In this compelling biography of Henry Morton Stanley, Tim Jeal has set himself the task of rescuing Stanley's long-tarnished reputation. The explorer was a controversial figure in his own time; the success of his three expeditions in Africa made him a hero to Britain and the Western world at the same time that his self-reported acts of violence earned him widespread condemnation. The revelation that the Congo Free State, which he had helped found and for which he had lobbied for years, was one of the most brutal and extractive enterprises in colonial Africa further damned him in the eyes of many contemporaries, as well as most biographers and future scholars.
Jeal's goal, thus, was not an easy one, but he had one distinct advantage: unprecedented access to the Stanley family papers housed at the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale in Tervuren, Belgium. The collection was closely guarded by the Stanley family until 1982, when part was sold to the museum. The rest of the papers followed in 2000, but none were made open to scholars until museum officials invited Jeal—who has written two other popular biographies, including one of Dr. Livingstone—to examine the material in 2002. Jeal's study is therefore significant if for no other reason than that of the insight it offers into the material in this collection. Jeal's footnotes will likely be of particular interest to scholars of African exploration and the Congo, but the range of official and personal correspondence on which he drew suggests that this archive will prove valuable to a number of fields.
The most fascinating argument Jeal presents is that Stanley invented or exaggerated several of the incidents for which he would later be pilloried. By comparing Stanley's papers and diaries to his published works, Jeal concluded that Stanley overstated the number of men who both deserted and were killed during his quest to find the source of the Nile (162, 178–79, 217). He also appears to have fabricated at least one instance of flogging a woman (144). Jeal explains Stanley's disconcerting prevarications in terms of his unfortunate childhood. Born illegitimate and with the name John Rowlands, the man who would later name himself Henry M. Stanley was repeatedly rejected by his mother and consigned between the ages of five and fifteen to a workhouse. This difficult background made Stanley highly sensitive to rejection or insults, desperate for approval, and envious of the casual manners of the upper classes. That these traits would have led Stanley to invent scenarios that he believed would appeal to Victorians’ interest in adventure and depict him as master of the situation is certainly possible, but should that fact serve to clear his reputation? He was a popular hero for many in this period, and his literary embellishments supported the brutality of others and encouraged people to view violence in Africa as necessary and acceptable. Still, Jeal's revelations offer a fascinating commentary on the mentality that pervaded late Victorian society, when a man might believe, even if falsely, that brutal, careless violence would be a credit to his name.
It was from Stanley's third and final major expedition that the most serious claims against him would emerge. Jeal estimates that seven hundred people died during this three-year tragic farce (382). Stanley's mission was to rescue the Emin Pasha, a provincial governor of Egypt, from the armies of the Mahdi, but his ill-judged preference for, and King Leopold's insistence on, traveling to Lake Albert via the Congo rather than the east coast condemned the party to delay, starvation, and attacks from local people who assumed they were slave traders. The sadistic cruelty of the two officers whom Stanley left in charge of the Rear Column also damned the entire party by association—and particularly Stanley for hiring them. Among these men's crimes were murder, rape, and the purchase of a slave girl to watch her be killed and eaten by cannibals. The expedition's violence led metropolitan observers to question the legitimacy and value of exploration in Africa, particularly when it was done without the sanction of a government. Jeal agrees with these conclusions but strives to direct responsibility away from Stanley by highlighting the contingencies that guided Stanley's decisions and noting his efforts and concern for the African men he hired.
As might be expected, in his effort to exonerate Stanley, Jeal makes a number of controversial claims, but his tendency to privilege sources that paint Stanley in a positive light over those that do not mutes the force of his arguments and raises some troubling implications. One wishes, for instance, that Jeal had explored the accusation made by a friend of Stanley's that Stanley had flogged him sadistically during their trip to Turkey (59). On a similar note, Jeal passes quickly over claims that Stanley was a hypocrite, using and instructing his officers to employ corporal punishment but then critiquing them for brutality when they followed his orders (326). On a more critical note, Jeal ignores a set of serious allegations made by Africans to an American missionary regarding Stanley's actions in the Congo, refuting only one of the claims in a footnote (525).
These are the criticisms common, however, to popular and strongly revisionist histories. Jeal makes a number of very convincing arguments, such as when he uses one of two original treaties Stanley made in the Congo to argue that far from tricking local sovereigns out of their lands, Stanley sought to preserve their political authority while establishing rights of access, development, and trade for the Congo Free State. Stanley also emerges in this biography as a man committed to ending the slave trade in Africa, but in the extractive world of colonialism, his misguided philanthropy, naïveté, and minor character flaws would ultimately take a high toll in terms of human life and suffering.
