Did he puff his crimes to please a bloodthirsty readership?

Letters

Vol. 29 No. 10 · 24 May 2007

From Paul Landau

Bernard Porter gives the impression that Henry Morton Stanley was not really all that bad (LRB, 5 April). He does, it’s true, mention Bumbireh in enumerating Stanley’s sins. ‘In at least one case,’ he writes, ‘his second battle with the people of Bumbireh in August 1875, there was a strong suspicion that he acted out of revenge’ – but that is hardly the way to describe what happened.

Stanley’s patron was the powerful king of Buganda, who could field thousands of warriors in combat. Outfitted with the king’s bearers and canoes, Stanley made landfall on Bumbireh, a Haya-speaking fishermen’s island in Lake Victoria. After being driven away, he fired on Bumbireh’s men from offshore, killing among others a chief and his wife and infant with his elephant gun. The bloodshed had an ‘extraordinary result’, Stanley reported in the New York Herald, and soon he was away to safety.

After weeks of further exploits, during which he faced mounting regional opposition, Stanley decided to return to Bumbireh: the island had not been sufficiently ‘punished’. He tried to trick Bumbireh’s king into a trap by holding another leader until the king was forcibly delivered as ransom. He then ‘prepared a force of 280 men, 50 muskets, 230 spearmen, placed them in 18 canoes’, and circled back in the water to make an unexpected appearance at a cove on the island. The spearmen were not needed. ‘The savages,’ as Stanley reported in the paper,

rose from their coverts and ran along the hill slopes to meet us, which was precisely what I wished they would do, and accordingly I ordered my force to paddle slowly so as to give them time. In half an hour the savages were all assembled … I ordered a volley to be fired at one group which numbered about fifty … I then ordered the canoes to advance within fifty yards of the shore, and to fire as if they were shooting birds. After an hour the savages saw that they could not defend themselves … [I] told [the canoes] to advance in a body to the shore as if they were about to disembark. This caused the enemy to make an effort to repulse our landing … the bugle sounded … and another volley was fired into the dense crowd, which had such a disastrous effect on them that they retired far up the hill … and our work of punishment was consummated.

The next day Stanley returned and fired a few more shots at the same beach, until people came to him at the water’s edge and begged to be left alone, whereupon Stanley rebuked them for their lack of hospitality.

Paul Landau
College Park, Maryland

Vol. 29 No. 12 · 21 June 2007

From Tim Jeal

As the author of Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, I am responding to Paul Landau’s assertion (Letters, 24 May) that Bernard Porter, in his review of the book, was wrong to have been convinced by me that Stanley was not as bad as he has been painted. To try to prove his point, Landau gives an account of Stanley’s two visits to the island of Bumbireh that lacks context and is misleading.

Stanley did not arrive on his first visit to Bumbireh ‘outfitted with Mutesa of Buganda’s bearers and canoes’, as stated by Landau, but with 11 starving African (Wangwana) oarsmen in one storm-battered open boat. Though Stanley spotted armed men near the shore on Bumbireh, hunger obliged him to risk landing and trying to buy food. His boat was rapidly surrounded by spearmen and carried up the beach. For several hours Stanley and his men expected to be killed, until Chief Shekka told them they could depart in peace if they handed over their trade goods. This they did, only to be robbed of their oars. Believing that Stanley could not leave, the islanders relaxed their vigilance, and he and his men managed to launch their boat and paddle away, using the bottom boards. Stanley fired buckshot at his pursuers to stop them grabbing the sides of his boat. None of these facts about Stanley’s first visit to the island is mentioned by Landau, who makes it sound as if he fired on the islanders for no reason at all.

Far from wishing to return to punish Bumbireh, as Mr Landau claims, Stanley wanted to bring his main expedition – then camped on the southern shores of Lake Victoria – back to Buganda overland, and never again to go anywhere near the island. But the two paramount chiefs of the mainland territory opposite Bumbireh would not allow him to cross their land. This was not primarily due to his behaviour. Arab-Swahili slave traders had reached Lake Victoria twenty years earlier and had found African rulers (including Mutesa) willing to sell men and women to them. The atmosphere around the lake had subsequently become poisoned with suspicion between tribes and with hatred of strangers. Stanley therefore had to buy canoes to transport his main expedition across the lake. But the only vessels he could purchase were rotten, and started to sink in a storm soon after he had launched them. He abandoned his plan to cross the middle of the lake. Instead, he realised he would have to sail through the strait between Bumbireh and the shore, risking simultaneous attack by canoes from the island and from the shore.

In an attempt to neutralise the islanders, Stanley captured Bumbireh’s chief by a ruse and made his unopposed passage through the strait a condition for his release. But he also urgently needed to buy food for his expedition, which had been increased by a large contingent of Bugandans sent by their king to protect him. To see whether the islanders would be willing to allow him peaceful passage, Stanley and the Bugandans sent a delegation to Bumbireh to buy food. The islanders killed the delegation’s leader and severely wounded six other men, some of whom later died. Stanley was now persuaded that a pre-emptive attack on Bumbireh was needed if he and his men were to have any chance of passing through the strait unharmed. ‘We went into the heart of Africa self-invited,’ wrote Stanley, ‘therein lies our fault. But it was not so grave that our lives should be forfeited.’ After his attack on the island, Stanley prevented the Bugandans from landing and carrying out a general massacre. That Stanley really did prevent it is confirmed by his companion Frank Pocock in his diary.

Instead of mentioning any of these background facts (all of which are laid out with sources in my book), Landau chose instead to rely entirely on one of Stanley’s least reliable despatches to the New York Herald, which, like so much of his journalism, is full of exaggeration. By selecting such spiced up passages (written with newspaper sales in mind), and ignoring other sources, it is never hard to misrepresent Stanley.

Tim Jeal
London NW3

From Bernard Porter

I’ll leave the truth of the Bumbireh episode to others to determine. All I want to add is that both Tim Jeal and Paul Landau are mistaken in inferring that I was persuaded by the former’s defence of Stanley. Rereading the original article, I think it’s plain that I was generally sceptical of Jeal’s approach.

Bernard Porter
Stockholm