Stanley, Sir Henry Morton

Stanley, Sir Henry Morton, 1841–1904, Anglo-American journalist and empire builder, b. Denbigh, Wales. Originally named John Rowlands, he took the name of his adoptive father in New Orleans, where Stanley went in 1857. After fighting on both sides in the American Civil War, he drifted into journalism. His coverage of Lord Napier's Ethiopian campaign in 1868 for the New York Herald won him journalistic fame, and the Herald commissioned him to go to Africa to find David Livingstone. Stanley located the great explorer on Lake Tanganyika on Nov. 10, 1871, addressing him with the famous words, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Failing to persuade Livingstone to leave Africa, Stanley returned to England with the news of his discovery. He found a mixed reception in England, where Livingstone's backers criticized Stanley's efforts and methods. Nevertheless, Stanley led a second expedition (1874–77), sponsored by newspapers, to further Livingstone's explorations. He followed the Congo River from its source to the sea, but he found the British uninterested in developing the region.

Stanley then accepted the invitation of Leopold II of Belgium to head another expedition. During this third journey (1879–84) he helped to organize the notorious Congo Free State (see under Congo, Democratic Republic of the), largely by persuading local chiefs to grant sovereignty over their land to the Belgian king. At the Berlin Conference (1884–85; see Berlin, Conference of) he was instrumental in obtaining American support for Leopold's Congo venture. His last African journey (1887–89), to find Emin Pasha, helped to put Uganda into the British sphere of influence. A naturalized U.S. citizen, Stanley again became a British subject in 1892, sat in Parliament (1895–1900), and was knighted (1899). His spirited and often self-aggrandizing accounts of his adventures include How I Found Livingstone (1872), Through the Dark Continent (2 vol., 1878), In Darkest Africa (2 vol., 1890), and The Exploration Diaries of H. M. Stanley (ed. by R. Stanley and A. Neame, 1961). A British and American hero for about a century, Stanley has fared poorly in recent histories, which have revealed instances of his lying about events in his life, duplicity in some of his dealings, and many acts of brutality to Africans.

Bibliography

See his Autobiography (1909, repr. 1969), ed. by his wife, Dorothy Stanley ; biographies by R. Hall (1974), J. Bierman (1990), and F. McLynn (2 vol., 1989 and 1991); R. Jones, The Rescue of Emin Pasha (1973).

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Stanley, Sir Henry Morton

 orig. John Rowlands

Sir Henry Morton Stanley, detail of a portrait by Sir Hubert von Herkomer; in the City Museum & …

(credit: Courtesy of the City Museum & Art Gallery, Bristol, England)

(born Jan. 28, 1841, Denbigh, Denbighshire, Wales—died May 10, 1904, London, Eng.) British-U.S. explorer of central Africa. An illegitimate child, Stanley grew up partly in a British workhouse; he sailed to the U.S. as a cabin boy in 1859. After becoming a journalist for the New York Herald in 1867, he embarked (1871) on a journey to locate David Livingstone, of whom little had been heard since his departure for Africa in 1866. On finding him at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, Stanley uttered the famous words “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” He further explored central Africa for extended periods between 1874 and 1884, often in the service of Leopold II of Belgium, for whom he paved the way for the creation of the Congo Free State. Stanley's last expedition (1888) was for the relief of Mehmed Emin Pasha, who had been cut off by the Mahdist revolt in the Sudan; he escorted Emin and 1,500 others to the eastern coast. His highly popular books include Through the Dark Continent (1878) and In Darkest Africa (1890).