The Handshake at Ujiji
A ragged American journalist walks into a lakeside village in Central Africa and utters four words that will echo for a century — but the man he finds is barely alive.
Henry Morton Stanley was born John Rowlands in Denbigh, Wales, in 1841, the illegitimate son of a mother who abandoned him and a father who died weeks after his birth. Raised briefly by a grandfather, then shuffled among relatives, he ended up in the St Asaph Union Workhouse, where he suffered abuse and neglect. At eighteen he emigrated to the United States in 1859, sailing to New Orleans, where, by his own account, he was taken in by a merchant named Henry Hope Stanley, whose name he adopted out of gratitude — though biographers later doubted the story's accuracy.
The Civil War pulled him through an improbable sequence of allegiances: he fought for the Confederacy at Shiloh, was captured, joined the Union Army as a 'Galvanized Yankee,' was discharged for illness, and eventually served in the US Navy. Afterward he drifted into journalism, covering the 1868 British expedition to Abyssinia for the New York Herald and scooping every other correspondent by bribing a telegraph operator to send his report first.
His defining assignment came in 1871, when the Herald sent him to find David Livingstone, the missionary-explorer who had vanished into Central Africa years earlier. Stanley arrived in Zanzibar and assembled an expedition of 192 porters, sparing no expense. The journey was brutal: malaria killed two of his assistants, and clashes with local people battered the caravan. On 10 November 1871, Stanley walked into Ujiji through a crowd of astonished villagers and found Livingstone alive but gravely weakened.
Stanley's supplies of food and medicine restored Livingstone's strength, and the two men explored the northern shore of Lake Tanganyika together, spending three weeks in each other's company before parting at Tabora. Stanley returned to Zanzibar, and eventually to Britain, but continued sending Livingstone provisions. When news reached him that Livingstone had died, Stanley was deeply affected — and resolved to return to Africa to finish what Livingstone had begun.
His second expedition, launched in 1874, aimed to map Lake Tanganyika fully and settle the question of the Nile's source, a mystery John Hanning Speke had proposed but not conclusively proven. Despite attacks from hippopotamuses and hostile groups along the rivers, Stanley confirmed that Speke had been right. In 1876 his caravan pushed on along the Lualaba River, enduring ambushes and passing through dense rainforest inhabited by peoples his accounts described as cannibals, at one point passing a path lined with 186 human skulls. Following the Lualaba into the Congo River, the expedition eventually reached Boma on the Atlantic coast, completing the exploration of Africa's last unmapped major river. Of the 356 people who had set out, only 114 survived; the rest had died or deserted, including three of Stanley's close companions.
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