Sir Henry Morton Stanley made a double appeal to the imagination of the early Nineties. He represented both the old romance of adventurous travel and the new romance of mechanical efficiency. It was his luck to do considerable things exactly at the time when exploration had become scientific, but had not ceased to be picturesque. A generation before there was glamour, but little good business, in the conquest of the wild; on the whole the betting was decidedly on the wild. A generation later the glamour had largely departed, though the business was very good business indeed. But in the high and palmy days of Stanley the explorer had the best of both worlds. He was admired as a disinterested knight errant, and rewarded handsomely for not being one. To-day the public is a little cynical on the whole subject. It is not so much that the world has grown smaller; the world is still a very large place. It is not so much that danger has been eliminated; it has in some ways been notably increased. But the very completeness of a modern exploration boom defeats part of its purpose. So far as it sets out to make the restless hero an efficient money-maker for himself and others it generally succeeds mightily. So far as it sets out to make the restless hero a demigod it invariably fails; it makes him, instead, something very like a bore. The public reads all about book rights, serial rights, cinema rights, oxy-hydrogen In the Nineties there was already visible a good deal of this modern tendency to get crazes very badly and tire of them very quickly. But the “lion of the season” still existed, and Stanley, on his return from the Emin Pasha relief expedition, was a lion indeed. It is curious, at this time of day, to recall the origin of this, the last of Stanley’s great marches through the African wild. One Edouard Schnitzer, known as Emin Pasha, had been stranded in Equatorial Africa after the capture of Khartoum by the Mahdi. Why any large body of Englishmen should have been interested in this man it is not easy to say. But towards the end of 1886 there was a considerable agitation for an expedition to discover the fate of As for Stanley himself, the expedition covered him with enduring glory. Every British boy born in the late Sixties and Seventies was familiar with his haggard but resolute features, and knew by heart the singular story of his life. It was the kind of story that impresses itself indelibly on the imagination of youth. Stanley’s name, of course, came to him only in mature life. He was born John Rowlands, the son of a farmer near Denbigh. His father he never knew; during his childhood he only saw his mother once, in the workhouse of St. Asaph, whither she had come with two other of her children; she would not recognise him, and when, after his first return from America, he paid her a visit, it was only to meet with a cold repulse. John Rowlands had been left as an infant in charge of his grandfather, Moses Parry, then living within the precincts of Denbigh Castle. On the death of this old man he was transferred to the care of an ancient couple, two of his uncles guaranteeing a maintenance allowance of five shillings a week. This at last failed, and the child was taken to the St. Asaph Union Workhouse; he was then in his sixth year. Young Rowlands in these dismal surroundings suffered all the pangs possible to a boy of keen sensibilities and strong natural affections who finds himself the victim, not only of privation and humiliation, but of actual tyranny. His schoolmaster was a one-handed monster named Francis, who seems to have been as bad as anybody in Dickens. “No Greek helot or dark slave,” says Stanley in his Autobiography, “ever underwent discipline as the boys of St. Asaph under the heavy, masterful hand of James Francis. The ready back-slap in the face, the stunning clout over the ear, the strong blow with the open palm on alternate cheeks, which knocked our senses into confusion, were so It is a testimony to the toughness of child nature, though none to the management of this brutal institution, that of Stanley’s thirty school-fellows one lived to be a wealthy merchant, another to be a clergyman, a third to be a colonial lawyer, and a fourth to become a man of large fortune overseas. But the iron entered deeply into young Rowlands’ soul, and the most constant motive in his life was to obliterate the stigma of pauperism. His connection with the workhouse abruptly terminated when he was about fifteen. He turned on the brutal master, gave him a severe thrashing, ran away, got first a place as a pupil teacher, then worked as a farm-boy, a haberdasher’s boy, and a butcher’s boy, until at last, at Liverpool, he obtained a job on an American sailing-ship. At New Orleans, tired of the brutality he had experienced in a voyage of eighty-three days, he ran away from the ship, and the same day chanced across the man who was to become his adopted father, a Mr. Stanley, who, once some sort of minister, was now a commercial traveller. No more striking tribute has ever been paid to the influence of American institutions than that of the ex-workhouse lad from England. “The people I passed,” he says, “appeared to me nobler than any I had seen. They had a swing Mr. Stanley soon after lost his wife—whom young Rowlands describes as having taught him “the immense distance between a lady and a mere woman.” This bereavement induced him to adopt the young Englishman, and he performed the ceremony in due form, filling a basin with water and baptizing the erstwhile John Rowlands as Henry Morton Stanley. “The golden period of my life,” says Stanley, “began from that supreme moment.” For the first time in his life he had a proper outfit of clothes, and was introduced to the amenities of civilised life. But his adopted father did not long survive, and in the meantime the Civil War, in which Stanley saw service on both sides, had broken out. When peace was declared, Stanley, who had suffered extraordinary vicissitudes of fortune, took advantage of a chance introduction to the New York Press to embark on the career of free-lance journalism. His great chance as a war correspondent came with the Abyssinian War. Gordon Bennett thought American interest in Abyssinia too slight to justify the expense of a special correspondent, but agreed to pay for any matter accepted if Stanley cared to defray his The natives of the Lower Congo gave him a name which signified “Breaker of Rocks,” and in doing so proved themselves no mean judges of character. Stanley was not a cruel man nor an unprincipled, and Sir Garnet Wolseley has spoken of his high courage and unruffled calm in positions of danger. But he was not in the position of a soldier in charge of a military expedition; he acted only occasionally in a quasi-military capacity; more often he travelled as a civilian, and sometimes as in every sense a private person. This circumstance he seems to have overlooked. “My methods,” he said, in expressing the hope that it would be his to follow Livingstone in opening up Africa to the “shining light of Christianity,” “will not be Livingstone’s. Each man has his own way. His, I think, had its defects, though the old man personally had been almost Christ-like for goodness, patience, and self-sacrifice. The selfish and wooden-headed world requires mastering as well as loving charity; for man is a composite of the spiritual and earthly.” We have here the sharp contrast between the earlier and later nineteenth-century schools of exploration, the school of the gospel and the school of the gatling gun. Stanley had his own conception of religion; in his way he was a decidedly pious man; his workhouse wretchedness had inclined him to seek the Father of the fatherless; he had resumed in later life the prayerful habits of his boyhood, and he devoted some considerable time in his first trans-African tour to converting a ruling chief to Christianity. But there was more of Calvin than of Christ in his faith, and more of the Old Testament than the New. With the completion of the Emin Pasha expedition he retired on his laurels, married, and went into politics. But, though after a first unsuccessful One curious thing may be recalled concerning him. He was often to be seen at public dinners. But nobody ever saw him eat anything; every dish went away untasted. |