Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer

Stanley is most famous for finding Livingstone, but it was a publicity stunt, his real legacy were two crossings of equatorial Africa, the first in recorded history. The popular perception of Stanley as a young upstart who finds Livingstone then turns into a brute killer and imperialist enabler, a model for the Heart of Darkness turns out to be wrong, he is more victim than victimizer, a scapegoat. Jeal does an admirable job establishing Stanley as one of the great African explorers who was unfairly maligned, in no small part due to Stanley's own insecurities from his workhouse upbringing. He wanted to appear tough and strong, and went too far in his memoirs, even when the truth was more sanguine. Of course much of this is speculation, show more other authors might speculate differently, but Jeal had access to a trove of newly available primary source materials. And Jeal is no hagiographer, as his biography of Livingstone can attest, so his opinion is credible. The third major expedition Stanley took, the rescue of Emin Pasha, is about as Apocalypse Now as it gets for Victorian explorers. They went deep up the Congo, then up another major river into a thousand mile forest full of headhunters, columns got separated and people went insane committing brutish atrocities. Documented in Stanley's In Darkest Africa and later adapted to the 1978 play The Rear Column (dir. Harold Pinter). show less

More of a hagiography than a biography, but very well done. The affect of Stanley’s traumatic childhood on his entire life is very much front and center. The author acknowledges his desertions and his sometimes brutal behavior, though he definitely downplays them. Uses tons of primary sources to demonstrate how Stanley was often his own worst enemy, trying to burnish his reputation by presenting himself as having killed and exerted control more than was actually the case. The items about his relationship with his son were particularly touching, leaving me to wonder how he fared when Stanley died

I liked this, though I quickly grew to dislike Jeal and his constant refrain of "no one else has ever used these materials or drawn these conclusions - everyone else has always been wrong about Stanley and I alone am right!" He wrote a biography of Livingstone in which I gather he claimed to be the only person ever who didn't think Livingstone was an angel, and in this he claims to be the only person ever who didn't think Stanley was a devil. It is a very good biography when the biographer keeps his ego out of it, which he sometimes manages to do for twenty pages at a time.

Written with access to a wealth of new documentary material, Jeal goes a long way toward rehabilitating Stanley's clearly erroneous reputation for bloodthirsty conquest, etc. Even so, Stanley is not a terrifically sympathetic character, as ambitious as he was. If anything, this biography is a case study in why it's better in the end to tell the truth, instead of having to weave one tissue of lies to cover another tissue of lies.

An interesting biography of the journalist and explorer which introduces evidence from Stanley's diaries and letters to counter the prevailing image of him as a brutal opportunist who colluded with Belgium's King Leopold in ruthlessly exploiting the people and resources of the Congo basin. I was most impressed by the accounts of Stanley's trans-African journeys, which were quite amazing.

This was maybe a little too long for my interest level in Stanley. Exhaustive. And a little apologetic.

PLodding. Parts great but more than I ever wanted to know about his sex life.