The Greatest Trek of All Time

It was a big job. A really challenging job. A brutally relentless job. And when Henry Morton Stanley took it on, he never planned to make the mapping of the earth’s largest continent his life’s work. A chance journalistic assignment from his newspaper, the New York Herald, set him on a path that was to lead to eventual accomplishment and world-wide fame. Anyone who looks at a map of Africa can grasp the legacy of Henry Morton Stanley. The vast terrain of central Africa, stamped “unexplored” on charts printed before the mid-1800s, seduced him with its challenges. Stanley was dogged in his pursuit of a geography of Africa., tracing the rivers, charting the jungles and filling in the blanks for cartographers of his generation.

Yet the life of the man who mapped the 2,700-mile-long Congo River and located the source of the Nile is a story of hardship every step of the way. Even death has been ruthless, for the glory of the accomplishments of Henry Stanley, once household knowledge on both sides of the Atlantic, has largely faded as Africa has evolved into independent countries, each with its own interpretation of history. Today, almost a century after his death, the greatest African explorer is remembered more for his inane greeting of Dr. David Livingstone, the prominent Scottish missionary and explorer, than for his exploration of what used to be called “the dark continent” because of its vast interior that seemed to defy investigation.Stanley took on a seemingly impossible misson that was to make him famous and even infamous. His mission: Find the missing Dr. Livingstone, unheard from for three years and rumored dead. The story of how Stanley found one man on an enormous continent and later returned to Africa to notch even greater achievements, is a story about tackling obstacles head-on. “Stanley’s persistence and determination to succeed carried him through feats that no other African explorer could equal,” observes Susan Clinton in The World’s Great Explorers: Henry Stanley and David Livingstone.

The Early Years
By the time he arrived in Zanzibar to begin the trek to Africa’s interior, Stanley already had seen more adventure than many of his contemporaries would see in their lifetimes. He had sailed to America as a teen; fought, was captured, then switched sides and fought again during the Civil War (at one time escaping death because of a well-placed belt buckle that deflected a bullet); covered the Indian Wars as a journalist for the Missouri Democrat; survived two shipwrecks; and traveled solo throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East as a correspondent for the Herald.

And he accomplished all this in spite of – or, some argue, because of – an extraordinarily humbling childhood. Henry Morton Stanley was born John Rowlands in January 1841 to an unmarried mother, then sent to live with his maternal grandfather. Under the guise of taking young John for a walk following the grandfather’s death, one of Rowlands’ uncles deposited him at age six on the doorstep of the St. Asaph Union Workhouse, five miles north of his birthplace in Denbigh, Wales. He remained there until the age of 15.

According to Stanley’s accounts, the workhouse was a grim, fear-ridden place in which schoolmaster James Francis frequently beat his students. But it forever hardened Rowlands to the world. “The years spent in the workhouse gave a permanent shape and texture to the future explorer’s personality,” writes Daniel Cohen in Henry Stanley and the Quest for the Source of the Nile. “He was immune to hardship and loneliness.”

John Rowlands fled the workhouse in 1856. He sailed for America aboard the Windermere with the promise of being the captain’s cabin boy but instead found himself forced to work like all the other sailors. Frustrated by the rigors of life at sea, he left the ship upon its arrival in New Orleans, quickly finding work there with the help of a kind gentleman named Henry Stanley. That man became a father figure to Rowlands, who later adopted his name before plunging into the Civil War and his journalistic endeavors.

“Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?”
It was from those beginnings that Stanley arrived in Zanzibar in 1871 with orders in hand from the Herald to “find Livingstone.” He picked up six tons of supplies and close to 200 porters and armed guards, then sailed for the mainland to begin his search. Lacking today’s never-out-of-touch technologies, Stanley had no idea where to find the explorer, so decided to head for Ujiji, 750 miles inland and the origin of Livingstone’s last correspondence three years prior.The caravan traveled a route used for hundreds of years by Arab traders, but even this well-traveled path yielded many hardships. Temperatures soared well over the 100-degree mark, the rainy season turned the route into knee-deep mud and food was scarce. On top of that, insects quickly spread malaria and other diseases throughout the troupe, killing the only two Englishmen early in the trip and laying Stanley low with fever on several occasions.

When the expedition stopped to rest at Tabora, an Arab town 200 miles from the coast, Stanley learned that the shortest route to Ujiji was blocked by a chief named Mirambo, who said he would destroy any caravan that tried to pass through his land. So the expedition took a long, arduous detour to the south. All these obstacles caused frequent desertions and threats of mutiny. But never did Stanley consider giving up. He wrote in his diary, “No living man, or living men, shall stop me, only death can prevent me. But death – not even this; I shall not die, I will not die, I cannot die!”

He did not die. Instead, a few days outside of Ujiji, he came across a group of travelers that had recently left that village. The travelers reported that a white man had just returned there after several years of exploring. Stanley was certain that white man was Livingstone. He picked up his pace.

On November 10, 1871, after eight months of travel, Stanley and his porters put on their best clothes and strode into Ujiji. Near the center of town, a tall, tired-looking man with white hair approached and suddenly Stanley didn’t know what to say. What if it wasn’t Livingstone? In deference to the solemnity of the occasion – an enormous crowd had surrounded the two white men in hushed expectation – and his own uncertainty, Stanley uttered the phrase that would go down in history: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

Public Disbelief
It was indeed the missing Dr. Livingstone, and Stanley would spend the next four months with him. Together they explored the north end of Lake Tanganyika, their mutual respect and admiration growing daily. When the rainy season ended and Stanley was ready to leave, he tried to convince the missionary to go with him, but Livingstone insisted on staying. He had a notion that the Lualaba River was the source of the Nile and needed to prove it.

It was the last time the two explorers would see each other. Stanley’s caravan left on March 17, 1872, and made it to the coast in a record two months. Like horses returning to stable, his porters were anxious to return home, their loads were lighter and Mirambo was no longer at war with the Arabs and so had cleared the direct route to the coast. By the time Stanley reached his starting point at Bagamoyo, his expedition had been gone 14 months and traversed 2,250 miles of Africa, and 20 of its members had died. “Stanley himself had lost 76 pounds because of an acute attack of dysentery and 23 bouts with severe fever,” writes Cohen. “His round face had become gaunt, and his thick black hair was now streaked with gray. He had aged ten years.”

Anticipating a hero’s welcome, Stanley was unprepared for the reception he received. Instead of lavishing him with praise, the world was skeptical that he really had found Livingstone. Many asserted that the box of Livingstone’s letters and journals Stanley had hauled out of the African interior had been forged. The British were indignant that an American could possibly have found a man sent into Africa by the Royal Geographical Society.

Still, Stanley persisted in telling the story he knew to be true. And as reports confirming the Stanley-Livingstone meeting gradually emerged from Africa, and Livingstone’s son verified the authenticity of his father’s notes, Stanley’s fame eventually soared.

The Source of the Nile
Despite these accolades, Stanley’s greatest discoveries in Africa were yet to come. At the time of Livingstone’s death in 1873, the source of the Nile was still in question, although there were three theories as to its origins. Livingstone had held the Lualaba River to be the source of the Nile. Explorer Richard Burton insisted that Egypt’s lifeblood flowed out of Lake Tanganyika; a rival of Burton’s, John Hanning Speke, said Lake Victoria was the Nile’s source.

To settle the question, Stanley would return to Africa twice more. He sailed the entire perimeter of Lake Victoria, confirmed it to be one lake instead of a group of smaller ones, and found at its northern end a series of falls that emptied into a northward-flowing channel – almost certainly the Nile. He then sailed around Lake Tanganyika and found it wholly unconnected to the Nile. Finally, he sailed the length of what starts as the Lualaba. The journey, through one of the roughest regions of Africa, turned out to be his most harrowing. Disease, cannibals and the wild, unpredictable river cut him down at every turn and left many of his men dead. Yet he persevered, ultimately charting the entire river – the Congo, not the Nile, as it turned out.

Confident the matter of the Nile’s source was settled at last, it is ironic that on a third and final journey to Africa in 1885 – a relief expedition for Equatorial governor Emin Pasha rather than a geographical exploration – Stanley saw the fabled Mountains of the Moon, the true source of the Nile. Located in western Uganda, these snow-covered peaks are the wettest range in the world, their moisture draining into the Kagera River which feeds Lake Victoria. They are almost always enshrouded in mist, and therefore impossible to see; miraculously, the mists cleared on the day Stanley trekked by. Now his work was truly complete.

Stanley returned to Britain a hero. “To the Victorians, Stanley was the ultimate adventurer – an intrepid individual who reaffirmed their belief in ‘civilized’ man’s ability to overcome all physical obstacles as he extended his conquest of the natural world,” writes John Bierman in Dark Safari: The Life Behind the Legend of Henry Morton Stanley.

Still, death dealt Stanley a cruel blow. The great explorer died May 10, 1904, certain that he would be laid to rest in Westminster Abbey beside Dr. David Livingstone. However, the Dean of Westminster ruled against it – it is believed because Stanley’s name is so tightly entwined with the slave trade-ridden Congo – and so he was cremated and buried in the village churchyard of his home in Pirbright, UK.But his place of burial does not diminish his accomplishments. “He conquered a continent through grit, resourcefulness and sheer will,” lauds Bierman. “His life is one of the great adventure stories of all time.”

Resources used in the preparation of this article:

Dark Safari: The Life Behind the Legend of Henry Morton Stanley, John Bierman, New York Knopf, 1990 (Out of print)

The World’s Great Explorers: Henry Stanley and David Livingstone, Susan Clinton,Children’s Press (Out of print)

Henry Stanley and the Quest for the Source of the Nile, Daniel Cohen, NY: M. Evans and Company, 1985 (Out of print)