During the following days, Mr Stanley plied the boy with questions about his life. He had suspected he was an orphan and expressed surprise that his few blood relatives had not claimed him. Mr Stanley explained that he had always wanted a son and when John Rowlands appeared from nowhere, asking: ‘Do you want a boy, sir?’ the question seemed to give voice to his lifelong wish, although the shabby lad appeared far too big for this purpose. ‘The long and the short of it is,’ said Mr Stanley, ‘as you are wholly unclaimed, without a parent, relation, or sponsor, I promise to take you for my son, and fit you for a mercantile career; and in future, you are to take my name – Henry Stanley.’
With that, the older man and occasional Episcopalian lay-preacher rose, dipped his hands in a basin of water and made the sign of the cross on the boy’s forehead, speaking the words of the baptism ceremony, ending with a brief exhortation to bear the new name worthily. No documentary record exists of a formal version of this ceremony – making it unlikely that Henry Hope Stanley ever adopted John Rowlands and changed his name, legally or otherwise.
The older man set about the task of equipping his new ‘son’ for the position he hoped he would assume, kitting him out with new suits, linen, collars, flannels, shoes, boots, his first nightshirt and toothbrush – ‘it had never entered my head before that teeth should be so brushed,’ he recalled.
At the end of 1859, stepfather and stepson began a series of riverboat journeys from one city to another, one store to another, conducting business for the Commercial Cotton Press, now a significant enterprise with Henry Hope Stanley its principal partner. Over the next two years they travelled between New Orleans and the lower Mississippi tributaries, trading with country merchants and plantation owners. The boy learned fast and had a good memory. He was taught how to recognise the superiority of one grade of sugar over another, why one grade of flour fetched a higher price than an inferior variety, why Bourbon whiskey was better than rye and how to spot varying merits of coffee and tea. He also acquired the social graces and was taught how to deal honestly in business.
Riverboats and hotels along the Mississippi always had plenty to offer weary commercial travellers with diversions and distractions in barrooms, at gambling tables and cheap vaudeville theatres. They were not for Mr Stanley and his stepson. They carried a portmanteau of books, including classic texts, poetry and drama and as soon as they arrived in their cabin or hotel room, the volumes were unpacked and the next stage of young Stanley’s education continued as diligently as if he had been at school.
The mobile library was replenished in each city and when not studying, the stepfather-tutor pointed out items of note en route. Mr Stanley also corrected the boy’s verbal errors. He was determined to turn his stepson into a respectable gentleman who sounded every bit as correct as himself. If the older man ever found the lad daydreaming on the riverboat deck, he would enquire if he had finished reading a particular chapter or found a different answer to a problem set earlier that day.
They rarely mixed with other passengers or hotel guests, all of whom the older man looked upon as time-wasters, gossips and his intellectual inferiors. He told the boy: ‘To squander time and youth among such fellows as congregate around barrooms and liquor counters is as foolish as opening my veins to let out my life blood.’ For his part, Henry Stanley Jr loved every moment spent under the older man’s tutelage. He was hungry for knowledge and was eager to study, converse and listen to his stepfather.
In New Orleans, Stanley and his stepson often travelled to Tangipahoa to stay at his country plantation, Jefferson Hall, and meet its caretaker-widow and her daughters. At weekends, father and son attended the local church. American historian Mary Willis Shuey recalls that when the pair arrived at the plantation they were immaculately dressed in their finest linen clothes and shiniest shoes. Thanks to nourishing food, Stanley Jr had gained weight and his new light-coloured clothes now fitted his stocky figure tightly.
Shuey informs us that merchant and planter families attended the church and during the summer months young Stanley was invited to join members of the congregation for country walks. It was on one of these walks that he learned from new friends that his stepfather was actively courting the widow at Jefferson Hall. The boy found it hard to accept that his stepfather would consider marrying again. In his view, no one who had known the warm, gracious and saintly second Mrs Stanley could ever consider replacing her with another. Everyone at Tangipahoa had been aware that Mr Stanley and the widow were becoming more intimate – apart from young Stanley.
Stanley senior began making excuses to prevent his stepson from joining him at Jefferson Hall. According to Shuey, the boy was jealous of his father’s relationship with the widow and started a major argument. Relations were tense for weeks afterwards until their Mississippi travels resumed.
The tone of the relationship between stepfather and stepson now began to change and it appears as if Mr Stanley felt the need to distance himself from his clinging teenage stepson. On one of their Mississippi journeys, Mr Stanley outlined his plans for his stepson. They would continue to travel, trade and study until Henry Stanley Jr was ready to manage a mercantile store of his own. The store would probably be in a rural backwater somewhere along the Mississippi or Arkansas rivers, but with excellent navigation and regularly served by riverboats needing to replenish supplies from a store carrying the respected name ‘H.H. Stanley & Son’ above the door.
In September 1860, the Stanleys met a tall Southern gentleman on board a New Orleans river steamer. His name was Major Ingham, originally from South Carolina but now relocated to a plantation in Saline County, Arkansas. It was out of character for Stanley senior to develop polite acquaintance with anyone on a journey, but he appeared to enjoy Ingham’s company, thanks to mutual friends and a shared love of business. The boy also warmed to Ingham’s tales of wild animals living in forests around his plantation. By the end of the voyage, Ingham had invited the boy to spend a month with his family. Stanley senior thought it a good idea and promised to write to Ingham with details of his son’s travel arrangements.
Once back in New Orleans, Henry Hope Stanley received a letter that had been awaiting his return from his brother in Havana urging him to come to Cuba to run his business while he recovered from an illness. This presented an ideal opportunity for the boy to visit Major Ingham’s Arkansas plantation and scout around for suitable locations to open a general store along the Arkansas River. Stanley wrote to a Jewish friend called Altschul who lived near the Ingham plantation in Cypress Bend, requesting him to teach his stepson everything he needed to know about running a country store.
The boy viewed the idea with suspicion. He had been tricked by an older person before and saw this latest scheme as an opportunity for his stepfather to get him out of the way. He was disturbed by the speed with which his stepfather began making arrangements for the trip. Within days, steamer tickets to Havana and Arkansas had been purchased. The boy travelled with his father to the harbour to say goodbye. In his stepfather’s stateroom, the boy was tongue-tied and lost for words. The man who had become his stepfather, who had changed and shaped his life, was now going to leave him indefinitely. As he prepared to walk down the gangplank, the older man gave the boy a photograph of himself along with a lock of his hair. Stepfather and stepson waved to each other as the steamer pulled away. The boy watched it until it became a small speck on the distant horizon.
Although Henry Stanley Jr received letters from his stepfather confirming his safe arrival in Cuba and expressing his desire to return home soon, the boy would never see Henry Hope Stanley again.
Henry Morton Stanley’s version of his early life as a poor immigrant in New Orleans, meeting the man who would become his benefactor, quitting his job to sit at a sickbed and travelling up and down the great river in steamboats is a story straight out of the pages of Mark Twain.
Stanley’s own version is questionable. Henry and Frances Stanley certainly existed, but the boy’s relationship with them was more imaginary than real. Frances Stanley actually lived for twenty years after Henry Morton Stanley ‘killed her off’ in the pages of his memoirs. He treated his ‘stepfather’ in similar fictitious fashion. It is likely that the older man was an inspiration to John Rowlands and that he occasionally brought him to his home – a wonderful thing for a lonely boy who longed to be part of a family and needed a father figure and, perhaps, a mother figure, too. That is almost certainly as far as their relationship went.
It is plausible that the boy travelled along the Mississippi with the fascinating Mr Stanley – but as his assistant, not as a stepson. Yet John Rowlands looked on Henry Hope Stanley as the father he had never known. Deep in the heart of Africa a decade later, another man would take a similar place.