Privately he spent his holidays with his mother and family in Wales, speaking Welsh no doubt with a strong American accent. The whitewashed American has always a piercing twang, even if he has adopted as his “native” land, soft-voiced Missouri, or polished Louisiana.
In those days Doctor Livingstone was missing. The gentle daring explorer had found Lakes Nyassa and Tanganyika, and to the westward of them, a mile wide river, the Lualaba, which he supposed to be headwaters of the Nile. He was slowly dying of fever, almost penniless, and always when he reached the verge of some new discovery, his cowardly negro carriers revolted, or ran away, leaving him to his fate. No word of him had reached the world for years. England was anxious as to the fate of one of her greatest men, so there were various attempts to send relief, delayed by the expense, and not perhaps handled by really first-rate men. To find Livingstone would be a most tremendous world-wide advertisement, say for a patent-pill man, a soap manufacturer, or a newspaper. All that was needed was unlimited cash, and the services of a first-rate practical traveler, vulgar enough to use the lost hero as so much “copy” for his newspaper. The New York Herald had the money, and in Stanley, the very man for the job.
Not that the Herald, or Stanley cared twopence about the fate of Livingstone. The journal sent the man to make a big journey through Asia Minor and Persia on his way to Zanzibar. The more Livingstone’s rescue was delayed the better the “ad” for Stanley and the Herald.
As to the journey, Stanley’s story has been amply advertised, and we have no other version because his white followers died. He found Livingstone at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, and had the grace to reverence, comfort and succor a dying man.
As to Stanley’s magnificent feat of exploring the great lakes, and descending Livingstone’s river to the mouth of the Congo, again his story is well exploited while the version of his white followers is missing, because they gave their lives.
In Stanley’s expedition which founded the Congo State, and in his relief of Emin Pasha, the white men were more fortunate, and some lived. It is rumored that they did not like Mr. Stanley, but his negro followers most certainly adored him, serving in one journey after another. There can be no doubt too, that with the unlimited funds that financed and his own fine merits as a traveler, Stanley did more than any other explorer to open up the dark continent, and to solve its age-long mysteries. It was not his fault that Livingstone stayed on in the wilderness to die, that the Congo Free State became the biggest scandal of modern times, or that Emin Pasha flatly refused to be rescued from governing the Soudan.
Henry M. Stanley
Stanley lived to reap the rewards of his great deeds, to forget that he was a native of Missouri and a freeborn American citizen, to accept the honor of knighthood and to sit in the British parliament. Whether as a Welshman, or an American, a confederate, or a federal, a Belgian subject or a Britisher, he always knew on which side his bread was buttered.