HENRY M. STANLEY
Stanley was the most self-contained man imaginable, when he chose to
be. And when he chose to be otherwise, his anger was terrific. He had
a hard face and steely-cold grey eyes. Neither eyes nor face revealed
what he felt, if he wished to conceal feeling. I have seen him quite
unmoved, rock-like, when, after an African expedition, he met devoted
friends, or faced a cheering multitude, or drove his way through an
angry mob. All was one to him if he had to get anything, or go
anywhere, or do anything. None the less he felt, and his feelings were
deep, but he held them in the closest grip. But when his temper blazed
you wanted to call out the engines. He could not tolerate blunderers
and fools; he had no patience with reformers, nor with sentimentalists;
and very little with Emin Pasha, whom he came to regard as possessing
the "mushy" qualities. Perhaps I should say that he had a great deal
of patience with Emin Pasha in view of the fact that Emin, while
willing to be found, did not wish to be "rescued", and so Stanley had
his aches and pains and hardships for his trouble. It is possible to
sympathise with him.
Stanley returned to London in April, 1890, after {206} the Emin
Expedition. There were crowds to greet him in the streets, and a big
crowd at the railway station. I went, with an old friend of his, to
meet him at the train. We had special cards to the platform at which
the train would arrive, and were fortunate enough to secure places at
the point where Stanley's saloon carriage stopped. There were about
five hundred holders of similar cards, I should think, and among them
the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, who was a very old friend of Stanley.
When the train pulled in, the privileged five hundred broke ranks with
a rush and a roar and a waving of hats and handkerchiefs. The crowd
beyond the platform barriers took up the cheering. As everybody on the
platform knew the Baroness by sight, a path to Stanley was promptly
cleared for her, and immediately the explorer advanced and shook hands
with the kindly old lady. But he did not smile. He was as grim as a
statue. He lifted his hat two or three times to the crowd, but he
scarcely looked at it. He seemed in no way elated or touched by the
popular greeting, but I suppose he was touched.
As soon as he saw the Baroness, he removed his hat, carrying it in his
left hand, and stepping forward quickly, held out his right. But he
did not speak; nor did she. Her kind old face quivered a little, and
there were tears in her eyes. Perhaps if she had spoken, she would
have shown too much emotion. Stanley, I thought, realised this, and
was silent. But he kept the old lady's hand in his and shook it a
little every instant or so, while he looked out over the mass of faces
beyond. When he recognised {207} any one standing near him, he nodded,
but said never a word; he would look again at the venerable lady, and
give her hand another little shake, and then, when all was ready, he
gave her his arm and escorted her to her carriage, her husband
following. The three entered the carriage, and Stanley stood up,
bareheaded, and bowed to the cheering crowd. But never a word spoke he.
Out of the station they drove amid a din of cheering, but still he
maintained his silence. One of them told me afterwards that he was
silent until they reached their door in Stratton Street, Piccadilly.
All the way the crowds cheered. Sometimes, when the roar was unusually
loud, he would lift his hat. Then, when the spectators saw that his
close-cut hair had turned white, they would double their cheers. I
don't know what men think about when they experience such moments. I
have asked many who have had them. They seemed to think that they were
gratified, or puzzled, or stunned. I can imagine Stanley asking
himself: "When can I get out of this?" But his face might have been
the face of a graven image,--say a Sphinx from the sands of North
Africa.
The next time I saw him in public was at St. James' Hall, about a week
later, when he addressed an audience invited by the Emin Pasha Relief
Committee. It was a ribboned and jewelled audience; it was composed of
royalties, nobilities, famous commoners and fighting men, diplomats who
sparkled and bishops who did not, men of letters, men of science and
art, not to mention their radiant ladies, {208} an audience which
literally shone, for the affair was an "occasion." The Prince of Wales
(afterward King Edward VII) presided; his Princess and the present King
sat in the front row. If I were to give a list of "among those
present" it would exhaust pages of "Debrett" and "Who's Who", to say
nothing of my own pages. The Emin Pasha Relief Committee had done the
thing handsomely, as well they might, for this was Stanley's first
public appearance since his return from the expedition of which the
world babbled long. It was all in the day's work for him. He never
turned a hair. He was in command of that audience, he told it what he
wished to tell it, quietly, resolutely, and his words went home. They
would have thought he addressed such audiences every night. But he had
spoken in circumstances far more difficult.
At the proper moment he took his manuscript in hand and walked to the
edge of the platform. When the audience had finished its applauding
welcome, he looked about for a reading desk, or a table, on which he
might put his papers. He seemed puzzled, and I daresay he was, that
the committee of the occasion had not provided something of the kind.
The Prince of Wales was quick to perceive his need, and picking up a
small table that stood in front of his own chair, he carried it to
Stanley and placed it in front of him. Then the explorer smiled,
bowed, and thanked the Prince, and, turning to his audience, he fitted
a pair of gold-bowed spectacles before his eyes and plunged at once
into his address.
{209}
He told simply, directly, without oratorical flourishes, but as a
courageous man to whom dangers were familiar, the story of that awful
march into the heart of Africa. It was a famous march then. The world
has since forgotten it, I daresay, having had, for years, its fill of
deadly suffering. But it is worth remembering as a tale of heroism,
and I am able to repeat here some of the passages which I preserved at
the time. Stairs, and Parke, and Jephson, and Nelson, the surviving
officers of his expedition, were with him on the platform.
The little religion that our Zanzibaris knew, said Stanley, was nothing
more than legendary lore, and in their memories floated dimly a story
of a land that grew darker and darker as you travelled toward the end
of the world, and drew nearer to the place where a great serpent lay
supine, coiled round the whole earth. And the ancients must have
referred to this, where the light is so ghastly, where the woods are
endless, and are so still and solemn and grey, to this oppressive
loneliness amid so much life, this loneliness so chilling to the heart!
And the horror grows darker with their fancies, the cold of early
morning, the comfortless grey of the dawn, the dead white mist, the
ever-dripping tears of the dew, the deluging rains, the appalling
thunder-bursts. When night comes with its thick, palpable darkness,
our Zanzibaris lie cuddled in their little damp huts, they hear the
tempest, the growling of the winds, the grinding of the storm-tossed
trees, the fall of granite, the shock of the trembling earth, the
roaring and rushing as of a mad, overwhelming sea--and then the horror
is intensified.
It may be, next morning when they hear the shrill sounds of the
whistle, and the officers' voices ring {210} out in the dawn, and the
blare of the trumpet stirs them to preparation and action, that the
morbid thoughts of the night, and the memories of the terrible dreams,
will be effaced for a time. But when the march has begun once again,
and the files are slowly moving through the woods, they renew their
morbid broodings and ask themselves: "How long is it to last?"
They disappear into the woods by twos and threes and sixes, and, after
the caravan has passed, return to the trail, some to reach Yambruja,
and upset the young officers with their tales of woe, some to stray in
the dark mazes of the forest, hopelessly lost, some to be carved for
the cannibal feast.
Those who remain, committed by fears of greater danger, mechanically
march on, the prey to dread and weakness, the scratch of a thorn, the
puncture of a pointed cane, the bite of an ant, the sting of a wasp.
The smallest thing serves to start an ulcer, which becomes virulent and
eats its way to the bone, and the man dies.
That self-contained man had been the leader in that march of death.
Weeks, months, years of such fighting he had known, fighting not man
but nature, a foe he could not strike in return. Sometimes man and his
weaknesses aided the enemy, jolly black, or surly black fellows packed
with superstitious fears. The voice of the demagogue was loud in
England in those days, but not so loud as it is in these days. Stanley
had been criticised harshly for his "treatment of the natives"; they
were "our black brothers" and all the rest of it; he had even been
criticised for making expeditions at all, since "only by black labour
could expeditions go forward. What is there in it for the blacks?"
There {211} were other mushy-minded objections similar to those
employed by pacifists in these days. He had his own way of hitting
back at the mollycoddles. They had been asking what he got out of the
bold adventure. That is always the way. He turned to Stairs and
Parke, Jephson and Nelson, and said quietly to his audience:
These men were volunteers. What did they "get out of it", save the
dangers they sought, the sport which perhaps they found, such
contribution to general and special knowledge as they might make, and
their consciousness of duty performed? They are English gentlemen.
Two of them are officers in the British Army. Mr. Jephson paid a
thousand pounds for the privilege of accompanying the expedition.
Captain Nelson left a comfortable home and the luxuries of civilised
life for the sole purpose of joining in the rescue of one of Gordon's
governors, whom the great soldier's untimely fate had left in a
perilous position in the extreme south of the Soudan. These volunteers
pledged themselves to be loyal and devoted, and I must confess,
assuming that I am a sufficient judge, being naturally jealous of
anything that is not downright and real, that they have redeemed their
pledge in the noblest and completest manner.
Darkest Africa has been to them a fiery furnace, a crucible, and a
question chamber, which they have tried, each of them to the very
depths of their natures. They have borne every trial to which they
have been subjected with more than Spartan, with old-English fortitude,
the fortitude that existed before mawkishness and mock sentiment had
made men maudlin. It is for you who hear me now to do your part toward
recognising the merits of these young gentlemen, or causing them to be
recognised {212} by those who have the power to dispense awards
appropriate to noble and thorough and uncalculating performance of duty.
The gossips used to say, as if they took a peculiar pleasure in saying
it, that Stanley did not recognise loyalty in others. But if the
remarks just quoted were not recognition, and handsome recognition,
given, as they were, before the most influential audience that could
have been assembled in London, I do not know what recognition could
possibly be.
Of all my memories of Stanley, the most amusing relates to the
"American Dinner" given in London in his honour. It was not so amusing
at the time, because that was a time of mishap and muddle. Apart from
the fact that the name of America should be associated, not allied as
Mr. Wilson would insist, with a mismanagement which seemed especially
determined to prove false the tradition that Americans have a natural
and trained capacity for getting things done, the thing was a roaring
farce. There was a "Committee", of course, but the Committee had
nothing to do with the arrangements. There were forty "Honorary
Stewards", but I can vouch for the fact that the honorary stewards had
nothing to do with the arrangements. I was one of the forty. The
ebullient zeal of one man who undertook to do everything, and who
welcomed the responsibility, because he was a friend of Stanley, was
responsible for the general wreckage of the elaborate plans which
promised a dinner of ceremony and resulted in an informal collation. I
have always supposed that the kindly gentleman who undertook the whole
{213} thing, and who was really one of the best fellows going, must
have paid a good share of the cost of this entertainment to his friend
Stanley, and insisted, therefore, upon having his own way, or the
members of the Committee must have shirked their duties, which is n't
likely, considering who they were.
Well, here was an American dinner to Stanley. There were sixteen
speeches, save the mark! And eleven of the speakers were Englishmen.
There must have been at least three hundred and fifty men at the
dinner, and fully one half of them, possibly more, were not Americans.
Not an American dish was served, and the caterers, whoever they were,
did not serve the first course until an hour and a half, or something
like that, after the dinner should have begun.
There was no one to receive the company. The chairman was there, but
most of the guests arrived before he did. There was no reception
committee. The honorary stewards had no badges or other marks to
distinguish them from anybody else, and no searcher for a guide or for
information knew who they were. There was no table plan, no list of
guests. Nobody knew where he was to sit, or who would be his
neighbours. We heard that the printer's forms had collapsed into
horrible "pi" just at the point of going to press. Although, as an
"honorary steward", I arrived a quarter of an hour before the time
announced, I could find on the premises none of my companion
honoraries, nor was any list of them available. I was talking with two
{214} or three arrivals when a familiar voice behind me asked: "Are we
alone in Africa?"
"It looks like it, Mr. Stanley," said I. "I can't find the huts, or
the bones of the feast, or the chief of the tribe. But you have come
to the rescue, as usual."
Stanley looked amused. "Where's our friend ----? Have you seen him?"
he asked.
I explained what I had heard about the dear fellow's dilemmas, and the
little that I understood of them.
"Then we 'll have to work our passage," Stanley said. "Will it be all
right if I stand here? I 'll have to meet everybody, I suppose. They
won't fear I 'll bite 'em, will they, if there 's no manager to keep me
tied up?"
And so it was to Stanley's good sense and his willingness to enter into
the spirit of the thing that the affair got under weigh. But it was a
long time in arriving anywhere. I saw Whistler put his head in at the
door. I went after him and introduced him to Stanley. "I say," said
Whistler to me, "are you stewarding? I 'm a steward, too. It's all
stew, is n't it? But I don't know what to do, do you? Is there
anything to eat?"
"Not yet," said I.
"B-r-r-r-r-h! What's that?" It sounded like a crash of china in an
adjoining room.
"The end of all things, I should think," said Stanley. "I say, there's
the Duke! No Committee? Well, I 'll receive him."
"The Duke" was the Duke of Teck, the father {215} of the present Queen.
In a minute he was followed by another Duke, Sutherland. And there
were Stanley's chief officers, who were to share with him the honours
of the evening. And very soon the rooms were filled. But nobody in
authority appeared, or if appearing, no authority was exercised. For
an hour and a half everybody stood about, accumulating hunger and
getting very tired. And there was no one to say what was to be done,
or when, or how.
At last somebody cried: "Gentlemen, dinner is served. This way,
please, and sit where you like!"
We all cheered at this.
And so the royalties, and the guests of honour, and the orators of the
evening followed the hungriest men who were nearest the doors, walked
rapidly into the dining room, and took the first seats they could find.
The affair had become a picnic. But there was a meal. That was the
important thing. After famishing so long, we had a dinner of sorts.
But there were sixteen speeches to follow! This fact we learned from
the souvenir albums which we found at our plates. In the course of
time the speeches began.
One of them issued, poured, from a New York lawyer who stood in a far
corner, waving his arms and displaying vast expanses of shirt-cuff. He
spread-eagled, he made the eagle scream, he Gods-countried till you
could hear the corn grow. Nothing could stop him. He ran on till he
ran down. And then the Grenadier Guards Band, Dan Godfrey {216}
conducting, struck up the "Star Spangled Banner." That was another
relief.
The American dinner to Stanley was given in the Portman Rooms in Baker
Street. The Portman Rooms had formerly housed Madame Tussaud's
Waxworks. Perhaps the hall in which we dined had been the Chamber of
Horrors. I suspect it. At any rate, there was a general air of
wonderment as to what might happen next. We would have liked the
affair more if the Committee, or the Manager of All Things, had given
less of his useful attention to souvenir albums and elaborate trophies,
and more attention to the details of the evening. Some one had
designed a large, costly, and elaborate silver shield, on which were to
be depicted events in Stanley's career. It was to be presented with a
flourish of trumpets, that is to say, a speech by the Consul-General.
But the shield was unfinished, although on the spot, and some of the
flourishes had to be omitted. If the table plans were omitted,
somebody had managed to get up a list of guests, at the last minute.
But that was incomplete, too. In that dim English way which robs men
of their first names and puts them down with a single initial, even
Cumberland, the mind reader, who was present, could not have guessed,
without seeing him, that "H. Hunt" was Holman-Hunt, and not Helen, or
Henry; that "H. White" was Henry White, the secretary of our Legation,
and later Ambassador at Rome and Paris, still later the unabashed
deliverer of a pro-German speech, and in the Wilsonic course of events,
a member of the American Delegation {217} to the "Peace Conference" of
1918-1919. But so many names were disguised by the poverty of labour
which denied them all connection with their owners that I must now deny
them space on this page. I remember that "B. Harte" was Bret Harte,
that "E. Gosse" meant Edmund Gosse, and I remember that "Prof. John S.
Hopkins of Gilman University", as he appeared in the newspapers of the
following morning, was really Professor Gilman of Johns Hopkins
University. To this day the Briton persists in printing the name of
that university "John S. Hopkins."
We wished to hear the speeches of Stanley and his officers, or, say,
the remarks these gentlemen might make. Not a button did any one care
for the other speeches, and the less we cared, the more they lapsed
into oratory. We knew that Stanley and his men would give us plain
talk over our cigars, and that is what they did. Some of Stanley's
talk that night I can quote from a report that was made at the time.
Did I give the date? It was May 30, 1890.
On a wintry afternoon, in 1867, just twenty-three years ago, I started
from America for Africa, at the imperial command of one of the
dollar-powers of America. I was as ignorant as a babe of the land I
was going to. As I look back upon my stock of resources I am not
unmindful that none could be poorer in what was fitting and necessary,
but I possessed some natural store of good will, fondness for work, and
a wholesome respect for the boss, the employer--the paying power. I
learned down south what they mean by the saying "Root hog, {218} or
die!" They mean if you don't work, you shan't eat. It's another form
of the scriptural saying: "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy
bread." In the America of my time they understood that.
In Abyssinia I acquired several lessons from English journalists, the
most important being what chaff is, and the second--that black trousers
in the daytime are not suitable. I learned, also, to distinguish good
soldiers from bad, what kind of men made the best officers.... It
takes longer to know an Englishman than to know any other Christian, or
any pagan, that I ever came across. He does n't walk up to you, as the
Yankee does, and pester you with questions about your private business
and your conjugal experiences. He looks at you as if he did not care
whether you lived or died, starved or rotted. Yet if you do him a
little service, he is so grateful that he will remember it. Not
effusive, like a Frenchman, nor gushing like a German, he does not
regard you superciliously, as a Madrileno would, or look upon you as
legitimate prey, as is the custom of the Greeks; but he has the knack
of assuming a profound indifference to your existence.
I was sent to Spain to study Spanish war and politics. I discovered a
defect, and I doubt greatly whether the Spanish leaders have yet become
conscious of that defect. They could not execute the laws. They
lacked the courage to do so. Therefore, the Republic, which could be
sustained only by justice, was impossible.
It was necessary for me to wander further afield, to view cities and
men, great works, great assemblies, many countries--Greece, Egypt,
Palestine, Turkey, Russia, Persia, India, and then, after being well
seasoned with experience, I entered Africa as a leader of men.
According to the rules I was not {219} ripe, judging by what I now know
and what less I knew then. I was still young and very rash,
headstrong, I relied too much on force. Fortunately fate was
propitious, I was not prematurely cut off.
Marching eighteen hundred miles into Africa, I had time to think. It
was reflection I needed. Yet I was a dull pupil, and my blood was like
molten lava. I must admit that while with Livingstone I saw no good in
the lands I travelled through. The negro was precisely what he ought
to be--a born pagan, a most unloving and unlovable savage.
Nevertheless, much of what Livingstone expounded was unanswerable. I
attempted to parry what he said by lavish abuse of the natives and
their country.
In 1873 I was back again in Africa, on the opposite side of Africa, and
after the brief Ashantee campaign, returned with a few more experiences.
The beginning of my real African education was in 1875 while sailing
along the shores of the greatest lake in Africa. It came like a
revelation to me.
Now I have shown you what a dull, slow, student I was. You can well
understand how lightly the abuse and chaff of my brother journalists
sit on my mind. For there were even duller and slower folk than I. It
is not one lecture, or one speech, or even a hundred, that will suffice
to infuse a knowledge of the value of Africa into the English mind. It
took ten years for people to believe thoroughly that I did find
Livingstone!
Only a few days ago one of the most prominent men in England said: "I
do not know what you have been doing lately in Africa, Mr. Stanley, but
if you are to lecture I will gladly go to hear you." And so I say that
although in this assembly we may know what is going on in Africa, we
must not suppose that the British public, or the journalism which is
its reflection, is any wiser to-day than in the time of Mungo Park.
{220}
Rather neat scoring, I think. The world does not change much.
Stanley married and went into Parliament. One day I thought it might
be interesting to see him try conclusions with an election crowd in
London. He was contesting on the Surrey side of the river. I think it
was in Lambeth. He got a new experience. The crowd heckled him, and
tried to shout him down, just for the mere joy of living. But they
could n't silence him. While they bellowed, he would stand calmly and
look at them. After some minutes of this kind of thing, he managed to
be heard.
"Is this my meeting or yours?" he asked. They were quite certain the
meeting was their own. The interruptions were numerous. I was
thinking what he would do with a mutinous lot in Darkest Africa, and
presently he told them that the savages compared pretty favourably with
"their white brothers in London"! The crowd yelled, but they couldn't
disconcert him. He finished his speech; cut it short, no doubt, but
did n't appear to do so. Only the persons near him could hear what he
said, there was so much noise. As he left the meeting, the gentle
souls began to throw things. I saw them trying to overturn his
carriage. His wife was in it!
Stones flew. But Stanley lived to fight again. Knowing him, I think I
know how angry he really was.
"But," said he when we met again, "I longed for a few seconds of
Africa! My education is n't completed yet. I am learning about
British {221} electioneering crowds. When they shout: 'Fair play, fair
play', they mean 'Fair play for our side.' Come now, that's a fact."
It is unnecessary that I should incriminate myself.
I never could see what satisfaction Stanley got from being a member of
Parliament. In his heart he would have been glad, once or twice, to
lead them all, Government and Opposition and their followers, into an
African jungle--and lose them.
I see I have not mentioned that he became Sir Henry. But I knew him as
Mr.
{222}