Did he puff his crimes to please a bloodthirsty readership?

Bernard Porter

  • BuyStanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal
    Faber, 570 pp, £25.00, March 2007, ISBN 978 0 571 22102 8

For a biographer looking for an unlikely reputation to rescue, reputations don’t come much unlikelier than that of Henry Morton Stanley. Widely excoriated in his own time as one of the most brutal of African travellers, condemned by historians for his part in the creation of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but embarrassingly arch greeting to David Livingstone when he ‘found’ him in Ujiji in November 1871 – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – as well as for his silly ‘Stanley cap’ (like a chamberpot with holes and a tea-towel flapping at the sides), he has always been every historian’s least favourite British explorer. (Obviously, some foreigners were worse.) This is despite the fact that he was, as Tim Jeal’s subtitle indicates, undeniably a ‘great’ one, if greatness is measured by geographical mysteries solved (the source of the Nile, among others) and hardships endured (countless bouts of malaria, gastritis, flesh-eating ulcers, being shot at and never finding the love of a good woman).

You are not Logged In

  • If you have already registered login here
  • If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
  • If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
  • If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
  • If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions