King Leopold's Ghost

Mariner Books

Chapter One

"I SHALL NOT GIVE UP THE CHASE"

On January 28, 1841, a quarter-century after Tuckey's failedexpedition, the man who would spectacularly accomplish whatTuckey tried to do was born in the small Welsh market town of Denbigh.He was entered on the birth register of St. Hilary's Church as "JohnRowlands, Bastard" ? an epithet that was to mark the boy for the rest ofhis life, a life obsessively devoted to living down a sense of shame. YoungJohn was the first of five illegitimate children born to Betsy Parry, ahousemaid. His father may have been John Rowlands, a local drunkardwho died of delirium tremens, or a prominent and married lawyer namedJames Vaughan Horne, or a boyfriend of Betsy Parry's in London, whereshe had been working.

    After giving birth, Betsy Parry departed from Denbigh in disgrace,leaving her baby behind in the home of his two uncles and his maternalgrandfather, a man who believed a boy needed a "sound whipping" if hemisbehaved. When John was five, his grandfather died, and the unclesimmediately got rid of their unwanted nephew by paying a local familyhalf a crown a week to take him in. When the family asked for moremoney, the uncles refused. One day the foster family told young John thattheir son Dick would take him to visit his "Aunt Mary" in anothervillage:

The way seemed interminable and tedious.... At last Dick set me down from his shoulders before an immense stone building, and, passing through tall iron gates, he pulled at a bell, which I could hear clanging noisily in the distant interior. A sombre-faced stranger appeared at the door, who, despite my remonstrances, seized me by the hand and drew me within, while Dick tried to sooth my fears with glib promises that he was only going to bring Aunt Mary to me. The door closed on him and, with the echoing sound, I experienced for the first time the awful feeling of utter desolateness.

Six-year-old John Rowlands was now an inmate of the St. Asaph UnionWorkhouse.

    Records of life at St. Asaph's are generally covered by a veil of Victorianeuphemism, but a local newspaper complained that the master of theworkhouse was an alcoholic who took "indecent liberties" with womenon his staff. An investigative commission that visited the workhouse in1847, about the time John Rowlands arrived, reported that male adults"took part in every possible vice," and that children slept two to a bed, anolder child with a younger, resulting in their starting "to practice andunderstand things they should not." For the rest of his life, John Rowlandswould show a fear of sexual intimacy in any form.

    Whatever John may have endured or seen in the workhouse dormitory,in its schoolroom he thrived. For his achievements he won a prizeBible from the local bishop. He was fascinated by geography. He had anunusual ability to mimic someone else's handwriting after studying it fora few minutes. His own penmanship was strikingly graceful; his youthfulsignature was stylish and forward-leaning, with the stems and tails of theletters sweeping dramatically far above and below the line. It was as if,through his handwriting, he were trying to pull himself out of disgraceand turn the script of his life from one of poverty to one of elegance.

    One evening, when John was twelve, his supervisor "came up to meduring the dinner-hour, when all the inmates were assembled, and, pointingout a tall woman with an oval face, and a great coil of dark hairbehind her head, asked me if I recognized 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, andperceived she was regarding me with a look of cool, critical scrutiny. I hadexpected to feel a gush of tenderness towards her, but her expression wasso chilling that the valves of my heart closed as with a snap."

    Adding to his shock was the fact that his mother had brought two newillegitimate children to St. Asaph's with her, a boy and a girl. Some weekslater, she left the workhouse. For John, it was the latest in a chain ofabandonments.

    At fifteen, John left St. Asaph's and stayed with a succession of relatives,all of whom seemed queasy about sheltering a poorhouse cousin. Atseventeen, while he was living with an uncle in Liverpool and working asa butcher's delivery boy, he feared he was about to be turned out oncemore. One day he delivered some meat to an American merchant ship atthe docks, the Windermere. The captain eyed this short butsturdy-looking young man and asked, "How would you like to sail in this ship?"

    In February 1859, after a seven-week voyage, the Windermere landed inNew Orleans, where the young newcomer jumped ship. He long rememberedthe city's fascinating array of smells: tar, brine, green coffee,rum, and molasses. Roaming the streets in search of work, on the porch ofa warehouse he spied a middle-aged man in a stovepipe hat, a cottonbroker, as it turned out, and approached him: "Do you want a boy, sir?"

    The cotton broker, impressed by John's only reference, the prize Biblewith the bishop's inscription, took on the Welsh teenager as an employee.Soon after, young John Rowlands, now living in the New World, decidedto give himself a new name. The procedure was gradual. In the 1860 NewOrleans census, he is listed as "J. Rolling." A woman who knew him atthis time remembered him as John Rollins: "smart as a whip, and muchgiven to bragging, big talk and telling stories." Within a few years, however,he began using the first and last name of the merchant who hadgiven him his job. He continued to experiment with the middle names,using Morley, Morelake, and Moreland before finally settling on Morton.And so the boy who had entered the St. Asaph Union Workhouse as JohnRowlands became the man who would soon be known worldwide asHenry Morton Stanley.

    Stanley gave himself not only a new name; he tried for the rest of hislife to give himself a new biography. The man who would become themost famous explorer of his time, renowned for his accurate observationsof African wildlife and terrain, was a world-class obfuscator when it cameto his early life. In his autobiography, for example, he tells of leaving theWelsh workhouse in melodramatic terms: he leaped over a garden walland escaped, he claims, after leading a class rebellion against a cruelsupervisor named James Francis, who had viciously brutalized the entiresenior class. "`Never again,' I shouted, marvelling at my own audacity. Thewords had scarcely escaped me ere I found myself swung upwards intothe air by the collar of my jacket and flung into a nerveless heap on thebench. Then the passionate brute pummelled me in the stomach until Ifell backward, gasping for breath. Again I was lifted, and dashed on thebench with a shock that almost broke my spine." Stanley was then avigorous, healthy fifteen-year-old and would not have been an easy victimfor Francis, a former coal miner who had lost one hand in a miningaccident. Other students later recalled no mutiny, much less one ledby Stanley; they remembered Francis as a gentle man and Stanley as ateacher's pet, often given favors and encouragement and put in charge ofthe class when Francis was away. Workhouse records show Stanley leavingnot as a runaway but to live at his uncle's while going to school.

    Equally fanciful is Stanley's account of his time in New Orleans. Helived, he says, at the home of the benevolent cotton broker, Henry Stanley,and his saintly, fragile wife. When a yellow fever epidemic struck the city,she sickened and died, in a bed curtained with white muslin, but at themoment of death "she opened her mild eyes, and spoke words as fromafar: `Be a good boy. God bless you!'"

    Soon after, her sorrowing widower clasped his young tenant and employeeto his breast and declared that "in future you are to bear my name."What followed, Stanley claims, were two idyllic years of traveling onbusiness with the man he refers to as "my father." They took river boatsup and down the Mississippi, walking the decks together, reading aloud toeach other, and talking about the Bible. But sadly, in 1861, Stanley'sgenerous adoptive father followed his beloved wife into the next world."For the first time I understood the sharpness of the pang which piercesthe soul when a loved one lies with folded hands icy cold in the eternalsleep. As I contemplated the body I vexed myself with asking, Had myconduct been as perfect as I then wished it had been? Had I failed inaught? Had I esteemed him as he deserved?"

    A poignant story ? except that records show that both the elderStanleys did not die until 1878, seventeen years later. Although they didadopt two children, both were girls. According to city directories andcensus reports, young Stanley lived not in their home but in a series ofboarding houses. And Stanley the merchant had an angry quarrel andpermanent rupture with his employee, after which he asked that theyoung man's name never again be mentioned in his presence.

    Stanley's wishful description of his youth clearly owes something to hiscontemporary Charles Dickens, similarly fond of deathbed scenes, saintlywomen, and wealthy benefactors. It also owes much to Stanley's feelingthat his real life was so embedded in disgrace that he would have toinvent whatever self he presented to the world. Not only did he make upevents in his autobiography, but he created journal entries about a dramaticshipwreck and other adventures that never happened. Sometimesan episode in his African travels appears in strikingly different form in hisjournal, in letters, in the newspaper articles he sent home, and in thebooks he wrote after each trip. Psychohistorians have had a feast.

    One of the more revealing episodes Stanley describes or invents tookplace soon after he arrived in New Orleans, when he was sharing a bed ina boarding house with Dick Heaton, another young man who had comeover from Liverpool as a deckhand. "He was so modest he would notretire by candle-light, and ... when he got into bed he lay on the vergeof it, far removed from contact with me. When I rose in the morning Ifound that he was not undressed." One day Stanley awoke and, looking atDick Heaton asleep at his side, was "amazed to see what I took to be twotumours on his breast.... I sat up... and cried out ... `I know! I know!Dick, you are a girl.'" That evening Dick, who by then had confessed tobeing Alice, was gone. "She was never seen, or heard of, by me again; butI have hoped ever since that Fate was as propitious to her, as I think it waswise, in separating two young and simple creatures who might have beenled, through excess of sentiment, into folly."

    Like his Dickensian deathbed scene, this has an echo of legend ? ofthe girl who disguises herself as a boy so that she can enlist as a soldier orrun away to sea. Whether real or made up, the episode's emotional messageis the same: Stanley's horror at the idea of finding himself so close toa woman.

    When the American Civil War began, Stanley joined the ConfederateArmy, and in April 1862 went into combat with his regiment of ArkansasVolunteers at the battle of Shiloh, in Tennessee. On the second day offighting he was surrounded by half a dozen Union soldiers and soonafterward found himself in a crowded, typhus-ridden prisoner-of-warcamp outside Chicago. The only way out of this miserable place, hediscovered, was to enlist in the Union Army, which he promptly did, onlyto fall ill with dysentery and receive a medical discharge. After workinghis way back and forth across the Atlantic as a sailor, in 1864 he enlisted inthe Union Navy. His fine handwriting got him a post as ship's clerk onthe frigate Minnesota. When the ship bombarded a Confederate fort inNorth Carolina, Stanley became one of the few people to see combat onboth sides of the Civil War.

    The Minnesota returned to port in early 1865, and the restlessStanley deserted. Now the pace of his movements accelerates. It is as if he hasno more patience for confining, regulated institutions like the workhouse, amerchant ship, or the military. He goes first to St. Louis, signs on as afree-lance contributor to a local newspaper, and sends back a series offlorid dispatches from ever farther west: Denver, Salt Lake City, San Francisco.He writes disapprovingly of "debauchery and dissipation" and the"whirlpool of sin" of the Western frontier towns.

    After an adventure-seeking trip to Turkey, Stanley returned to theAmerican West, and his career as a newspaperman took off. For most of1867 he covered the Indian Wars, sending dispatches not only to St. Louisbut to East Coast papers as well. It did not matter that the long, hopelessstruggle of the southern Plains Indians against the invaders of their landwas almost at an end, that the expedition Stanley accompanied saw littlecombat, or that most of the year was devoted to peace negotiations;Stanley's editors wanted war reporting about dramatic battles, and this hegave them: "The Indian War has at last been fairly inaugurated.... theIndians, true to their promises, true to their bloody instincts, to theirsavage hatred of the white race, to the lessons instilled in their bosoms bytheir progenitors, are on the warpath."

    These dispatches caught the eye of James Gordon Bennett, Jr., theflamboyant, hard-driving publisher of the New York Herald. He hiredStanley to cover an exotic little war that promised to sell many newspapers:a punitive expedition the British government was organizing againstthe Emperor of Abyssinia. At Suez, on his way to the war, Stanley bribedthe chief telegraph clerk to make sure that when correspondents' reportsarrived from the front, his would be the first cabled home. His foresightpaid off, and his glowing account of how the British won the war's onlysignificant battle was the first to reach the world. In a grand stroke of luck,the trans-Mediterranean telegraph cable broke just after Stanley's storieswere sent off. The dispatches of his exasperated rivals, and even the Britisharmy's official reports, had to travel part of the way to Europe by ship. Ina Cairo hotel, in June 1868, Stanley savored his scoop and the news thathe had been named a permanent roving foreign correspondent for theHerald. He was twenty-seven years old.

* * *

Now based in London, Stanley could hear around him the first rumblingsof what would before long become known as the Scramble for Africa. Ina Europe confidently entering the industrial age, brimming with thesense of power given it by the railroad and the oceangoing steamship,there now arose a new type of hero: the African explorer. To those whohad lived in Africa for millennia, of course, "there was nothing to discover,we were here all the time," as a future African statesman would putit. But to nineteenth-century Europeans, celebrating an explorer for"discovering" some new corner of Africa was, psychologically, a prelude tofeeling that the continent was theirs for the taking.

    In a Europe ever more tightly knit by the telegraph, the lecture circuit,and widely circulating daily newspapers, African explorers became someof the first international celebrity figures, their fame crossing nationalboundaries like that of today's champion athletes and movie stars. FromAfrica's east coast, the Englishmen Richard Burton and John Speke madea bold journey to the interior to find Lake Tanganyika, the longest freshwaterlake in the world, and Lake Victoria, the continent's largest body ofwater, and capped their adventure with a spectacle the public alwaysenjoys from celebrities, a bitter public falling-out. From Africa's westcoast, the Frenchman Paul Belloni Du Chaillu brought back the skinsand skeletons of gorillas, and told riveted audiences how the great hairybeasts abducted women to their jungle lairs for purposes too vile to bespoken of.

    Underlying much of Europe's excitement was the hope that Africawould be a source of raw materials to feed the Industrial Revolution, justas the search for raw materials ? slaves ? for the colonial plantationeconomy had driven most of Europe's earlier dealings with Africa. Expectationsquickened dramatically after prospectors discovered diamondsin South Africa in 1867 and gold some two decades later. But Europeansliked to think of themselves as having higher motives. The British, inparticular, fervently believed in bringing "civilisation" and Christianity tothe natives; they were curious about what lay in the continent's unknowninterior; and they were filled with righteousness about combating slavery.

    Britain, of course, had only a dubious right to the high moral view ofslavery. British ships had long dominated the slave trade, and only in 1838had slavery's vestiges been abolished in the British Empire. But the Englishquickly forgot all this, just as they forgot that there had been slaverevolts in the West Indies and that economic factors had hastened slavery'send by making it less profitable. In their opinion, slavery had come to anend throughout most of the world for one reason only: British virtue.When London's Albert Memorial was built in 1872, one of its statuesshowed a young black African, naked except for some leaves over hisloins. The memorial's inaugural handbook explained that he was a "representativeof the uncivilised races" listening to a European woman'steaching, and that the "broken chains at his feet refer to the part taken byGreat Britain in the emancipation of slaves."

    Significantly, most British and French antislavery fervor in the 1860swas directed not at Spain and Portugal, which allowed slavery in theircolonies, or at Brazil, with its millions of slaves. Instead, righteousdenunciations poured down on a distant, weak, and safely nonwhite target: theso-called Arab slave-traders raiding Africa from the east. In the slavemarkets of Zanzibar, traders sold their human booty to Arab plantationowners on the island itself, and to other buyers in Persia, Madagascar, andthe various sultanates and principalities of the Arabian peninsula. ForEuropeans, here was an ideal target for disapproval: one "uncivilised" raceenslaving another.

    Arab was a misnomer; Afro-Arab would have been more accurate.Although their captives often ended up in the Arab world, the traders onthe African mainland were largely Swahili-speaking Africans from territorythat today is Kenya and Tanzania. Many had adopted Arab dress andIslam, but only some of them were of even partly Arab descent. Nonetheless,from Edinburgh to Rome, indignant books and speeches and sermonsdenounced the vicious "Arab" slavers ? and with them, by implication,the idea that any part of Africa might be colonized by someoneother than Europeans.

    All these European impulses toward Africa ? antislavery zeal, thesearch for raw materials, Christian evangelism, and sheer curiosity ? wereembodied in one man, David Livingstone. Physician, prospector,missionary, explorer, and at one point even a British consul, he wanderedacross Africa for three decades, starting in the early 1840s. He searched forthe source of the Nile, denounced slavery, found Victoria Falls, looked forminerals, and preached the gospel. As the first white man to cross thecontinent from coast to coast, he became a national hero in England.

    In 1866, Livingstone set off on another long expedition, looking forslave-traders, potential Christians, the Nile, or anything else that mightneed discovering. Years passed, and he did not return. As people began towonder about his fate, New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennettsaw a great opportunity. In 1869, or so went the story Stanley would tell,Stanley received an urgent telegram from Bennett, his boss: COME TOPARIS ON IMPORTANT BUSINESS. A journalist, Stanley wrote with theself-importance that had now become part of his public persona, is "likea gladiator in the arena.... Any flinching, any cowardice, and he is lost.The gladiator meets the sword that is sharpened for his bosom ? the ...roving correspondent meets the command that may send him to hisdoom." He dashed to Paris to meet his publisher at the Grand Hotel.There, a dramatic conversation about Livingstone climaxed with Bennett'ssaying, "I mean that you shall go, and find him wherever you mayhear that he is, and to get what news you can of him, and perhaps ... theold man may be in want: ? take enough with you to help him should herequire it ... do what you think best ? BUT FIND LIVINGSTONE!"

    This scene provided a splendid introduction for Stanley's first book,How I Found Livingstone, and it made Bennett, to whom the volume isdedicated, appear the far-sighted initiator of the great adventure. Butnothing like this conversation seems to have happened. The pages ofStanley's journal for the dates around the alleged meeting with Bennetthave been torn out, and in fact Stanley did not even begin looking forLivingstone until well over a year later.

    However inflated, Stanley's story of Bennett's dramatic summons toParis sold plenty of books, and to Stanley that mattered. He was aftermore than fame as an explorer; his melodramatic flair made him, asone historian has remarked, "the progenitor of all the subsequent professionaltravel writers." His articles, books, and speaking tours brought himgreater riches than any other travel writer of his time, and probably of thenext century as well. With every step he took in Africa, Stanley plannedhow to tell the story once he got home. In a twentieth-century way, hewas always sculpting the details of his own celebrity.

    To leave no clues for possible competitors in the search for Livingstone,Stanley carefully spread the word, as he headed for Africa, that hewas planning to explore the Rufiji River. He first went to Zanzibar torecruit porters to carry his supplies, and from there wrote a stream ofletters to Katie Gough-Roberts, a young woman in his home town ofDenbigh. Theirs had been a brief, stiff, nervous courtship, punctuated byStanley's many departures for journalistic assignments, but in his letters hepoured out his heart to her, confessing the painful secret of his illegitimatebirth. Stanley planned to marry her on his return from findingLivingstone.

    At last, in the spring of 1871, accompanied by a dog named Omar andporters, armed guards, an interpreter, cooks, a guide carrying the Americanflag, and two British sailors ? some 190 men in all, the largest Africanexploring expedition to date ? Stanley marched inland from theeast coast in search of Livingstone, who by now had not been seen by anyEuropean for five years. "Wherever he is," Stanley declared to his NewYork newspaper readers, "be sure I shall not give up the chase. If alive,you shall hear what he has to say; if dead I will find and bring his bonesto you."

    Stanley had to trek for more than eight months before he found theexplorer and was able to utter his famous "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"The long search was shaped into legend by his stream of dispatches andBennett's realization that his newspaper had one of the great human-interestscoops of the century. Because Stanley was the only source ofinformation about the search (his two white companions died during theexpedition, and no one ever bothered to interview the surviving porters),the legend remained heroic. There were the months of arduous marching,the terrible swamps, the evil "Arab" slave-traders, the mysterious deadlydiseases, the perilous attacks by crocodiles, and finally Stanley's triumphantdiscovery of the gentle Dr. Livingstone.

    Livingstone was haloed in Stanley's prose, for he was the noble fatherfigure the younger man had long been looking for and, to some extent,had actually found. According to Stanley, the experienced sage and thebold young hero became fast friends as they explored together for severalmonths. (They sailed around the northern end of Lake Tanganyika, hopingto find the Nile flowing out, but to their disappointment found onlyanother river flowing in.) The older man passed on his wisdom to theyounger before they sadly bade each other farewell and parted forever.Conveniently for Stanley, Livingstone remained in Africa and died soonafterward, before he could come home to share the spotlight or to tell thestory at all differently. Stanley cannily sprinkled his tale with picturesquechiefs, exotic sultans, and faithful servants, and he introduced it with thesweeping generalizations that allowed his readers to feel at home in anunfamiliar world: "The Arab never changes"; "The Banyan is a borntrader"; "For the half-castes I have great contempt."

    Unlike the uncombative and paternalistic Livingstone, who traveledwithout a huge retinue of heavily armed followers, Stanley was a harshand brutal taskmaster. "The blacks give an immense amount of trouble;they are too ungrateful to suit my fancy," he wrote while on the journey.Although they are softened by successive revisions, his writings show himgiven to explosive rage. He drove his men up hills and through swampswithout letup. "When mud and wet sapped the physical energy of thelazily-inclined, a dog-whip became their backs, restoring them to a sound-- sometimes to an extravagant ? activity." Only half a dozen yearsearlier Stanley had deserted from the U.S. Navy, but now he noted withsatisfaction how "the incorrigible deserters ... were well flogged andchained." People in the villages that the expedition marched throughmay well have mistaken it for another slave caravan.

    Like many whites who would follow him, Stanley saw Africa as essentiallyempty. "Unpeopled country," he called it. "What a settlement onecould have in this valley! See, it is broad enough to support a largepopulation. Fancy a church spire rising where that tamarind rears its darkcrown of foliage, and think how well a score or two of pretty cottageswould look instead of those thorn clumps and gum trees!" And again:"There are plenty of.... Pilgrim Fathers among the Anglo-Saxon raceyet, and when America is filled up with their descendants, who shall saythat Africa ... shall not be their next resting place?"

    To him and to his public, Stanley's future was now firmly linked toAfrica. On his return to Europe, the French press compared his findingLivingstone to Hannibal's and Napoleon's crossing the Alps. Even moreaptly, given Stanley's boasts about shooting anyone who got in his way,General William Tecumseh Sherman met the explorer for breakfast inParis and likened Stanley's trip to his own scorched-earth march tothe sea.

    The British were more hostile. The Royal Geographical Society hadbelatedly sent an expedition to find Livingstone, and its members hadbeen appalled to cross paths with Stanley in Africa just as he was triumphantlyboarding a ship to return home. Between the lines of huffystatements from the society's officials was their exasperation that theirnative son had been found by someone who was neither a proper explorernor a proper Englishman, but a "penny-a-liner," writing for theAmerican yellow press. Furthermore, some in England noticed, Stanley'sAmerican accent tended to change to a Welsh one whenever he gotexcited. The rumors about his Welsh birth and illegitimacy worried Stanleydeeply, because, writing for a jingoistic and anti-British New Yorknewspaper, he was vigorously claiming to be American born and bred.(He sometimes implied that he came from New York; sometimes from St.Louis. Mark Twain sent congratulations to his "fellow Missourian" forfinding Livingstone.)

    Stanley, quick to feel rejected, especially by upper-crust Englishmen,now found himself rejected also by his fiancée. During his travels, hediscovered, Katie Gough-Roberts had married an architect named Bradshaw.Stanley was desperate to retrieve the letters he had sent her, particularlythe one in which he had told her about his origins. But when hewrote to ask for them, she refused to give them back except in person. Ata lecture he gave in Manchester, she and her husband were in the audience.Afterward, she came to the house where he was staying and askedthe butler to tell him she had the letter with her. Stanley sent the butlerback to the door to collect it; once again she refused to hand it over toanyone but Stanley. He would not go to the door, and she departed, letterin hand. His hurt pride remained like an open wound. Before long hewould once again seek solace in Africa.

Continues...
Excerpted from King Leopold's Ghostby Adam Hochschild Copyright ©1999 by Adam Hochschild. Excerpted by permission.
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