How I Found Livingstone in Central Africa became the book everyone wanted to read at the end of 1872. It was an immediate bestseller, making Stanley a rich man. Although the New York Herald did not benefit directly from sales of the book, it did no harm to the newspaper’s reputation as a crusading, daring publication that spared no expense to deliver truth and excitement to its readers. Stanley dedicated the book to
James Gordon Bennett, Esq., (Proprietor of the ‘New York Herald’). This Record of the Expedition Sent in Search of Doctor Livingstone and of Travels, Adventures and Discoveries in Central Africa, is Respectfully Dedicated as a tribute to the generosity and the liberality which originated, sustained and crowned the enterprise, by his Grateful Special Correspondent – Henry M. Stanley, Late Commander ‘New York Herald’ Expedition.
Once the book was published, all England wanted to hear Henry Morton Stanley personally tell the thrilling story of his search for Livingstone. Audiences fell into two categories: people with a genuine interest in geography and exploration and those eager to be under the same roof as a famous personality and expecting to be entertained. Stanley was aware of this, and devised a programme that catered for all tastes. He delivered hard facts and told his story, but lightened things up by bringing on Kalulu from time to time to do what little boys do best – sing songs, dance and perform imitations, the only difference being that Kalulu’s songs were sung in Kiswahili, his dances were tribal and his impressions were of a Muslim at prayer. The audience loved it, and Kalulu, who liked life in England, enjoyed it, too.
When Stanley was invited to dine at homes of his new friends, Kalulu was occasionally also invited, to be fussed over by great ladies in their equally great homes. The boy was polite, well mannered and spoke only when spoken to. He looked smart in the tailor-made suits, shirts and ties Stanley had bought for him, although he never did get the hang of wearing boots and shoes. When Stanley sent regrets that he was unable to dine due to other engagements, hosts would ask him to send Kalulu instead. A hansom cab would be sent to the Langham Hotel and Kalulu dispatched to a fashionable house in Kensington or Belgravia where he would meet other well-dressed children and take tea. He generally returned to the hotel with a sovereign in his pocket. His hosts usually reported to Stanley that Kalulu ‘was a little charmer, and no mistake’.
In between speaking engagements in large venues across the country, Stanley travelled to Hamilton, Scotland, to meet remaining members of Livingstone’s family and talk to them about the time he had spent with their father. Stanley was already acquainted with sons Oswell and Tom, but the meeting would be his first with Livingstone’s daughters, Janet and Agnes.
Oswell was cool towards Stanley. He had just received a stern letter from his father expressing how shocked he was that his son had turned his back on him and not ventured into the interior with Stanley’s caravan from Zanzibar. In a separate letter to his daughter, Agnes, the doctor said that Oswell should ‘have had the sense to come with me and gain a little credit that may enable him to hold up his head among men and not be merely Livingstone’s son’. Livingstone accused Oswell of cowardice and duplicity and said he was ‘as poor a specimen of a son as Africa ever produced . . . a person who does not think of supporting himself by his own labour but runs away home calling loudly for more money’. Livingstone believed his family – including his sisters – wanted him home to write another best-selling book, go on the lucrative public-speaking trail again and provide them all with a comfortable income.
Janet Livingstone gave Stanley a Bible inscribed: ‘Presented to Henry M. Stanley by Miss Janet Livingstone, 5th November 1872, Hamilton, Scotland.’ Later Agnes Livingstone would give Stanley her father’s sextant ‘in grateful acknowledgement of his invaluable services rendered to my father in Africa’. Stanley was also granted the freedom of the Burgh of Hamilton ‘in acknowledgement of his noble service in relieving Dr. David Livingstone, when deserted and destitute in Central Africa’. The freedom scroll was placed in a Scottish silver casket, the first of many accolades given to Stanley in towns and cities around the world.
When Stanley and Kalulu arrived in Manchester to talk at the Free Trade Hall, a young married couple sat near the speaker’s podium. The young woman was five months pregnant and known to her Manchester neighbours as Mrs Katherine Bradshaw – the former Katie Gough-Roberts from Denbigh, once Stanley’s ‘betrothed’. On returning to London after his discovery of Livingstone, Stanley had contacted Katie, care of her father, asking her to return correspondence he had sent her – especially the fifteen-page confessional letter penned in 1870. Katie replied that she was happy to return the letters, provided she could hand them over in person. Stanley declined, either because a face-to-face meeting with the girl who had rejected him was too painful, or because his love for Katie had turned to disgust.
Following the Manchester lecture, Katie and Urban Bradshaw followed Stanley to the home of the president of Manchester’s Chamber of Commerce, where he was staying, and rang the doorbell. Katie scribbled a note asking Stanley to come to the door and passed it to one of the servants to deliver. But Stanley refused to come in person and Katie and her husband left without returning the letters or talking to Stanley. They would hold on to the letters for another thirty-five years.
Daily Telegraph, 20 September 1872:
America is more anxious to hear about Stanley and Livingstone than is England. Mr. Stanley has accepted an engagement to deliver in the United States a series of lectures on his explorations in Africa, and his discovery of the great father of all explorers, the Marco Polo of the Unknown Continent. The terms of his contract – to use an American word – are ‘lucrative’. The number of lectures is specified, the time is limited and the ‘remuneration’ is fixed at £10,000 and all expenses paid. Now £10,000 represents more than £300 a year for life – the average income for an Oxford or Cambridge fellow of a college – and is beyond all doubt a very comfortable sum to realise in the period of some few weeks. Cynics, of course, will sneer and declare that the correspondent of the New York Herald commenced life as a flaneur, grew into a charlatan and has ended by becoming a professional mountebank.
While Bennett had granted Stanley permission to lecture in American cities – providing the New York Herald with another publicity coup – the proprietor did not want his newspaper to be associated with the venture. Bennett was now uncertain how to use the reporter whose name was better known than his own. Herald reporters quietly claimed that although Bennett was deliriously happy with Stanley’s Livingstone scoop, he was resentful of his correspondent’s success, reminding everyone that although his man had got the story, he himself had paid handsomely for the privilege. Bennett decided to let the hullabaloo quieten down before determining how best to use Stanley in future. After all, he could hardly send the world’s best-known journalist out on routine stories. In future, all of Stanley’s assignments needed to be important, significant and carry gravitas – otherwise he might become bored and go and work for a rival newspaper. Bennett decided to have a private meeting with Stanley when he called at head office on Broadway and Ann Street, where ‘the boys’ on the Herald’s news staff were planning a reception in their colleague’s honour on the editorial floor.
Stanley and Kalulu sailed into New York on the Cuba on 20 November 1872 to be greeted by a battery of press colleagues from the New York Herald and competing newspapers. Kalulu was whisked off to the Fifth Avenue Hotel while Stanley was marched to the Herald’s offices to meet the boss. All work on the following day’s edition stopped as Stanley swept into the building to the sound of cheers from his fellow newspapermen, most of whom he hardly knew, never having worked directly from the paper’s head office. He was ushered into Bennett’s presence and the door was firmly closed behind them. The conversation that took place was never disclosed and is said to have lasted just ten minutes. When the door opened again, Bennett and Stanley shook hands and parted – the boss to his desk to continue working and his star reporter to lunch with fellow newsmen.
To attract as large an audience as possible, Stanley’s lecture series at New York’s Steinway Hall was promoted with all the razzmatazz of a Broadway entertainment. Advertisements were taken out in theatre and vaudeville columns announcing:
STEINWAY HALL |
STANLEY’S LECTURES |
HENRY M. STANLEY’S
AMERICAN LECTURES ON THE DISCOVERY OF
THE REV. DR. LIVINGSTONE
DECEMBER 3/4/6/10/11/13 – MATINEES DECEMBER 7 & 14
SALE OF SEATS FOR THE COURSE, EIGHT LECTURES,
WILL BEGIN AT STEINWAY HALL, ON TUESDAY NOVEMBER 26.
COURSE TICKETS: $10.00
STEINWAY HALL |
H.M. STANLEY |
STANLEY’S MARCH INTO AFRICA!
(THIS WEDNESDAY EVENING)
MR. HENRY M. STANLEY’S THRILLING LECTURE
WILL BE GIVEN AT STEINWAY HALL
SUBJECT: ‘THE MARCH OF THE STANLEY–LIVINGSTONE
EXPEDITION’
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT! ON THIS OCCASION MR. STANLEY WILL
APPEAR BEFORE THE AUDIENCE COSTUMED, ARMED & EQUIPPED AS
HE WAS WHEN PURSUING HIS ARDUOUS JOURNEY INTO AFRICA
AND ACCOMPANIED BY THE LITTLE NATIVE AFRICAN – KALULU!
HE WILL ALSO DISPLAY THE FLAGS, SPEARS AND OTHER
ACCOUTREMENTS WORN BY THE NATIVES OF CENTRAL AFRICA
WHO FORMED A PART OF HIS EXPEDITION IN SEARCH OF DR.
LIVINGSTONE
THESE RARE CURIOSITIES WILL REMAIN ON EXHIBITION DURING
THE EVENING AT THE HALL. GENERAL ADMISSION: $1.00
Advertising was bold to attract a wide selection of the ticket-buying public, including those frightened of the word ‘lecture’ and more used to popular entertainments. For the first time, Stanley learned he was competing with himself for an audience. Two shows were playing in New York with identical themes that season – the ‘sensation drama “Africa!!! Or Livingstone and Stanley”’ starring the comedy duo Harrigan and Hart at the Theatre Comique and ‘Dan Bryant’s Burlesque Lecture “Stanley & Kalulu”, introducing Stanley’s Casyembra Negro boy, Kalulu’ at the Opera House.
Conquering a tough New York audience would be his hardest assignment yet. . . .
Kalulu fascinated New Yorkers and Stanley had long since recognised his potential as a crowd-puller. On 21 November 1872, he invited some New York Herald colleagues to his suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel to meet the little fellow who, according to a reporter was ‘clothed yesterday after the manner of an English page of the nineteenth century, whose status is better expressed in the word “buttons”.’ Under the headline ‘Stanley and Kalulu – Interesting Interview with the Negro Boy – An Amoozin’ Little Cuss’, the New York Herald told readers:
Although eleven years of age, his education must have been neglected in early youth, for he is very honest, although not much more than a year in the hands of civilisation. He was a little shy on being first introduced. When, however, he was addressed in Kiswahili, the language of his tribe . . . he talked with considerable fluency and a certain pertinence of reply. [Kalulu was shown a photograph and asked to name the person in the picture.] ‘Lifinston,’ replied the boy beaming with intelligence. [Stanley then asked Kalulu to run through some of his set party pieces.] A devotional look overcast the dusky features of the untutored lad, and he forthwith proceeded to imitate the praying of Arabs at sunset with the perfection of mimicry. . . . He also proved how the musical instinct of the children of Africa was strong within him. He rocked his body, rolled his eyes and burst forth in Kiswahili song. . . . In reply to further questions in his native tongue, he stated that he was at present in a country called London. He finds it hard to see the difference between slaves and freemen yet. In Africa people were owned by other people, and here, so far as he had looked into politics and business, he found it much the same thing. This boy has evidently a lot to learn from the bird of freedom. The coloured boys at the hotel he called pagans, and his white admirers he admitted to being brothers. At this stage in the proceedings he remembered some chestnuts in his pockets and all further efforts to draw out this interesting little African lion had as much effect as attempting to interview the lion at Central Park when polishing a bone.
On 25 November 1872, the New York Herald carried a curious headline: ‘Livingstone Finds Stanley’. Underneath was a report about how John Livingstone, the doctor’s older brother (by two years), had travelled to New York from his Canadian home to pay his respects to the man who had found his sibling. John Livingstone was invited to Stanley’s hotel suite and went up to the room with a reporter. The reporter was hoping to witness Stanley opening his door with the words: ‘Mr Livingstone, I presume?’ but was disappointed when he said: ‘I see a good deal of the Livingstone characteristic about your face, sir.’ To which John Livingstone replied: ‘Yes, I believe there is quite a resemblance between the doctor and myself – at least there was when we were young.’ He explained that he was unable to go to Africa to see his brother so had done the next best thing – travelled to New York to see the man who had found him.
Stanley agreed to address the American Geographical Association, but the continual round of official lunches, dinners and speaking engagements took its toll and he was forced to cancel at the last minute when fever packed him off to bed. At one stage he attempted to get up and get dressed but John Livingstone was on hand to restrain him.
On 3 December 1872, Stanley gave his first lecture at the Steinway Hall on the subject of ‘Life in Central Africa and the Horrors of the Slave Trade’. The auditorium was crowded with what the New York Herald described as ‘a select and intellectual audience’. There were a number of empty seats, too. On display was a large map of Central Africa showing the regions through which both Livingstone and Stanley had crossed and some of the weapons Stanley had picked up from villages razed by Mirambo’s men. The Stars and Stripes, which had been held aloft when Stanley marched toward Livingstone at Ujiji, was also prominently displayed.
John Livingstone and Kalulu sat in the front row and applauded enthusiastically when Stanley mounted the podium. James Gordon Bennett declined to attend, preferring to send along his chief drama critic, George O. Seilhammer to ‘review’ Stanley’s ‘performance’ in the same way as he would cover a theatrical play.
Seilhammer felt that ‘the earnest manner of the lecturer showed a degree of enthusiasm in his subject that was not lost on the audience’. He praised Stanley’s ‘admirable ability to photograph, as it were, in the minds of his hearers, the strange, eventful scenes through which he so triumphantly passed, which made even dry details attractive. As he warmed to his subject his descriptions became more interesting and his audience more deeply impressed. Rarely has a lecturer been called upon to handle a subject so difficult and abstruse, and rarely have efforts on the rostrum been crowned with similar success.’
Seilhammer told Bennett privately that he – and most of the audience – had found the lecture dull and Stanley’s delivery lacking in drama. Bennett ordered Seilhammer to be more critical of Stanley’s second ‘performance’ about the march from Zanzibar to Unyanyembe, delivered to an auditorium one-third full of ‘attentive and intelligent’ people. Seilhammer said the evening was ‘more interesting, both in treatment and delivery, than the previous effort. But it was far from being a marked success. Mr. Stanley’s elocution is bad, though it improves as he gets into his discourse and might be made acceptable if his manner of treating his subjects was such as to ensure a partial forgetfulness of his failure of oratory. Unfortunately this is not the case.’
Seilhammer found parts of the lecture ‘intolerably dry and dull’ and added: ‘Though not enlivened by the orator’s skill, his narrative of the way in which he was sent on his perilous journey was well received, because it had in it some of the personal spice which the public always demanded.’ He criticised Stanley for failing to utilise the large map on show and use the African props properly ‘to make his hearers interested by making them illustrative of his subject. In everything he overlooks the personal and the peculiar and treats only of the geographical and the commonplace.’ Seilhammer said that the audience were hoping for ‘a personal talk about strange people and sights. Instead Mr. Stanley is giving only geography and natural history and his anecdotes are spoiled in the telling. All this is unnecessary and it would be cruel to Mr Stanley not to say so.’ Stanley was advised to ‘forgo his manuscript and, forgetting the sing-song and doleful monotone in which his voice is too often pitched and simply talk to his audience of what he saw, heard and suffered while doing his duty so nobly for the Herald’.
Advance bookings for remaining lectures were poor and the organisers switched the venue to a smaller hall attached to the Plymouth Church without warning the public of the change. When ticket holders arrived at the Steinway Hall they were told by the janitor at the door: ‘Stanley’s played out; there will be no lecture tonight or any other night as Mr. Stanley’s receipts do not meet expenses.’
According to Seilhammer, the third lecture, describing Stanley’s discovery of Livingstone, was ‘a marked improvement upon his last effort upon the platform’. The reviewer noted that Stanley appeared to have ‘acted upon our counsel, discarded his manuscript and simply talked to his audience instead of disclaiming to them’. Stanley’s ‘style and manner . . . was [sic] somewhat wanting, although his personal friends know well that when the occasion inspires him, he is a vivid and magnetic speaker’.
Bad reviews by his own newspaper and its competitors caused Stanley’s lecture tour to collapse after the third night. With no new assignment for the Herald in the offing, Stanley had to think hard about where to direct his energy. Money was not a problem. Royalties for How I Found Livingstone came pouring in from England and America and he was still on full salary from the newspaper. So Stanley did what every good writer with energy to burn does – he wrote. Stanley turned his hand to fiction, one of only two occasions in his life when he wrote about subjects in which he was not the main player.
My Kalulu – Prince, King and Slave was ‘written for boys . . . those clever, bright-eyed, intelligent boys, of all classes, who have begun to be interested in romantic literature, with whom educated fathers may talk without fear of misapprehension, and of whom friends are already talking as boys who have a promising future before them. These boys are the guests for whom I have provided a true Afric feast.’
The book was inspired by Kalulu himself, who had related stories about his African life to Stanley during their travels together. A fictitious Kalulu, several years older than Stanley’s young companion, became the central character in a fanciful story about a boy born into slavery who becomes a courageous king, encounters wild animals, explores the dark interior, participates in tribal battles, witnesses a kidnapping, engineers a heroic rescue and observes secret ceremonies.
My Kalulu was written to be read in cliff-hanging episodes, one thrilling chapter leading effortlessly to the next. It was based on incidents collected by Stanley as he walked across Africa in search of Livingstone and tales related by Kalulu. It was intended to be a blend of fact and fiction and ‘something lighter, fresher’ than his previous book. In his introduction, Stanley assures ‘those interested in Kalulu that some day, if I live, I shall attempt to take him back to his own country, through numberless adventures, incidents and scenes, in the hope that he shall enjoy his own again’. In the meantime, Stanley and Kalulu returned to England to await further instructions from Bennett.
Weeks passed without word from the boss, but Stanley kept busy completing My Kalulu and making occasional visits to his mother in Wales, often taking a gift of an African curio or artefact to decorate her pub. In April 1873, he was again summoned to meet Bennett in Paris – the same city where the editor had famously given him the Livingstone mission. There was to be no repeat assignment of the same magnitude. At the Hotel des Deux Mondes, where Bennett had taken up residence, the editor ordered Stanley back to Spain on temporary cover until a story of importance broke. He informed Stanley that he was carefully monitoring events on Africa’s Gold Coast, where a despot king threatened to invade a neighbouring British protectorate. Bennett told Stanley that if the situation deteriorated and the British government decided to send military aid, the job was his. Stanley returned to London, put Kalulu into a boarding school run by an Anglican minister in Wandsworth and returned to Spain, its routine riots and revolutions – and waited.