Henry Morton Stanley

Welsh explorer and travel writer Henry Morton Stanley was born John Rowlands (he may have been illegitimate). His father died when he was 2; his mother, a butcher's daughter, went into service in London and then married, and did not want him. Stanley's paternal grandfather, a prosperous farmer, refused to care for him. For a while his mother's brothers boarded him out, then they stopped paying for him and he was taken, at 6, to the workhouse at St. Asaph, where he remained until 1856, when he was 15. The schoolmaster there was a savage brute, afterward adjudged insane, and the boy's life was one long series of torture, in the midst of which somehow he gained an elementary education. At last he beat his tormentor, and ran away. For a while, a cousin at Brynford employed him as a pupil teacher in a National School, and after school he studied languages and mathematics. For several years, he went from one town and one poor and unwelcoming relative after another, working odd jobs. In 1859 he went to sea as a cabin boy, without pay, on a boat going to New Orleans. A kind-hearted cotton broker, Henry Stanley, picked him up, starving, on the street, cared for him and adopted him. The boy took his benefactor's name. The next year Stanley sent him to his farm in Arkansas, to take charge of the store there. Then he died suddenly, without having made any provision for his adopted son. Young Stanley found himself stranded, and the Civil War had begun. Though his sympathies were with the Union, he enlisted as a Confederate, was taken prisoner at Shiloh, and was released from Camp Douglas, Chicago, by re-enlisting on the other side (a very discreditable, though fairly common at the time, action, which he never entirely lived down). His turncoat tactics proved unnecessary; he contracted dysentery, was discharged from the army and, sick and penniless, worked his way from Harper's Ferry, Virginia, back to Wales. Once more his relatives threw him out, and he became a sailor. In 1864 he enlisted in the United States Navy as a ship's writer. With this experience he became a wandering news correspondent in the western United States. He made and saved money, and in 1866 was able to travel to Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) with a friend. The next year a Missouri newspaper sent him to report on General Winfield Hancock's Indian expedition. In 1868 he joined the staff of the New York Herald, which sent him to Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia) to report on the war there. The rest of Stanley's life belongs to Africa, where he felt he had a "mission". In 1869 James Gordon Bennett Jr., the publisher of the New York Herald, decided to send a reporter to Africa in search for David Livingstone, who was last heard of six years previously. On November 24, 1871, Stanley reached Ujiji (on the shores of Lake Tanganyika) and found Livingstone, weak from illness and barely alive. Despite his condition, Livingstone refused to return to England with Stanley, and died 17 months later. For the Herald he also covered the Ashanti War in 1873. He made three more African explorations, in Equatorial Africa from 1874 to 1877, in the Congo (for King Leopold II of Belgium) from 1878 to 1884 and in the Sudan from 1885 to 1888. In 15 years, without an army, as a private civilian, he added about 2,000,000 square miles for the British Empire, and he cannot be held responsible for the horrendous atrocities later committed by the Belgians during their ownership and exploitation of the Congo Free State. The controversies arising from the Livingstone expedition gradually died down, though they (and his quick and harsh temper) retarded any bestowal of honors on him. In the 1890s he made a lecture tour in the United States and Australasia. He abandoned his American citizenship, was re-naturalized in England and from 1895-1900 was a member of Parliament. In 1897 he made his last journey, to South Africa, just before the Boer War. He was finally knighted in 1899. He suffered a stroke four years later, and died the following spring.