Page:EB1911 - Volume 25.djvu/801

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STANLEY, E.—STANLEY, H. M.
779

Founder—have impressed themselves more and more on the teaching and the preaching of every class of clergy in the Church.

See G. G. Bradley, Recollections of A. P. Stanley (1883); R. E. Prothero and G. G. Bradley, Life and Correspondence of Dean Stanley (2 vols., 1893).

STANLEY, EDWARD (1770-1849), bishop of Norwich, the younger brother of the 1st Baron Stanley of Alderley, was born in London and educated at St John's College, Cambridge (16th wrangler, 1802). He was ordained in 1802 and became rector of Alderley, Cheshire, three years later. Here he took a great interest in education, and encouraged especially the teaching of secular subjects at his school. In 1837 he was consecrated bishop of Norwich. The diocese at this time was conspicuous for laxity and want of discipline, and this he proceeded to remedy, although at first he met with much opposition. Ordinations and confirmations were held more regularly and frequently, the schools were properly inspected, the Plurality Act was enforced and undesirable clergy were removed. He was tolerant towards Dissenters and supported all missionary undertakings without regarding their sectarian associations. In politics he was a Liberal and devoted himself especially to educational questions. Dean Stanley (see above) was his third son.

Stanley's letters, Before and after Waterloo (edited by J. H. Adeane and M. Grenfell, 1907), are full of interest to students of Napoleonic history.

STANLEY, SIR HENRY MORTON (1840-1904), British explorer of Africa, discoverer of the course of the Congo, was born at Denbigh, Wales, on the 10th of June 1840.[1] His parents were named Rowlands or Rollant, and his father, who died in 1843, was the son of a small farmer. John Rowlands, by which name Stanley was baptized, was brought up first by his maternal grandfather, and after his death was boarded out by his mother's brothers at half a crown a week. In 1847 he was taken to the St Asaph Union workhouse, where he was noted for his activity and intelligence. The schoolmaster at the workhouse, James Francis (who eventually died in a madhouse), was a tyrant of the Squeers type, and in May 1856, Rowlands, after giving Francis a thrashing, ran away from school. He sought out his paternal grandfather — a well-to-do farmer—who refused to help him. A cousin, however, who was master of a national school at Brynford, took him in as a pupil teacher. But within a year he was sent to Liverpool, where he lived with an uncle who was in straitened circumstances. The lad, after working at a haberdasher's and then at a butcher's shop, engaged himself as a cabin boy on a sailing ship bound for New Orleans, in which city he landed early in 1859. There he obtained a situation through the good offices of a merchant named Henry Morton Stanley, who subsequently adopted the lad as his son, designing for him a mercantile career. To this end young Stanley (as he was henceforth known) was sent to a country store in Arkansas. The merchant shortly afterwards died, without having made further provision for his protege.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861 Stanley enlisted in the Confederate army; he was taken prisoner at the battle of Shiloh (April 1862), and after two months' experience of the hardships of Camp Douglas, Chicago (where the prisoners of war were confined), he obtained release by enrolling in the Federal artillery. In less than a month he was discharged as unfit. In November 1862 he returned to Liverpool "very poor, in bad health and in shabby clothes," and made his way to Denbigh, but was turned away from his mother's door. This incident deeply affected him. Naturally of a sensitive, affectionate nature, henceforth he practised strong self-suppression and reserve. For a livelihood he took to the sea—was wrecked off Barcelona—and in August 1864 enlisted in the United States navy. According to an apparently authentic story[2] he obtained promotion for swimming 500 yds. and tying a rope to a captured steamer, while exposed to the shot and shell of a battery of ten guns. After the war he crossed the plains to Salt Lake City, Denver, and other parts, acquiring a reputation as a vivid descriptive writer for the press.

Thus began a series of adventures in search of "copy." In the autumn of 1866 we hear of him travelling in Asia Minor "en route for Tiflis and Tibet," and as being attacked, with his twc companions, by brigands, robbed apd imprisoned, the Porte subsequently paying through the American minister an indemnity for the outrage. In December of the same year Stanley revisited Denbigh and St Asaph, returning thence to America. In 1867 he joined General Hancock's expedition against the Red Indians, acting as correspondent for the Missouri Democrat and other papers. His reports induced the New York Herald to send him to accompany the British expedition of 1867-68 against the emperor Theodore of Abyssinia. Succeeding in sending through the first news of the fall of Magdala, Stanley attracted the special attention of the proprietor of the Herald, James Gordon Bennett, and received from him a roving commission. He went to Crete, then in rebellion, in the latter part of 1868, and thence to Spain, where he arrived in time to witness the scenes following the flight of Queen Isabella from Madrid. He chronicled the events of the Republican rising in 1869 and was at Madrid in October of that year, when he received a telegram from Mr Gordon Bennett, jun., summoning him to Paris.

Arrived in Paris Stanley was informed that he was to go and find Livingstone.[3] Stanley then shared the common opinion that Livingstone had died somewhere in Central Africa, but Bennett was sure he was alive and Stanley was to find and help him to the best of his ability. The journey, which was to be kept secret to avoid suspicion, was to begin next day. Strangely enough, though so urgent in the matter, Bennett cumbered Stanley with a large number of commissions to fulfil before the quest for Livingstone could be begun. In accordance with these instructions, Stanley went to Egypt to witness the opening of the Suez Canal in November, thence to Philae, and in January 1870 he arrived in Jerusalem, where he met Captain (afterwards Sir) Charles Warren. Next, by way of Constantinople, he visited the battlefields of the Crimea, and, passing through the Caucasus from Baku, he made an adventurous journey across Persia to Bushire, whence he sailed to Bombay. From Bombay he sailed for Africa, reaching Zanzibar on the 6th of January 1871.

The journey to the interior was begun on the 21st of March; on the 10th of November, having overcome innumerable difficulties, Stanley arrived at Ujiji, where Livingstone then was; the young traveller greeting the famous veteran with the words, "Dr Livingstone, I presume?" With Livingstone Stanley navigated the northern shores of Tanganyika and settled the question as to whether the Rusizi was an effluent or an affluent—a point then much debated in connexion with the hydrography of the Nile basin. Leaving Tanganyika on the 9th of January 1872 Stanley regained Zanzibar on the 7th of May. He had accomplished his mission, and by it he established his reputation as a leader of men and an explorer of great promise. His story, made public in a picturesque narrative, How I Found Livingstone (1872), was at first received in London with some incredulity, owing in part to his connexion with American journalism of a type then unfamiliar and distasteful; but the journals of Livingstone, which he brought home, silenced the critics, and from Queen Victoria Stanley received a gold snuff-box set with brilliants and her thanks for the services he had rendered. Nevertheless Stanley records that all the actions of his life, and all his thoughts, since 1872, were strongly coloured by the storm of abuse and the wholly unjustifiable reports circulated about him then.

A series of public lectures in England and America followed. In 1873, as war correspondent of the Herald, he accompanied Wolseley's expedition to Ashanti, which he described, together with his Abyssinian experiences, in a volume entitled Coomassie and Magdala: Two British Campaigns (London, 1874). On reaching the island of St Vincent from Ashanti in 1874 he first heard that Livingstone was dead, and that the body was on its way to England. After the funeral of Livingstone some time was spent in negotiations for sending Stanley again to Africa,

  1. This is the usually accepted date, but from Stanley's Autobiography it would appear that the year of his birth was 1842.
  2. See C. Rowlands, Henry M. Stanley, p. 102.
  3. Previously, in November 1868, Stanley had been sent to Egypt by the Herald "to meet Livingstone," at the time reported to be on his way home. Stanley got as far as Aden when he was recalled.