Rightly they call him Breaker of the Path,
Who was no cloistered spirit, remote and sage,
But a swift swordsman of our wrestling age,
Warm in his love – and sudden in his wrath.
From ‘Henry Morton Stanley’, Sidney Low, 1904
By the time Stanley arrived in Marseilles on the way back to England, thirty Anglo-American Expedition dispatches had been published in the New York Herald and Daily Telegraph. Newspaper readers from Denbigh to Denver had waited eagerly for Stanley’s African articles and were not disappointed. Each was a thrilling combination of adventure story and geography lesson rolled into one. Stanley also commented on how the continent’s landscape and mineral wealth were ripe for exploitation by forward-thinking governments seeking a toehold on this new part of Africa. His notebooks were crammed with information about flora, fauna, topography and people and about how rivers and corridors through the interior might be turned into routes of commerce. These notes were used while writing his epic account of the journey, Through the Dark Continent, which he began drafting in Zanzibar to divert his mind from Alice Pike.
One of the keenest readers of Stanley’s journalism was Leopold II, King of the Belgians, whose father had attempted various colonising schemes in parts of the developing world and instructed his son to ‘file his brains on other people’s’. Leopold wanted to acquire a slice of Africa for Belgium, a country no larger than Wales – and Stanley was just the man to help him achieve his objective. Hearing that Stanley was visiting Marseilles to attend a banquet in his honour, Leopold dispatched a pair of emissaries to meet the explorer. They told him that the King welcomed an opportunity for a meeting in Brussels to examine ways and means of gaining his co-operation on ‘a new African venture’. Stanley was flattered, but exhausted and depressed by Alice’s unfaithfulness. He replied: ‘I am so sick and weary. At present I cannot think of anything more than a long rest and sleep. Perhaps in six months time I shall see things differently.’ Stanley did not turn the Belgians down flat and the emissaries sensed that he was interested, information which they conveyed to their king.
Stanley threw himself into a punishing work schedule. He completed Through the Dark Continent, which he delivered to Sampson Low, Marston & Company in April for publication to critical acclaim two months later. When not writing, Stanley gave talks to Royal Geographical Society members and to a capacity audience at London’s St James’s Hall, at which Edward, Prince of Wales was guest of honour. He visited Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds where he spoke about the grand opportunity now available to Britain to build roads, railways and river stations from the mouth of the Congo to its source in the interior to promote trade. Stanley spoke of the region’s wealth in raw materials – copper, saltpetre, gold, palm oil, fibre for rope and paper, grasses for mats, nets and fishing lines, timber for shipbuilding and furniture. He likened the region to the Amazon and Mississippi and stressed that it was now open and ready to be claimed – and it should be Britain that must claim it, warning the country to act quickly or it would regret it.
There were no takers for the Congo to be found anywhere in the British Isles. Instead, humanitarian groups attacked Stanley’s account of his treatment of Africans, accusing him of murder and brutality towards natives. The brickbats had begun to fly before Stanley had returned to England and following hard on the publication of his dispatch describing the battle at Bumbireh Island. The Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society urged the government to censure Stanley for ‘his act of blind and ruthless vengeance’. They suggested he be taken back to Africa under a British flag and ‘hanged with impartial justice as other murderers are’. The government replied that it was powerless to do anything as Stanley was an American citizen. The New York Herald sneered at ‘those howling dervishes of civilization who, safe in London, dare attack American vigour and enterprise while Britain sits back and does nothing to further the cause of African exploration’.
Quietly, the Foreign Office instructed Dr Kirk in Zanzibar to mount his own investigation into Stanley’s conduct following complaints by a British missionary about murder, brutality, cruelty, plunder and the use of guns against ‘defenceless’ natives during the Anglo-American expedition. Kirk was delighted with the opportunity to discredit Stanley and pay him back for disparaging remarks made in articles penned during the search for Livingstone. He interviewed Wagwana who had travelled with the expedition ‘and from these men and from statements of others, I have been led to form the opinion that the doings of Mr. Stanley in this expedition were a disgrace to humanity and that his proceedings will prove one of the principal obstacles that future explorers and missionaries will have to meet when following his track’.
In documents now housed at the National Archive, Kirk accused Stanley of using women slaves for his personal concubines before passing them on to his men. He stated that Wagwana had informed him that during one attack on a native village, Frank Pocock had ‘seized and carried off’ a young native girl who had been ‘used by Pocock as his mistress’. The report added: ‘Soon after his death, she had a child of which it is said he was the father’, and that the girl was later given to his native detective, Kacheche, ‘who now lives in Zanzibar with the woman and Pocock’s half-caste child, which he is desirous to get rid of as Mr. Stanley left nothing out of Pocock’s wages for its maintenance’.
Kirk alleged that Stanley had kicked and beaten a man to death during the expedition and that ‘the chain gang was seldom empty on the march’. He concluded: ‘If the story of this expedition were known it would stand on the annals of African discovery unequalled for the reckless use of power that modern weapons placed in his hands over natives who never before had heard a gun fired.’
In his defence, Stanley included the following in his preface to Through the Dark Continent:
The rule of my conduct in Africa has not been understood by all, I know to my bitter cost; but with my conscience at ease and the simple record of my daily actions . . . to speak for me, this misunderstanding on the part of a few presents itself to me only as one more harsh experience of life. And those who read my book will know that I have indeed had a ‘sharp apprehension and keen intelligence’ of many such experiences.
Matters were not helped by graphic illustrations produced by John Shoenberg from Stanley’s own sketches for Through the Dark Continent which found their way into the Illustrated London News, showing Stanley firing at spear-wielding savages in their great canoe, some lying injured with gunshot wounds at the bottom of their boat. These and other ‘action’ pictures helped make the book a best-seller and establish Stanley’s reputation as a man not prepared to be overrun by savages.
A Belgian politician once said that the brain of Leopold II was so large ‘that one might wonder whether it didn’t usurp the place of the heart’. He was a king who surrounded himself with brilliant and trustworthy advisers, including those prepared to pave the way for Belgian colonisation of potentially rich parts of the globe which did not currently appear on any map. In 1876, just as Stanley was preparing for the final part of his Congo expedition, Leopold initiated an international conference in Brussels to examine the ‘propagation of civilisation among the peoples of the Congo region by means of scientific exploration, legal trade and war against Arabic slave traders’. It would explore ways and means of ‘healing the sore’ of Africa’s slave trade, building ‘scientific stations’ in strategic locations that could also be used to generate trade and seek ways of colonising the region with Europeans. With great understatement and considerable disingenuity, Leopold informed delegates that ‘the idea of a future partition of Africa underlies the scheme’ but that Belgium did ‘not aspire to the direction of it’ because ‘Belgium is small; it is happy in its lot; it nurses no other ambition than to serve humanity and civilisation in peril in the heart of Africa’.
The conference was attended by eminent geographers, scientists, diplomats, soldiers, engineers, officials and a handful of explorers. Its outcome was the creation of the Association Internationale Africaine, or AIA, under the presidency of Leopold II who led an international committee comprising delegates from eleven countries. It even had its own flag – and it was under the protection of this flag of convenience that the head of one of Europe’s smallest monarchies was able to begin creating a personal empire the size of Western Europe. The Belgian government had no part to play in the AIA’s affairs and Leopold was keen to distance the new organisation from his country’s politicians.
After six months spent in futile attempts to convince Disraeli’s Conservative administration and British business leaders of the commercial opportunities along the Congo, in the summer of 1878 Stanley visited Paris and Brussels for meetings with Leopold and his representatives. At the age of thirty-seven, Stanley had become disillusioned with journalism and the negative and damning press coverage he had received in Britain and the United States. Stanley was ready for new challenges. His New York Herald salary for the three years he had been away with the Anglo-American Expedition plus royalties from books and lectures were sufficient to keep him comfortable for life. He could have retired, but felt he still had more to offer – and if an ungrateful Britain did not care to listen to what he had to say about opening up Africa, then he would talk to someone who would.
By this time, Leopold had read Through the Dark Continent from cover to cover and told the ‘able and enterprising American’ that he had learned more about Africa from this book than from any other. As far as Leopold was concerned, no Belgian could achieve his personal aspirations for Africa. Only two men were equipped to win 800,000 square miles of the dark continent, 76 times the size of Belgium, for its ambitious monarch: Henry Morton Stanley and a 26-year-old French-Italian naval officer and explorer called Count Pietro Francois Camille Savorgnan de Brazza, who had also been following African rivers hoping to find the Congo. When Brazza returned to Europe at the same time as Stanley, he learned from Daily Telegraph articles that while following the course of a small river called the Alima, he had been less than five days away from reaching the Congo’s main artery.
De Brazza had secured some funding for his expedition from the AIA and was invited to Brussels by Leopold, decorated, kissed on both cheeks and asked hundreds of questions. But Brazza wanted to create an African empire for France, not Belgium, and politely refused to entertain ideas from another government – leaving Stanley as the only avenue left open to Leopold.
At an audience in Brussels, Stanley told the King that the Congo could only become a commercial proposition if a railway was built to link the river stations with the Atlantic port. To achieve this, agreements must be reached with tribal chiefs prepared to allow Europeans to exploit, mine and harvest their land ‘for scientific and technical’ purposes, build roads and plant farms – actions which would change for ever the way tribes had lived in riverside settlements for thousands of years. The river also needed to be exploited by steamers able to navigate their way along safer parts of the riverine system, particularly the upper section, which stretched for 1,250 miles before arriving at the cataracts, from where a tramway would be carved out of the jungle for the rest of its course.
In November 1878, a commercial syndicate was formed by ‘various persons of more or less note in the commercial and monetary world from England, Germany, France and Holland’, and, with a start-up capital of 1 million gold francs, was named the Comité d’Etudes de Haut-Congo (CEHC). Stanley was offered a contract to supervise construction of three river stations, launch a steamer on the Upper Congo and maintain communications with the sea. It looked simple on paper. In reality it would require all of Stanley’s energy and spirit to accomplish. A sum of $100,000 was allocated to equip the expedition and Stanley offered a salary of $5,000 a year, to be paid out of Leopold’s personal account. He immediately cabled his resignation to James Gordon Bennett in New York, who must have received it with relief, once again not knowing what to do with Stanley after his return from his latest African assignment.
Stanley would be taking orders directly from two people: Leopold and Colonel Maximilien Strauch, General Secretary of the AIA, a career soldier in the Belgian infantry who had been appointed the CEHC’s chief administrative officer. Strauch would be responsible for selecting Stanley’s European assistants – mostly Belgian military personnel – and be his principal point of contact for the next five and a half years.
Stanley was ordered to remain silent about the expedition. Leopold was concerned that foreign powers would object if they learned that Stanley was returning to the Congo, possibly to plant an American flag on African soil. Or they might draw their own conclusions if they heard he was employed by a king trying to acquire a large slice of Africa for his empire. There would definitely be no dispatches to the New York Herald or Daily Telegraph on this expedition.
When Stanley boarded the Zanzibar-bound steamer Albion under a veil of secrecy at Marseilles in January 1879, he knew that while the CEHC and the AIA might be international organisations, the sole object of his mission was to help win the Congo for Leopold II. He noted: ‘Now I am equipped by a foreign people to try and obtain the Congo for it [Belgium]. Well, so be it. We shall see what we can do. . . .’ A letter from Leopold later spelled out his expectations from Stanley: to ‘purchase for the Comité d’Etudes as much land as you will be able to obtain, and that you should place successfully under the suzerainty of the Comité as soon as possible and without losing one minute, all the chiefs from the mouth of the Congo to the Stanley Falls’. Strauch pointed out that the King had no intention of creating a new Belgian colony but rather
a new State, as large as possible, and running it. It is clearly understood that in this project there is no question of granting the slightest political power to Negroes. That would be absurd. The white men, heads of stations, retain all the powers. They are the absolute heads of stations made up of free and freed Negroes. Every station would regard itself as a little republic. Its head, the white man in control, would himself be responsible to the Director General of stations, who in turn would be responsible to the President of the Confederation [Leopold].
Stanley’s departure remained a secret and he crossed the Channel unnoticed before making his way to Marseilles. Because Stanley was accustomed to vanishing for years on end for his work as a reporter, his disappearance from Europe would go equally unnoticed. If anyone at the AIA enquired of his whereabouts, it was agreed they should be told he had accepted royal support for ‘a scientific and humanitarian undertaking, to be made public in the fullness of time’.
While the Albion nosed its way towards Zanzibar, the Belgian freighter Barga was taking on supplies and equipment for the mission at the port of Antwerp – a collection of paddle boats, wooden screw-propeller steam launches and a twin-screw steel steamer called respectively the Royal, Belgique, Esperance and the Jeune Afrique. Prefabricated buildings, tons of tools and food were loaded into the ship’s hold. The Barga slipped quietly out of Antwerp unannounced and under cover of darkness.
At Zanzibar Stanley recruited men who had travelled with him previously and then sailed with them through the Suez Canal and down Africa’s west coast to Banana Point near the mouth of the Congo, where they joined other Europeans on the CEHC payroll. Men recruited included sixty-eight Zanzibaris and Somalis, forty of whom had crossed Africa with Stanley two years before. Former slaves from the Lower Congo would be hired locally to reinforce numbers once the party arrived in West Africa. Despite Dr Kirk’s accusations that men working for the Anglo-American Expedition had been mistreated, Stanley encountered few problems hiring porters. Kirk and Stanley did not meet each other and people known to Stanley guessed he was passing through Zanzibar on his way to another adventure on the mainland. Questions were only asked when they learned that the boat carrying Stanley and his men out of Zanzibar was not bound for Bagamoyo, but a destination thousands of miles away on the other side of the continent. By then it was too late to get any answers.