Stanley - The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal

Author:Tim Jeal [Jeal, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300142235
Google: 3QENqczKCjQC
Amazon: 0300142234
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2008-09-30T14:00:00+00:00

King Leopold II of Belgium

Stanley first met the king in Brussels on 10 June 1878, having been brought from the railway station in central Brussels to his palace at Laeken, outside the city, in a royal carriage. Henry was not overwhelmed by the king’s grandeur, despite finding Leopold a ‘charming’ and impressive figure with his ‘fine brown beard’ and enviable height of six feet five inches. He was dismayed to find that the king did not believe, as he did, that building a railway from Matadi to Stanley Pool should be given priority. When Leopold spoke of wanting to establish a series of posts linking East Africa with the Upper Congo, Stanley countered that it was much more important to build trading stations on the Congo and a railway by-passing the cataracts. To date, three ALA expeditions to East Africa, all inspired by the king, had resulted in the foundation of a single small station on Lake Tanganyika at the cost of many lives.

Far from being overawed, Stanley fought his corner, and by mid-November 1878 had managed to persuade Leopold to concentrate on the Congo. In this month Henry finally signed a five-year contract with the Belgian king, having at last accepted that the British government would never back him. His salary would be £1,000 per annum — by no means large — with £20,000 available for the expedition itself for the first year, and £8,000 annually thereafter. Henry was not to be allowed to lecture or to publish anything without the king’s permission, so his annual income was going to be less than when he had been a journalist and author. It has been claimed that Stanley was in fact paid £2,000 per year and received two years’ pay in advance, but the evidence for this is flimsy.

To finance Stanley’s expedition and associated developments, Leopold set up a syndicate with a capital of 1,000,000 francs, and a committee to run it — the Comité d’Etudes du Haut Congo. Its objective was defined by Leopold as the establishment of stations for scientific, philanthropic and commercial purposes on the Congo. A sum of 40,000 francs was voted for the expedition’s first steam launch, with further vessels being promised for a later date. Apart from the king, subscribers included James Hutton, the head of a Manchester firm trading in West Africa, William MacKinnon, Stanley’s shipping millionaire friend, and, a little later, Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Stanley had encouraged these British subscribers to invest, hoping that they might ultimately build up a majority shareholding and win control of the syndicate. Although the king and a Dutch company, the Africaansche Handelsvereeniging, held most of the shares, the religious MacKinnon and the philanthropic Burdett-Coutts were confident that Leopold’s scheme would benefit the Congolese by giving them ‘legitimate’ commerce. None of these investors seemed alarmed that a philanthropic body had now acquired the powers of a commercial undertaking. After all, why shouldn’t philanthropy on such an epic scale reduce its costs to some extent?

On 10 December Henry signed a three-year contract with the Comité, independent of his five-year contract with the king.

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