Henry Morton Stanley was undoutedly one of the greatest of overland explorers, but he was also, by all accounts, a terrible person. He was brutal towards his native wangwana bearers and troops, frequently ordering them flogged and several times executed or left to the mercy of hostile tribes who would do the dirty work for him. He treated the white officers of his party with hardly any less brutality, though of a more subtle type: he took every opportunity to steal glory from others, and satisfy petty grudges. When it suited his purposes, he would always re-invent any incident to sound more favorable to him, and preserving the truth was not an issue. More than once he would wreak fits of pique out through appalling losses of human life (Sir Richard Burton described him, in a phrase ripe with dislike, as "this Stanley who shoots negroes as if they were monkeys") and by his third trip to Africa on the Emin Pasha "relief" mission, he seemed very much a man not in full control of his own faculties.

Stanley wrote in his memoir Through the Dark Continent that "the savage only respects force, power, boldness, and decision"; he penned that sentence with a lack of self-awareness which is genuinely breathtaking even within the context of his era. Given the other consequences of his explorations through the African interior (tipping the delicate balance of power between nation-tribes with gifts of English rifles to select chiefs, opening unexplored routes to Arab slavers, spreading diseases and causing rampant inflation and food shortages whererever his column marched - and that's not even bringing up his complicity as a dupe of Leopold II in the creation of the Belgian Congo) his "progress for the advancement of our fellow man" was far from an unmixed blessing.

My question is, in light of the unexpurgated records now available instead of Stanley's own highly-colored and imaginative accounts and Lady Stanley's hagiographic prose, how do we reassess Stanley's position in history? in terms of sheer distance he rivaled Burton, but if he lacked Burton's Orientalism he more than made up for it with a pragmatism that exceeded brutality. The Stanley who ordered the village of Bumbireh torched and its inhabitants slaughtered for refusing to trade with their expedition was the same Stanley who cried when a pariah dog with fleas was thrown overboard of the side of a steamer on the Congo River, and also the same Stanley who encouraged the Egyptian refugee women in Emin Pasha's train to slip off to the side of the trail to quietly abandon babies and toddlers in order to speed the column's pace. The same Stanley whom, with a bravery verging on magnificence, almost single-handedly negotiated a peace that opened the trade road to Ujiji again, enabling him to relieve the ailing and trapped missionary Dr David Livingstone (the two retained a serious and spiritual bond until Livingstone's death) was the self-same Stanley whom, when out of funds as a young reporter in Turkey, tricked a sixteen-year-old boy, Lewis Noe, into accompanying him into the country with promises of adventure, and then when the money ran out, dressed the boy as a homosexual prostitute, lured in a john and tried to club the would-be customer to death to rob him. The john recovered, Stanley and his teenage companion were captured, and Stanley recounted in bloodlessly formal prose in his diary how the local Turkish magistrate had sentenced the affair to be settled: by allowing three Turkish men (the injured victim and his two brothers) to rape Noe. Stanley seems hardly affected in his recounting of the horror, though he was tied less than three fee from Noe at the time, and is insistent in his journal two days later that Noe was perfectly fine and fully recovered from his "pecadillo." (Noe himself, as can be imagined, had quite a different accounting of the matter in his own book.)

By any lights, even the kindest and most culturally-relative ones, Henry Morton Stanley's grand African explorations caused as much harm as good -- harm to the local residents, with the good going only to various African Exploration Societies and the New York Yacht Club, which had its pennant carried at the head of Stanley's dismal third African expedition in a symbol almost too apt to be believed. Stanley's bloody and ruthless record has lived on long after him. My question is, do his methods still continue to justify his astounding feats of exploration: the opening of Ujiji road, the circumnavigation of Lake Victoria, the charting of the Lualaba and Congo rivers? How should Stanley, the man whose name in Swahili was Bula Matari, " the Breaker of Rocks" (or, in a more colloquial translation, "Ballbuster",) his methods, and his beliefs be re-evalated in modern terms, especially in light of the fact that a good number of his party were in fact slaves who had been rented to Stanley and who made the trip into the uncharted interior against their will? Most of Stanley's major feats of exploration relied on many columns of porters, most of whom were slaves and the rest of whom were Stanley's free wangwari personal bearers from Zanzibar. The former far outnumbered the latter. None of Stanley's efforts would have succeeded without this conscripted labor. How should that fit with credit given to discoverers of major geographical features along the expedition's route, and how should that influence the recording of the expediton's impact in the history of Central Africa?