Tom Stacey

Sick heart river

Love can drive a man to his grandeur. H. M. Stanley, greatest of all of Africa’s explorers — let us agree with this fine biographer, Tim Jeal, on Stanley’s pre-eminence — was driven by the reverse: love denied, love rebuffed. And with Stanley, that deprivation was a good deal more complex. ‘This poor body of mine has suffered terribly,’ he was reflecting in his diary in June 1877, closing upon the final desperate stretch of his descent of the Congo river, having solved one of the last big geographical conundrums of central Africa:

it has been degraded, pained, wearied and sickened and has well nigh sunk under the task imposed on it; but it is a small portion of myself. For my self lay darkly encased, and was ever too haughty and soaring for such miserable environments as the body that encumbered it daily.

Serving him still, when that entry was made, was the Lady Alice, the 24-foot boat he had had carried up in sections from Zanzibar to navigate lakes Victoria and Tanganyika. He had named her after the high society American ingénue Alice Pike his engagement to whom was announced before he set off anew into the unknown three years earlier. By now, as his undeliverable mail would have told the explorer, she was Mrs Someone-else.

As for that dark encasement of the ‘real self’, it had begun at St Asaph’s, North Wales, workhouse in which he had grown up, the bastard child of an 18-year-old servant girl who not only disowned him from the start but agreed to substitute the identity of his real father (probably a Denbigh solicitor) with that of a local sheep-cropper, John Rowlands, whose name for a bob or two was foisted on the infant in the Register.

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