Stanley, Sir Henry Morton

Stanley, Sir Henry Morton (1841-1904), Anglo-American journalist and explorer; one of the leading figures in the European exploration and colonization of Africa.

Originally named John Rowlands, Stanley was born on January 28, 1841, at Denbigh, Wales. At the age of 18 he sailed as a cabin-boy to New Orleans, Louisiana, where he gained employment under an American merchant named Henry Morton Stanley, whose name he adopted. During the American Civil War he served in the Confederate army and in 1862 was captured at the Battle of Shiloh. He transferred to the federal service but was discharged, ostensibly because of ill health. In 1867 he became a special correspondent for the New York Herald, and in that capacity in 1868 he accompanied the British punitive expedition led by the British army officer Robert Cornelius Napier against the Ethiopian king Theodore II and was the first to relay the news of the fall of Magdala, then the capital of Ethiopia.

In 1869 the American newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett of the Herald dispatched Stanley to find the Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone from whom little had been heard while he was searching for the source of the Nile. After being delayed by other assignments, Stanley reached the island of Zanzibar off the eastern coast of Africa on January 26, 1871. He crossed over to the mainland and left for the interior on March 21, with about 2,000 men. On October 28 he met the ailing Livingstone at Ujiji, a town on Lake Tanganyika, and is said to have greeted him with the now-famous remark, “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” After nursing Livingstone back to health, Stanley and he explored the northern end of Lake Tanganyika. Stanley returned to Europe in 1872, and the following year was sent by the Herald to west Africa to report on the British campaign against the Asante of what is now Ghana.

The New York Herald and London Daily Telegraph shared the cost of Stanley's next expedition, planned to continue the work of Livingstone, who had died in 1873. In November 1874 Stanley left Zanzibar for the interior, accompanied by 359 people. He visited King Mutesa of Buganda and then circumnavigated Lake Victoria, becoming involved in several skirmishes with the inhabitants of the lakeshore. During the journey around the lake, he established in May 1875 that the Nile was its only outlet, and the Kagera its only tributary, and that therefore the Kagera and its tributaries were the true source of the Nile. He then went south, circumnavigated Lake Tanganyika, and headed west to the Lualaba River, a headstream of the Congo River. In a great journey of discovery, Stanley navigated down the Lualaba and Congo rivers as far as Livingstone Falls, which he named. He then continued overland for a short distance to the Atlantic Ocean, which he reached in August 1877, after a total journey of 999 days. About half of his party had died during the arduous trip.

Stanley returned to London in January 1878. The following year, under the sponsorship of Leopold II, king of the Belgians, he returned to the Congo on another expedition, which lasted for five years. During this period he constructed a road from the lower Congo to Stanley Pool (now called Pool Malebo) and laid the foundations for the establishment of the Independent State of the Congo, set up during the “Scramble For Africa“.

In January 1887, Stanley was placed at the head of an expedition to assist the German explorer Mehmed Emin Pasha, governor of the Equatoria Province of the Egyptian Sudan, who was surrounded by rebellious Mahdist forces. In 1888 Stanley reached Emin Pasha, who refused to return to Egypt. During this expedition, Stanley discovered the Ruwenzori Range, the so-called Mountains of the Moon, and found that the Semliki River linked Lake Albert to Lake Edward. In 1889, Stanley and Emin Pasha returned to the coast, though at enormous cost in lives to both their parties.

In 1890 Stanley married Dorothy Tennant, who later edited his autobiography (1909). He had become a naturalized United States citizen in 1885, but in 1892 again became a British subject. From 1895 to 1900 he sat in Parliament as the Liberal Unionist member for North Lambeth. Stanley's last visit to Africa was in 1897, and in 1899 he was knighted. He died in London on May 10, 1904. Among his books are How I Found Livingstone (1872), Through the Dark Continent (2 vols., 1878), and In Darkest Africa (2 vols., 1890).