CHILD ABUSE VICTIM BECOMES "GREATEST EXPLORER"

I spent some hours during a recent snow vacation in Central Oregon reading a new biography of Henry Morton Stanley who was described by author Tim Jeal as “the greatest explorer of the century.”  David Livingstone, the British missionary-explorer and Stanley, the naturalized American journalist, are no longer the celebrities and best-selling authors they were during the second half of the l9th Century in Britain and in the United States.  Younger Americans may never have heard of them.   But they interest me because I spent five years living and working in Africa as a young diplomat, mostly in East Africa where so many of the 19^th Century European explorations took place and where Stanley and Livingstone were still spoken of as legendary figures. 

I found this new biography by Tim Jeal fascinating for another reason.  Any victim of child neglect and abandonment tempted to feel sorry for himself should consider the case of Henry Morton Stanley, who began life in Wales not as Henry Morton Stanley, but as John Rowlands.  John’s early life was a nightmare.  Born to an unmarried 18 year-old who went on to have four more illegitimate children by at least two more men, John never knew his father.  His mother quickly abandoned him to her father who died when Stanley was five years old.  He eventually was placed in a workhouse, an 19th Century English orphanage, by a prosperous uncle who wouldn’t keep John in his own home because he was shamed by John’s illegitimacy.  An adult Stanley would never forget how his guardian fled and the door of the workhouse was slammed shut and he at age six “experienced for the first time the awful feeling of utter desolateness.” 

After nine years in the workhouse John eventually escaped and accepted an offer to become a cabin boy on a ship bound for New Orleans.  That voyage was the beginning of a new and liberating chapter in an incredible life story that biographer Tim Jeal has told so well.  He documents how Stanley fought with both the Confederate and Union armies during the Civil War, prospected for gold in Colorado, became a journalist and then a war correspondent, and how he persuaded the owner of the New York Herald to finance an expedition to find David Livingstone in the heart of Africa.  That was only the first of Stanley’s African explorations which he described in several best-selling books, beginning with How I Found Livingstone.  The books made him a wealthy man.   

But it is Stanley, the neglected and abandoned child and extraordinary survivor, that most interests me.  After being repeatedly rejected by his mother and biological family, Stanley spent a lifetime trying to find a family to which he could belong.  At age 21 he had still not quite given up on his mother.  He returned to his home town in Wales from the United States ill, penniless, and exhausted after walking the final 21 miles of the journey.  What his mother said to this anything but prodigal son was, “Never come back to me again unless you are in far better circumstances than you seem to be in now.”  To this the mother of five illegitimate children added that John “was a disgrace to them in the eyes of their neighbors” and ought to leave as speedily as possible."  

So eager was young John to belong to a family and to conceal his illegitimacy and impoverished background that he fabricated his adoption by a New Orleans businessman, and took the man’s name as his own.  Over night John Rowlands, the son of a former prostitute who refused to have anything to do with him, became Henry Morton Stanley, in a fictive adoption he managed to hide from most of the world for many years.

Once Stanley located David Livingstone the two men spent four months together looking for the sources of the Nile River, one of the great challenges for l9th century explorers.  During that period the two men formed a bond, the bond of father (Livingstone) and son (Stanley).  Stanley believed he had found in David Livingstone the father figure he had been seeking all his life as Livingstone began to consider Stanley a son.  One result of that relationship is that Stanley the journalist single-handedly restored Livingstone’s badly tarnished reputation after the tragic failure of the 1858 Zambezi Expedition during which his beloved wife, Mary Livingstone, among many others, had died. 

Is there any connection between Stanley’s painful beginnings and his world fame as a journalist and explorer?  What drove him?  What created his incredible self-discipline and will power?  That will be the subject of the next blog.