Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (28 page)

Stanley began his journey across the Marenga Mkali on the last day of May. For safety, he combined his expedition with six Arab slave and ivory caravans travelling in the same direction. His once mighty caravan had been diminished by a third through desertions and
death and he needed the extra company as he travelled through hostile territory. Also, the Arabs were experienced traders who would know the fastest routes. Through them Stanley learned that extreme heat and lack of water meant the three-hundred-man contingent must cross the Marenga Mkali in a single march. Moving mostly at night, they would compress three days into seventeen hours of brisk travel.

Early in the crossing, malaria attacked. Stanley’s former presumptions of immunity to Africa’s illness were mocked as the alien presence in his body made itself known again. One minute he was riding his donkey across the plain, wishing the distant herds of wildlife were close enough to shoot, the next he was as somnolent as a lion after a night of hunting. His body temperature spiked. Pain coursed through his gut. ‘A dangerous fever attacked me which seemed to eat into my very vitals. The wonders of Africa that bodied themselves forth in the shape of flocks of zebras, giraffes, elands or antelopes galloping over the jungle-less plain, had no charm for me. Nor could they serve to draw my attention from the severe fit of sickness which possessed me,’ he wrote. ‘I lay in a lethargic state, unconscious of all things.’

Too weak to ride his donkey, Stanley’s boots and spurs were removed. He was placed in a litter and carried by Bombay’s soldiers. The Arabs graciously sent doctors to tend to their fellow traveller. The scene mirrored Livingstone’s travails.

In that barren expanse, borne on strong arms into inner Africa, Henry Morton Stanley was as helpless as a child. It was oddly appropriate, for Stanley was undergoing a rebirth in Africa. In an environment where the only truth was survival, the crutch of lies supporting his life had no place. Instead, accomplishments, training, setbacks, neuroses, hopes and dreams were all coiling together like a mighty rope — a lifeline to cling to throughout his journey.

Stanley had carried a portfolio of lies through his adult life, drawing upon it to create himself in the image he
desired. The greatest lie of all was his name. The second was his nationality. Though only a select group of people knew either truth, as his journey pressed forward, and through Bennett’s publication of his stories, it would all be revealed.

His real name was John Rowlands. He was Welsh, born in the village of Denbigh, just south-west of the international port of Liverpool. His nineteen-year-old mother was Betsy Parry, the local whore. His father, after whom he was named, was the town drunk. ‘John Rowlands’, read the entry for Saint Hilary’s Church on 28 January 1841, ‘bastard’. No middle name was given.

Betsy immediately pawned the child off on her father. When young John Rowlands was five, kindly old Moses Parry fell over dead while working in the fields and Rowlands was sent to board with an older couple, the Prices. But taking care of a five-year-old was beyond their ken. In a scene straight out of Dickens, their son, Dick, came to get Rowlands one day, telling him they were going to see an aunt in a neighbouring village.

Instead, he was being abandoned. ‘At last Dick set me down from his shoulders before an immense stone building and, passing through tall iron gates,’ Stanley wrote later, ‘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 soothe my fears with glib promises that he was only going to bring my Aunt Mary to me. The door closed on him, and with the echoing sound, I experienced the awful feeling of utter desolateness.’

The St Asaph Union Workhouse was home to forty boys and thirty girls, lorded over by a psychotic former miner named James Francis who had no left hand. Stanley later said that for ‘the young it is a house of torture’. The children slept two to a bed, with adolescents paired with the youngest children. ‘From the very start,’ said an 1847 Board of Education investigation into life at St Asaph’s, the children ‘were beginning to practise and understand things they should not.’ To the despair and confusion the
child felt over his unexplained abandonment was soon added the powerlessness of being fondled and violated by teenaged boys as he tried to sleep. A lifetime of sexual ambivalence — a deep longing for women combined with a proclivity for dubious friendships with adolescent boys — sprang from those years.

If Rowlands had any doubts that he was effectively an orphan, the appearance of Betsy Parry at the workhouse when he was twelve put them to rest. She was tall, with an oval face and long dark hair which she’d piled on her head in a bun. The occasion for the visit was to consign two of her other illegitimate children to the workhouse.

When told that the woman was his mother, Stanley shyly gazed upon her. Parry glared back, as if checking the boy for defects. ‘I had expected to feel a gush of tenderness towards her, but her expression was so chilling that the valves of my heart closed, as with a snap,’ he wrote of the day.

By the time Rowlands was released from St Asaph’s at fifteen, he had been given a rudimentary education in reading, writing and arithmetic, and had a reputation as being Francis’s pet. Young Rowlands was chubby and short and emotionally needy, and had no friends in the outside world. Attempts to communicate with his mother’s family were mostly rebuffed. The one time he was successful, an aunt in Liverpool invited him to stay the night. The next morning, after Rowlands left to look for work, she sold his only suit.

Reading became the teenager’s escape. ‘I became infected with a passion for books. And for eighteen hours out of the twenty-four I was wholly engrossed with them.’

Rowlands found short-term jobs in a haberdasher’s and as a butcher-shop delivery boy. But his past hadn’t prepared him for a life beyond menial labour. He seemed fated to continue scrabbling hand-to-mouth for whatever table scraps the British Empire saw fit to toss to lower-class men like him. If the averages applied to him, there was a good chance he would be dead by thirty.

But one day, while making a delivery for the butcher
shop, seventeen-year-old Rowlands found himself at Liverpool docks. They were a teeming, exotic place. Hundreds of ships’ masts poked above the horizon. Boys his age clambered up the ratlines into the rigging. The sailors wore their hair in pigtails, and walked with a splay-footed waddle necessary for keeping balance on decks. Accents, aromas and attitudes from around the world shot through the seaside air and through the doorways of crowded waterfront pubs. For a boy who learned of the world from books but had never ever been to London, the salt and tar of Liverpool’s docks stimulated his imagination like a drug.

One ship in port was the American merchantman
Windermere
. Its regular route was delivering cotton from New Orleans to Liverpool, then returning home with finished goods from British textile plants. The captain, a man by the name of David Hardinge, had an ingenious way of decreasing his overheads: young men were hired as hands for the Atlantic passage, with the promise that they would work as cabin boys for five dollars per month. Though he was charming and paternal during the recruitment phase, Hardinge was lying. The boys wouldn’t work in his cabin, but below decks and up in the freezing, bucking rigging. The newcomers would work beyond exhaustion, and be subject to sadistic thrashings by the ship’s master and mates. Once
Windermere
arrived in port the plan would reach its completion. The young hands would be so eager to flee the floating gulag that they would jump ship without collecting their pay.

Hardinge cast his eye on the butcher’s delivery boy and offered him work as his personal cabin attendant. ‘But I know nothing of the sea, sir,’ Rowlands replied.

‘Sho! You will soon learn all that you have to do, and in time you may become captain of a fine ship,’ Hardinge promised.

Eager for adventure and not knowing that he was about to endure seven weeks of seasickness, severe cold, brutality and molestation, Rowlands signed on. He quit his job at the butcher’s after just two weeks of employment,
and, just seventeen, sailed three days later for New Orleans.

The position as cabin boy was forgotten before the
Windermere
had sailed down the Irish Sea into the North Atlantic. Rowlands was cast into the dank, mildewed hold with the rest of the crew. That area below decks, scarcely larger than the living room in a large home, was where all his off-duty time was spent. As he would in Africa, Rowlands slept in a hammock. He had been unfortunate enough to join
Windermere
in December, a time when high seas and constant storms caused the closing of the hold’s portals. Fresh air was minimal. The men rarely bathed, and many spent their off-duty hours drinking rum, so the crew’s quarters smelled like one of Liverpool’s ocean-front taverns — dirty clothing, sweaty bodies, alcohol fumes. Rowlands contributed to the smell by getting violently seasick. He spent the first three days of the trip vomiting.

On deck the air was fresh and crisp, but being on deck meant being put to work. The labour was bone-chilling and sometimes deadly. The tar-covered ratlines had to be climbed every time shifting winds or weather conditions demanded a sail change. The smallest boys, like Rowlands, were forced to climb highest into the swaying rigging, then clamber out along the horizontal yards to furl or unfurl the topsails. A slip meant a long fall to the deck, or into the ocean.

Weather conditions gradually improved as
Windermere
moved south, and by the time she sailed around the tip of Florida into the Gulf of Mexico, the air was balmy and the swells gentle and rolling. But Rowlands wanted out. New Orleans was a city of promise, where the air smelled of ‘coffee, pitch, Stockholm tar, brine of mess-beef, rum and whisky drippings’. The Mississippi was the first truly massive river Rowlands had ever seen, disappearing into the American hinterlands like a promise waiting to be kept. Everything about New Orleans was surreal in its novelty. When, on his first night in town, Rowlands wandered into a brothel and was shown four girls in lingerie, he fled back to the ship in panic.

Five days later, unknowingly playing into Hardinge’s plans, Rowlands answered New Orleans’ siren song. He fled the ship without collecting his pay. It was February 1859. He had just turned eighteen. In Africa, Dr David Livingstone was enduring his second Zambezi expedition.

John Rowlands met Henry Hope Stanley during his first week in New Orleans. The British cotton merchant with the flowing beard was reclining in the morning sun outside his warehouse on Tchapitoulas Street, reading a newspaper. It was 7 a.m. Rowlands walked by, in search of work. ‘Would you like a boy, sir?’ he asked. The young man’s earnest demeanour impressed Stanley, who gave him a series of small tasks. One led to another, until Rowlands became a clerk. And while the relationship was merely that of a boss to a worker for Stanley, the middle-aged gentleman represented a surrogate father for Rowlands. He adored the older man so much that in 1859 he impulsively took the older man’s name. John Rowlands was no more. He would spend the rest of his life as Henry Stanley. ‘Morton’ was added years later, after other middle names were tried and found wanting.

The young Stanley began coming around to his employer’s house on Annunciation Square, unaware that men of Stanley’s class didn’t fraternize with their employees. At first, Henry Hope Stanley enjoyed his young employee’s company, and was flattered that his young charge had taken his name. But the older Stanley’s young wife, Frances, came between them. They had married when she was just fifteen. She was all of twenty-eight in 1859, which made her only ten years older than Stanley. Frances Stanley found the young man annoying, and mistook his flattery for flirtation. However, with one of his adopted daughters dying young and the other eloping, Henry Hope Stanley filled their absence by treating young Stanley as a son. Both men enjoyed reading, and books were a constant in their relationship. Henry Hope Stanley’s greatest gift to his young surrogate son, however, was an American attitude towards success. ‘I don’t know what the customs of the Welsh people may
be, but here we regard personal character and worth, not pedigree. With us, people are advanced not for what their parentage may have been, but for what they are themselves.’

The words would function as a parting benediction, for the two men quarrelled in 1860. The younger Stanley was banished up the Mississippi. Just in case he was interested in coming back to New Orleans and pestering him further, the elder Stanley told his overeager employee that he and his wife were moving to Havana to escape the coming Civil War.

Stanley was living in Cypress Bend, Arkansas when the war began, working as a dry goods salesman at a general store on the Arkansas River. Cypress Bend was a swampy backwater, and a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Stanley was soon stricken by his first dose of ague, known in those parts as swamp fever. He endured the chills, headaches and fever, even as his body weight dropped below seven stone and he was forced to ingest bitter doses of quinine grains. His only friend was a hard-drinking Irishman named Cronin who was fond of having sex with slave women. When Cronin was found out, and was forced to move on, Stanley found himself alone again. He had come from New Orleans, and thought the people of Cypress Bend were petty, racist and simple. They felt the same about him.

Stanley felt alone and out of place, but he was in no hurry to find new fellowship by joining the crush of local men enlisting to fight for the Confederacy. There was also a more pressing reason for him to stay in Cypress Bend. Stanley was in love. It was a new experience for him. Until then, he had shied away from women, felt awkward in their company. But a local girl named Margaret Goree had caught his eye, and with the men of Cypress Bend rushing off to war, he was on the verge of having her all to himself. Since Margaret seemed interested in him, too, the decision seemed wise.

One day he received a plain package from his newly beloved. In it was a chemise and petticoat. Margaret
Goree, in symbolic terms, was calling Stanley a coward. Desperate to prove his manhood, he enlisted shortly thereafter. Stanley never saw Margaret Goree again. By April of 1862, after nine months of training with the local regiment, Stanley was on the front lines in one of the bloodiest engagements in American military history, the Battle of Shiloh. Ten thousand men died on both sides in less than twenty-four hours of fighting.