Did he puff his crimes to please a bloodthirsty readership? 

Bernard Porter

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).

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