Henry Morton Stanley

Stanley settled down following this last venture. In 1890 he married Dorothy Tennant and through 1892 went on lecturing tours in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. On his return to England he became a British subject again (he had become a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1885), and in 1895 he won a seat in the British Parliament, a position he held until 1900. He made his last trip to Africa in 1897, visiting British holdings in southern Africa and writing Through South Africa (1898). Stanley was knighted by British monarch Queen Victoria in 1899.

If Stanley was among the most ruthless and driven of Europe’s African explorers, he also was among the most accomplished. Much of what the Western world came to know about Central Africa, including the drainage of its lakes and rivers, was derived from Stanley’s explorations. Moreover, he was one of the central figures in events leading to the Scramble for Africa. His call for the Christianizing of Africans and for the development of commerce with the interior echoed the call Livingstone had made a decade earlier and spurred on Europeans to settle African territory. When Stanley died in 1904 virtually all of Africa was in European hands.