Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (10 page)

‘How thoroughly and sincerely the whole British nation rejoiced at the good news of our great explorer’s safety,’ botanist H. G. Adams exulted.

Young hadn’t explored anything, and he hadn’t laid eyes on Livingstone. But if ever there was a perfect expedition, Young’s was it. There were no casualties. Livingstone was shown to be alive. Based on Young’s findings the Sultan of Johanna sentenced Musa to be thrown in chains for a period of eight months. And Young and his compatriots were lionized as heroes. Given voice by his success, Young was empowered to speak out about Livingstone’s place in history. ‘His extensive travels’, Young concluded, ‘place him at the head of modern explorers, for no one has dared penetrate where he had been. No one has, through a lengthy series of years, devoted so much of his life to seeking out tribes hitherto unknown. I believe his equal will rarely, if ever, be found in one particular and essential characteristic of the true explorer.’

Gunner E. D. Young’s audacious adventure came to a close. In the amazing year of 1867, when America purchased Alaska from Russia, Alfred Nobel invented dynamite and Karl Marx published
Das Kapital
, the accomplishments of an ambitious gunner from Portsmouth grabbed a healthy share of the headlines. Young’s journey was important because it showed Britain that she didn’t need to worry about Livingstone. He would bash on, regardless, to return one day.

NEW YORK WAS
cold, damp. Christmas was just five days away. Henry Morton Stanley, fresh off the train from the Great Plains, prowled the cobbled streets of Lower Manhattan, craving the newspaper job that would at last place him in the highest echelon of American journalism. New York reeked of promise, political corruption and arrogance; old money, new money, gangs and immigrants. It was an upstart city, longing to find its place on the international stage. A great Central Park, designed to compare with the monumental urban parks of Europe, had been carved from the swamps along what was then known as Bloomingdale Street — later Broadway — less than ten years before.

The city’s newspapers were its collective voice. An astounding eleven dailies battled for readers. Editors were more powerful than politicians and more famous than actors, and a sharply worded editorial had the power to make careers and ruin lives. And while established titans like the
Sun
’s Charles A. Dana, Abraham Lincoln’s Assistant Secretary of War, and the
Tribune
’s Horace
Greeley of ‘Go west, young man’ fame, dominated the landscape, the most popular newspaper in all New York, selling sixty thousand copies each day, was the New York
Herald
. Readers didn’t mind that the
Herald
was more expensive than its competitors — its nickel price a penny more than the
Times
and three pennies more than the
Sun
. The
Herald
’s combination of hard journalism, sensationalism and bizarre human-interest stories was worth the extra cent. The personal ads placed by the city’s prostitutes didn’t hurt any, either.

The
Herald
was Stanley’s destination as he walked through Lower Manhattan, under skies threatening snow. Its headquarters was at the corner of Broadway and Ann, in a bright white building that looked very much like a French chateau. He was emboldened by the knowledge that his coverage of the American Indian Wars for the Missouri
Democrat
during the spring and summer had been so powerful dozens of other American newspapers — the
Herald
among them — had picked it up. The minor renown of being the journalistic voice of the Indian Wars had allowed Stanley to rub elbows with men of accomplishment, men like General Ulysses S. Grant, General William Tecumseh Sherman, General George Armstrong Custer, Buffalo Bill Cody and ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok, who threw a saloon patron over a pool table after the man insulted Stanley. It was a minor, temporary elevation in social status, but a great motivator. Stanley had become impatient to leave the isolation and anonymity of the prairie once and for all, and so he impulsively quit the
Democrat
in the autumn of 1867. He took the train to New York, ready and willing to pit his journalistic skills against the best reporters in the business.

Stanley didn’t have an appointment with James Gordon Bennett, Jr, the
Herald
’s infamous young editor, as he approached the corner of Broadway and Ann. Nor did Stanley hold a letter of recommendation that might help him win a job. All Stanley had — all he had
ever
had, through good times and bad — was determination, bluster and the almost masochistic ability to endure rejection.
Each quality, in its own way, made Stanley fearless.

He would need those qualities in abundance, for Bennett was equal parts genius and ass. Tall and without muscle, an icy-gazed whippet with a thick brown moustache hiding his upper lip, the twenty-six-year-old Bennett raced horses until they collapsed beneath him and fired reporters for something as simple as a bad haircut. He was so rich he once threw a bulky wad of cash into a fireplace because it interfered with the cut of his suit. Bennett was a lightweight who drank to excess, a loner who terrorized his Manhattan neighbours by driving his coach and four naked at midnight, and a brawler who fought with a passion beyond his ability. He was an adventurer, too. Once, Bennett raced his yacht across the Atlantic in the dead of winter on a drunken bet. It was the first ever trans-Atlantic sailboat race. He won.

Bennett was, without a doubt, the
enfant terrible
of the New York publishing world. Ironically, the same combination of arrogance, fondness for risk and embrace of change that made Bennett socially notorious also made him a phenomenal newspaperman. He was willing to do whatever it took to win New York’s daily circulation wars. ‘I want you fellows to remember’, Bennett once lectured his staff, ‘that I am the only one to be pleased. If I want the
Herald
to be turned upside down, it must be turned upside down.’

Bennett ordered layouts and fonts altered in order to help the reader’s eye track down the page easier. He increased the paper’s heft by expanding international coverage. The bylines of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane graced the
Herald
’s columns.

Most important, Bennett revolutionized the concept of news-gathering by creating ‘exclusives’ — a one-of-a-kind story no other newspaper was bold enough to cover. ‘A great editor’, Bennett believed, ‘is one who knows where hell is going to break loose next and how to get a reporter first on the scene.’ To that end, he would invest thousands of dollars in a piece, knowing the pay-off might not come for years, or at all.

But much of the time it did. The result was a monstrous $750,000 annual profit, even after Bennett’s million-dollar salary. Bennett ploughed it all back into the newspaper. He sent reporters to Asia and Europe in search of stories that would generate a groundswell of public opinion and create a news cycle. When the trans-Atlantic cable was perfected in 1866, he gladly paid for the quicker news it provided. Once, when a reporter cabled back the entire contents of a speech given by the King of Prussia, it cost Bennett seven thousand dollars.

‘No rival journalists dared to go to bed before seeing a copy of the early edition of the
Herald
,’ Oswald Garrison Villard of the
Evening Post
wrote, ‘which they picked up in fear and trembling lest they find in it one of those record-breaking stories which made its name as famous as that of The Thunderer in every corner of the globe.’

It was small wonder, then, that Stanley would want to write for the
Herald
. When he arrived at their offices Stanley wandered the hallways until he located Bennett’s office. Then, as if Bennett were the editor of a small newspaper of no consequence, Stanley talked his way past Bennett’s secretary and found himself face to face with the publisher of America’s most popular newspaper.

Stanley quickly introduced himself. He wrote later that he was surprised when Bennett admitted to having read — and enjoyed — his dispatches from the Indian Wars. But Stanley was rebuffed when he asked for work. ‘I wish I could offer you something permanent,’ Bennett lamented, preparing to brush Stanley off, ‘for we want active men like you.’

Stanley, however, had planned for such a dismissal. Instead of marching back out the door into the cold December air, Stanley — in words that he later wrote down verbatim — parried, ‘You are very kind to say so, and I am emboldened to ask you if I could not offer myself for this Abyssinian campaign.’

‘I do not think this Abyssinian expedition is of sufficient interest to Americans,’ said Bennett, before slyly inquiring, ‘On what terms would you go?’

That was the opening Stanley had been waiting for. He quickly laid out a plan to travel to Abyssinia, a land of desert and mountains situated on the horn of Africa, and cover an escalating hostage crisis. Theodore, Emperor of Abyssinia, a man with a history of mental illness, had imprisoned 67 British diplomats and their 187 dependants in Magdala, his mountain stronghold. The British Army would soon march inland to rescue them. Stanley would accompany the British on their march then write about the heroic rescue. Covering the British Army in Africa wouldn’t be too different from covering the American Army in Kansas. The scenario, Stanley argued, seemed perfect for a segue from the national to international stage.

Stanley offered to work without a contract, covering his own expenses. He would stand or fall based on his professional merits. If Bennett liked the stories and the
Herald
printed them, he would be paid by the letter for the exclusive. Otherwise, Stanley would absorb the loss. Bennett was being offered a no-lose situation.

The editor agreed. If only on a trial basis, Stanley was officially a reporter for the New York
Herald
. On 22 December 1867, Stanley boarded the steamer
Hecla
, bound for Europe. By New Year’s Day he was in Paris. A month later, Stanley found himself in Annesley Bay on the Red Sea, where he linked up with the British expeditionary force about to march inland to Magdala.

What followed was a journalistic tour de force.

Not only were Stanley’s missives brilliant, but through foresight and sheer luck, he scooped the British journalists who were also covering the campaign. After the British military force under General Sir Robert Napier not only rescued the hostages, but also killed Theodore in the process, Stanley raced back to Suez to send his stories to the world via telegraph.

Luckily, before the initial march to Magdala had begun, Stanley had had the forethought to bribe the lone telegraph operator in Suez. Thus Stanley ensured that his dispatches would be sent across the wire before any other
journalist’s. By a stroke of luck, not only did the telegraph operator send Stanley’s work before any of the British writers’, but the underwater telegraph cable mysteriously broke before any other stories could be sent.

New Yorkers, much to the embarrassment of papers such as
The Times
of London, received word of the British Army’s triumph before Londoners. Angry British editorials called Stanley a liar, saying he had made up the stories, finding it impossible an American could outdo their best war correspondents. But when writers from the
Telegraph
,
Times
and
Standard
finally got their stories to London a week later, Stanley was exonerated. ‘Here is
The Times
, which for half a century has beaten every journal in Europe in energy and enterprise, actually publishing the latest news of a British expedition through the favour of a London correspondent of the New York
Herald
,’ London’s
Spectator
marvelled, framing Stanley’s achievement.

Stanley’s writing style was purple and intimate, as if penning a letter to a dear friend he was trying to impress. The sentences were meandering, sparsely punctuated, sometimes lazily crafted — yet always evocative. Stanley’s true brilliance lay in getting the story first, getting it right, and getting it no matter what the cost. ‘Our readers will not fail to perceive the vast superiority in style of writing, minuteness of detail and graphic portrayal of events which the
Herald
correspondence possesses over the same matter printed in the London journals,’ a
Herald
editorial boasted of Stanley’s Abyssinia piece.

Abyssinia made Stanley’s reputation. More than impressed by the upstart journalist’s ingenuity and pluck, Bennett hired Henry Morton Stanley as the
Herald
’s new roving correspondent, to be based out of the London bureau. His assignment: to go anywhere he was ordered.