Stanley meets Livingstone at Ujiji

A reporter is rarely sent eight months overland through the East African interior on the unverified assumption that a missionary who has not been heard from in six years is still alive somewhere on the rim of a lake the cartographic departments of London-and-New-York have only the vaguest map-position for. The New York Herald sent Henry Morton Stanley on exactly that brief in the spring of 1871. He found the missionary on the shore at Ujiji on the morning of the tenth of November. The four-word question he is recorded as having asked at the moment of recognition has been the central single line of nineteenth-century English-language journalism ever since.

THE DENBIGHSHIRE WORKHOUSE

Henry Morton Stanley was born John Rowlands in the small market town of Denbigh in north-east Wales on the twenty-eighth of January 1841, illegitimate son of Elizabeth Parry, a Denbigh slaughterhouse-worker's daughter, and (by his maternal grandmother's account, never legally confirmed) John Rowlands of Llys, a Denbigh farmer who had abandoned Elizabeth before the birth. He was raised by his grandfather Moses Parry until Moses's death in 1846, was placed at five with his uncles at Castle Square in Denbigh until the uncles refused to continue the support in 1847, and was put into the St Asaph Union Workhouse at six in February 1847. He remained at the Workhouse for the next nine years.

He left the Workhouse at fifteen in May 1856, took a junior pupil-teacher position at the Mold National School in Flintshire, worked across the next two years at small clerical positions in Liverpool, and in December 1858 in his eighteenth year took the cabin-boy position on the Windermere, a New Orleans-bound packet boat. He jumped ship at New Orleans in February 1859, took the famous shop-clerk position with the New Orleans cotton-broker Henry Hope Stanley, was effectively adopted by the cotton-broker (who had no children) under the assumed name Henry Morton Stanley (the Henry from the broker, the Morton at random, the Stanley as the formal adoption-name), worked across the next two years at the cotton-broker's New Orleans office, and on the broker's death in 1861 was thrown back on his own resources at twenty.

He enlisted in the Confederate States Army at twenty in the first months of the American Civil War, was captured by Union forces at the Battle of Shiloh on the seventh of April 1862, was held at the Camp Douglas prisoner-of-war camp at Chicago, was offered the choice between the Camp Douglas mortality-rate and enlistment in the Union Army, took the Union enlistment in June 1862 (the standard choice for the captured Confederate prisoners of the period), was discharged from the Union Army within a month on medical grounds (dysentery and acute fever), and worked his way back across the Atlantic on a series of cabin-boy positions to arrive at Liverpool in late 1862. He spent the next two years in Britain and on commercial-shipping postings, returned to the United States in 1864, served as a junior-and-then-senior staff-rank in the Union Navy from 1864 to the close of the war, and on demobilisation in August 1865 took the position of staff-reporter on the Missouri Democrat at Saint Louis at twenty-four.

THE NEW YORK HERALD

He moved across to the New York Herald in 1867 in his twenty-seventh year on the strength of his Missouri Democrat field-reports from the post-war Plains Indian campaigns under General Hancock. The Herald sent him through 1867 to 1869 to cover the British expedition to Abyssinia under Sir Robert Napier (the famous Napier-of-Magdala campaign that ended in the storming of the Magdala fortress and the death of Emperor Tewodros II), the Cretan insurrection against the Ottomans, and the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869. He had become by late 1869 the leading single international-and-colonial correspondent of the American press.

James Gordon Bennett Junior, the Herald's proprietor, sent for Stanley at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre at Paris on the seventeenth of October 1869 with the brief that has been universally remembered ever since. Bennett asked Stanley over the dinner at the hotel: where do you think Livingstone is? Stanley replied that nobody knew. Bennett said: I want you to go and find him. The brief was unlimited in budget (Bennett's standing-instruction was draw a thousand pounds at any bank for the expedition; if you need more, draw more), open in timeline, and singular in objective: find Livingstone, alive or dead, and report back to the Herald with the story.

THE ZANZIBAR EXPEDITION

Stanley took fifteen months to prepare the expedition: the travel to Zanzibar via Bombay, the recruitment of the porter caravan, the assembly of the trading-goods (the standard East African mid-nineteenth-century commodities of beads, copper wire and trade-cloth that were the medium-of-exchange across the East African interior), and the recruitment of the askari armed-guard contingent under the standing Zanzibar Royal Guard arrangements. He departed Zanzibar with the full expedition on the twenty-first of March 1871: approximately two hundred porters, twenty-seven askari guards, six tons of trading-goods, and two horses-and-thirty-mules. The route ran west from the Bagamoyo port across the East African plateau by the standard slave-trade caravan-route through Mpwapwa, Ugogo, Unyamwezi, and the Tabora trading-centre to the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika at the small Arab slave-trading-and-coastal-merchant town of Ujiji.

The expedition took eight months across the dry season of 1871. Stanley contracted malaria in the second month, smallpox in the fourth month, dysentery in the sixth month. He survived three desertion crises (the porter contingent attempted to abandon the expedition at Mpwapwa, at Ugogo and at the Tabora-Ujiji caravan-fork), one armed engagement with the Mirambo war-band that was disrupting the central caravan-route through the Unyamwezi country, and an extended four-month delay at the Tabora trading-centre on the strength of the Mirambo war and the need to reorganise the porter contingent. He arrived at the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika in the first week of November 1871 with approximately a hundred and twenty surviving porters, eight askari, the two surviving mules (the horses had died in the first month), and the small Herald-Bennett expedition flag he had carried at the head of the column across the eight months.

THE TENTH OF NOVEMBER

Ujiji in November 1871 was the central Arab slave-trade-and-coastal-merchant entrepôt of the East African interior, a small palm-and-mango-shaded waterfront town of approximately three thousand inhabitants on the east shore of Lake Tanganyika opposite the small Belgian-Congo-Free-State settlement of Uvira. Livingstone had been at Ujiji intermittently since 1869 on the strength of his small expedition into the central African interior on the search for the source of the Nile; he had returned to Ujiji at the end of October 1871 from a long unsuccessful exploration of the Lualaba river-system in the central Congo basin (the Lualaba is in fact the headwaters of the Congo, not the Nile, but Livingstone had not yet realised the geographical fact), was in poor health, had lost his medical kit-and-trading-goods to thieves on the Lualaba return-march, and was effectively stranded at Ujiji waiting for re-supply.

Stanley's column came in to the Ujiji waterfront in the late morning of the tenth of November 1871. The standard practice for a substantial European-led expedition arriving at an East African coastal town of the period was to halt at the town entrance, send forward a messenger to the local Arab governor with the announcement of the expedition's arrival and intent, and to wait for the formal Arab-governor reception. Stanley did the standard reception-protocol. The Ujiji town crier (a small mixed-race man named Susi who, unknown to Stanley, was Livingstone's senior personal-assistant of the previous five years) ran from the Ujiji waterfront to the small mud-walled compound on the rise above the lake where Livingstone was lodging, with the news that an mzungu (a white European) had arrived at the town with a large expedition. Livingstone, who had been writing his journal in his hut, came down to the waterfront to investigate.

The crowd at the waterfront when Stanley arrived was approximately a hundred and fifty Ujiji locals (the standard arrival-crowd for a European expedition), the small Arab governor's escort of about fifteen men, and Livingstone at the back. Stanley, who had never met Livingstone in person but had two photographs of him taken at the 1864 London visit, recognised Livingstone immediately from the photographs. He removed his own pith helmet, walked the last twenty paces through the crowd to the small figure at the back, and addressed Livingstone in the form of the question that has been universally remembered ever since: Doctor Livingstone, I presume? Livingstone smiled, raised his blue cloth cap in reply, and said Yes.

THE FOUR-MONTH CAMP

Stanley delivered the eighteen-month-old letter-of-correspondence from Livingstone's children at Newstead Abbey that he had carried in his pith-helmet hatband across the eight months of the East African march. Livingstone read it, wept openly, and embraced Stanley. The two men camped together at Ujiji across the next four months, made the joint exploration of the northern half of Lake Tanganyika by Arab-canoe across November-and-December 1871 (the exploration that confirmed the lake's northern bank as not connected to the Nile system), and marched together back to the Tabora trading-centre on the East African caravan-route across January-and-February 1872.

Stanley left Tabora for the coast on the fourteenth of March 1872, reached Bagamoyo and Zanzibar on the sixth of May 1872, and despatched the famous Herald cable from Zanzibar on the seventh of May 1872 (the cable was relayed through the British colonial cable-stations of Aden, Suez, Alexandria and Malta to London on the second of July 1872, and was forwarded to New York for the seventh of August 1872 publication in the Herald). The Herald printed the story across the entire front page on the seventh of August 1872 under the four-deck headline: HOW I FOUND LIVINGSTONE / TRAVELS, ADVENTURES AND DISCOVERIES IN CENTRAL AFRICA / THE ARRIVAL AT UJIJI / DR LIVINGSTONE'S RECEPTION OF THE NEW YORK HERALD EXPEDITION. The story made Stanley the most-famous American journalist in the world and established the news-reporter-as-explorer tradition that the late-nineteenth-century international press would carry across the next forty years.

Livingstone refused to return to the coast with Stanley in March 1872 (he was committed to the continuing search for the source of the Nile), continued the Lualaba exploration through 1872 to 1873, and died at Chitambo's village in northern modern Zambia on the first of May 1873 at sixty. His body was carried by his African porters Susi and Chuma across nine months of overland march to the East African coast and brought home to Westminster Abbey for the famous April 1874 burial. Stanley continued the African exploration career across the next twenty years (the 1874-1877 trans-African expedition that traced the Lualaba-Congo connection and demonstrated that the Lualaba was the headwaters of the Congo, not the Nile; the 1879-1884 Belgian-Congo-Free-State foundation under Leopold II that established the colonial Congo Free State; the 1887-1889 Emin Pasha Relief Expedition). He sat as Liberal Unionist MP for Lambeth North 1895 to 1900, was knighted in 1899, and died at his Pirbright country house in Surrey on the tenth of May 1904 in his sixty-fourth year. The Stanley name in modern journalism-and-exploration history carries the weight of the Ujiji waterfront on the morning of the tenth of November 1871.