Henry Morton Stanley

Henry Morton Stanley was born John Rowlands in Denbigh, Wales, in 1841, and spent his early years in a Welsh workhouse before emigrating to America, adopting the name of a New Orleans merchant who befriended him, and becoming a journalist.

His career was transformed by the New York Herald's commission in 1869 to find David Livingstone, who had disappeared into the African interior. Stanley's two-year journey through East Africa, his discovery of Livingstone at Ujiji in 1871, and his famous greeting — "Dr Livingstone, I presume?" — made him the most famous journalist in the world. How I Found Livingstone (1872) was an immediate bestseller.

His later African journeys were more ambitious and more disturbing. Through the Dark Continent (1878) described his crossing of the continent from Zanzibar to the Atlantic — the first such crossing — along the Congo River. In Darkest Africa (1890) documented his relief expedition to Emin Pasha, a journey of extraordinary hardship.

Stanley's writing is gripping but must be read knowing that he was a brutal expedition leader, that his accounts of African peoples were coloured by the racism of his age, and that his later Congo work was conducted in service of Leopold II's regime, one of the bloodiest in colonial history.