to go from one mast to another on the stays, hand over hand, instead of coming down the rigging ... You had the same quiet pluck and daring on that ship that you have displayed since ...34

  Whatever Henry's inner feelings, the impression he gave was of a tough and resourceful young man. By late October 11863, Stanley was in Brooklyn, clerking for and lodging with a hard-drinking notary public whom he called `Judge' Thomas Hughes. One night Hughes attacked his wife with a hatchet, and Henry separated them. In the summer of 11864, he came to an astonishing decision: he resolved to join the Federal armed forces for the second time. This may have been partly because Hughes's business partner, Lewis Stegman, had just joined up to escape their drunken employer. Stanley chose the Federal navy, rather than the army. He was familiar with ships, and knew very well that if he had rejoined the army his earlier desertion might have come to light. At this time he was living immediately opposite the Brooklyn Navy Yard.35

  On 119 July 11864, Henry enlisted for three years. His age, he said, was twenty, when really he was twenty-three. 6 Two years earlier in Chicago he had claimed to be twenty-two - but creating this age difference was deliberate. He needed to differentiate naval Henry Stanley from Henry Stanley the army deserter. To achieve this, he also changed the colour of his eyes from blue to hazel and made his hair dark. His place of birth now became England. He seems to have felt, after all his sufferings, that he had a right to sprinkle official forms with untruths. Henry made no mention of having been a seaman, only that he had been a clerk. This meant that he was listed as a `landsman' - making him more eligible, he hoped, for the post of ship's clerk or writer. He would not be disappointed. Soon after joining the 3,3oo-ton screw steamer USS Minnesota at Hampton Roads, Virginia, he was given that position.

  The ship's writer rated as a petty officer, and his duties included keeping the ship's log and other records, and working closely with the first lieutenant. Stanley would now do civilized work, and have time for reading travel books - a new passion. The Minnesota saw no actio
n after being involved, peripherally, in the bombardment of Fort Fisher in December 11864. Apart from writing an official account, Henry wrote a more highly coloured version of the bombardment and managed to sell it to several newspapers. These descriptive paragraphs marked his debut as a journalist - a significant moment in his life.37

  In January 11865, a synchronized Federal land and sea attack on Port Wilmington's defences was at last successful, effectively ending Stanley's hopes of further active service. For six months, he had been getting to know members of the Minnesota's 6oo-strong crew, among them Commodore Joseph Lanman's fifteen-year-old messenger boy, Lewis Noe. Stanley always envied people with relaxed personalities and a graceful way of moving - traits that his self-consciousness denied him. He described Lewis as having `regular classical features, and a pair of laughing, mischievous black eyes'. Tall for his age, and slight, Lewis Noe seemed to Henry `a thorough specimen of an American boy'. Lewis could, in addition, `whistle every known song ... catch balls like a juggler, imitate a cat to perfection and excellently perform difficult acrobatic feats'." Such circus tricks might have been expected to wear thin, but they did not. Lewis's boyish admiration soothed the insecure, though outwardly blase Stanley.