Part One: Henry Morton Stanley: The Explorer Who Shot His Way Through Africa

Robert is joined by Soren Bowie to discuss Henry Morton Stanley.

FOOTNOTES:

1. Stanley: Africa's Greatest Explorer
2. The Imperial History Wars: Debating the British Empire
3. Henry Morton Stanley’s Unbreakable Will
4. Stanley: the impossible life of Africa's greatest explorer
5. Henry Morton Stanley: Reborn in New Orleans
6. Henry Morton Stanley and His Critics: Geography, Exploration and Empire
7.  Example of Stanley's Congo Treaties 
8. King Leopold's Ghost
9. Henry Stanley, The Man Who Stole The Congo
10. An Apology for a Pathological Brute
11. King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
I don't have an introduction. I'm I'm Robert Evans, is
behind the Bastards podcast about the worst people in history.
And we have as our as our national ventilator stockpile
runs out. My national introduction stockpile has been completely exhausted.
So these are these are desperate and dire times, and
I thank you all for tuning in. My guest today

(00:22):
to help me navigate these troubled waters is Mr Sower
and Booey Airhorn airhorn airhorne. Yeah, we have to do
the airhorns manually because then the airhorn stockpiles out as well.
They're gone. They're gone. We used them all up. We
use them. Hospitals need them. That's that's the new charity

(00:44):
is airhorns for hospitals. Really, honestly, if you have an airhorner,
you have azla at home to the hospital, donate it today.
They need it more than you do. Just drive past
the hospital and throw it at them as hard as
you can. They will thank you. Ye drive past the
hospital and kick it out of your car like your
O ding friend Saren. How are you doing today? I'm

(01:10):
pretty good. Yeah, I feel good. I mean I want
to make sure my levels are okay and everything. I
guess there's no way to even know that there there
there is, but we'll just move right past that and
our listeners will know if we got it right. You
are one of the writers on the TV show American Dad,
which I love and have loved for years. You are

(01:31):
my former uh co worker at at cracked dot Internet. Uh,
and you also host a podcast now with with my
old boss and our mutual friend, Daniel O'Brien. That's right, Yeah,
Daniel and I have a podcast called Quick Question with
sore and Dan I get front. Bill. That makes sense.
You want to put the face up front? I think yeah, now,

(01:54):
Sar you you guys did an episode of your show
recently where you talked about the old days at Cracked
um and you were talking particularly about some like old
sketches that uh, we're glad we didn't get to make
or you're glad that you didn't get to make, and
during one of them, you brought up a guy that
you had as a character in one of those sketches,
Henry Morton Stanley. Yeah. Weird that we wouldn't have done

(02:15):
a sketch about Henry Morton Stanley, Yeah, especially because he
was the hero in the sketch. So you want to
talk about who you know Henry Morton Stanley as like,
what you what you know about this dude? I hope
you didn't. No, I have a very cursory knowledge of
of Henry Morton Stanley, or as I like to call him,

(02:36):
h MS. That's why British ships are named that. By
the way, don't look at us. I know that he's
a knight. He's been knighted. He was famous for going
and fine. He's the guy who says Dr Livingston, I
presume yes, yes, that's his most famous line, Dr Livingston

(02:58):
and then Dr Livingston at the time was like trying
to find the source of the nile. He went to
go try and find Livingstone, found him, and then Henry
Morton Stanley spent a bunch of time trying to find
the source of the nile. Uh. And then during all
that time he also got very involved with the slave
trade as far as I know, and let kind of
everybody on his everyone of his voyages die. Yeah, everyone

(03:20):
on all of his voyages dies. He is the guy
who actually finds the source of the Congo River um
or at least I should say he is the white
guy who who finds the source of the Congo River
and informs all the other white guys where it is
um and he is uh. He actually was very anti slavery.
He was an abolitionist, but also in a way that
morally doesn't really matter. We'll we'll be talking about that

(03:42):
a lot this episode. This is a fun one, So
we're gonna we are gonna have us a motherfucking time
if you can hear it. But I'm rubbing my hands together, like,
oh delicious, this hot dish in front of me. I
can't wait to eat it. One of the reasons I'm
excited to talk about this sor And it's something else
that came up in that episode. You and Dan did
of quick question where you were talking about how you know,
when we all when you you had to call him

(04:03):
at cracked you or not just when you had a calm.
When you were on a show that we did called
After Hours, which was like a very popular show, and
you were one of the characters and you guys discussed
pop culture, and your character was kind of like a
caricature of I think, how how like you appear, because
you're you're a very uh, handsome all American looking fellow.
And so your character is like the archetype of like

(04:25):
the the high school quarterback kind of guy, right, and
and yeah, sort of like monotonously handsome. Yeah, and and
you're you're you're concerned with that, you know, looking back
in eight years later, is that it kind of contributed
to some some people's like unrealistic attitudes about masculinity. And
one of the fun things about this story is that

(04:47):
Henry Morton Stanley did that in like the most dangerous
way you possibly can. And now there's like a because
of the lies he told. He wasn't like he wasn't
he didn't kill nearly as many people as he lied
about killing, and as a result, a bunch of other
people committed a lot of murder. And now there is
a whole industry devoted to actually saying that Henry Morton

(05:09):
Stanley was a good guy because he lied about how
many people he killed. It's a fun story. We're really
gonna yeah, yeah, there will be a lot of fun
opportunities for conversations about toxic masculinity in this. But let's
let's let's let's dig into this. The son of a
bit so I love people who lie in the wrong direction.
That's wonderful. Yeah, it's really interesting. This is such a

(05:31):
such a wild tale. So uh. We talked about Henry
Morton Stanley on my show a little bit earlier, and
we talked about King Leopold the Second of Belgium, who's
like the king who conquered Central Africa and killed thirteen
million people making a rubber factory. Very ambitious, very ambitious. Yeah,
wrote a tricycle a lot weird dude, um, And Stanley

(05:52):
was like we talked about Stanley a bit in that
and I one of my sources King Leopold's Ghost, which
is a really big, a really good book by Adam
hoss Child, and the Stanley that Adam describes as a
monster who shot his way through the Congo to discover
the source of the river, shot his way back out,
and then connived a bunch of African chiefs to hand
over their land by making them sign treaties they couldn't
read and giving them cloth in return. Um. And like

(06:13):
I said in the in the that was kind of
most people's interpretation of Stanley for most of the last
hundred years, right, Like, he was popular during his lifetime
and pretty quickly afterwards, people were like, Oh, this was
a real This guy was a bad dude. But now
there's a whole industry that sort of cropped up about
rehabilitating not just him, but a lot of other British
colonial figures. And one of my sources for today's episode

(06:36):
is a book written by one of those people in
two thousands seven agoin named Tim Jeal published Stanley, The
Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer. Um and Jill was
able to get access to a never before open trove
of Stanley's private letters and journal entries, which is how
he learned about stuff like Stanley lying about how many
people he'd killed. Um and Gil is the guy who

(06:56):
really starts trying to rehabilitate Stanley by like saying that
he was a much better guy than people think he is.
Um and It's Yeah. I'm gonna quote a little bit
from a two thousand eleven Smithsonian magazine article that gives
you an idea of how this is generally sold. Quote
another Stanley has recently emerged. Neither a dauntless hero nor
a ruthless control freak. This explorer prevailed in the wilderness

(07:17):
not because his will was indomitable, but because he appreciated
its limitations and used long term strategies that social scientists
are only now beginning to understand. This new version of
Stanley was found appropriately enough by Livingstone's biographer Tim Geil,
a British novelist and expert on Victorian obsessives. Gild drew
on thousands of Stanley's letters, YadA, YadA, YadA. It depicts
a flawed character who seems all the more brave and
humane for his ambition and insecurity, virtue and fraud. So

(07:40):
and I should say this, This article in Smithsonian is
arguing that Stanley should be like a productivity guru that
we take advice on. It's fun, Like where this all
has gone is real interesting. Oh that's what I want
those like Columbus apologists to do, something like this, just like, hey,
you know what, we Columbus maybe got a bad rap everybody.

(08:03):
Maybe he got it didn't get a fair shape. Yeah,
this this is gonna be full of a lot of
that stuff. So I read Jeal's book, and I also
went through um King Leopold's Ghost again, and they did
a bunch of other research. And we're gonna have a
fun time here. Saron, We're just gonna have us a
good ass time. So, Sir Henry Morton Stanley was born
on January one under the name John Rowlands. Uh. He

(08:26):
was born a bastard in the literal sense of the word.
So that's convenient for the show. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we
don't really know who his dad was. His mom was
a woman named Betsy Perry who was by all accounts,
a very promiscuous housemaid. Um, she got around historically. That
is that is the that that is uh widely discussed. Um,

(08:47):
and it has an impact on on on Stanley later.
So his father was probably a guy named John Rowlands
who was a local town drunk who died from being
the town drunk. Um. But we don't really know. And
other stories say his dad was a wealthy law or
who was shoot all connection with his illegitimate child. Um.
The important thing is that absolutely nobody wanted this kid
around when he was born, like wildly unwanted to an extent.

(09:10):
That is just heartbreaking, actually, like yeah, it's it's a bummer. Um,
I don't know, I got a kid never around a
lot of other kids and sometimes you can just tell
yeah some of them, some of them, Yes, yes, yes, yes,
something like nah, we don't want nobody wants that kid.
That is sore and Bowie's official stance, it's okay if
some kids are unwanted. Yeah, it's if kids not wanted.

(09:34):
That's your internal cluck and your internal compass telling you
that's not a good kid. That's not that's a bad one.
That kid's going to be a problem. Shouldn't have that kid.
So his mother abandoned him basically immediately and left him
in the care of his uncle's and his grandfather, Moses Perry.
Uh and Adam hoss Child describes Moses Perry as quote

(09:56):
a man who believed a boy needed a sound whipping
if he missed the saved uh and kind of describes
it as sort of an abusive relationship. Geal takes the
completely opposite task and and argues that the two had
a good relationship until Moses Perry fell down dead in
the middle of a potato field on June forty six,
when John was five and a half years old. Um

(10:17):
So John was left fully in the care of his
two uncles, who did not, in fact care very much
about him. They subcontracted the gig and paid a poor
family to take him in. But eventually that family started
asking for more money, and the uncles refused, And so
they told John that his older cousin, Dick, was going
to take him to another aunt in a town nearby.
And so John and Dick went on an eight mile

(10:38):
walked together, and it was it was tragically sore, and
it was a walk of lies. Uh. As John later wrote, quote,
the way seemed determinable and tedious. At last, Dick set
me down from his shoulders before an immense stone building,
and passing through tall iron gates, he pulled it a bell,
which I could hear clinging noisily in the distant in tier.
Here a somber face stranger appeared at the door, who,
despite my remonstrances, seized me by the hand and drew

(11:00):
me within. Now, as John was being pulled away, his
cousin assured him that he would be right back. He
was going to get him both cakes. But this was
also a lie. In reality, Dick had abandoned his stone
building cakes. Yeah, as you do, you go into the woods,
you find the nearest stone building. It's like, I bet
they got cake in there. So John just abandons his
cousin to a workhouse. That was the plan from the beginning. Um, yeah,

(11:24):
Geal writes, quote the false cajolings and treacherous endearments lavished
upon him during that journey would live forever at Henry
Stanley's memory. Since that dreadful evening, Stanley would right in
his fifties. My resentment has not a wit abated. It
would have been far better for me if Dick, being
stronger than I, had employed compulsion instead of shattering my
confidence and planting the first seeds of distrust in a
child's heart. Um, this is a bad thing that happens.

(11:47):
And I'm gonna guess you've heard of workhouses right sore in. Yeah,
I'm familiar. Yeah, now most people probably have, if only
from the Christmas Carol. You know, there's a bit where
Ebenezer Scrooges asked to donate money to the poor, and
he asks, are there no prisons? Are there are no workhouses?
And this is this is the kind of place that
John Rowlands at age six, gets put into the St
Asaf Union workhouse. So the British government, which was at

(12:11):
the time conquering big chunks of the world and stealing
their ship, did not like the the idea of taking
care of their own poor people, and in fact, the
powers that be found it disgusting, uh, the idea that
they would provide good care for the poor. So they
had workhouses and these provided basic necessities. But they did
so while treating the inmates as if they are prisoners,
because they were considered to be basically criminal for needing assistance. Um,

(12:35):
so it's it's a child prison for poor kids. That's wonderful.
It's awesome. You. Um, it's kind of hard to exaggerate
how bad England sucks in this period of time. It's
just so bleak. It's so bleak. It's like this factory benighted,

(12:59):
cold drenched hell, escape of of of dying kids and uh,
fancy people. It's it's the best. But like the kids
are the working class, Like that's your those those who
are doing all of the jobs. For some reason, they
only made jobs available to children. Well, their little hands
can reach all sorts of things, aren't They make very
good chimney sweeps, I'll say, incredible chimney sweeps. So inmates

(13:22):
at the workhouse, and again a lot of them are children,
are required to wake up at six am and they're
locked in their dorms at eight pm. They received only
bread and gruel for food. Husbands and wives were separated
as we're parents and children. If you were poor enough
to need state assistance, the state decided that you no
longer deserve to have a family. Even siblings were kept apart.
Poor children were seen as wholly to blame for their circumstances.

(13:45):
As an adult, Stanley would write, it is a fearful
fate that of a British outcast, because the punishment afflicts
the mind and breaks the heart, which is certainly truthful.
It is you read about this guy's background and it's
like not that this makes his crime is okay, but
like hard to imagine this ending. Well, yeah, it does
feel like a lot of these And I've listened to

(14:06):
a few of your podcasts, I'll say, and it seems
like a lot of them. You kind of have to
get on a dark bus for the beginning of it
because you have to see where the where all this originated.
And every single time, like somebody teaches these people how
to hate really well, like how to be really good
at hating. Yeah, it's Saddam Hussein giant monsters, like oh yeah,
and he was threatening his teachers with a gun when
he was like fourteen. Yeah, that kind of scance. Yeah,

(14:28):
I see where this evolution happens. Stalin was getting beat
so bad that he was peeing blood, and you're like, okay,
I get it. Yeah, okay, it's not so hard to
draw these lines together. Um. So it's and it's interesting,
Like that line that I just read above is certainly truthful.

(14:48):
We have a lot of other accounts from work houses
and they sucked. Um. But it's hard to trust Stanley
on anything because he lied about everything, including his time
at St. Asaph's. He would go on a claim later
in his writings that he saw a boy beaten to
death by James Francis, the school teacher. And the general
consensus of historians, based on workhouse records and other people

(15:10):
who are in that workhouse at the time, is that
nothing like this happened while Stanley was at the school. Um,
and in fact, most people who recalled their time there
seemed to think pretty fondly of this teacher. And so yeah,
it's uh, it's it's it's interesting. And Stanley would later
tell lies about like getting into a fight with this
teacher himself and like beating him up and like being

(15:31):
cheered on by the rest of the school. And these
are almost certainly lies, but they were also probably a
cover for something very sad, which is childhood's sexual abuse. Uh.
The year that Stanley was admitted to st assets, Yeah,
we don't really know, but like the year he was admitted,
nineteen of the girls at the poorhouse were turned out
as prostitutes and pimped by some of the male employees.

(15:52):
Um and a government inspector who observed the school during
this time noted that young male inmates regularly slept with
each other in experimented set truly, and a lot of
that experimentation was probably not consensual on both sides. And well, yeah,
I love that the government has an inspector to go
check out the workhouses. Like what is he hoping to
find there? Yeah, you are kind of at a loss

(16:16):
to like what would have been possibly the Like, you're
not doing anything to stop this from happening, So what's
your hope here? Yeah, created a prison for children. When
you go there, when you're like, oh, no, they're having
sex with each other, You've gotta be kidding me. I
have to raise the alarm. It turns out things are
bleak at the child prison. So we don't know if

(16:40):
if Stanley engaged in any of this experimentation or if
he was sexually abused. He would always claim in letters
to like his romantic partners that he stayed pure at
the school while writing about it later. But that doesn't
fucking mean a damn thing. Um whatever, Yeah, whatever the truth.
Stanley was noted the rest of his life by everyone
who knew him for having an extreme terror of physical

(17:02):
and sexual intimacy, and this terror remained with him for
the entirety of his life. So something happened. We don't
really know what, but this boy walks out of it
real changed. Yeah, I think he went in a little
changed to you don't talk for the words with your
your surrogate father who's lavishing you with praise and then
drops you off at a workhouse and be like, yeah,

(17:22):
you know what, I'm gonna let somebody else in. It
feels like at the opportunity for me to open my
heart to someone else. This is one of those stories
that it reads like an experiment for like how much
can we damage a child? Like if we really go
all in, how badly can we fucking get up? Yeah?
So Stanley did uh, at the least receive an education
which you know, generally was considered to be pretty decent.

(17:44):
Where he went, he learned how to read and write,
and he excelled at school. While he was in the workhouse,
he was awarded a fancy bible from the local bishop
for his scholastic excellence. Uh. Young John Rowlands, and again
that's his name at the time, that's his real name is.
John Rowlands was particularly enamored by geography and penmanship throughout
his life. He made a point of writing neatly, almost

(18:05):
to an obsessive degree, and King Leopold's ghost hoss Child writes,
it was as if through his handwriting he were trying
to pull himself out of disgrace and turn the script
of his life from one of poverty to one of elegance,
which I think is probably pretty accurate description. So John
may not have had the very worst childhood a boy
could have in Wales, but it was pretty close to that. Uh.

(18:25):
The defining moment of his early life came when he
was twelve. His supervisor quote came up to me during
the dinner hour when all the inmates were assembled, and
pointed out a tall woman with an oval face and
a great coil of dark hair behind her head. He
asked me if I recognized her, No, sir, I replied,
what do you not know your own mother? I started
with a burning face and directed a shy glance at
her and perceived she was regarding me with a look

(18:47):
of cruel, critical scrutiny. I had expected to feel a
gush of tenderness towards her, but her expression was so
chilling that the valves of my heart closed with a snap.
So that's yeah, that's a bad thing to go through
as Yeah, that's a rough one. He saw his mom

(19:07):
at that, So she was she then in the workhouse
as well. She had two more kids and she wasn't
going to take care of them, but they were also
young enough that she couldn't just drop them out the
workhouse basically, I think made her kind of hang around
to finish breastfeeding them and stuff before she could abandon them.
So she's there for a while with her other kids
before she abandons them too. And yeah, not great. It's

(19:32):
at least you know that the records the record keeping
there is good. Yeah, it's really good record keeping. Absolutely,
they know not only do they know that this was
his mother. They're not just like taking in kids and
being like, yeah, well the parents didn't want you. We
don't know who they are. They're like, no, we're gonna
keep tracks so that when you are old enough for
the age of revenge, we'll give you a name on
a piece of paper and you can go take care
of it. It would be so much less depressing if

(19:54):
he got revenge on her. But the rest of his
life part of why he lied so much as he
was like very dedicated to making his mom proud and
she clearly didn't give a funk about him and at
best wanted his money. Um, it's a fucking bummer duty.
So the workhouse remained John Rowland's life until the age

(20:14):
of fifteen, when he escaped. Now, the reality of the
situation seems to be the escape wasn't really hard and
he basically just fucked off because he was old enough
to do so. Um. But Stanley felt the need to
dream up a lurid lie about how he left the school,
and I'm gonna quote from Adam hoss Child again. He
tells of leaving the Welsh workhouse in melodramatic terms. He
leapt over a garden wall and escaped, he claims, after

(20:35):
leading a class rebellion against a cruel supervisor named James Francis,
who had viciously brutalized the entire senior class. Never again,
I shouted, marveling at my own audacity, Stanley wrote, the
words had scarcely escaped me. Where I found myself swung
upwards into the air by the color of my jacket,
and flung into a nerveless heap on the bench. The
passionate brute pumbled me in the stomach until I fell backward,

(20:56):
gasping for breath. Again, I was lifted dashed upon the
bin with a shock that almost broke my spine um.
And this is again all lies. One of the things
that hosts Child notes and and that Gel notes, is
that Stanley was at that point a very healthy fifteen
year old boy, while his teacher was it was a sick,
middle aged former cold miner who was missing a hand.

(21:17):
And was he he he was unlikely to have been
doing a lot of throwing, is the incredible. Yeah, So
most people seem to agree if there had actually been
a fight, the fifteen year old, healthy boy probably would
have beaten the handless coal miner, but you know the

(21:38):
man with black lung and copd Yeah, yeah, he wasn't.
He wasn't a price fighter. Um. And none of Stanley's
classmates were called anything like this happening. And yeah, again
they considered frances to have been a nice guy and
Stanley to have been, uh, the teacher's pet. And again
one of the really sad things about this is that
one of the suspicions is that why he later developed

(22:01):
such a grudge against John Francis, is that maybe Francis,
who there's a good chance was gay. Maybe Francis made
a pass at him once he's you know, because like
fifteen people were considered yeah, so maybe this the teacher
made a pass at him or something more, and that's
why Stanley felt the need to attack him so much.
But we really don't know, um, But something happened there too,

(22:22):
Like there's a couple of points like this in his
life where it's like, yeah, something happened to make you
tell that specific kind of lie. But and also what
you're probably getting from this is that young Stanley was
a big fan of A. C. Dick h. Charles Dickens
um and and Dickens Like that's a very Dickensian moment,
like the child like fights off the abusive teacher to

(22:46):
like save his classmates and then winds up on a
magical journey. Like that's a fucking Charles Dickens story. You know.
Stanley would be throughout his life a big Dickens fan.
Probably influenced how he wrote his own biography. Um yeah,
actually that okay, so a lot of things are falling
into place that that's why his writing style is so
purple and like I could see. Yeah, yeah, he's he's

(23:09):
very influenced by Dickens. Um. And it's a really fun
note if anybody wants to know more about Charles Dickens
from like an interesting perspective. George Orwell wrote so many
fucking articles about Charles Dickens is writing and like analyzed
him from like the perspective of a socialist is really
interesting set up. There's a bunch of them in um
the collection All Art Is Propaganda, which is a good

(23:29):
chunka Orwell reading if you're into that anyway. Um, so yeah,
after he escapes from the workhouse or just kind of
walks out the door because they don't really care all
that much. Um, Stanley winds up, you know, living with
a series of relatives for brief periods of time, but
none of them wanted to put him up for long,
and he eventually wound up living with an uncle in Liverpool,
working as the delivery boy to a butcher um and

(23:52):
John got the feeling that he was going to be
kicked out onto the street at any moment, and he
was probably right about that, and fortunately right around the
same time time, he wound up delivering meat to an
American merchant ship called the Windowmere, which was docked nearby.
And as Stanley kind of describes it, and it's probably
broadly accurate because this was an uncommon at the time,
the captain basically looked him up and down and was like, hey,

(24:13):
you want to work on a boat there. There weren't
a lot of rules back of the day about this
sort of thing. So it feels like they were like
twelve people in history, like every time somebody wanted a job,
they're like, all right, I'll get you a job. Yeah.
So he he does the pretty normal thing for a
poor kid at this part of the world at the time,

(24:35):
and he gets a gig fucking working on a boat
that takes him to the United States. Um and John
very clearly was not a fan of sea life, and
as soon as the Windowmere landed in New Orleans in
February of eighteen fifty nine, he jumped ship and basically
just wandered into America and said, Okay, I guess I'm
gonna have a life here. Um Because again, you could
do that at the time. So in some ways, I'm like,

(24:58):
I'm really it's depressing to hear about history. In other ways,
I'm like, funk. Everything was so much easier then that,
Like a lot of stuff was easier. You could just
be like, you know what I want to be in.
I feel like I want to be in Louisiana. I
will figure out a way to get there. And if
I don't die of cholera, no one's gonna stop me. Right. Yeah.
The thing you really had to worry about where diseases
and abusive people. But like, yeah, the opportunities beyond those

(25:21):
horrific things were endless. Yeah, it wasn't hard to to
just do ship like that, you know if it Yeah,
nobody was making you fill out a whole lot of paperwork. Yes, yeah,
you're being tracked for your Like his credit was consideration
at that point, you no, it was not Um. And
and and again. This is another one of one of

(25:41):
what will become many different parts of the Stanley story
where his version of events in reality to verge. But
he claims that basically, he's wandering around the streets of
New Orleans and he sees a local business owner like,
looks up at this guy who's wearing a nice suit
and runs a business. Uh, and he walks out. He
just walks up to this guy and says, do you
want to boy? Sir? That's your resume in the eighteen fifties,

(26:08):
just a just a single word boy next to a dash.
Uh God, what a gig to have. But this distinguished
gentleman did in fact want a boy. He turned out
to be a wealthy cut You know what, I came

(26:32):
into town for one of those I was gonna pick
me up a boy at the workhouse. But this is
this is fast so uh yeah, this, this gentleman turned
out to be the wealthy cotton salesman Henry Hope Stanley Um,
who was a real person and was a very successful
merchant in New Orleans at the time. And and again,
according to Stanley's version of events, which is a lie.

(26:54):
Henry Hope Stanley instantly developed a liking for our boy
John and became his mentor in sir get father figure. Uh.
He got him a job working for a shopkeeper named
James speak Um. And again, the only part of this
is that's true is that Stanley worked for James Speake
and the reality Henry Morton and family. He probably did not.

(27:15):
Stanley inserts Henry Hope Stanley into the story decades later.
The likely reality is that he was in fact wandering
the streets, walked into this guy's shop and said, do
you want a boy and this guy was like, yeah, sure,
And he worked at this guy's shop until he died
and then he went on with his life. Um. But
that's Stanley has to lie. He judges up the story
and he adds in this rich person who has the

(27:36):
name that he later adopts. That's incredible. He's got such
like a Trumpian element to him. Yeah, totally. He can't
help himself but lie to let to sound in any
way any like little tiny way grander. Yeah. Yeah, they're
all kind of everyone we talked about on the show
is kind of the same person, with the exception of

(27:56):
l Ron Hubbard who is at the top of the heap.
But I mean before you get into it. Uh, do
you know what time it is? I can't imagine what
you're trying to lead me towards, Sophie. I don't know that.
Just this thing that you know keeps this podcast afloat.
Oh oh oh you mean robbing merchant vessels on the

(28:19):
Spanish Main exactly? Yeah, for some information? Oh absolutely, yeah?
Did your did your gun not coming the mail? No?
But I mean I got a lot this okay, fun, Yeah,
this will be this will be. This will be a
real hoot. Yeah. Alright, Well, we're gonna go find a
merchantman on the Spanish Main. You do the same, and
we will all meet back to talk more about Henry

(28:40):
Morton Stanley and divide up the booty. We're back. Oh
my gosh. That was some good pillaging, some good looting,
a lot of balloons. Now you do you do? Um,
you're gonna want to find a boy to help you
with that. I need a fence for these. I don't

(29:01):
even know. I want to work. Does like Target take these? Actually? Yeah?
Target does? Costco does not. Uh, they prefer pieces of eight,
which are probably the same things but whatever, fuck you.
So Stanley starts working for this guy, James Speak, and
he basically works as a boy in a shop, and
he's really good at at working and like, uh, this
is like essentially like a grocery store type deal or

(29:23):
a general store. And he's good at the job. He's
an incredible memory. Everybody seems to agree that about him,
and so he's really good at keeping things stocked and knowing,
you know, what needs to move. And yeah, he's he's
a good worker. Um. But Stanley's version of the story
is very different. He claims that while he's working for
James Speak, he and Henry Hope Stanley are growing very
close and that they basically spend two years traveling up

(29:45):
and down the Mississippi on business, and that the old
man eventually tells Stanley, who becomes a surrogate son, that
he's giving him the right to use the Stanley name.
Uh yeah, so uh fucking Stanley will claim that Henry
Hope Stanley died in eighteen sixty one, which is a lie.
He lived for like another sixteen years. What a weird

(30:05):
thing to lie about. Yeah, he lies about everything though,
Um so yeah, there's no evidence that he and Stanley
arranged exchange so much as a word. But you understand,
like the real story in the fake story. The fake
story is that you know, he works with this guy,
James Speake, who pays him very well, and then James
Speake dies when a plague hits town and Stanley winds
up needing to move on. Um yeah, so it's cool.

(30:29):
Uh yeah, it's it's the opposite of cool. Yeah, Stanley
is not a cool dude. He's not a cool dude.
Throughout the early eighteen sixties, though, he starts adopting the
name of like one of the richest people in town,
and smart gradually changed that that is not a bad call.
Yeah yeah, John Rowlands is a shift, a shitty name

(30:50):
in anyway, like Henry Morton Stanley. You just tell that
name to someone and asks, this is a famous person,
what do you think they did. One of your first
three guesses is going to be explorer, right like yeah, absolutely, yeah,
um so yeah, I'm going to read a quote from
King Leopold's Ghost explaining the process of him stealing this
other man's name. In the eighteen sixty New Orleans Senses,

(31:13):
he's listed as j Rolling, a woman who knew him
at the time, remembered him as John Rowland's smart as
a whip and much given to bragging, big talk and
telling stories. She said, yeah. Within a few years, however,
he began using the first and last name of the
merchant who had given him his job. He continued to
experiment with the middle names, using Morley, more Like, and Moreland,
before finally settling on Morton. So yeah, that's more or

(31:36):
less the truth and Tim Jeal's revisionist history of Stanley
the one that's like really pro Stanley goes into the
fact that he's lying about all of this, like Gel
in a lot of ways, it's a very valuable book
because again he was like the first guy with access
to this dude's notes. There's a lot of it that's
in there that's interesting. The stuff that shitty, I think
is actually Jeal's personal conclusions about everything. Um. But he
he goes he's very open about the fact that Henry

(31:59):
Morton Stanley or lied about fucking everything. Um but he
has all these really fun explanations and justifications for why
Stanley light in every case, like he's defensive of his
biography subject and he feels the need to like explain
why it's cool that he did all this. Um, And
his argument in favor of stealing a man's name is

(32:20):
that Henry first told this lie to his mother after
he was famous, and then it became a part of
his biography later, and so he started lying about this
because he wanted her to believe that somebody rich and
powerful had adopted him, which is actually kind of plausible.
Um That, Like, he wanted because he'd been abandoned by
every single adult in his childhood. He wanted to be
able to go back to them and be like, this

(32:42):
guy was rich and cool and he thought I was
good enough to be his son. He wanted me. Yeah,
which is a bummer and kind of scans like, I'll
give gel that one. Later on, his justifications get worse
that one. Yeah, I could see that being the truth. Um.
So Gil goes on a note, and this is where

(33:02):
we get into him being really defensive, and I find
it fun. Yet his lies have led his critics to
treat him with disdain and condescension ever since. His private
lies to his mother were made public by her without
his knowledge, thus making it all but impossible for him
to be honest. Later, young people who lie usually do
so because they feel bad about themselves and need to
enhance their self esteem. That Stanley should have been trapped
for the whole of his life and by what he

(33:22):
had said to his mother during his twenties was a
personal tragedy for him and for his subsequent reputation. Um.
And one of the things that interesting about Geal is
he is as frustrated at people judging Stanley for this
is he isn't them judging Stanley for gunning people down
in the congo, like it's both are have equal weight
in his Yeah, they absolutely do, and it's it's fun.

(33:46):
I want I think that fun. Without meeting Geal, I'm
pretty confident that he's a liar. He's somebody who is
lying in his past like little kids lie, because yes,
yes they do. But that's not why we're critical of
stand now. Yeah so anyway, uh. For a while, Henry
worked at a general store in a log cabin, selling

(34:08):
all sorts of tools that people needed as they kind
of moved into the less settled parts of Louisiana. He
became particularly interested in different sorts of rifles and revolvers
and became very knowledgeable about firearms. And this was as
much out of necessity as interest. Southern culture at the
time was brutal in ways we don't normally talk about,
because you know, there was slavery, and that's kind of
everyone's focus on how brutal that was. But the brutality

(34:30):
extended throughout every layer of Southern culture. Um and it
included the fact that plantation owners and they're like were
extremely physically aggressive people as a matter of rule. Uh
something about owning hundreds of human beings that seems like
it makes you unwilling to listen to what anyone else
has to say. Um And Jil has actually a pretty
good quote here. It shocked Henry, after the civilities of

(34:51):
the city, to witness gunfights and to hear about murders
and disappearances. With so many vain and violent men around him,
possessing natures as sensitive as hair triggers, he was care
well not to argue with Ednie backwoodsman or planter, who
might draw a gun on the least provocation. However amiable
they might originally have been, their isolation had promoted the
growth of egotism. These Southern gentlemen talked endlessly about their

(35:12):
honor and often acted to avenge it. In this environment,
it was every man for himself. So in case of trouble,
Henry bought a Smith and Wesson revolver and practiced with
it until he could sever a pack threat at twenty paces.
I feel like that's still that's like a lesson you
can still live by today. Yeah. Yeah, if you're going
to live in the South, learn how to sever a
thread with a revolver and keep it on you at

(35:32):
all times. I've always said that. Yeah. And if you're
in a rural area, don't funk with anybody there, absolutely not. Yeah. Yeah,
don't argue with people out in the sticks, you know,
just move move along, just get going. Yeah, keep on,
keep on trucking. Um. So. People who knew Stanley during

(35:57):
this period described him as talkative and intelligent, short, but burly,
and confident unless he was asked about his family. Questions
about his family caused him to stutter and eventually mumble out,
there is a mystery about my birth. Um. He's not
even a good liar. No, no, no, no, I didn't
even think about that in person when he was actually

(36:17):
doing his line. He was not bad. No, he doesn't
seem to have been great at it. He was a
good he was a good writing liar. So after a
year or so, when Louisiana, Stanley's boss died and Stanley
was forced to move to Cyphress Bend at the age
of nineteen, he got a job at another store and
rented a room at a cheap boarding house. And Stanley
stood out there, his colorful neckerchiefs and his habitual cleanliness

(36:40):
where it odds with the sort of people who crashed it.
What was essentially a mix between a shitty motel and
a for profit homeless shelter. Like that's kind of what
a boarding house is. And this part of the world
at the time a lot of real rough customers moving through.
And then you have kind of this this fancy lad
victorian fop who rolls through, Yeah, big fan of yeah,
big fantasy kerchiefs, colorful kerchiefs, really wants to be a

(37:04):
British noble, even though he comes from I mean, the
poorest fucking working class background you can, right, this is
an example of relying in the wrong direction, like trying
to establish himself as an aristocrat in a place where
no one wants that. It's like, no your background would
help you here, Stanley tell people the truth. Yeah, and
it is one of those things throughout his life, like
a lot of fancy British people will always treat him

(37:26):
like ship, even after he becomes rich and famous, because
he comes from a low class background. Well like the
Americans he works, They're just like, yeah, whatever, you can
shoot a pack threat at thirty paces, That's all I
care about, because we're going to shoot at each other.
I come from the South. I can't not shoot somebody.
I got it. I haven't shot a single personal day.

(37:48):
You're not You're not my buddy if we haven't gotten
into an afternoon gunfight. Yeah. So Henry got malarias shortly
after moving and dropped down to just ninety five pounds
and this hilaria. Yeah, this happens so many times throughout
his life. He will drop down to like the weight
of a ten year old repeatedly, just because you know,

(38:09):
every he's always sick and dying, like this guy's in
the Congo for a huge chunk of his life. He
spends about like half of his life actively dying of
some sort of horrible, contagious, contagious disease. And that's the
case with every explorer, Like I do a lot of
reading about the lives of great explorers, because that that's
my ship. Uh. And they all are always dying of

(38:31):
the illnesses they've picked up. Like the best of them
were just constantly ill and just didn't quite die. I
love that in actual actuality, these people are being dragged
through their exploration. They're they're not actually out there cutting stuff,
bush whacking with their own machete or anything. They're being
carried on a palanquin as they slowly wither away into nothing.

(38:51):
Some of them are Stanley is one of those guys
who is famous for like always like like working his
ass off like and and a number of them were
like what they would just always be sick and dying.
And the ones that got famous are the ones who
didn't die, like like the whole team would crack, would
croak basically and stay. It would just be like Stanley
and a bunch of like local people wandering into some town. Um, yeah,

(39:16):
it's he's It's funny to me that like the stereotypical
image of like one of these guys, it's kind of
like the rock in those Jumanji movies or whatever. Like
we're like the big barrel chested wearing that shirt they
all wore, and like the reality is like they looked
like fucking concentration camp survivors a lot of the time
because they just had been dying for nine months, like
they had no calories left. They were shipping themselves uncontrollably,

(39:39):
like just couldn't keep food down, zero fat on their bones. Like,
and that's that's Stanley's whole life. He's actively looks like
a dead man most of his days. He's Christian Baleing
the machinist. Yeah yeah, yeah, it's it's it's it's rough,
and that's just a call. Like everyone's sick all the
time back in those days. So yeah, he moves to

(39:59):
the sticks and immediately almost dies. And despite being on
the verge of death, his new boss, who's like working
at a shop, sends him out regularly to work as
a debt collector and collect debts from customers, which is
not a safe vocation. So he's like in armed standoffs
with men as he's shifting himself uncontrollably and like barely
able to stay conscious. So Stanley lives though, because he's he's.

(40:21):
One thing you can say for Stanley, he was a
cussed ly tough son of a bitch um. Yeah, and
he doesn't die, as will be the long story with
this guy. Uh. And you know, during this time as
he's doing working as a debt collector and dying, he
had exactly two encounters with members of the opposite sex,
and both of them were profoundly sad um and Teal

(40:43):
writes here unlike most young men living in boarding houses
frequented by sailors, Stanley had avoided brothels. However, on one
occasion only he had taken to a gilded parlor where
he saw four young ladies and such scant clothing that
he was, He wrote, speechless with amazement. When they proceeded
to take liberties with my person. They seem to me
to be so appallingly wicked that I shook them off
and fled. My disgust was so great that I never,

(41:05):
in after years, could overcome my repugnance to females of
that character. I love that he this women started touching
him and he ship dog that fucks him up. Yeah. Yeah,
he's that kind of dude. And there is the thing
he is scaredest of, like Stanley is is the kind

(41:28):
of guy who will repeatedly face down like wild animals,
you know, with a crude and unreliable rifle. Um, but
he cannot handle a woman being like, I think you're cute,
the most dangerous animal of all. Yeah, it's awesome, um
and totally totally to character. So Gil goes on to note,
abandoned by a promiscuous mother, Henry's mistrust of prostitutes was

(41:51):
not hypocritical. Uh, and he goes he notes another incident
confirmed his sexual naivety in his overcrowded boarding house. Bet
sharing was not unusual. Once Stanley slept on a four
poster with a youth called Dick Heaton, who had also
jumped ship. Although Dick was so modest he would not
retire by candle light and walked in a suspiciously female manner.

(42:13):
Stanley oldly twigged his true sex at the end of
three days. Um. And he like realizes this in bed
when he sees one of Dick's breasts. And I don't
know if like Dick was actually like a transgender person
or just like a lot of times in those days,
like if you were a woman who had to travel
alone for some reason because you have money, it's just
safer to present his male hard to say what the

(42:34):
actual truth here, But he realizes Dick name for we
have Yeah, that is a good porn name. Um. So
Stanley's recollection of this is that like they're sleeping together
because you know, that was pretty normal at the time.
And Stanley realizes that Dick has has breasts and and

(42:55):
lady parts. Um, you know, realize Stanley really lies, is
that that that Dick is? Yeah? Anyway, and he like
freaks out and Dick has to flee the place, like
he doesn't tell anyone, or at least Stanley claims he
doesn't tell anyone. But Dick is gone the next day
and Stanley hears nothing else about him. So I don't know, no, no, no,

(43:18):
not a great story. Yeah, surely something. Yeah, that's another
one of those situations where something happened between the two
of them and Henry Morton. Stanley is like, I never
want to hear about this person again. I mean, he
was just gone. He's gone from my memory, he's gone
from the world. He doesn't exist anymore. I wouldn't be
surprised if actually what happened is that he like turned
him in or like made other people aware, and things

(43:38):
went really bad for Dick and It's something that horrified
Stanley that he didn't talk about. I don't know hard
to say, well, we'll never know. This could have actually
gone just the way because I could also see Henry
Morton Stanley being so shocked and horrified by this realization
that he just is spellbound for hours. Yeah, like this,
this rocks the firmament of his world. The Mike Pence

(44:01):
soul inside of him is like, yeah, no, no, no, no,
I need to lie down for a week. This is
worse than malaria, yeah, which he was dealing with constantly
at the time. So in November of eighteen sixty, Abraham Lincoln,
America's greatest president not named Taft, was elected after a
contentious vote. As a foreigner, Henry didn't really see what
the big deal was, but his friend Dan Gorerie, with

(44:23):
the son of his store's biggest customer, filled him in.
And obviously, Dan Gorerie is a rich Southern kid in
eighteen sixty, so I'm gonna give you a guess as
to where his political allegiances wound up being during the
whole war thing. Stanley later wrote that he was informed
quote the election of Aide Lincoln in November previous had
created a hostile feeling in the South because this man
had declared himself opposed to slavery. And as soon as

(44:45):
he became president in March, he would do all in
his power to free the slaves. Of course, said he.
In that event, all slaveholders would be ruined. Now, as
you can probably guess, Dan and his father were people
who owned other people for profit. The Gory family had
a hundred and twenty slaves, which is yeah, yeah, I apologize.

(45:07):
Um Now. Dan told Henry that he suspected the South
would succeed over the issue of slavery and whatever else
you can say. He was not wrong about that. Uh.
And as the Civil War ramped up, Stanley's main concern
was that the Union had seized a series of forts
at the mouth of the Mississippi. Uh he and he
concluded that this meant that the election of Abraham Lincoln
was going to ruin his business because he worked as

(45:27):
a ship boy on the river. Uh. And so that's
why he says he decides to volunteer for the Confederate Army,
or at least that's part of it. Um. So one
of the funniest things in the world. Sor and in
the whole goddamn world is reading Tim gel try to
explain how Henry Morton Stanley, a man who fought for
the Confederate Army, did not support slavery and was not

(45:49):
a racist. He's been so much of this book arguing
that Stanley wasn't a racist, and it is the funniest
goddamn thing. I mean, it's it's really it's really amusing.
I'm going to read you a selection from Tim Jill's
book Stanley, so you can hear this man explain how
totally not racist Stanley was. Yes, though Henry expressed no

(46:10):
revulsion towards slavery in the Deep South, which was legal
and accepted by everyone he knew, he was not he
was not prejudiced against black people, but it was fine
to own them. But that that's not That doesn't mean
you're prejudiced. You can be racist and fine, you can
be not anti racist and fine with slavery. It's it's impossible,

(46:31):
totally possible. I guess that is an argument. No, No,
I think these people are perfectly equal to me in
every way, and I just owned them from bydnal force.
Like I guess, at least that's honest. Boy, Yeah, I
love that. I love Jill that He's like, look he yes, okay,
he and he lived with slavery and maybe it got

(46:53):
advantages from it, but it was legal, everybody, It's fine,
it's legal. It's fine. Not just got advantage? Is this
from it? Like actively fought and was willing to kill
for it. Uh, it is a stance to take. Yes,
he fought for slavery, but he wasn't racist. Excellent, It's

(47:14):
it's great, dude. Uh So, I'm not even done with
this fucking quote. So he just explains how that he's
not practiced against black people. Indeed, he had lived in
the New Orleans boarding house that was owned by a
freed black woman. It had been recommended to him by
two of James Speake's slaves. Uh. Oh boy, Now, Soren,

(47:36):
you know who won't fight for slavery in eighteen sixty
Abraham Lincoln. That is accurate. That is accurate. And also
the products and services that support this podcast, many of
which are Abraham Lincoln. He's a big, big donor to
the pod, The Ghost of Abraham Lincoln. Here we go,

(48:08):
all right, we're back. Oh my gosh, oh those ads.
I I am just fucking you could hang a pipe
rail gate off me. That's how hard I am. Anyway,
let's roll back into the episode and not analyze that
too much. Um so, uh yeah, okay, we are still
making it through this fucking paragraph of Tim Geil explaining

(48:28):
why it's not racist to fight for the Confederacy. Um
my god. So he's just explained that he lived in
a New Orleans boarding house, was one by a free
black woman. Quote. A frenzy desire to fight the Yankees
inflamed most of the young men Stanley knew, and most
of the young women urged them on. Many customers of
the store joined up after Captain Samuel G. Smith raised
a local company called the Dixie Grays. Because Henry felt

(48:48):
the Coral was not really his and was puzzled that
white's meant to fight one another over the rights of blacks.
He did not enlist but on receiving So he's not racist,
but he doesn't see why it's worth fighting over the
rights of other people who aren't white. Tim, are you
reading the paragraph you're writing? Can't we all just get along?

(49:10):
Not them, I mean us people, the actual human beings. Yeah,
you do get that feeling from old Timmy g Timmy J.
So quote. Uh yeah, but upon receiving in a parcel
a chemise and a petticoat such as a Negro lady's
maid might wear, he felt compelled to ask, not least
because suspecting that the sinder was one of Dr Gorey's

(49:32):
beautiful daughters. So he gets sent ladies clothing by a
woman he thinks is hot, and she's basically being like,
you're a lady because you're not fighting for the South. Oh,
that's such a good burn for that time. Yeah, and
it it it's actually a really common thing historically. A
similar thing happened in England during World War One. We're
like women would get together to like shame men in

(49:53):
town who hadn't volunteered to fight yet. Um. Variations of
this have happened in a lot of places throughout history.
Uh and Stanley, if that's true, Stanley, that's absolutely part
of what Stanley does this for. It did not seem
like a whimp, which you know scance. But on the
other hand, a woman he liked just sent him some
of her clothes. I mean that's like silver. No, it

(50:15):
wasn't her clothes, It was the kind of ladies clothing
that a black woman would wear. Oh yeah, I bet
that was part of that. No, he did not like that.
So he enlists as a private soldier under an officer
named Henry H. Stanley, which is weird, um, but nobody
seems to make anything of it. So whatever. He wound

(50:36):
up fighting with a unit called the Dixie Grays at
the Battle of Shiloh, which was a pretty bad battle.
Not a good time familiar. Yeah, yeah, not a great
battle as far as battles go. If I had to
be in a battle, wouldn't be top of my list. Uh.
And yeah, he fought against the Army of I don't
know about you, Sor, but my favorite career alcoholic Ulysses
Simpson Grant. Um, yeah, he alcoholics. A cry baby. Uh.

(51:02):
He fucking ruled, dude. Oh my gosh. So Stanley saw heavy,
nightmarish combat during the first day of the battle, and
many of his friends were shot dead immediately in front
of him. Uh. He later wrote of his feelings while
standing in the carnage that he felt shocked to see
quote that the human form we made so much of
should now be mutilated, hacked, and outraged, and that life
hitherto guarded as a sacred thing should be given up

(51:22):
to death. Um, so that's all right, Henry, Yeah, come on, man, Yeah,
it's it's lame. You're about the eighty billionth person to
write about that. And what you're about to do is
what you're about to do exactly that to hundreds of people.
Oh my gosh, with so many more than hundred. Soren
So he was captured on the second day of fighting
and found himself imprisoned in a pow camp outside of Chicago.

(51:45):
And this was not a nice place, although it probably
compared favorably to the workhouse he'd grown up in. Um.
After a brief confinement, he was given the opportunity to
free himself by enlisting in the Union Army and fighting
for the other side. Adam hoss Child of King Leopold's
Ghosts right that he promptly agreed to do so. And
this is one of the few places where hoss Child
has kind of a more positive view of Stanley than

(52:06):
Tim Jean does. But Tim Jean doesn't mean it that way.
He disagrees with this and thinks that it was hard
for Stanley to leave the Confederacy. Quote. Henry held out
for six weeks before changing sides. He had been through
hell with his fellow Southerners and felt disloyal, but as
a foreigner embroiled in the war by chance and having
little understanding of the conflict's true significance, Stanley's behavior was

(52:27):
not forgivable. And it's funny because he says that he
really just didn't understand what all this fighting was about.
And then later in the book, when Stanley becomes an
anti slavery crusader, makes a huge point about how good
it was that he was an abolitionist. How could he
not have known what this fight was about? That's great.
Uh so, it's awesome. Um, it's it's so cool. Yeah,

(52:51):
he it's it's cool that he feels the need to
explain how why leaving the Confederate Army was quote not forgivable.
That says a lot about gene. That wasn't anyone's question,
tim So anyway, Stanley and next spent some time fighting
for the Union as an artillerist until he gets sick
from dysentery and received a medical discharge. He' spent a

(53:14):
bit of time working as a sailor on the Atlantic
before in eighteen sixty four, he enlisted in the Union
Navy and got a posting on the frigate Minnesota by
virtue of his very nice penmanship. Uh. He worked as
a ship's clerk and was present for a naval battle
wherein his ship bombarded a Confederate fort in North Carolina.
Henry Morton Stanley was one of a very small number
of people to experience combat on both sides of the war,

(53:35):
in the land and on the sea. So that's an
eat piece of trivia. Well, not a lot of folks
do that. Yeah, So he was in the army and
the navy. He was in the Confederate Army, the U. S. Army,
and the U. S. Navy. During the course of the
Civil War, he got around a bit, you know, not
most not a lot of people did that. So once
the Civil War was over, Stanley used some of his

(53:56):
army bucks to take a trip to Turkey with two
of his friends, including a younger boy who basically worship
Stanley named Louis no. And this is a recurrent theme
in Stanley's life. There's always one or two or three
young white boys hanging around who think he's the bee's knees,
and most of them die. Um, but he seems to
have a need to have adoring young men kind of

(54:18):
hanging around him. So the object of Stanley's trip was
to just kind of wander around Turkey and then quote
write a great book of adventure. It's amazing. Yeah, it
is like the child It's like the career that I
dreamed of having when I was nine. Yeah, go find
yourself in this foreign country and then write a gripping

(54:38):
book about it. Yeah. I mean his Eat Prey Love
would involve shooting a lot of people, but like that
was the idea, right, Yeah. Yeah, and I'm not opposed
to reading something like that either. No. I I too
would like to travel somewhere different from what I'm used
to and then write a great book of adventure. That
does sound fun. Now. The fact that people like me

(54:58):
and people like you if I that fun is part
of why the eight hundreds were a real rough period
for a lot of the globe. That's a good point.
That's a good point. Yeah. But you know, whatever while
we were just describing was a very very tame version
of manifest destiny. Yeah, and it's like the version of

(55:19):
manifest destiny that I don't know, like like Indiana Jones
and Tintin books pass Along, where it's like, yeah, it
seems super fun to go have adventures and meet cookie
characters and strange places. What's about that? Go get into
scrapes with the crazy savages. Oh oh yep, okay, yeah,

(55:40):
there's I see that's problematic. Yeah. The people who did
that got so many people killed. Okay. Yeah. So unfortunately,
before they could go off to Turkey, No and Uh
Stanley lost almost all of their guns and equipment to
a boating accident in the United States. UH, and they
suffered a fur or accident in Anatolia. When they actually

(56:02):
get to Turkey, and Louis No decided to start a
campfire in the middle of a drought and it quickly
raged out of control and the local police took Stanley
and his other partner into custody. UH. They got out,
but louis No freaked out because he was scared of
how angry Stanley was going to be UH and as
soon as they got out of jail, he fled to
a nearby island. So Stanley catches up with his boy

(56:23):
a few days later, and he gives what No would
later call a sadistic flogging and then forces him to
return to the expedition. So the slavery hater has a
long history of whipping people and making them work for him,
but in ways that aren't slaveries. Yeah, it's cool, it's cool.

(56:45):
The voyage continued and the crew made their way three
miles inland to Turkey, with again no clear goal but adventure. Uh.
They reach a village called and here's how Jail describes
what happens next. According to no who came to hate
Stanley before the trip was over, Stanley tried to murder
a turk in order to steal his horses. It's all perfect.

(57:06):
He's just gonna kill me a man and take his horses.
Henry would later claim that the turk had made obscene
overtures to Know, and he Stanley had been slashed at
him with his sword to defend his young friend. Stanley's
diary confirms that the turk had been sexually drawn to
Know when they were riding together in a group, but
Stanley may have used his disgust as a pretext to
attack an attempt to rob the man. So again, this

(57:29):
is the guy who is the most sympathetic to Stanley.
You could be he was like, maybe he used his
friend's sexual assault is pretext to commit armed robberies. Al Right,
guy like horses, We gotta get us some horses. I'm
gonna steal him. I'm gonna I'm gonna make up a
story about this guy wanting us my friend so I

(57:51):
can take his stuff. Yeah, uh, it's cool. I'm gonna
continue Jeels paragraph because the middle gymnask is here. Real fun.
If he had really been contemplating murder, he would have
surreptitiously loaded a gun in advance to be able to
shoot the turk without risking a hand to hand tussle
with a man used to fighting with swords and daggers,
so both both being like, look, here's what he would

(58:15):
have done if he really wanted to kill the guy,
and also going of course, turks naturally know how to
fight with daggers. You always see them with those long
curved swords. But Henry made no such preparation. After his
hands had been badly cutting the fight and he was
desperate to end it, he failed to lay hands on
a single loaded gun among the weapons he had brought
with him, so like, he also didn't kill him in vengeance,

(58:37):
So he's a good guy. It's so fun so reputation spotless.
Still still a flawless man, oh man. Now, Stanley and
his men were surrounded by angry Turks and they opted
to surrender rather than fight. They were beaten, tied up,
and robbed, and Louis No was raped at knife point repeatedly. Um.

(58:59):
They vived though, and successfully brought suit against the men
who'd attacked them. Stanley won a dollar judgment, and he
gave louis No the smallest share. Yeah. Well, imagine the
emotional turmoil this Henry Smarton Stanley had to go through
his boy get beaten like that. Yeah, oh good lord.
So Stanley returned to the United States and got a

(59:19):
job as a reporter. And this is the first time
in his life when Henry Morton Stanley was good at something. Um.
He his beat was the Indian Wars, which in eighteen
sixty seven we're not a super at a hopeful point
for the Native American side, and most of what Stanley
saw in person were like, you know, we would call
him desperate peace negotiations um by the victims of a

(59:41):
genocide and the genociders. Now, this is the area where
hoss Child and Gail diverge substantially, or at least one
of them. Uh. The hoss Child claims that Stanley just
lied and invented fake battles and massacres to basically rile
up people's blood with lines like this, the Indians, true
to their promises, true to their bloody instincts, true to
their savage hatred of the white race, true to the

(01:00:01):
lessons instilled in their bosoms by their progenitors, are on
the war path. Um. Yeah, that's a that's a bad one. Yeah,
that's a bad one. Um. Gel has a totally different
attitude and says that Stanley did witness some horrible crimes
by Native Americans, but that he also reported sympathetically on

(01:00:22):
them because he thought they'd been mistreated by the white man.
And he provides several examples of this, and the reality
seems to be that number one, it wasn't uncommon to
both right lies about the brutality of Native Americans and
also write sympathetically about their plight. That was huge in Europe.
There was this both all throughout. We talked about this
in our Karl May episode, whose Hitler's like favorite novelist

(01:00:44):
who wrote a bunch of cowboy books. May simultaneously wrote
about how tragic it was that Native Americans were being
exterminated and also portrayed them as brutal, savage monsters. Like
he did both simultaneously, and that was kind of pretty
common in among Europeans, and Stanley he did the same thing. Um,
so yeah, it's it's cool. Uh. Later, with explaining why

(01:01:06):
it's okay that Stanley vastly exaggerated the number of people
that he killed. Uh, Tim, Jeal cites this is a
justification quote the knowledge he had gained when reporting from
the Indian Wars that Americans like to read about red
Indians being killed in retaliation for injuries. So so there's
a guy who's very sympathetic toward the Native American. Yes, yes,
the least racist person possible. Come on, let's let's give

(01:01:32):
him a break, everybody. The funniest part of Jeal's biography
is the multiple points where he off handedly expresses that
he's cleared Stanley from any charges of racism, just like,
we can just dispense with that because I've proved he wasn't.
It's so good. So eventually, the quality of Stanley's articles

(01:01:53):
earned him the attention of James Gordon Biddett Jr. The
owner of the New York Herald, which was at the
time one of the most profitable publications in the world
at the moment. I would try to compare it to
a modern publication, but I can't think of a profitable one,
so we're just gonna move on past that. Stanley fin
angled himself a job basically working for free to report
on a war between the British government and the Emperor

(01:02:14):
of Abyssinia. So Stanley is one of those guys who're like, yes,
sometimes you get it right for free to get exposure, um,
which is not ideal but also isn't wrong. Like that
is kind of the way it works, and it sucks
and unfairly uh rewards people who are already rich and
come from wealth. But if you're willing to write for free,
you can really jump start your career. Yeah, or if
you're either you're rich or you're used to living in

(01:02:36):
absolute squalor yes, that is the path I took and
lived in a place where the ceiling collapsed on me
more than once. Quote here's talking Adam hoss Child describing
his his first war, corresponding gig at Suez on his
way to the war, Stanley bribe the cheap telegraph clerk
to make sure that when correspondence reports arrived from the front,

(01:02:58):
his would be the first cabled home. His site paid off,
and his glowing account of how the British won the
war's only significant battle was the first to reach the world.
In a grand stroke of luck, the trans Mediterranean telegraph
cable broke just after Stanley's stories were sent off. The
dispatches of his exasperated rivals and even the British Army's
official reports had to travel part of the way to
Europe by ship. In a Cairo hotel in June eighteen
sixty eight, Stanley savored his scoop and the news that

(01:03:20):
he had been named a permanent roving foreign correspondent for
the Herald. He was twenty seven years old, so really
fox up his fellow reporters, but not a dumb call.
Yeah yeah, And I I had someone do the big
equivalent of that to me when I was in Moses.
I had an employee of a major news network bribe

(01:03:40):
the Iraqi military to not let me in. A bunch
of other journalists passed a checkpoint. And that is the
most I can say about that story. Without being legally
charged with something by the said company. So we're gonna
roll right along. It was a fun We got where
we wanted to go because we had better fixers than
they did. But it sucked. So Uh, this was you know,

(01:04:03):
the first time in this story that Henry's life was
in what you would call pretty good shape. You know,
he's he's a roving foreign correspondent. He's gotten a huge scoop.
Money is starting to come in and he's in in America.
I don't know if you wouldn't call journalism respectable, but
he has money and that's respectable. Um. And despite you
know the fact that he fought for an empire founded
on human bondage. You could call this an inspiring journey.

(01:04:26):
Abandoned child makes his way up to respected foreign correspondent.
That's a that's a tale with an arc to it.
But Stanley wasn't satisfied with these achievements. Journalism then is
now was not a well regarded profession in England. People
in America, you know, a little bit more positive towards him. Uh,
William Morton Stanley had been living as an American for
more than a decade at this point, but the opinions

(01:04:46):
of English high society still very much mattered to him,
and he knew that the only real way for a
man like him to sneak his way into the tippy
top of English society was to become the most respected
thing of that day, an African explorer. And that is
where we're gonna roll into in part two. Are you
ready for this ship? This is where it gets really

(01:05:07):
this is really really starts cooking. This is where he
really starts, and I mean really starts killing people like
he's been doing. He's been doing some killing, don't get
me wrong, but he really he really in some lives here.
All right, I can't wait? Alright, Soran, Uh you got
anything to plug? Uh? Yeah, I have my podcast which

(01:05:30):
is uh Soaring and Dan. It's called Quick Question with
Sore and Dan. Actually I don't even know the name
of my own podcast. Uh. You can also find me
on Twitter Sore and Underscore Ltd. And you can watch
American Dad. We should've got new episodes coming out in May,
he sure does. You can find us on the internet
behind the Bastards dot com. And you have plenty of

(01:05:51):
time to do that with the whole being stuck inside
thing you can. You can buy T shirts if you
need to hire your nakedness in these times. I'm actually
shocked that we're we're our T shirt sales are are
more or less the same, just because I didn't imagine.
I thought a lot more people would be going shirtless
during this period of time. And I haven't really processed
my feelings on that. But we have Anderson merch. We

(01:06:14):
do have Anderson merch. People should continue buying that so
that they can use it to craft the flags that
wave over the glorious revolution. Just wait, but those shirt
sales will start tanking, and then and then buy a
mug by a magnet by a sticker if you still
have money, because the economy hasn't collept. If not, continue

(01:06:35):
enjoying our free content. Check out some of the sources
for this episode. Um, and go hug a cat. You
can still do that a lot of the time if
you already have one. Don't hug a stranger's cat. You
might you might spread the COVID h which has bummed
me out. I love hugging strange cat anyway. Follow Robert
on Twitter and I write, okay, you can follow us

(01:06:57):
some Instagram at Bastard's pod. You can find the sources
for this podcast under the episode description on all the
apps who use and uh, wash your hands, wash your hands.
Just sanitize those cats before you hug them. You could
do that still, Robert, I do, but they just hate
they you know what, they hate the tequila sprayer and
I can't think of another way to sanitize a cat quickly.

(01:07:18):
But they don't want to hugging much either, so it's
too much. It's kind of a wash for you, especially
after I've sprayed them with the tequila. It is just
not good anyway. Episodes over all, right, m