A Welshman by nativity, born near Denbigh, in 1840, he came to the United States at the age of sixteen and thenceforth cast his lot with America, and as a citizen of this country made his explorations under its flag. It is reputed that he exchanged his natal name of Rowlands for that of Henry M. Stanley, for a merchant of New Orleans who adopted him; but in any event his early life was passed without the loving and modifying influences of a home, his youth almost equally destitute of those adventitious surroundings that properly mould the character and insure opportunities for success to young men. Thus he stands forth a self-made man to whom strength has been accorded to develop the manhood that God implanted in his soul.
Stern experiences in the American civil war, brief life in the far West, and special service in Turkey had shaped Stanley into a reliant, self-contained man when his first African journey came to him, in 1868, through assignment as newspaper correspondent to accompany the British army in its invasion of Abyssinia. He participated in this wonderful campaign, which led him four hundred miles through a country of indescribable wildness and grandeur, across rugged mountains, along deep valleys, up to the fortress-crowned crest of Magdala, ten thousand feet above the sea.
Difficult as were the mountains of Abyssinia, they were less dangerous than the African region later to be traversed by him; a journey unsought, but which came to him as the fittest man for the time and service.
A telegram and five hours’ preparation carried Stanley from the blood-red fields of revolutionary Spain into the famous search journey that gave to an anxious world news of the long-lost Livingstone. For twenty years this great Scotch missionary had carried the gospel of Christ and its civilizing influences from one end of Africa to the other; once he had crossed the continent in its greatest breadth, and now, vanished from the sight of the civilized world in his renewed missionary labors, for two years his very existence had been problematical.
| The Hut where Livingstone Died. |
The search expedition owed its inception and maintenance to James Gordon Bennett, Jr., whose brief orders to Stanley were: “Find Livingstone and bring news of his discoveries or proofs of his death, regardless of expense.” The personnel, methods, and arrangements devolved entirely on Stanley, but his preliminary route was to lie through certain countries. It thus occurred that between Madrid, his starting point, and Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika, the camp of Livingstone, he saw the gayties of Paris; was present at the eventful opening of the Suez Canal that revolutionized Eastern commerce; ascended the Lower Nile to scrutinize with interested eye Baker’s prospective expedition to the Soudan; divined under the mosques of the Bosphorus the political riddles of Sultan and Khédive; examined the uncovered foundations of Solomon’s Temple in the Holy City; meditated over the historic battle-grounds of the Crimea; penetrated the Caucasus to Tiflis for news of the Russian expedition to Khiva; and, traversing Persia through the Euphratan cradle of the human race, entered India, whence his route lay to Zanzibar and the dark beyond. What a contrast those preliminary journeys afforded, across effete countries whose varying and recorded phases of civilization are contemporaneous with the history of the human race, to the threshold of a vast region whose barbaric freshness is such that its entire history lies within the memory of living man.
Stanley landed at Zanzibar, January 10, 1871, and, fortunately, was at once impressed with his ignorance of outfitting, which he thought he had learned from books. Resorting to the Arab traders he proved such an apt pupil and skilful organizer that he enlisted twenty-seven soldiers, gathered one hundred and fifty-seven carriers and five special employees, which, with two white assistants, Farquhar and Shaw, made his aggregate force one hundred and ninety-two. He had his African money—beads as copper coins, cloth as silver, and brass rods as gold; canvas-covered boats for navigation; asses and horses for special work; fine cloth for tribute to local chiefs, which, with tentage, medicine, etc., made some six tons of freight.
March 21, 1871, the rear guard marched out of Bagamoyo, the town on the mainland opposite Zanzibar, and taking a route never before travelled by a white man, Stanley reached Simbamwenni in fourteen marches, the journey of one hundred and nineteen miles having occupied twenty-nine days, during which the commander came to fully realize the difficulty of his undertaking, the inefficiency of unpractised subordinates, and the uncertain loyalty of carriers.
The onward march resembled all in Africa: thorns and jungle to wound the naked carriers, rivers to be forded or crossed on almost impracticable bridges, swamps many miles in length and so miry as to tax the utmost strength and energy of man and ass, insolence and exactions of local potentates, thefts by natives, desertions of carriers, the oft-recurring fever, and occasionally a death.