STANLEY
The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer
By TIM JEAL
Yale University Press
Copyright © 2007
Tim Jeal
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-14223-5
Contents
Illustrations...................................................ix
Plates..........................................................xi
Maps............................................................xiv
Introduction....................................................1
1 Dreams of Love and Freedom....................................17
2 In the Name of the Father.....................................31
3 A Terrible Freedom............................................42
4 An Accident-prone Apprenticeship..............................57
5 War Correspondent.............................................62
6 How are we to be Married?.....................................73
7 The Long-imagined Quest.......................................91
8 'I Cannot Die!'...............................................101
9 Canonizing Dr Livingstone.....................................117
10 'Fame is Useless to Me'......................................133
11 A Destiny Resumed............................................149
12 Love and the Longest Journey.................................157
13 The Island of Death..........................................171
14 'The Great Struggle with this Mystery'.......................193
15 'I Hate Evil and Love Good'..................................220
16 A Colony for a King..........................................233
17 A Banquet in Paris...........................................257
18 After the Slave Raids........................................266
19 Who Stole the Congo?.........................................280
20 A Pawn in Great Power Politics...............................289
21 'A Kind of Innocence'........................................298
22 Why Rescue Emin Pasha?.......................................313
23 A Fateful Decision...........................................329
24 The Enigma of Emin Pasha.....................................336
25 'Evil Hangs over this Forest ...'............................354
26 Keeping Emin Pasha's Secret..................................365
27 The Shape of Things to Come .................................384
28 Dorothy's Other Love.........................................391
29 Was the Emin Pasha Expedition Piratical?.....................407
30 Africa or a Child............................................415
31 An End to 'Noble Objects'....................................423
32 Stanley, Leopold and the Atrocities..........................443
33 'Before it is Too Late'......................................453
Afterword.......................................................464
Acknowledgements................................................476
Sources.........................................................478
Bibliography....................................................482
Notes...........................................................488
Index...........................................................547
Chapter One
Dreams of Love and Freedom
John Rowlands - who would one day be known to the world as Henry
Morton Stanley - was five and a half when a great disaster befell him.
His grandfather, Moses Parry - once a prosperous butcher, but now
living in reduced circumstances - dropped dead in a potato field on the
outskirts of the Welsh market town where John had lived all his life.
The place was Denbigh, the date 22 June 1846, and the old man was
seventy-five years old.
John was born illegitimate, and his eighteen-year-old mother, Elizabeth
Parry, had abandoned him as a very young baby and had then cut off all
communication. She would go on to have five more children - by two, or
possibly three other men - only the last child being born in wedlock. Yet
all these children would be granted some attention by her, unlike her
rejected firstborn, John, who would be doubly disadvantaged, since he
would never meet the man named as his father in the parish registers. It
is not known why John alone should have been abandoned by her. From
his earliest months, he was cared for by Moses Parry, his maternal grandfather,
which was why Moses' sudden death was such a shattering blow.
Twenty years after the event, John - by then calling himself Henry Stanley
- was moved to write a tribute to his grandfather on a scroll of special
blue paper. In his best calligraphy, he described Moses' cry, as he
raised both hands to his chest and fell, taking just three more breaths
before dying. Every detail recorded by a local journalist was precious to
the grown-up John, who ended by listing the virtues of the only relation
who had ever cared for him: 'Let us emulate his goodness, his kindness,
his good deeds, for they were worthy of EMULATION.'
The old man had taken a liking to John from the beginning, and
shortly after the boy's birth had thrust a gold sovereign into his mouth
so he could bite on it and guarantee himself a prosperous future. His
grandson would remember him as 'a stout old gentleman, clad in corduroy
breeches, dark stockings, and long Melton coat, with a cleanshaven
face, rather round, and lit up by humorous grey eyes'. The little
boy accompanied Moses everywhere, including to the town's Wesleyan
chapel, where he would struggle not to fall asleep among the
lavender-scented pews. At home, sitting on the old man's knee, John
was taught to write his letters on a slate.
After his grandfather's death, John's uncles, Thomas and Moses
junior, decided - though they were prosperous butchers - that John
would have to leave his late grandfather's cottage in the shadow of
ruinous Denbigh Castle. At first they arranged for him to be boarded
out in an overcrowded cottage close to his old home and placed in the
care of its owners, Richard and Jenny Price, a couple in their fifties,
four of whose children still lived with them. Richard maintained the
castle bowling green and was known as 'the green-keeper'. He also
dug the graves at nearby St Hilary's Church, where John had been
baptized. The Prices were very poor and refused to look after John
Stanley's grandfather's cottage, where he was born
for less than half a crown a week, perhaps £60 in today's money. In
the day, John briefly attended the Free School in the crypt of St
Hilary's Church. After a few months the place was closed down
because 'the floor and seats were broken, and damp from the churchyard
penetrated into the crypt'. No arithmetic had been taught there
and few children could even read words of one syllable. John took
away with him the memory of 'a terrible old lady with spectacles and
a birch rod'.
At the Price's cottage, John played on the grassy slopes beside the
Castle, just as he had done when living with his grandfather. He also
continued to witness the arrival of the well-dressed members of the
bowling club, whose refreshments were sent up to the castle by various
purveyors, in baskets with the names of their businesses on the
sides. The boy studied these names carefully. '"Well, John, what do
they mean?" asked a member of the Price family. He answered in
Welsh, "Byddigion," which is the infantile word for "gentlefolk".'
His precocious awareness of his own low social status would make the
next development in his life all the harder to bear.
About six months after his arrival at the Prices, when the little boy
had settled in well, his uncles decided to stop paying for his keep.
Richard and Jenny Price suspected that John's relatives were gambling
on their being too fond of the boy to part with him. The Prices were
having none of this and told their twenty-seven-year-old son, also
called Richard Price, to get John Rowlands ready for a journey.
Richard's own account of what happened was given to a journalist
forty years later, at which date he still lived in the cottage where John
had once been cared for. 'So I requested my mother to dress him ...
Then I put him to stand on that chair there, and taking his little hands
over my shoulders, I carried him down through the town passing the
houses of his well-to-do relatives ...' For part of the journey, Richard
let the boy walk. The six-year-old John was very anxious and often
asked in Welsh: 'Ble rydan ni'n mynd, Dick?': 'Where are we going,
Dick?' John had been told that he would soon be seeing his aunt Mary,
who lived in a hamlet to the north of Denbigh. When their eight-mile
journey ended at the doors of the St Asaph Workhouse, and Richard
Price turned to leave, having rung a bell that clanged deep within the
building, the child asked him where he was going. 'To buy cakes for
you,' replied the shamefaced Price, before hurrying away. The 'false
cajolings and treacherous endearments' lavished upon him during that
journey on 20 February 1847 would live forever in Henry Stanley's
memory. 'Since that dreadful evening,' Stanley would write in his
fifties, 'my resentment has not a whit abated ... It would have been far
better for me if Dick, being stronger than I, had employed compulsion,
instead of shattering my confidence and planting the first seeds of distrust
in a child's heart.'
There has been a lively debate among scholars about how humane,
or inhumane, the St Asaph workhouse really was - with one historian
arguing that a child in this newly built institution was better housed,
better fed, better clothed and better educated than many a boy or girl
reared with his or her parents in a rural cottage. Yet emotional deprivation
is immensely more damaging than ignorance or poverty. Nor
should the main social objective of workhouses be forgotten. Apart
from preventing the poor from starving in the streets, they were meant
to deter people who had failed to provide for themselves from ever
failing again, and to persuade anyone who might be thinking of relying
on the state, rather than on his or her own labour, to reconsider.
The new arrivals, whether adult paupers or deserted children, were
subjected to a humiliating ritual. First they were washed in cold water,
then their hair was cropped short and, to complete the removal of
their individuality, they were clad in identical drab fustian suits if
male, or striped cotton dresses if female. If, for any reason, they ever
left the workhouse, which required permission, they would at once be
recognized as inmates. It was as if, wrote Stanley, they had committed
a crime, and yet their only offence was to have 'become old, or so
enfeebled by toil or sickness that they could no longer sustain themselves',
or, if young, their sin was to have been deserted. Workhouse
inmates were at the bottom of the social heap, in a cruelly snobbish
society, and were made to know their place every day of their lives.
They rose at six, and were penned into their dormitories at eight in the
evening. Their bread and gruel was unappetizing, and meant to be.
Husbands and wives were separated, parents and children too, and
even brothers and sisters were kept apart. 'It is a fearful fate that of a
British outcast,' wrote Stanley, 'because the punishment afflicts the
mind and breaks the heart.'
Stanley exaggerated and lied about the level of brutality at St Asaph
- his most notorious false claim being that a boy had been beaten to
death by James Francis, the schoolteacher. The workhouse records
were kept with bureaucratic thoroughness, and they show that nothing
of the kind took place when Stanley was there; as they do again, on the
day on which Stanley claimed to have left for good, after having beaten
his teacher insensible, following a brutal assault by the man. The only
diary record of his early years is a brief and fragmentary affair, written
by him four decades later in Swahili - as if, even then, he had still
needed to distance himself as far as possible from the pain of those
days. The entry for 5 January 1854 reads in translation: 'He [Francis]
hit me a lot today for no reason. I will never forget,' and this perhaps
explains his need to console himself with fantasies about overcoming
the man who had symbolized his captivity. There was no adult at St
Asaph willing, or able, to comfort him. 'It took me some time to learn
the unimportance of tears in a workhouse. Hitherto tears had brought
me relief in one shape or another ...' His inability to convey in words
the extent of his mental suffering accounts in part for his exaggeration
of the physical violence in the workhouse.
The inspector's report on St Asaph in the year of Stanley's admission
was very bad. The girls - there were nineteen of them - were said to
have been corrupted by prostitutes and from them 'had learnt the
tricks of the trade'; the men had taken part in every possible vice, and
the boys slept two in a bed, an older with a younger, 'so that from the
very start ... [they] were beginning to understand and practise things
they should not'. The master, as distinct from the teacher, was censured
for being drunk and 'taking indecent liberties with the nurses'.
In the words of the report, the teacher, James Francis, aged thirty-two,
had 'received no training, and speaks very broken English and appears
to understand the language imperfectly'. Out of thirty boys, ten were
learning to write but 'only one copy-book was well-written'. Yet
Stanley would state a dozen years after leaving: 'I had a pretty fair
education during my ten years in St Asaph workhouse.' And he was
being serious - vice, brutality and low academic standards had also
been prevalent in the country's most famous schools, such as Eton and
Winchester. Nor was it disastrous that a teacher should speak poor
English in a school where the first language of most children was
Welsh. In fact the inspector's reports improved so much as the years
passed, that a satisfactory situation was recorded by 1856, the year in
which Stanley left. Francis even received an efficiency award and a rise
in salary.
Stanley learned to read and write, and even to love books - though
the only novels given him to read were pious morality tales. He was
good at arithmetic and geography and could write remarkably neatly
at an early age. From time to time he was even called in to help with
the workhouse accounts. His teacher, James Francis, who had left
the mines after losing his hand in a pit accident, asked Stanley, as head
boy, to deputize for him when he was away, and rewarded him with
small gifts. Stanley did not, however, escape all punishment, and he
would never forget being beaten after an illicit blackberrying expedition.
On several occasions, Francis called on Stanley's uncle Moses
and 'urged him to do something for little John, since he was an excellent
scholar and endowed with extraordinary talents'. But Moses
always refused to help.
Why Stanley chose to represent Francis as a sadistic monster will
never be known with certainty. Francis was a bachelor, and his many
gifts to chosen boys would undoubtedly raise eyebrows in any school
today. The fact that homosexual practices among the boys were
remarked upon by the inspectors suggests a possible reason for Stanley's
hatred. An unwanted sexual advance by his bachelor teacher may
account for his violent antipathy. His mother's promiscuity meant
that, as a young man, Stanley was disgusted by overt sexuality, and
especially by prostitutes. In his letters to his first serious girlfriend, he
insisted that he had remained 'pure' in the workhouse. A sexual
advance by his teacher would therefore have been an especially shocking
betrayal. A simple withdrawal of favour hardly seems adequate
motivation for Stanley's vilification of someone who had once
rewarded and praised him.
A momentous event occurred in December 1850. The boy was a
month short of his tenth birthday. Without warning, during the dinner-hour,
Francis took John aside and 'pointing to a tall woman with
an oval face, and a great coil of dark hair behind her head', asked him
if he knew her.
'No, sir,' I replied.
'What, do you not know your own mother?'
I started with a burning face, and directed a shy glance at her and perceived she
was regarding me with a look of cool, critical scrutiny. I had expected to feel a
gush of tenderness towards her, but her expression was so chilling that the valves
of my heart closed as with a snap.
In reality, the boy's longing to be loved by his mother had not been
turned off as if by some convenient tap. Elizabeth Parry had never
before come to see John during his four years in the workhouse, and
now she only came because she and two of her other children had been
admitted as destitute paupers. But this did not stop him dreaming of
winning this aloof woman's love. Despite his rage at being thrown
away by a mother who kept her younger children with her, he would
for many years persist with attempts to please her, even after humiliating
setbacks. No photograph of Elizabeth Parry as a young woman
survives, though Stanley once carried one with him everywhere. A
photograph of her aged about fifty - the only one known to exist - is
published for the first time as this book's Plate 3. The square shape of
her head is very similar to her famous son's, as is her resolute and
determined expression.
People who are shut up in institutions often have fantasies of escape
and freedom, of climbing over walls, living in woods, and walking for
days towards far horizons. It is easy to see why Stanley's years in the
workhouse would predispose him towards travel in a limitless continent.
Stanley felt imprisoned and cut off. It was as if he and the others
'were in another planet ... Year after year we noted the passing of the
seasons, by the budding blossoms, the flight of bees, the corn which
changed from green to gold.' Meanwhile, in his own words, he 'vegetated
within the high walls surrounding our home of lowliness'. On
rare occasions, when permitted to visit the small town of St Asaph,
John, with his pale face and fustian garments, was amazed at the good
fortune of the local boys who could eat raisins and sugar, and wear
colourful neckties. The desire to escape was in him early. When he was
ten, he ran away to Denbigh. But the outcome of this trip was so
painful that he never wrote about it.
Once over the wall, John had nowhere to go except to his neglectful
relatives. So he headed for the house of his uncle Moses Parry, whose
successful butchery business enabled him to live in Vale Street, the
most desirable address in town. In 1851, Moses and his wife, Kitty - who
had played the leading role in forcing little John out of the house
where he had been born - had two sons: a baby and a boy of three.
They also had two servants. In the 1880s Kitty told a journalist how
she had woken one morning to find John at her door. She asked him
in Welsh where he had come from.
'With twinkling eyes, he replied: "Dw'i wedi dengid." ("I have escaped.") Since
daybreak, he had walked eight miles ... I washed his face and hands and then gave
him a good breakfast. During the rest of the day he played about the place with
his cousins. That night I put him to bed with one of my boys. Late that night,' continued
Mrs Parry, 'his uncle Moses came home and I told him that his sister,
Betsy's little boy was in bed upstairs. Moses was on bad terms with his sister, and
he ordered me to send him back to St Asaph in the morning.'
Moses was a respectable tradesman, and the feckless Elizabeth with
her four illegitimate children was not the kind of sister who would
help anyone's business, but his mother's promiscuity was not John's
fault. He had spent a happy day and night in an ordinary home and
witnessed the natural affection between a mother and her sons. Yet his
prosperous uncle sent him back to the workhouse in the name of
respectability. Years later, a tugboat skipper who had been at St Asaph
with Stanley wrote to him saying that he well recalled the morning
when he came back from his cousins' house in a state of collapse. John
Rowlands's prostration had been due to his forcible return to a loveless
institution, after having been part, albeit briefly, of an ordinary
family.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from STANLEY
by TIM JEAL
Copyright © 2007 by Tim Jeal.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.