In October 1869, Stanley was in his Madrid apartment resting after covering republican disturbances across Spain. His Spanish assignment followed on after the New York Herald asked him to file dispatches from Greece, Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt. He was told to go to the paper’s London office to receive ‘secret’ instructions from bureau editor, Colonel Finlay Anderson. In London, Anderson told Stanley that there was a possibility that Dr David Livingstone, the Scottish-born missionary and traveller, might be making his way out of Africa’s interior towards Zanzibar. There were rumours he might be dead, while other stories claimed he was alive but in poor health. Stanley was to sail to Aden and await further instructions, and when – if – positive information arrived, he was to use discretion about travelling to Zanzibar to meet and interview the elderly doctor.
With days left before departing for Aden, Stanley found time to visit Denbigh to see his mother, half-brothers and sister. Now that he was a well-paid, fashionably dressed and polite young American reporter with a great future ahead, Betsy had found room in her life for her boy and was pleased to introduce him to respectable friends in the neighbourhood. Stanley’s 25-year-old half-sister, Emma Parry-Jones, was also proud of her ‘American’ half-brother and introduced him to her friend Catherine – ‘Katie’ – Gough-Roberts, the nineteen-year-old daughter of ‘retired gentleman solicitor’ Thomas Gough-Roberts, who lived just outside the town. Katie found the young man interesting and agreed to allow Stanley to write to her while he was on his Aden assignment.
Back in London, Stanley raced around bookshops buying everything he could lay his hands on about Africa. He purchased works by former African explorers, John Hanning Speke, Samuel White Baker, Richard Francis Burton, James Bruce, Mungo Park and Livingstone himself. This working library would provide the reporter with valuable information on how to put together an expedition into the interior.
Arriving in Aden in November 1868, Stanley found nothing new had come to light about Livingstone since he had left London. He directed polite but deliberately vague letters to the British Consul in Zanzibar seeking news of Livingstone, avoiding any mention of the fact that he was a reporter hoping to land the scoop of the century. He also wrote to the American Consul, Francis Webb, who replied promising to share any intelligence about Livingstone with a fellow American.
To while away the time sitting it out in hot and dusty Aden, Stanley turned his Magdala dispatches into a book he planned to publish at a later date. He also wrote to Katie Gough-Roberts – addressed as ‘My dear Miss Roberts’ – and studied his books about African exploration. However, Stanley’s Aden sojourn proved a waste of time. There was no news about Livingstone. He returned to London and checked into the Langham Hotel near Oxford Circus, where he was told to await further instructions. There he received an unexpected visit from Thomas Gough-Roberts, Katie’s father, who made it known that he held the young man in high regard and considered Stanley eminently suitable as his prospective son-in-law. He also mentioned that whoever married his daughter could expect a generous dowry of around £1,000 to help them in their married life.
It was from the Langham Hotel on Easter Sunday 1869 that Stanley sat down to compose a long and heartfelt fifteen-page letter to Katie, owning up to his workhouse background, his strained relationship with his mother, how he had run away to sea and his ‘adoption’ by Henry Hope Stanley. He admitted to being ambitious, stating that he intended to make something of himself – and could achieve it more easily with a wife, ‘not a pretty, doll faced wife, but a woman educated and possessed with energy. With her aid and encouraging presence . . . I would defy the world.’ He begged to know how he should address Katie because ‘Miss Roberts is so formal, almost unkind. Address me by my name, Henry’.
Stanley returned to Spain to report the continuing revolution that would eventually drive Queen Isabella from her throne. One of his liveliest Spanish dispatches was written from the balcony of a Saragossa hotel overlooking barricades designed to keep revolutionaries in and mounted artillery out. From this vantage point and with bullets whistling through the air, Stanley observed the battle for thirty-nine hours.
In June 1869, Stanley allowed himself a little self-congratulation in his journal:
So well have I performed my duty, surpassing all my contemporaries, that the greatest confidence is placed in me. . . . How have I done this? By intense application to duty, by self-denial, which means I have denied myself all the pleasures, so that I might do my duty thoroughly, and exceed it. Such has been my ambition. I am fulfilling it. Pleasure cannot blind me, it cannot lead me astray from the path I have chalked out. I am so much my own master, that I am master over my own passions.
The telegram delivered to Stanley’s Madrid apartment on 16 October 1869 was short and abrupt: ‘Come to Paris on important business – Bennett.’ Five hours later Stanley was on his way to Paris, where he arrived the following evening. He went directly to the Grand Hotel and knocked at the door of James Gordon Bennett’s suite. What followed next has entered newspaper legend:
‘Come in,’ called a voice and on entering Stanley found Bennett sitting up in bed.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘My name is Stanley,’ he reminded the man he had met only once before; but in all probability, Bennett had enjoyed a few aperitifs, glasses of wine and a cognac or two over dinner and his recollection may have been clouded. . . .
‘Ah, yes! Sit down; I have important business in hand for you,’ said Bennett, motioning Stanley to a chair. He then asked: ‘Where do you think Livingstone is?’ Stanley had to concede that he had no idea and acknowledged that the doctor might even be dead. Bennett had other ideas.
‘Well, I think he is alive, and that he can be found, and I am going to send you to find him.’
‘Do you really think I can find Dr Livingstone? Do you mean me to go to Central Africa?’ Stanley enquired somewhat naïvely.
‘Yes; I mean that you shall go, and find him wherever you may hear that he is, and to get what news you can of him, and perhaps the old man may be in want – take enough with you to help him should he require it. Of course you will act according to your own plans, and do what you think best – BUT FIND LIVINGSTONE!’
Stanley gently asked if Bennett had seriously considered the great expense ‘likely to be incurred on account of this little journey?’
‘What will it cost?’ asked Bennett abruptly.
‘Burton and Speke’s journey to Central Africa cost between £3,000 and £5,000, and I fear it cannot be done under £2,500.’
‘Well, I will tell you what you will do. Draw a thousand pounds now; and when you have gone through that, draw another thousand, and when that is spent, draw another thousand, and when you have finished that, draw another thousand, and so on; but, find livingstone!’
Surprisingly, Bennett did not expect Stanley to sail directly to Africa to search for the doctor. He instructed his reporter:
I wish you to go to the inauguration of the Suez Canal first, and then proceed up the Nile . . . and as you go up, describe as well as possible whatever is interesting for tourists; and then write up a guide – a practical one – for Lower Egypt; tell us about whatever is worth seeing and how to see it. Then you might go to Jerusalem . . . then visit Constantinople and find out about that trouble between the Khedive and the Sultan. Then – let me see – you might as well visit the Crimea and those old battlegrounds. Then go across the Caucasus to the Caspian Sea . . . from there you may get through Persia to India; you could write an interesting letter from Persepolis. Baghdad will be close on your way to India; suppose you go there, and write up something about the Euphrates Valley Railway. Then, when you have come from India, you can go after Livingstone. Probably you will hear by that time that Livingstone is on his way to Zanzibar; but if not, go into the interior and find him. If alive, get what news of his discoveries you can and if you find he is dead, bring all possible proofs of his being dead. That is all. Good night and God be with you.
Stanley’s version of his Parisian meeting with Bennett makes no reference to the fact that he had already been posted to Aden hoping to hear something of Livingstone’s movements. It also fails to mention that New York Herald founder, James Gordon Bennett ‘the Elder’, now ailing, in retirement but still casting influence over the content of his newspaper, was Scottish by birth and took an interest in the achievements of fellow Scots at home and abroad. Hitherto, column inches in the paper devoted to Livingstone’s story had been at the insistence of the old man, whose instincts had been correct: American readers were indeed fascinated by stories about Livingstone’s work in Africa, and Bennett ‘the Elder’ wanted his paper to be first with the big story of his discovery when it broke. Sharing his father’s nose for news and public taste, Bennett Jr was happy to go along with a scheme to find the sick old man missing in the jungle and he knew that Stanley was just the reporter to go and get the news – exclusively.
Off went Stanley to cover his shopping list of foreign assignments, all the time monitoring what might – or might not – be happening in Africa. It took a year to complete his tasks.
From Paris he crossed the Channel and hurried to Denbigh to see Katie and ask her father’s blessing to marry his daughter before leaving on his Suez assignment, taking his bride on a working honeymoon. Thomas Gough-Roberts was horrified by the suggestion and refused to give his permission. Perhaps he was uncomfortable with what Denbigh’s citizens would have made of a hastily arranged marriage, which in those parts usually meant one thing – the girl was pregnant. Or perhaps Thomas disliked the idea of home-loving Katie travelling from one strange place to another, unable to put down roots anywhere for long. She would be visiting hostile locations and be separated from her husband for long periods while he went in search of news in dangerous places. What if he were killed, and Katie made a widow before she had time to become a proper wife? No. Thomas told Stanley that marriage must await his return when his roving life might cease for a while and the wedding of one of Denbigh’s most prominent citizens could be organised properly.
Although Stanley was disappointed, he believed that he and Katie were now ‘betrothed’ and he would continue writing to her as often as he could during his travels.
The Suez Canal Company welcomed Stanley back to Egypt and he was present on 17 November 1869 when this new route of commerce was opened to sea traffic from all over the world. Stanley was on the deck of one of the first ships to sail through the canal, following a yacht carrying Empress Eugénie, the Austrian Emperor, the Crown Prince of Prussia and other international VIPs. He told New York Herald readers: ‘A beautiful morning ushered in the greatest drama ever witnessed or enacted in Egypt. It is the greatest and last, so far, of all the magnificent periods which Egypt has witnessed.’
He floated along the Nile as one of seventy special guests of the Khedive and wrote a fascinating piece – ‘twenty-three days of most exquisite pleasure, unmarred by a single adverse incident’. Then on to Jerusalem where he observed a vast archaeological dig beneath the city and saw the foundation stones of Solomon’s Temple.
It is interesting to note that in the same edition of the New York Herald to carry Stanley’s Suez Canal article, a story from London reported that the Royal Geographical Society had received a twelve-page letter from Livingstone in New Bangweolo, South Central Africa. In it he claimed to have found the source of the River Nile ‘between 10–12 degrees south latitude or nearly in the position assigned by Ptolemy, the second-century Greek astronomer’.
By February 1870, Stanley had returned to Turkey in circumstances considerably different to those of his previous visit four years earlier in the company of Lewis Noe and Harlow Cook. In Constantinople he had a debt to settle, repaying the £150 loan given to him in 1866 by Edward Morris, the US Consul in Turkey after the encounter with bandits. Morris had not asked Stanley for security, trusting that the loan would be repaid in the future. Stanley now wanted to make amends, repay the debt – and seek Morris’s assistance.
Morris recalled: ‘The uncouth young man whom I first knew had grown into a perfect man of the world, possessing the appearance, the manners and attributes of a perfect gentleman. Instead of thinking he was a young man who had barely seen 26 summers [Stanley was in fact aged twenty-nine at this time] you would imagine that he was 35 or 40 years of age, so cultured and learned was he in all the ways of life.’
In Constantinople, Morris gave Stanley letters of introduction to other ambassadors whose path he was likely to cross along the way and a Winchester .44 Henry Rimfire rifle, which he would carry into the African interior in his search for Livingstone.
Dispatches were filed from Crimea, Odessa, Tiflis and Teheran and in August 1870, Stanley arrived in India where he looked forward to his next big assignment and confessed to his journal: ‘I feel very ignorant about most things concerning Africa.’
Stanley was also ignorant of what was happening in Denbigh. As he was making arrangements to sail from Bombay on the first leg of his voyage to Zanzibar, his ‘betrothed’, Katie Gough-Roberts, was making her own arrangements – to walk down the aisle with Urban Rufus Bradshaw, a 22-year-old Denbigh architect. Stanley had continued to correspond with Katie from places he had visited on assignment, but she was not prepared to await his return to Wales. He had been unable to tell her precisely when he might be back – it might have been the following month or the next year – so she switched affections from the unreliable trouble-shooting reporter to the security of a provincial Welsh architect. Stanley’s half-sister, Emma, appears to have been the cause of the problem. A letter unearthed by the author in the Royal Geographical Society’s London archives from a Welsh writer calling himself ‘Morien the Bard’, claims that Emma had become jealous of Katie’s relationship with Stanley and told her that her half-brother had secretly married while out of the country, driving her into the arms of another man.
With his preliminary assignments completed, it was now time for Stanley to search for Livingstone, although there was still no news of his whereabouts. In October he sailed in the barque Polly from Bombay to Mauritius, a six-week-long voyage, during which Stanley made friends with the Scottish first mate, William Lawrence Farquhar from Leith, whom he engaged to accompany him on the expedition. Afraid that Farquhar might reveal the true purpose of his new employer’s reason for visiting Zanzibar, Stanley told the seaman he was travelling into the interior to explore a little-known river. Livingstone’s name was never mentioned and Farquhar asked no questions. Stanley and Farquhar boarded the brigantine Romp for a seventeen-day voyage to the Seychelles and then the whaling brig Falcon for the final nineteen days to the island of Zanzibar, where they arrived eighty days after leaving Bombay.
On 6 January 1871, fifteen months after receiving his instructions from Bennett, Stanley landed in Zanzibar. He expected to find further instructions and funds from his editor waiting with the US Consul, Captain Webb. There was nothing. By now, Stanley’s money was running dangerously low and he was expected to employ large numbers of native porters, kit out his expedition with food and equipment and transport the entire operation 25 miles across the Zanzibar Channel to the mainland. He estimated that he would need around $20,000 – and all he could summon up was $80 from his own pocket.
Former US naval officer Webb came to the rescue. Not only did he provide Stanley with accommodation at his residence, he also used his influence among Zanzibar’s expatriate community to introduce the reporter to people with possible knowledge of Livingstone’s movements. He helped Stanley raise money for his expedition from business sources on the island, whose owners were happy to assist a writer from America’s most respected daily newspaper. As far as they were concerned, the word of a New York Herald correspondent was good enough and Stanley wrote them drafts in the name of James Gordon Bennett Jr as his guarantor. As cheques and letters of credit were unrecognised in Zanzibar, money was provided in the form of gold coins, the only currency accepted in the island’s markets and bazaars.
Stanley wanted as few people as possible to know his true reason for coming to Zanzibar. He was happy for it to be known that he was a newspaper correspondent, but as far as the majority of the island’s population was concerned, he was there to mount an expedition to the mainland to explore the Rifiji River. Before long, everyone in Zanzibar knew that the white American had arrived in order to enter Africa and everyone – especially the island’s European population – wanted details.
To hear the latest rumours about Livingstone, Stanley began visiting Zanzibar’s consular officials, including Dr John Kirk, Livingstone’s old partner on the Zambezi expedition and now Acting British Consul on the island. Kirk was not the most cooperative of men, considered by many to be aloof and self-important. Stanley sensed that Kirk was not entirely convinced by his story of exploring the Rifiji River. At a consular reception one evening, Stanley gently introduced the subject of Kirk’s earlier travels with Livingstone in the hope that he might warm to the subject. Kirk was guarded when asked where he thought the doctor might be and said he was last heard of somewhere ‘between the coast and Nayamweze’ (Kirk was referring to the town of Unyamwezi, but for some reason was either unable to pronounce it or Stanley misheard what Kirk had said). ‘Of one thing I am sure, nobody has heard anything definite of him for over two years. I should fancy, though, that he must still be alive,’ Kirk volunteered.
Stanley confided to his journal: ‘Kirk gave me a very bad opinion of Livingstone; he says that he is hard to get along with, is cross and narrow minded; that Livingstone ought to come home and allow a younger man to take his place; that he takes no notes or keeps his journal methodically; and that he would run away, if he heard any traveller was going to him.’
Stanley was alarmed to hear that Dr Kirk had sent a ‘Livingstone caravan’ into the interior, paid for by the Royal Geographical Society and made up of forty-two native bearers. They had departed three months previously carrying thirty-five bales of goods and letters from home, hoping to meet Livingstone somewhere on the caravan path to the coast. No news of their progress had been received.
Sources in Zanzibar led Stanley to believe that Livingstone might be making his way to Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika and the reporter renewed his resolve to march there as fast as possible or meet the doctor somewhere en route – and preferably before news reached him that the New York Herald reporter was on his way. He recorded that ‘my impression of him is that he is a man who will try to put as much distance as possible between us’.
Stanley admitted: ‘I was totally ignorant of the interior and it was difficult at first to know what I needed in order to take an expedition into Central Africa.’ The first thing required was a direct route to bring him 900 miles westwards to Ujiji. After crossing the Zanzibar Channel to Bagamoyo on the mainland, the expedition caravan would traverse a variety of terrain, depending on weather and local conditions, taking them deep into the interior. Stanley would carefully record the distance covered and the time taken to march from one camp to the next in hours and minutes. There would be over ninety separate entries for camps between Bagamoyo and Ujiji.
Much of Stanley’s information about the route was culled from books about African exploration written by his predecessors Burton and Speke, which also gave him the background knowledge to estimate the amount of ground it was possible to cover in a single day, the stores and provisions needed and how to budget for a potentially lengthy expedition. The books gave Stanley clues about the type of terrain he might encounter – flat, hilly or mountainous, safe or dangerous, where extra supplies might be purchased from tribes along the way and whether they were friendly or hostile. He noted that explorers travelling this path before had paid porters and bartered with tribes using coloured cloth, beads, brass wire and lead shot and that a plentiful supply of each must be purchased in Zanzibar’s markets.
The number of porters to be recruited and how to go about selecting those who would not desert was another consideration. Zanzibar’s European community had little idea of what was required as none of their number ever ventured off the island. So the question of how much food must be purchased to feed a hundred men for days, weeks and months went unanswered until Stanley engaged an Arab merchant called Sheikh Hashid to address the problem.
Sheikh Hashid, ‘a man of note and of wealth in Zanzibar’, had dispatched his own caravans into the interior and was acquainted with prominent traders. He visited the market with Stanley and together the men bartered for the kind of beads preferred by different tribes as currency, some favouring white over black beads, brown over yellow, red over green, green over white and so on. Eleven different varieties were purchased and packed into twenty-two sacks, which were delivered to the storeroom of Captain Webb’s house. Stanley later noted: ‘The women of Africa are as fastidious in their tastes for beads as the women in New York are for jewellery.’
Next came the wire, a valuable trading commodity, which tribal men used ‘for the adornment of their wives, who wear it in such numerous circlets round their necks as to give them at a distance an appearance of wearing ruffs. Wristlets of copper, brass and iron, and anklets of the same metal . . . are the favourite decorations of the males.’ Sheikh Hashid told Stanley that while beads and necklaces stood for copper coins in Africa, good quality cloth was the equivalent of silver and brass wire of gold. Over 300lb of coiled brass wire, almost the thickness of telegraph wire, was purchased.
Stanley’s shopping list also included provisions, cooking utensils, rope, twine, tents, ammunition, guns, hatchets, medicine, bedding, a tin bath, plus twenty-two donkeys and pack mules to haul some of the goods through the interior. A large boat measuring 25ft long and 6ft wide capable of carrying twenty people plus ‘stores and goods sufficient for a cruise’ was purchased for $80. A smaller one, 10ft long and 4ft 6in wide, with room for six passengers, was bought for $40. The entire shopping expedition produced goods weighing 6 tons (it would later increase to 8½ tons) and Stanley confessed that he ‘was rather abashed at my own temerity’. He reasoned that a modern explorer travelling deep into the African interior needed to transport ‘just what a ship must have when about to sail on a long voyage. He must have his slop chest, his little store of canned dainties and his medicines, besides which, he must have enough guns, powder and ball to be able to make a series of good fights if necessary. He must have men to convey these miscellaneous articles; and as a man’s maximum load does not exceed 70 lbs, to convey 11,000 lbs requires nearly 60 men.’ Supplies were broken down into 116 individual loads.
The bill so far totalled $8,000 and in one of his dispatches to the paper aimed directly at James Gordon Bennett, Stanley later admitted to his chief that ‘the expense which you were incurring frightened me considerably; but then “obey orders if you break owners” is a proverb among sailors and which I adopted. Besides, I was too far from the telegraph to notify you of such an expense or to receive further orders from you; the preparations for the expedition therefore went on.’
Stanley thought of everything, including the possibility of arriving at Ujiji to find Livingstone was somewhere on Lake Tanganyika. With boats of his own, he could set out in pursuit of his quarry if necessary. To make each boat lighter, Stanley stripped each of its boards and replaced them with a double canvas skin, well tarred. The boats were then cut into sections which could be bolted together, each piece weighing 68lb. A number of canvas boats fitted to frames were also assembled.
A cockney third mate called John William Shaw, who had been discharged from the American ship Nevada in Zanzibar under suspicious circumstances, asked Stanley for a job. He was an experienced navigator and Stanley ‘saw no reason to refuse his services and he was accordingly engaged for $300 per annum, to rank second to William Farquhar’. Like Farquhar, Shaw was not told the true reason for the expedition. Instead, Stanley spun them a yarn about marching to Lake Tanganyika where he would measure its depth and report back his findings to his American superiors.
Together with his white companions, Stanley went in search of twenty armed guards prepared to walk into the interior with them. Men who had previously travelled with Burton and Speke were available for hire, familiar with the ways of the white man and able to induce others to join the expedition. One man, called Seedy Mbarak Mombay but known to one and all as ‘Bombay’, was considered the best. Stanley described him as ‘a slender, short man of fifty, or thereabouts . . . his face rugged, his mouth large, his eyes small and his nose flat’, and he indicated his willingness to head the marching party to Ujiji for $80 a year, half in advance, plus a muzzle-loading rifle, a pistol, knife and hatchet. Six other ‘faithfuls’ from Speke’s party were also engaged and Bombay rounded up a further eighteen ‘fine looking men, far more intelligent in appearance than I could have ever believed African barbarians could be’. The men were each paid $36 per annum or $3 per month and issued with a flintlock musket, powder horn, bullet-pouch, knife and hatchet, plus powder and ball for 200 rounds.
Stanley would engage porters to carry everything the expedition’s regiment of donkeys and pack mules was unable to transport across Africa. To help lighten the load, Stanley issued instructions for a cart to be constructed, 5ft long and 18ins wide. The cart would have a capacity of 280lb – equivalent to that of four human porters – and was intended to carry heavy ammunition boxes, but would prove useless deep in the interior.
On the eve of departure, Stanley was summoned to the palace of Sultan Seyd Burghash, where an Arab horse was presented to the American visitor. The Sultan also gave Stanley letters of introduction to agents, representatives and merchants in the interior, expressing the hope that on ‘whatever mission I was bound, I should be perfectly successful’. Later that evening, a Zanzibar-based American presented Stanley with a bay horse imported from the Cape of Good Hope.
On 4 February 1871, twenty-eight days after arriving in Zanzibar, the organisation and bales of equipment of the New York Herald expedition into the African interior were complete. At noon, four large Arab dhows were ready to make the short crossing to Bagamoyo and the men, their loads and animals were all on board. Only Farquhar and Shaw were missing. They were found in a quayside bar, sitting drinking as if they had all the time in the world. Stanley threw them out, reminding both that they were under contract. Shaw said he was having second thoughts about crossing to the mainland, unsure of what lay ahead. Stanley reminded him he had been paid half of his wages as an advance and it was too late to change his mind. Sullenly, the two white men climbed into one of the dhows.
An American flag, especially sewn for the New York Herald expedition by Mrs Webb, was raised at the masthead and a farewell committee waved hats and handkerchiefs as the dhows entered the Zanzibar Channel. Rank jungles, fetid swamps, fly-infested grasslands, fever, deserting porters and warring tribes all lay ahead and Stanley was prepared for everything – apart from the possibility of not finding Livingstone alive. This was an option he chose not to consider as the dhows nosed their way towards the African mainland. Instead, he pondered on the fact that one month ago he had been a total novice at putting a caravan together. Now he was in charge of a large expedition heading into the interior on an important mission – and as the man at its head he was all too aware that its success or failure fell entirely on his shoulders.