Engraving of Stanley’s meeting with Livingstone from Stanley's book How I Found Livingstone: Travels, Adventures and Discoveries in Central Africa: Including an Account of Four Months’ Residence with Dr. Livingstone (1872)

Stanley told the New York Herald that he'd greeted the doctor with 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?' 

In October 1871 Livingstone, at Ujiji on the shore of Lake Tanganyika was close to death. He wrote in his journal, ‘I felt in my destitution as if I were the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves; but I could not hope for Priest, Levite or good Samaritan to come by on either side.’

But then, just four days after Livingstone wrote those words, a white stranger strode into the village, his extremely well-appointed party waving a large American stars and stripes. He removed his newly white chalked hat and said ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume.’

Journalist Henry Morton Stanley had been sent, no expenses spared, to ‘find’ the doctor who was not lost and whose regular letters to consul Kirk in Zanzibar were regularly being read by the Royal Geographical Society.

But the new, daily, popular press in Britain and America had been keeping the rumours going that Livingstone was missing or had been murdered - and the notion that this famous explorer was again destitute somewhere in the interior of Africa, as was beginning to seem his habit, was, well, impossibly romantic.

Sending its own ‘special correspondent’ to find him would be the perfect stunt for the New York Herald – a headline-manufacturing showpiece to parade its superior American financial clout, and its world-wide coverage, and leave all the other papers in its wake. It would also be one in the eye for the RGS and London’s stuffy geographers.

Stanley's copious supplies brought Livingstone back to life for a few more months. 

#Livingstone #VictoriaFalls #HenryMortonStanley #WalimaKalusa  #ThomasFowellBuxton #exploration #NewYorkHerald #GordonBennett #DailyTelegraph #slavetrade #MissionaryTravels #LondonMissionarySociety #royalgeographicalsociety #AdrianWisnicki #meganward

Tobacco trading card 1910 - The World's Greatest Explorers - with Stanley, the face of Hassan cork-tip cigarettes. He wears the uniform of the Congo Belgian free-state he'd 'stolen' for the child-abuser King Leopold II, topped by the self-devised Stanley-cap

January 1874 news arrived that Livingstone was dead. Again

Livingstone's celebrity was fading once again until news of the explorer's death set the pulses of the popular press racing once again. Now the whole merry-go-round round of newspaper razzmatazz cranked into life again.

But this time Henry Morton Stanley had an inspiration. If Livingstone were dead, he, Stanley, would complete his exploration of Africa. His employer, the New York Herald, sniffed another patriotic sensation.

The Americans would take over where the British had so obviously, yet again, failed to get the job done. Its reporter, it said, would ‘command … an expedition more numerous and better appointed than any that has ever entered Africa.’

This time the trashy London daily Telegraph came in and from 1874 to 1877 Stanley, triumphantly financed and tracked by his tabloid backers, would stake out his reputation as a ghastly, grisly but grimly effective explorer, faking treaties with African peoples and seizing their lands. Herald and Telegraph readers were thrilled. We may imagine Livingstone turning in his grave.

And of course, by then Livingstone was indeed in his grave. But it is – of all the unexpected places in the world – in Westminster Abbey. How on earth Livingstone’s mortal remains came to be there, was the final, utterly unexpected and extraordinary act in his transformation into a legend of the British Empire. As we discover NEXT WEEK



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