September 23, 2017 • 27 mins
We're revisiting the story of Dr. Livingstone as told by previous hosts! In this episode, Deblina and Sarah recount the adventures of Livingstone and Henry Stanley, the journalist who found Livingstone in Africa.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello everybody. It is Saturday, which means we are bringing
another classic episode into your podcast feed. Up until now
we have stuck with episodes that were recorded during Hollies
in my time as hosts, but today we're going back
a little bit farther in the archive. Our latest new
episode of the show was on A Mean Pasha who
was air quotes rescued from Uganda by journalist and explorer
(00:25):
Stanley in the late nineteenth century. Prior hosts Deablina and
Sarah also talked about Stanley in their eleven episode Dr
Livingston I presume uh And this episode talks about Henry Stanley,
David Livingstone, and Stanley's mission to find Livingston in Central
Africa after he fell out of contact with the rest
of the world. So we thought listeners who haven't heard
(00:47):
this past episode might want to hear about a different
but connected part of Stanley's career in the years before
his expedition to relieve I Mean Pasha. One quick note,
listeners have asked us to give him a heads up.
There's gonna be cannibalism and there is so other than that.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from
(01:10):
How Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Blaine and Chuck Recording, and
today we're gonna start our podcast off with one of
the most famous lines in history. Probably heard it in movies,
TV shows, probably said it yourself. Here it goes Dr Livingstone.
(01:34):
I presume, yes, that's the line. Maybe you've even played
like Stanley and Livingston. I think I think I might
have done that when I was a kid. That was
just my first time doing it right there and really
my debut. How about that. We've got it on on tape.
So that line, originally before it was spoken by Dablino,
was spoken by Henry Morton Stanley to Dr David Livingstone
(01:57):
in one and that's in this Welsh turned American newspaperman
will explain that transformation. A little later found the famous
Scottish explorer in Africa. They were in this tiny town
called u g g which is now in Tanzania. And um,
it's actually just for a little reference. It might actually
(02:20):
help to pull up a map or something for this podcast,
but just to give you a little bit of a reference.
That's really near the National Park where Jane Goodall worked
But the really interesting thing about this quote that we
opened up with is that Stanley may have never really
said it in the first place. Livingston doesn't mention it,
and the page where it would have been in Stanley's
journal was actually ripped out, But the two men are
still forever linked by this by what he said. Yeah. Well,
(02:43):
and that's because finding Livingston alive after six years without
contact with the outside world made Stanley into a huge
journalist star, so famous that he was ultimately knighted, and
being found by Stanley in turn made Livingston even more
of a star than he already was. It kind of
created this myth of Livingston as the saintly missionary too,
(03:07):
especially when he refuses to leave Africa with Stanley and
go back home to England. Yeah, you really can't talk
about one of them without the other. No, So y'all
are in luck because this is going to be a
dual biography podcast, which happens once Intle Blue Moon. So
we'll go ahead and get started with a question. How
did Dr David Livingston find himself and Gigi in the
(03:28):
first place. Well, it was largely because of his difficult
Scottish upbringing and strict faith. He was born in eighteen
thirteen and he lived with six siblings in a single
room tenement, so really cramped space. Meager beginnings, and he
worked in a cotton mill at the age of ten,
so so a hard early life. But he's really interested
(03:50):
in bettering himself and pursuing an education, and in his
early twenties he became determined to become a missionary, and
so he started studying away. He worked on Greek and
medicine and theology while he was still working at the
mill part time, which I find pretty impressive. And by
thirty eight it really paid off and he was accepted
(04:10):
into the London Missionary Society. And his original intention was
to go be a missionary in China, but the Opium
Wars or the First Opium War was going on at
this time and it wasn't safe for him to go
to China, so instead he wound up in South Africa.
And he had a pretty adventurous life, to say the
least in South Africa. Yes he did. He explored and
(04:33):
traveled further north from South Africa than any other European
had before him. He was also mauled by a lion,
something that stuck with him for the rest of his life.
He had a crooked elbow and had to sight a
gun from the left. Yeah. Well, I would think even
if you didn't have a crooked elbow, that would still
stick with you for a while. From that, he also
won a gold medal from the British Royal Geographic Society
(04:54):
after leading an expedition that located lake Land Gani. But
his real hopes for his time in Africa were Christianity,
commerce and civilization. At least that's what he said. Yeah,
that was kind of his his line about what he
wanted to do while he was in Africa. And of
course now it seems pretty Victorian, narrow minded and kind
of silly to think that you, this one man from
(05:19):
Scotland can bring Christianity, commerce and civilization to an entire continent.
But what Livingstone was really hoping to do was to
open up the continent's interior and his his motive for
that was was admirable. It was to try to create
a trade route to the Atlantic that would undercut the
(05:39):
slave trade that was still going on, and it was
it was pretty bad, and he was very disturbed by
it and wanted to figure out some way to to
combat it. Yeah, and if he converted some folks along
the way, more the better. He that was something else
that he wanted to do, but it wasn't. Yeah, I know,
very good at that, very good at it at all.
(06:01):
And according to Stanley and Livingston biographer Tim ChIL, Livingstone
really only made one convert. This was truly amazing, and
the convert lapsed later, so very unsuccessful in that respect.
It's kind of amazing too when you hear that figure,
which I think just emerged in the nineteen seventies, because
(06:22):
Livingston does have such a reputation as this amazingly successful
missionary and explorer. But anyways, even if his missionary work
didn't prove to be that successful, his explorations definitely made
him a famous and he was especially famous in the
eighteen fifties, which is after he explored the Zambezi region
(06:43):
and named Victoria falls Um there was Queen Victoria again
like popping up in so many episodes. And after he
got back to London from that exploration, he published missionary
Travels and Researches in South Africa and sold seventy thousand
cops bees. And I mean this is he was a
little bit famous before this, but this made him into
(07:05):
a superstar explorer, somebody who would be mobbed on the
streets of London. Yeah. But his next expedition was much
less successful, right, Yeah, Yeah, his wife actually died, his
crew quarreled, and he was recalled in eighteen sixty three
because not much came out of it. I mean, I
think some scientific efforts came out of it, but not
(07:26):
much besides that. Yeah, I mean, folks were afraid that
he died if he stayed out there any longer. Yeah,
So it left him in a really bad spot. He
was getting older and he was pretty weathered from his
earlier travels. As you mentioned the lion lion maulling, lion
mauling injuries. Um, we're still hanging around and causing him problems,
and he needed to in illness. You're right, but he
(07:47):
also needed cash one last great adventure, so maybe one
last great adventure would do it and a best seller,
maybe out of vent Feller. So that's what he's hoping
to do. And so in eighteen sixty four, Sir Roderick Murchison,
who was the head of the Royal Geographic Society at
the time, asked Livingstone, who was his old buddy to
to go out on that one last, one last track
(08:10):
and try to find the source of the nile. So
trying to find the nile was apparently an old Explorers game,
one that had been going on for a very long time,
perhaps starting with Herodotus in four sixty b C. But
it had been in the news a lot at this time,
you know, in the past few years, because as recently
(08:30):
as eighteen fifty eight, the explorer Richard Burton another strange
name that doesn't quite fit in that time, had challenged
his old buddy John speak Um, who had claimed that
he had found the River's head at a lake that
he named Victoria. So these two old friends were going
to have basically a an explorer talk off or something,
(08:54):
you know, like some sort of match. I think it
was built as a gladiatorial match actually, Um and they
were going to debate the claims at the Royal Geographic Society.
But unfortunately speak turned up dead the day before from
a self inflicted gunshot wound Um, perhaps just overcome by
the stress of this debate. So this was something that
(09:18):
was on people's minds, clearly, trying to find the source
of the nile. It sounds a little old fashioned now,
but it was a big deal, yeah, and Livingston wasn't
one to back down from a challenge. He accepted and
he left August eight, sixty five and fully expected to
come back in two years time. But his expedition got
off to a bad start right from the beginning. As
(09:39):
we mentioned, his health was not good. He had to
take these roundabout ways to get where he was trying
to go, and he ended up getting deserted by some
of his followers, who after they deserted him, they cooked
up the story that he was in fact dead, so
they were afraid they'd get in troubles that I just said, Oh,
Livingston died back on the the trail, So there's this
(10:02):
rumor now that he is dead, and even though word
gets out within a year that he actually is still alive.
He's really lucky to be so because another deserter stole
his medical chest. He decided to keep going. And I mean, meanwhile,
he was pressing further and further into the interior of
the continent and really didn't have any safety nets in
(10:23):
place at all. So by July eight he was really
just too weak to go on by himself, so he
joins up with some Arab traders, which is a moral
dilemma for him because, as we mentioned before, he so
opposed the slave trade. But they helped keep him alive,
(10:45):
and they helped him get to Lake Tanganika in February
eighteen sixty nine. Yeah, and from there he finally makes
it to Niangue, which is located on the Lualaba River,
which is today in Western Democrat a Republic of Congo.
And at this point it was further west than any
European have traveled. And just to give you a little
(11:07):
idea of how isolated it is, it's about one thousand
miles from the Atlantic Ocean and about one thousand miles
from the Indian Ocean, and so way way out there. Okay,
But there's one little catch about hanging out with these
slave traders from Persia and Arabia and Oman. They know
that Livingstone is anti slavery and that their current work
(11:29):
isn't very popular around the world. So they are willing
to take care of him, to give him food and shelter,
and to essentially save his life. I mean, he would
have been out of luck out here on his own.
But they won't let him send any letters home because
then everybody will know from famous Livingstone exactly where they are,
exactly how far in they've gotten to the interior. So
(11:52):
that's why Livingstone, even though he is live and semi well,
is lost to the world. So in eighteen sixty nine,
the young journalist Henry Stanley, now we're on his story
a little bit, he pitches an idea to his editor,
James Gordon Bennett Jr. Of the New York Herald, and
he proposes that he go to Africa, find Livingstone, dead
(12:15):
or alive, and write about it. Yeah, and it'll be
the biggest story of the year. So Bennett agrees to this,
seeing its merits, and Stanley is off on his most
famous adventure. But he had a pretty wildlife up to
that point. He was well prepaired for future wild time. Yeah.
In fact, his name isn't even really Henry Stanley. Yeah.
(12:35):
He was born at John Rowlands in eighteen forty one
in Wales to Elizabeth Perry, who I saw described in
different sources as a housemaid or in one case the prostitute,
and John Rowlands, who was likely the town drunk. So
he was raised by unwilling relatives, you know, this illegitimate
(12:56):
child and spent some time in the workhouse, and it
must have been a difficult childhood for him, and um,
it must have been pretty tumultuous moving around. But it
might not be quite as Dickensian as he made it
out to be. We're gonna learn over the course of
Stanley's life that he is prone to exaggerating things or
(13:16):
just outright telling lies. Um, the workhouse was was probably
not quite as brutal, But at age fifteen he decided
to leave it nevertheless, and he hops on board a
ship bound for New Orleans and ends up taking the
name of this cotton merchant named Henry Hope Stanley. And
this is one of the weirdest parts of the story
(13:37):
in my opinion, again because of later sketchiness from Stanley
from the the News Stanley, we're not quite sure what
their relationship was, because he makes it out to be
like the elder Stanley, Henry Hope Stanley was a father figure,
you know, somebody who pretty much adopted him and helped
him get on his feet. And um, he took his
name sort of as um an homage to him. But
(14:01):
he might have not even known him, or not known
him well at least Yeah, he could have been a
total stranger, right. So this newly made Stanley sets out, however,
to Americanize himself. From this point, he picks up an accent.
He joins a Confederate regiment from Arkansas called the Dixie Grays,
and he fights at Shiloh. He is then captured imprisoned
(14:22):
at Fort Douglas and he switches side. So he switches
to the Union Army. He's given the option to either
stay in prison or switched to the Union, and you know,
what the heck because he's a Welshman anyway. So then
he deserts, however, and he heads back to Wales for
a little while. Yeah, And it's interesting because he doesn't
just stay in Wales. I think he's rebuffed by his
(14:44):
mother again. Um. He comes back to the United States
and he spent some time gold prospecting out west, and
then he becomes a journalist and he reports from places
like Turkey, Iowa, and Ethiopia. Know, Iowa doesn't sound quite
as exotic in that list that at the time, definitely, So, yeah,
(15:04):
there were good stories to be told out there. Yeah,
so just this kind of wild roving life. It reminded
me a little bit of um. An earlier podcast we
did on the Stars of the wild West. They all
have these lives where they're just all over the world,
crazy things happening. He certainly seems to attract adventure, yeah,
and at this point he's ready for a new one
(15:25):
and for fame as well. So that's why he approaches
Bennett with the story to find Livingstone. So he gets
his assignment. But after just three months in the African interior,
Stanley is down forty pounds, and he's sick with malaria
and dysenterry, and he's having trouble with his travel companions.
His thoroughbred stallion dies almost immediately. One human travel companion
(15:49):
dies of encephalitis. Another tries to shoot Stanley and then
dies a little bit later. And on his way to Tabora,
which was this big Arab trap aiding town in the interior,
so imagine a place with mansions and um very built up,
Stanley writes his first dispatch to the newspaper. He hadn't
(16:10):
really written much along the way, and he explains himself
in this five thousand word letter saying, essentially, I've been
using all of my strength to stay alive on the trail.
I haven't really had time to write. I hope I'll
be able to write more later if you, gentle readers
will be willing to hear it. But he does give
(16:31):
um kind of an ultimatum about finding livingstone. He does.
He says, until I hear more of livingstone or see
the absent old man face to face, I bid you farewell.
But wherever he is, be sure I shall not give
up the chase. If alive, you shall hear what he
has to say. If dead, I will find him and
bring his bones to you. I thought that was pretty
dramatic to not just say bring back his bones, bring
(16:53):
his bones to you the reader, the subscriber of this
New York newspaper, pretty wild. So he is hanging out
into Bora, not hanging out, you know, recovering, getting his
supplies together. But he's gotten word that a white man
has been spotted in Ugigi, which is only two miles
(17:14):
away or so, so that's where he's going to head.
There are a few roadblocks, like tribal wars actually blocking
the charted route, so he's gotta beat this new path
through the north. And the other issue is that he's
suffering from cerebral malaria, and having visions and delusions, and
(17:35):
once he recovers from that, miraculously does not die from it.
He catches smallpox, so pretty sickly himself, certainly surprisingly sickly
to go out looking for this other man. So Stanley
is not doing so hot. Meanwhile, in Nionggue, Livingstone's little
(17:58):
rest breaking comes to an end after some of the
traders massacre villagers, so he's out of paper. All this
craziness is going on, He's out of ink. He's writing
on scraps with root dye, but he basically has no help,
so he flees the situation, but he gets sick again
as he does that. He has dysentery and swollen feet.
(18:21):
He heads to Eugigi, about four hundred five hundred miles away,
so quite the hike for someone who's very ill, definitely,
but he's hoping that when he gets to the consulate
they'll have sent supplies. But when he gets there there's
not anything, yes, so he is out of luck. He's
in Eugiji, which is pretty isolated again, and his options
(18:42):
are essentially to die of starvation and sickness or to
become a beggar on the streets. So he is mulling
over this, this terrible fallen fortunes. And meanwhile Stanley is
pushing through his cerebral malaria and his smallpox, and he
gets about halfway to Eugigi through the uncharted territory, and
(19:05):
by November one, eight seventy one, he finally gets to
the Mala Garassi River, where this is so sad. A
crocodile eats his donkey. So, I mean his stallion's already died.
Is that a guy shoot at him and now a
crocodile eats his donkey? Yeah? I feel like you could
almost write a country song about this. It might have
(19:25):
to be an alligator, right. But by November ten, he
enters Eugigi with American flags waving. According to Livingston, however,
it was actually some time between October, but somewhere in
that month time. I think we can forgive them for
getting a little off on their count. Oh yeah, but
you know, Livingston sees this American caravan entering the city
(19:48):
and thinks that this must be some really rich traveler,
and I wonder what they're doing here. And when he
sees Stanley all clad in white flannel with a hat,
you know, I mean, he looks exact lee how you'd
picture a cartoon explorer or something. He thinks that Stanley
is so proper looking that he must be French despite
(20:08):
the American flags, and he actually writes something later that's
that's kind of funny. Essentially, he thinks, I can't speak French,
and how ridiculous is it going to be if we
run into each other and we can't communicate. Fortunately, though
Stanley is this nouveaux American and speaks English, and they
have their famous conversation Dr Livingstone, I presume yes, I
(20:34):
thank god, doctor, I've been permitted to see you. I
feel thankful I'm here to welcome you. So troubling with emotion.
Quite a solemn conversation. Actually, I looked up a YouTube
video of the old movie, and that's exactly how it
goes down, except I guess they have different inflections on
their words. Still pretty pretty low key, though, you think
(20:57):
they'd be maybe really excited to see each other at last, Yeah,
especially after everything they had gone through to find each other.
But regardless, even though their first meeting may have been underwhelming,
they do become very good friends. Stanley deliver supplies to Livingston,
and Livingston takes Stanley on some exploring trips around the area. Yeah,
they go tour the lake and they actually go out
(21:18):
exploring together for about a month, with Stanley sort of
picking up tricks from the the old Explorer. And by
the time that they're back to E. G G again,
Stanley still can't persuade Livingston to come back to England.
And it's it's kind of interesting. Stanley's original plan was
to go confirm Livingstone's status alive or dead, and then
(21:41):
immediately head back to somewhere where he could send off
his newspaper report. It's interesting that he took the time
to stall and to try to persuade Livingston to come
back with him. But Livingston wants to keep searching for
the Nile source. I mean, he is obsessed with that goal,
and so they part ways. Livingstone is helped out by Stanley,
(22:02):
you know, Stanley gets some some supplies and men to
go along with him, and when they part Livingstone tells
him you have done what few men could do, and
I am grateful, and so that's the end of Livingston. Essentially.
He dies May one, eighteen seventy three, and his heart
is buried in Africa and his body is mummified and
(22:24):
returned to England where it's buried in Westminster Abbey. Yeah,
and Stanley heads out. He gets his scoop on May second,
eighteen seventy two. The headline reads Livingstone Safe and like
we said earlier, I think they run this story for
about a year. They really milk everything they can out
of it. But that famous quote, we've got to address
that because it's pretty unclear if Stanley ever even said it. Yeah,
(22:50):
he swore that he said it. He mentioned it in
two dispatches, but it's not in his journal. Those pages
are torn out. So yeah, so it's possible that by
the time he got back from Africa, got the quote,
which had gone ahead of him, was way too big
of a deal for him to back out of. In
any way, we don't know if he said it or not.
It's a pretty well thought out thing to say it is,
(23:12):
And even if it remains a mystery, I don't think
it takes away from the adventure. That just makes a
good account. Definitely. Um So, Stanley, regardless of whether he
said the quote, became incredibly famous, and after Livingston died,
he himself decided to search for the Nile source sort
of picking up this this old friend's quest and his
(23:35):
accounts um really entranced the public his his accounts of
his later explorations, but they scandalized the Royal Geographic Society
because he resorts to violence and brutality with native people.
He um has, he shoots people. He hangs several of
his quarters, I think three of them throughout his career
(23:57):
for deserting and um, that's not something that an explorer
was supposed to do. I mean, clearly, But the Royal
Geographic Society doesn't think so either. It's it's a different
kind of man. It's not the explorer who comes and
observes and um take something home. However, a lot of
people think that Stanley may have actually exaggerated this right,
(24:19):
I mean a lot of the violence and the casualties
of his expositions, he might have just been sort of
inflating them to impress his Victorian readers because he wanted
to put a good story out there. She is also
disturbing to that Victorian readers wanted as many murders as possible.
But he was a boaster and it is really hard
to tell with his life what was fact and what
(24:39):
was fiction. But his reputation definitely got worse when he
assisted King Leopold the Second of Belgium in establishing trading
posts at the Congo River, so essentially opening up Congo
all the way up to Stanley Falls and um Stanley Falls,
of course, is a spot that was later called the
(25:00):
Interstation by Joseph Conrad. If any of you have read
Heart of Darkness, you know what kind of atrocities occurred
in the Belgian Congo. It's possibly a subject for a
very sad podcast, very deeply disturbing podcast of the Fitch
requested before. But just this association with King Leopold the
Second in the Belgium Congo really has forever tainted Stanley's name.
(25:25):
I mean, he's probably best associated with Livingstone. But this
comes in next. He was also damaged by his third
and last African expedition in the late eighteen eighties, and
this was due mainly to the behavior of his rear column.
The man who was left in charge was killed and
most famously Whiskey Air James Jamison bought an eleven year
old girl, sold her to cannibals and watched as she
(25:47):
was killed and eaten, and he drew it. That was
the point of it that he could document the whole
thing very disturbing and obviously that's even a little too
much for these Victorian readers who like his much blood
and violence as possible. And um, when he comes back
to England, he goes through a career change essentially, he
(26:07):
gets married, he adopted a son, and he was re
naturalized as a British citizen and goes on to become
an MP of all things. Um, he has a country state.
I mean, it's just this such a strange life, you know,
going from a workhouse to Africa to a country estate.
But I don't know, I guess that's Henry Stanley for you. Yeah,
(26:31):
very strange ending to kind of a bizarre adventurous life. Yeah, definitely. So,
I mean that's our dual biography. One guy ends up
in a country estate, one guy ends up with his
heart buried in Africa and his mummified body in Westminster.
App Hey, since these episodes that we're sharing on our
(26:58):
past classics have some updated information that will supersede the
contact stuff you've heard before. If you want to email us,
our email address is History Podcast at how Stuff Works
dot com and you can find us across the spectrum
of social media as Missed in History. You can also
find us at Missed in History dot com, and you
can visit our parent company house to Works at how
(27:19):
stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Does it How staff works dot com
Hello everybody. It is Saturday, which means we are bringing
another classic episode into your podcast feed. Up until now
we have stuck with episodes that were recorded during Hollies
in my time as hosts, but today we're going back
a little bit farther in the archive. Our latest new
episode of the show was on A Mean Pasha who
was air quotes rescued from Uganda by journalist and explorer
(00:25):
Stanley in the late nineteenth century. Prior hosts Deablina and
Sarah also talked about Stanley in their eleven episode Dr
Livingston I presume uh And this episode talks about Henry Stanley,
David Livingstone, and Stanley's mission to find Livingston in Central
Africa after he fell out of contact with the rest
of the world. So we thought listeners who haven't heard
(00:47):
this past episode might want to hear about a different
but connected part of Stanley's career in the years before
his expedition to relieve I Mean Pasha. One quick note,
listeners have asked us to give him a heads up.
There's gonna be cannibalism and there is so other than that.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from
(01:10):
How Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Blaine and Chuck Recording, and
today we're gonna start our podcast off with one of
the most famous lines in history. Probably heard it in movies,
TV shows, probably said it yourself. Here it goes Dr Livingstone.
(01:34):
I presume, yes, that's the line. Maybe you've even played
like Stanley and Livingston. I think I think I might
have done that when I was a kid. That was
just my first time doing it right there and really
my debut. How about that. We've got it on on tape.
So that line, originally before it was spoken by Dablino,
was spoken by Henry Morton Stanley to Dr David Livingstone
(01:57):
in one and that's in this Welsh turned American newspaperman
will explain that transformation. A little later found the famous
Scottish explorer in Africa. They were in this tiny town
called u g g which is now in Tanzania. And um,
it's actually just for a little reference. It might actually
(02:20):
help to pull up a map or something for this podcast,
but just to give you a little bit of a reference.
That's really near the National Park where Jane Goodall worked
But the really interesting thing about this quote that we
opened up with is that Stanley may have never really
said it in the first place. Livingston doesn't mention it,
and the page where it would have been in Stanley's
journal was actually ripped out, But the two men are
still forever linked by this by what he said. Yeah. Well,
(02:43):
and that's because finding Livingston alive after six years without
contact with the outside world made Stanley into a huge
journalist star, so famous that he was ultimately knighted, and
being found by Stanley in turn made Livingston even more
of a star than he already was. It kind of
created this myth of Livingston as the saintly missionary too,
(03:07):
especially when he refuses to leave Africa with Stanley and
go back home to England. Yeah, you really can't talk
about one of them without the other. No, So y'all
are in luck because this is going to be a
dual biography podcast, which happens once Intle Blue Moon. So
we'll go ahead and get started with a question. How
did Dr David Livingston find himself and Gigi in the
(03:28):
first place. Well, it was largely because of his difficult
Scottish upbringing and strict faith. He was born in eighteen
thirteen and he lived with six siblings in a single
room tenement, so really cramped space. Meager beginnings, and he
worked in a cotton mill at the age of ten,
so so a hard early life. But he's really interested
(03:50):
in bettering himself and pursuing an education, and in his
early twenties he became determined to become a missionary, and
so he started studying away. He worked on Greek and
medicine and theology while he was still working at the
mill part time, which I find pretty impressive. And by
thirty eight it really paid off and he was accepted
(04:10):
into the London Missionary Society. And his original intention was
to go be a missionary in China, but the Opium
Wars or the First Opium War was going on at
this time and it wasn't safe for him to go
to China, so instead he wound up in South Africa.
And he had a pretty adventurous life, to say the
least in South Africa. Yes he did. He explored and
(04:33):
traveled further north from South Africa than any other European
had before him. He was also mauled by a lion,
something that stuck with him for the rest of his life.
He had a crooked elbow and had to sight a
gun from the left. Yeah. Well, I would think even
if you didn't have a crooked elbow, that would still
stick with you for a while. From that, he also
won a gold medal from the British Royal Geographic Society
(04:54):
after leading an expedition that located lake Land Gani. But
his real hopes for his time in Africa were Christianity,
commerce and civilization. At least that's what he said. Yeah,
that was kind of his his line about what he
wanted to do while he was in Africa. And of
course now it seems pretty Victorian, narrow minded and kind
of silly to think that you, this one man from
(05:19):
Scotland can bring Christianity, commerce and civilization to an entire continent.
But what Livingstone was really hoping to do was to
open up the continent's interior and his his motive for
that was was admirable. It was to try to create
a trade route to the Atlantic that would undercut the
(05:39):
slave trade that was still going on, and it was
it was pretty bad, and he was very disturbed by
it and wanted to figure out some way to to
combat it. Yeah, and if he converted some folks along
the way, more the better. He that was something else
that he wanted to do, but it wasn't. Yeah, I know,
very good at that, very good at it at all.
(06:01):
And according to Stanley and Livingston biographer Tim ChIL, Livingstone
really only made one convert. This was truly amazing, and
the convert lapsed later, so very unsuccessful in that respect.
It's kind of amazing too when you hear that figure,
which I think just emerged in the nineteen seventies, because
(06:22):
Livingston does have such a reputation as this amazingly successful
missionary and explorer. But anyways, even if his missionary work
didn't prove to be that successful, his explorations definitely made
him a famous and he was especially famous in the
eighteen fifties, which is after he explored the Zambezi region
(06:43):
and named Victoria falls Um there was Queen Victoria again
like popping up in so many episodes. And after he
got back to London from that exploration, he published missionary
Travels and Researches in South Africa and sold seventy thousand
cops bees. And I mean this is he was a
little bit famous before this, but this made him into
(07:05):
a superstar explorer, somebody who would be mobbed on the
streets of London. Yeah. But his next expedition was much
less successful, right, Yeah, Yeah, his wife actually died, his
crew quarreled, and he was recalled in eighteen sixty three
because not much came out of it. I mean, I
think some scientific efforts came out of it, but not
(07:26):
much besides that. Yeah, I mean, folks were afraid that
he died if he stayed out there any longer. Yeah,
So it left him in a really bad spot. He
was getting older and he was pretty weathered from his
earlier travels. As you mentioned the lion lion maulling, lion
mauling injuries. Um, we're still hanging around and causing him problems,
and he needed to in illness. You're right, but he
(07:47):
also needed cash one last great adventure, so maybe one
last great adventure would do it and a best seller,
maybe out of vent Feller. So that's what he's hoping
to do. And so in eighteen sixty four, Sir Roderick Murchison,
who was the head of the Royal Geographic Society at
the time, asked Livingstone, who was his old buddy to
to go out on that one last, one last track
(08:10):
and try to find the source of the nile. So
trying to find the nile was apparently an old Explorers game,
one that had been going on for a very long time,
perhaps starting with Herodotus in four sixty b C. But
it had been in the news a lot at this time,
you know, in the past few years, because as recently
(08:30):
as eighteen fifty eight, the explorer Richard Burton another strange
name that doesn't quite fit in that time, had challenged
his old buddy John speak Um, who had claimed that
he had found the River's head at a lake that
he named Victoria. So these two old friends were going
to have basically a an explorer talk off or something,
(08:54):
you know, like some sort of match. I think it
was built as a gladiatorial match actually, Um and they
were going to debate the claims at the Royal Geographic Society.
But unfortunately speak turned up dead the day before from
a self inflicted gunshot wound Um, perhaps just overcome by
the stress of this debate. So this was something that
(09:18):
was on people's minds, clearly, trying to find the source
of the nile. It sounds a little old fashioned now,
but it was a big deal, yeah, and Livingston wasn't
one to back down from a challenge. He accepted and
he left August eight, sixty five and fully expected to
come back in two years time. But his expedition got
off to a bad start right from the beginning. As
(09:39):
we mentioned, his health was not good. He had to
take these roundabout ways to get where he was trying
to go, and he ended up getting deserted by some
of his followers, who after they deserted him, they cooked
up the story that he was in fact dead, so
they were afraid they'd get in troubles that I just said, Oh,
Livingston died back on the the trail, So there's this
(10:02):
rumor now that he is dead, and even though word
gets out within a year that he actually is still alive.
He's really lucky to be so because another deserter stole
his medical chest. He decided to keep going. And I mean, meanwhile,
he was pressing further and further into the interior of
the continent and really didn't have any safety nets in
(10:23):
place at all. So by July eight he was really
just too weak to go on by himself, so he
joins up with some Arab traders, which is a moral
dilemma for him because, as we mentioned before, he so
opposed the slave trade. But they helped keep him alive,
(10:45):
and they helped him get to Lake Tanganika in February
eighteen sixty nine. Yeah, and from there he finally makes
it to Niangue, which is located on the Lualaba River,
which is today in Western Democrat a Republic of Congo.
And at this point it was further west than any
European have traveled. And just to give you a little
(11:07):
idea of how isolated it is, it's about one thousand
miles from the Atlantic Ocean and about one thousand miles
from the Indian Ocean, and so way way out there. Okay,
But there's one little catch about hanging out with these
slave traders from Persia and Arabia and Oman. They know
that Livingstone is anti slavery and that their current work
(11:29):
isn't very popular around the world. So they are willing
to take care of him, to give him food and shelter,
and to essentially save his life. I mean, he would
have been out of luck out here on his own.
But they won't let him send any letters home because
then everybody will know from famous Livingstone exactly where they are,
exactly how far in they've gotten to the interior. So
(11:52):
that's why Livingstone, even though he is live and semi well,
is lost to the world. So in eighteen sixty nine,
the young journalist Henry Stanley, now we're on his story
a little bit, he pitches an idea to his editor,
James Gordon Bennett Jr. Of the New York Herald, and
he proposes that he go to Africa, find Livingstone, dead
(12:15):
or alive, and write about it. Yeah, and it'll be
the biggest story of the year. So Bennett agrees to this,
seeing its merits, and Stanley is off on his most
famous adventure. But he had a pretty wildlife up to
that point. He was well prepaired for future wild time. Yeah.
In fact, his name isn't even really Henry Stanley. Yeah.
(12:35):
He was born at John Rowlands in eighteen forty one
in Wales to Elizabeth Perry, who I saw described in
different sources as a housemaid or in one case the prostitute,
and John Rowlands, who was likely the town drunk. So
he was raised by unwilling relatives, you know, this illegitimate
(12:56):
child and spent some time in the workhouse, and it
must have been a difficult childhood for him, and um,
it must have been pretty tumultuous moving around. But it
might not be quite as Dickensian as he made it
out to be. We're gonna learn over the course of
Stanley's life that he is prone to exaggerating things or
(13:16):
just outright telling lies. Um, the workhouse was was probably
not quite as brutal, But at age fifteen he decided
to leave it nevertheless, and he hops on board a
ship bound for New Orleans and ends up taking the
name of this cotton merchant named Henry Hope Stanley. And
this is one of the weirdest parts of the story
(13:37):
in my opinion, again because of later sketchiness from Stanley
from the the News Stanley, we're not quite sure what
their relationship was, because he makes it out to be
like the elder Stanley, Henry Hope Stanley was a father figure,
you know, somebody who pretty much adopted him and helped
him get on his feet. And um, he took his
name sort of as um an homage to him. But
(14:01):
he might have not even known him, or not known
him well at least Yeah, he could have been a
total stranger, right. So this newly made Stanley sets out, however,
to Americanize himself. From this point, he picks up an accent.
He joins a Confederate regiment from Arkansas called the Dixie Grays,
and he fights at Shiloh. He is then captured imprisoned
(14:22):
at Fort Douglas and he switches side. So he switches
to the Union Army. He's given the option to either
stay in prison or switched to the Union, and you know,
what the heck because he's a Welshman anyway. So then
he deserts, however, and he heads back to Wales for
a little while. Yeah, And it's interesting because he doesn't
just stay in Wales. I think he's rebuffed by his
(14:44):
mother again. Um. He comes back to the United States
and he spent some time gold prospecting out west, and
then he becomes a journalist and he reports from places
like Turkey, Iowa, and Ethiopia. Know, Iowa doesn't sound quite
as exotic in that list that at the time, definitely, So, yeah,
(15:04):
there were good stories to be told out there. Yeah,
so just this kind of wild roving life. It reminded
me a little bit of um. An earlier podcast we
did on the Stars of the wild West. They all
have these lives where they're just all over the world,
crazy things happening. He certainly seems to attract adventure, yeah,
and at this point he's ready for a new one
(15:25):
and for fame as well. So that's why he approaches
Bennett with the story to find Livingstone. So he gets
his assignment. But after just three months in the African interior,
Stanley is down forty pounds, and he's sick with malaria
and dysenterry, and he's having trouble with his travel companions.
His thoroughbred stallion dies almost immediately. One human travel companion
(15:49):
dies of encephalitis. Another tries to shoot Stanley and then
dies a little bit later. And on his way to Tabora,
which was this big Arab trap aiding town in the interior,
so imagine a place with mansions and um very built up,
Stanley writes his first dispatch to the newspaper. He hadn't
(16:10):
really written much along the way, and he explains himself
in this five thousand word letter saying, essentially, I've been
using all of my strength to stay alive on the trail.
I haven't really had time to write. I hope I'll
be able to write more later if you, gentle readers
will be willing to hear it. But he does give
(16:31):
um kind of an ultimatum about finding livingstone. He does.
He says, until I hear more of livingstone or see
the absent old man face to face, I bid you farewell.
But wherever he is, be sure I shall not give
up the chase. If alive, you shall hear what he
has to say. If dead, I will find him and
bring his bones to you. I thought that was pretty
dramatic to not just say bring back his bones, bring
(16:53):
his bones to you the reader, the subscriber of this
New York newspaper, pretty wild. So he is hanging out
into Bora, not hanging out, you know, recovering, getting his
supplies together. But he's gotten word that a white man
has been spotted in Ugigi, which is only two miles
(17:14):
away or so, so that's where he's going to head.
There are a few roadblocks, like tribal wars actually blocking
the charted route, so he's gotta beat this new path
through the north. And the other issue is that he's
suffering from cerebral malaria, and having visions and delusions, and
(17:35):
once he recovers from that, miraculously does not die from it.
He catches smallpox, so pretty sickly himself, certainly surprisingly sickly
to go out looking for this other man. So Stanley
is not doing so hot. Meanwhile, in Nionggue, Livingstone's little
(17:58):
rest breaking comes to an end after some of the
traders massacre villagers, so he's out of paper. All this
craziness is going on, He's out of ink. He's writing
on scraps with root dye, but he basically has no help,
so he flees the situation, but he gets sick again
as he does that. He has dysentery and swollen feet.
(18:21):
He heads to Eugigi, about four hundred five hundred miles away,
so quite the hike for someone who's very ill, definitely,
but he's hoping that when he gets to the consulate
they'll have sent supplies. But when he gets there there's
not anything, yes, so he is out of luck. He's
in Eugiji, which is pretty isolated again, and his options
(18:42):
are essentially to die of starvation and sickness or to
become a beggar on the streets. So he is mulling
over this, this terrible fallen fortunes. And meanwhile Stanley is
pushing through his cerebral malaria and his smallpox, and he
gets about halfway to Eugigi through the uncharted territory, and
(19:05):
by November one, eight seventy one, he finally gets to
the Mala Garassi River, where this is so sad. A
crocodile eats his donkey. So, I mean his stallion's already died.
Is that a guy shoot at him and now a
crocodile eats his donkey? Yeah? I feel like you could
almost write a country song about this. It might have
(19:25):
to be an alligator, right. But by November ten, he
enters Eugigi with American flags waving. According to Livingston, however,
it was actually some time between October, but somewhere in
that month time. I think we can forgive them for
getting a little off on their count. Oh yeah, but
you know, Livingston sees this American caravan entering the city
(19:48):
and thinks that this must be some really rich traveler,
and I wonder what they're doing here. And when he
sees Stanley all clad in white flannel with a hat,
you know, I mean, he looks exact lee how you'd
picture a cartoon explorer or something. He thinks that Stanley
is so proper looking that he must be French despite
(20:08):
the American flags, and he actually writes something later that's
that's kind of funny. Essentially, he thinks, I can't speak French,
and how ridiculous is it going to be if we
run into each other and we can't communicate. Fortunately, though
Stanley is this nouveaux American and speaks English, and they
have their famous conversation Dr Livingstone, I presume yes, I
(20:34):
thank god, doctor, I've been permitted to see you. I
feel thankful I'm here to welcome you. So troubling with emotion.
Quite a solemn conversation. Actually, I looked up a YouTube
video of the old movie, and that's exactly how it
goes down, except I guess they have different inflections on
their words. Still pretty pretty low key, though, you think
(20:57):
they'd be maybe really excited to see each other at last, Yeah,
especially after everything they had gone through to find each other.
But regardless, even though their first meeting may have been underwhelming,
they do become very good friends. Stanley deliver supplies to Livingston,
and Livingston takes Stanley on some exploring trips around the area. Yeah,
they go tour the lake and they actually go out
(21:18):
exploring together for about a month, with Stanley sort of
picking up tricks from the the old Explorer. And by
the time that they're back to E. G G again,
Stanley still can't persuade Livingston to come back to England.
And it's it's kind of interesting. Stanley's original plan was
to go confirm Livingstone's status alive or dead, and then
(21:41):
immediately head back to somewhere where he could send off
his newspaper report. It's interesting that he took the time
to stall and to try to persuade Livingston to come
back with him. But Livingston wants to keep searching for
the Nile source. I mean, he is obsessed with that goal,
and so they part ways. Livingstone is helped out by Stanley,
(22:02):
you know, Stanley gets some some supplies and men to
go along with him, and when they part Livingstone tells
him you have done what few men could do, and
I am grateful, and so that's the end of Livingston. Essentially.
He dies May one, eighteen seventy three, and his heart
is buried in Africa and his body is mummified and
(22:24):
returned to England where it's buried in Westminster Abbey. Yeah,
and Stanley heads out. He gets his scoop on May second,
eighteen seventy two. The headline reads Livingstone Safe and like
we said earlier, I think they run this story for
about a year. They really milk everything they can out
of it. But that famous quote, we've got to address
that because it's pretty unclear if Stanley ever even said it. Yeah,
(22:50):
he swore that he said it. He mentioned it in
two dispatches, but it's not in his journal. Those pages
are torn out. So yeah, so it's possible that by
the time he got back from Africa, got the quote,
which had gone ahead of him, was way too big
of a deal for him to back out of. In
any way, we don't know if he said it or not.
It's a pretty well thought out thing to say it is,
(23:12):
And even if it remains a mystery, I don't think
it takes away from the adventure. That just makes a
good account. Definitely. Um So, Stanley, regardless of whether he
said the quote, became incredibly famous, and after Livingston died,
he himself decided to search for the Nile source sort
of picking up this this old friend's quest and his
(23:35):
accounts um really entranced the public his his accounts of
his later explorations, but they scandalized the Royal Geographic Society
because he resorts to violence and brutality with native people.
He um has, he shoots people. He hangs several of
his quarters, I think three of them throughout his career
(23:57):
for deserting and um, that's not something that an explorer
was supposed to do. I mean, clearly, But the Royal
Geographic Society doesn't think so either. It's it's a different
kind of man. It's not the explorer who comes and
observes and um take something home. However, a lot of
people think that Stanley may have actually exaggerated this right,
(24:19):
I mean a lot of the violence and the casualties
of his expositions, he might have just been sort of
inflating them to impress his Victorian readers because he wanted
to put a good story out there. She is also
disturbing to that Victorian readers wanted as many murders as possible.
But he was a boaster and it is really hard
to tell with his life what was fact and what
(24:39):
was fiction. But his reputation definitely got worse when he
assisted King Leopold the Second of Belgium in establishing trading
posts at the Congo River, so essentially opening up Congo
all the way up to Stanley Falls and um Stanley Falls,
of course, is a spot that was later called the
(25:00):
Interstation by Joseph Conrad. If any of you have read
Heart of Darkness, you know what kind of atrocities occurred
in the Belgian Congo. It's possibly a subject for a
very sad podcast, very deeply disturbing podcast of the Fitch
requested before. But just this association with King Leopold the
Second in the Belgium Congo really has forever tainted Stanley's name.
(25:25):
I mean, he's probably best associated with Livingstone. But this
comes in next. He was also damaged by his third
and last African expedition in the late eighteen eighties, and
this was due mainly to the behavior of his rear column.
The man who was left in charge was killed and
most famously Whiskey Air James Jamison bought an eleven year
old girl, sold her to cannibals and watched as she
(25:47):
was killed and eaten, and he drew it. That was
the point of it that he could document the whole
thing very disturbing and obviously that's even a little too
much for these Victorian readers who like his much blood
and violence as possible. And um, when he comes back
to England, he goes through a career change essentially, he
(26:07):
gets married, he adopted a son, and he was re
naturalized as a British citizen and goes on to become
an MP of all things. Um, he has a country state.
I mean, it's just this such a strange life, you know,
going from a workhouse to Africa to a country estate.
But I don't know, I guess that's Henry Stanley for you. Yeah,
(26:31):
very strange ending to kind of a bizarre adventurous life. Yeah, definitely. So,
I mean that's our dual biography. One guy ends up
in a country estate, one guy ends up with his
heart buried in Africa and his mummified body in Westminster.
App Hey, since these episodes that we're sharing on our
(26:58):
past classics have some updated information that will supersede the
contact stuff you've heard before. If you want to email us,
our email address is History Podcast at how Stuff Works
dot com and you can find us across the spectrum
of social media as Missed in History. You can also
find us at Missed in History dot com, and you
can visit our parent company house to Works at how
(27:19):
stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands
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