III.

Correspondent-Explorer

Between 1869 and 1871 the Herald’s proprietor, James Gordon Bennett, sent Stanley to report on the opening of the Suez Canal in Egypt, then to Crimea, Persia, and India. His final assignment was to attempt to locate Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone, who had been out of touch for several years as he explored the lake region of Central Africa. This mission would make Stanley’s name. At the head of 2000 men, he set out eastward from Zanzibar toward Livingstone’s suspected whereabouts in March 1871. On the way Stanley ruthlessly crushed all opposition from Africans, a practice that he believed critical to his success but one which would taint his reputation. After eight months, on November 10, Stanley encountered the ailing Livingstone at Ujiji, a town on Lake Tanganyika, and supposedly greeted him with the famous remark, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Stanley resupplied Livingstone, nursed him back to health, and then accompanied him on an exploration of the northern end of Lake Tanganyika. Stanley’s book on these ventures, How I Found Livingstone (1872), was extremely popular in Britain. Following his return to Europe, the Herald sent Stanley to report on the British campaign against the Ashanti Kingdom in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1873. He wrote of this and his earlier Ethiopian episode in Coomassie and Magdala: Two British Campaigns (1874).

The New York Herald and London Daily Telegraph shared the cost of Stanley’s next venture, intended to answer geographical questions about Central Africa that remained after Livingstone’s death in 1873. This expedition, which lasted from October 1874 until August 1877, was one of the most difficult ever undertaken by a European explorer of Africa, yet it significantly advanced European understanding of the continent. Stanley left Zanzibar with a party of 359 and slowly made his way to Lake Victoria. He visited Kabaka (King) Mutesa of Buganda on the west side of the lake, an experience that prompted Stanley later to summon missionaries to bring Christianity to the kingdom. Stanley then circumnavigated the lake, becoming involved in several skirmishes with the inhabitants of the lakeshore. In these encounters Stanley again employed brutal methods of dealing with African resistance. In one such incident, Stanley responded to the defiance of a small island’s inhabitants with modern firepower, killing dozens and wounding many more.

After circumnavigating Lake Victoria Stanley went south, circumnavigated Lake Tanganyika, and headed west to the Lualaba River, a headstream of the Congo River that Livingstone had located. In what may have been his greatest feat of exploration, Stanley led his party down the length of the Lualaba and Congo rivers to the Atlantic Ocean, a distance of nearly 3000 km (about 2000 mi), through equatorial forests along uncharted waters. Along the way, the expedition suffered from disease, desertion, drowning, and attacks by Africans, including an ambush by thousands of cannibals. Of the 359 people who had accompanied him, only 108 reached the Atlantic. This adventure, which Stanley wrote about in Through the Dark Continent (1878), answered many of the major questions in European minds about Central African geography, including the size and drainage of Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika. The trip also revealed the existence of a navigable waterway, the Congo, reaching into a region of Central Africa that held commercial potential. This was information not lost on Belgian king Leopold II, who was eager to tap Africa’s wealth.