Explorers of the Nile by Tim Jeal

Author:Tim Jeal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

Never to Give Up the Search Until I Find Livingstone

John Rowlands, who would one day be known to the world as Henry Morton Stanley, was born in the small market town of Denbigh in north Wales in 1841. He was the firstborn of a feckless eighteen-year-old barmaid, Elizabeth Parry, who deserted him as a very young baby, and would go on to have five more children – by two, or possibly three other men – only the last being born in wedlock. John never knew his father, whose identity remains uncertain. He was reputed to have been either a local solicitor, or a farm labourer, both of whom became alcoholics and died prematurely.1

John Rowlands was brought up by his maternal grandfather, a retired butcher, who had a fatal heart attack when his grandson was five. For six months after this disaster, John was boarded out with a middle-aged couple near his old home, but his two uncles, who were prosperous local tradesmen, suddenly stopped paying for his keep, and the couple told their eldest son, Dick, to take little John Rowlands to St Asaph Workhouse. During the eight-mile walk Dick told John that he was being taken to live with an aunt, whose farm lay in the same direction. When they arrived at the doors of the workhouse, Dick rang a bell that clanged deep within the building, and then turned to leave, saying sheepishly, when asked where he was going: ‘To buy cakes for you.’2

‘Since that dreadful evening,’ Stanley wrote fifty years later, ‘my resentment has not a whit abated … It would have been far better for me if Dick, being stronger than me, had employed compulsion, instead of shattering my confidence and planting the first seeds of distrust in a child’s heart.’3 This day of betrayal was the most formative in Rowlands’s young life, since it seemed to echo that earlier abandonment by his parents, reinforcing his conviction that his family thought him worthless. Certainly, nobody could possibly have imagined that this deserted, penniless boy would one day be able to attract the substantial sums required for African exploration. As a workhouse boy for nine years, Rowlands knew that in a cruelly snobbish society he was the lowest of the low but, instead of being crushed by it, this knowledge fired him with fierce determination to prove wrong all those who had rejected him.

In December 1850, when he was not quite ten, the master took him aside during the dinner-hour and, ‘pointing to a woman with a coil of dark hair behind her head’, asked him if he knew her.

‘No, sir,’ I replied.

‘What, do you not know your own mother?’

I had expected to feel a gush of tenderness, but her expression was so chilling that the valves of my heart closed as with a snap.4

His mother had not come to the workhouse to see him, but had been admitted herself as a destitute pauper with two of her other children. Yet, far from freezing out every fond feeling for her, John vowed that he would win this aloof woman’s love.

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