How an Abused and Abandoned Child Became a Famous Explorer

In the last blog I discussed the incredible life of the famous 19^th century journalist-explorer and naturalized American, Henry Morton Stanley.  We learned from Tim Jeal’s new biography of Stanley that he was an abused child rejected and abandoned by his mother and her family, and that he survived nine years in an English workhouse, essentially an orphanage where adults and children paid for their board and room as laborers.  Despite this difficult and emotionally painful beginning, Stanley eventually became a highly successful journalist, a world renowned explorer, and an author whose books were best sellers and made him a wealthy man.  How did he possibly do it?  Would it surprise you to learn I think his early years were in some ways a good beginning for an explorer of Central Africa in the 19^th century? 

Take isolation and loneliness, for example.  Exploring in Central Africa in the l9th century was an unusually lonely business.  Explorers were far from home in an often hostile environment. They were surrounded by, travelled with, and sometimes were threatened by people of very different cultures and customs who spoke no English.  But Stanley, who eventually learned to speak Swahili, was used to social isolation.  His family had rejected him.  He was an introvert and socially awkward with strangers. He had established a pattern of seeking solitude when he was unhappy.  Moreover, he was used to operating alone.  He learned early in life that he could depend only on himself.  He had developed that self-trust in his own capabilities that those with such backgrounds sometimes do. 

Exploration in Africa in the 19th century was dangerous.  Stanley was aware when he went looking for Livingstone that in four previous English-sponsored explorations of the Niger, Nile, Congo and Zambezi rivers, the mortality among British subjects was over 60 percent!  There was, first, the danger of disease, especially malaria and its complication, black water fever, which killed so many of the Europeans who dared go to Africa at that time.  Stanley, like David Livingstone, had an excellent constitution.  It’s not that he was never ill during his African journeys.  He suffered debilitating fevers and dysentery like everyone else but his bouts with fever and dysentery were less severe and not fatal.  While he probably owed some of this good constitution to his genes, it is also likely that his immune system was frequently challenged and strengthened by germs and contagious diseases in the conditions of poverty in which he lived as a child. 

There were many other dangers.  African wildlife, for example, presented some:    highly poisonous snakes, stalking lions and leopards, frisky hippopotami, and rivers crammed full of crocodiles.  Other dangers came from hostile, slave-seeking tribes.  There was also the danger of being drawn into tribal warfare, of being made to choose which side to join.  On his way to finding Livingstone Stanley had to pass through the territory of one hostile tribe that was known to practice cannibalism. 

Stanley was a high roller.  He took great risks against the odds, partly because of the sense that his deprived childhood had left him with precious little to lose.  He had no family to speak of.  This background helped him endure misfortune, since reversals did not surprise him as they would more fortunate men.  Eventually he came to believe his survival after close calls with death was due to “Lady Luck.”   He was a fatalist.

Tim Jeal’s fine biography of Stanley identifies yet another element of Stanley’s background that contributed to his success as an explorer.  Unless they were ill and had to be carried in a litter, European Africa explorers moved on foot.  And if there is a single characteristic that is indispensible for an explorer in 19^th century Africa, it is his capacity for endurance, his ability to face every challenge and slog on.  The following paragraph in Jeal’s book nicely sums up the answer to the question we began with:  “How did he possibly do it?”  

“For a man like Stanley, who needed to prove himself after his childhood rejection, mastering Africa was a test that could scarcely be bettered.  The task would have an epic dimension, involving power, pride, and above all, endurance as he battled with the African environment and with his own human limitations.  At the heart of the non-conformist Christian education of the workhouse had been the idea of redemption through suffering…becoming a new man.  In the vastness of Africa, as ruler of his small party ---away from the social distinctions of north Wales, from the greed and materialism of the slaving owning Deep South, from the helpless boy he had once been---there might emerge the new, perfected Stanley.”