Stanley pictured in 1872

Mr Stanley, I presume

Tim Jeal’s biography of explorer Henry Morton Stanley exposes the myths that surround him, writes Matthew Lewin

Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer by, Tim Jeal,
Faber and Faber, £25.00 order this book

DOCTOR Livingstone, I presume.” These are probably the most famous four words in the whole of Africa’s history – said to have been uttered by the explorer Henry Morton Stanley when he found David Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1871.
But, according to biographer Tim Jeal, Stanley almost certainly did not say those words, he made them up many months later. Stanley also removed the crucial pages of his detailed journal, which would have recorded exactly what was said at the meeting of the two great men.
Livingstone, who wrote 10 letters in the fortnight that followed, never mentioned the auspicious words either.
This is all revealed in Tim Jeal’s remarkable new biography. Mr Jeal, who lives in Willow Road, Hampstead, is the obvious person to have written this massive biography, since he has already produced the definitive biography of David Livingstone as well as of that other adventurer in Africa, Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the Scouts movement.
He managed to get access for the first time to a huge collection of Stanley’s personal documents, now housed in the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Brussels, which has enabled him to produce an account which sets the record straight on a number of important misconceptions about Stanley.
These include evidence that he was not a dysfunctional, a homosexual or someone unable to form relationships; that he was not a murderous monster during his expeditions and that he was, indeed, the greatest African explorer of them all.
Mr Jeal had his own taste of Africa when he left school and spent his time before going to read English at Oxford by travelling right down Africa from Somalia through Uganda and East Africa to South Africa. Ironically in the early 1960s, it was a relatively safe journey.
Stanley’s journey started in Denbigh, north Wales, where he was born, illegitimately, John Rowlands into poverty. So poor was the family that when his grandfather, who had been looking after him, died, little John, aged five, was abandoned in a workhouse where he was never visited by anyone.
He was so acutely angry and ashamed by his early experiences that he sought to deny them, even when they came back to haunt his reputation.
They led to his disastrous decision, after he had emigrated to America, to pretend to have been adopted by a wealthy cotton trader in New Orleans by the name of Henry Hope Stanley.
John Rowlands took on the name Henry Morton Stanley although, in reality, he never even met the businessman.
“Yes, these things really wrecked his life,” Mr Jeal says. “He just couldn’t admit to it all in public. He couldn’t face the snobbery of the age he lived in and being condescended to, because he already felt so bad inside. It would have hurt too much.”
The young Stanley eventually managed to become a noted war correspondent for the New York Herald.
It was the Herald which financed his first big expedition to Africa, to find the famous explorer David Livingstone who had not been heard of for many months and was feared lost.
As we know, he found Livingstone in spectacular fashion, and his account and later writings hugely enhanced the reputation of the older explorer.
But the real peak of Stanley’s achievements was his next expedition in which he set out from the east coast of Africa at Zanzibar with more than 300 porters.
After encountering disease, death of his colleagues, starvation, hostile attacks, privations and suffering on an unimaginable scale, he circumnavigated two of the most important lakes in Africa, confirmed the probable source of the Nile was Lake Victoria, and then travelled almost the entire length of the vast Congo River until he reached the west coast.
He also mapped his entire journey, producing the first ever maps of the lakes central Africa and the Congo River.
“There was a desperate courage about him which is almost beyond belief,” Mr Jeal says. “He faced circumstances which are beyond our wildest dreams of horror.
“A particular irony and sadness is that they had no clue that it was these insects that were causing their ill health. They would sometimes camp in marshy areas with no idea that mosquitoes were a health problem.”
He made one bad mistake on that journey, opening fire on a group of Africans on an island in Lake Victoria who, although not threatening him at that moment, had earlier behaved with extreme aggression and treachery towards him.
It was an incident later taken out of all proportion by Stanley’s enemies and was the source of his unfair reputation as a ruthless killer of native peoples.
Mr Jeal says: “Contrast that with the actions of General Kitchener at Omdurman in the Sudan, who used the most modern weapons to kill 11,000 of an enemy armed at best with steel weapons and a few flintlocks – Kitchener was showered with honours.”
Stanley’s later career did not enhance his reputation. It was during this expedition that some of his English officers carried out shocking crimes and atrocities (thought to be the source of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness), for which Stanley was (unjustly) blamed.
He eventually returned to England a famous and successful – if also controversial and sometimes vilified – figure.
There were adoring crowds, bestselling books and packed lecture theatres, but also vicious attacks on him and his reputation in the press and by academic opponents.
He married late in life, adopted a son and died in aged 63 – a ripe old age for an African explorer.