The morning before grandpa’s funeral my family agreed to refrain from sorting through and divvying up his worldly possessions until the following weekend, but by evening we were all drinking and exploring the nooks and crannies of his house with much sentiment and nostalgia, which—perhaps predictably—devolved into a collective pawing and claiming of pretty much everything. By the time we were finished, his place resembled the stripped skeleton of a car someone left parked in a bad neighborhood for too long, its remains resting on cinder blocks, the wheels, windows, and whatever else wasn’t permanently bolted down disseminated into the night.
At the time I had just taken up the itinerant lifestyle of a travel writer and therefore bore limited compulsion to collect yet more stuff to stuff into my already overstuffed storage. That’s not to say I didn’t come away with some solid scores. There was the ornate globe in which the countries were puzzled of inlayed pieces of polished stones spanning all manner of classification and color. It had stood in the entryway of grandpa’s various homes for decades and was originally claimed by my cousin, but in the last minute she decided that it was better suited to a wayfaring successor such as myself. Also old pocket knives and oversized flannel shirts, and a wide-brimmed hat something like Hemingway might have worn in Havana. First editions of The Razor’s Edge and Of Human Bondage. A carton of records including rare big band material, a 45 of “Jesse’s Girl” by Rick Springfield, and a few early Bill Cosby standups (which was a cool find at the time, for it was only February 2014 and we didn’t know any better yet). And, tucked away on a high shelf at the back of a closet, a cardboard box containing dozens, perhaps hundreds of newspapers dating as far back as the 1960s.
No one opposed when I claimed the box, obvious as it was to all sundry that it was my fare: front pages from the Timeses New York and Seattle, the North Coast News, the Skagit Valley Herald, and a smattering of others proffering word of moon landings and war, inaugurations and assassinations—a parade of varying events grandpa warranted chronicling for one reason or another. And among the newspapers I discovered a six-page facsimile of a typewritten letter dated March 22nd, 1869.
“Tell me how I may address you,” it began. “Miss Roberts is so formal, almost unkind. Address me by my name”—and here the author inserted several extra spaces for emphasis—“Henry.”
My grandfather’s name was Tom, so the letter wasn’t his. What followed was the most astounding missive I have ever read. A love letter, but what a love letter! Masterfully written, full of suggestion and bravado, allure and insinuation, but also—quite unexpectedly—harrowing historical implications.
Begging for its recipient’s confidentiality, Henry implores that their correspondence “may be written without the interpretations of outside and indiscreet persons.” In the letter it is made clear that sender and receiver had met through his mother, and one gets the sense that he perhaps endeavors to forestall village gossip. Later we will discover that he was then a figure of rising notoriety—and today infamy—so it is unsurprising that he would want to maintain a clandestine aspect to his personal life. What’s more, secrecy forges intimacy. There is something seductive about arcanum.
“We are both of us educated, moderately intelligent, moderately good also I hope, and past legal infancy. We are neither of us bound to impart our most cherished secrets to others, unless we wish. With this understanding, a path is laid out open to a better knowledge of each other—We will not be hasty, but we will go about our appointed task in a deliberate methodical manner.”
Surreptitious liaisons and subtle double entendres such as “a better knowledge of each other” and “our appointed task” were pretty racy for Victorian Britain, and he continues in this vein, spicing the text with ample dashes of flattery and boast, jest and innuendo. Then at some point he launches into his life story—at least up until 1869. Much came after. Horrible things.
“I am an illegitimate child of Elizabeth Parry and John Rowlands,” he begins, then shifts into third person to divulge how this unlucky birthright resulted in his abandonment to a poorhouse at the age of five, where he was “beaten, kicked, cuffed, snarled, sneered at, jeered at, and scoffed at as a workhouse brat, and illegitimate child. The knowledge of this inured him to the after life he followed.” He goes on to relate how, after a period of homelessness on the streets of Liverpool, he signed on as a sailor, shipping to New Orleans where he landed a clerking job and “by his ability he distinguished himself, was praised and flattered, was even baptized, confirmed, adopted as a son. Rowland became HENRY MORELAKE STANLEY.”
When I read it, the name gave me pause. I recognized it from somewhere, but couldn’t quite place it. Swept up in the epic scale of the narrator’s tale, I continued reading.
Upon the death of his adoptive father, Rowland-turned-Stanley journeyed west to Arkansas where he worked as a bookkeeper until he was swept up in the Confederacy and begrudgingly fought in its favor during the early months of the Civil War. Capture, brief imprisonment, and dramatic escape were followed by his desertion to England. Here he reconciled with birth family who furnished him with clothes, money, and passage back to New York, where he now enlisted in the United States Navy as a “Ships Writer” before securing an appointment as secretary to an admiral, eventually garnering promotion to Ensign following a purported dose of derring-do. After participating in the last great sea battle against the Confederacy, he sailed around the world for two years before furloughing for a stint in Constantinople, after which he returned to the U.S. and took a job as the New York Herald’s travel correspondent to Abyssinia, Arabia, Zanzibar, Egypt, Crete, Greece, Turkey, Palestine, Syria, Spain, France, Italy…
Upon concluding this genuinely incredible account of his life, he tells Miss Roberts that “this waif, this child Rowland—this Stanley is he who addresses you now—I assure you he is very ambitious, and means, God willing, to rise to some notoriety before he dies.” The coming decades will prove this a terrible understatement. In any case, “he could do better if he had a wife, not a pretty doll faced wife, but a woman, educated, possessed of energy…With a woman of such requirements I would defy the whole world. I write to you, having seen just such a one as I desire.” He is, of course, referring to Miss. Roberts, who I will later learn was Katie Gough Roberts of Wales, to whom he was briefly engaged. And after a few schmaltzy closing remarks—imploring once again for her discretion—he signs off “Henry M. Stanley.”
And it’s only now that the name rings a bell. This was no Henry Morelake Stanley, but Henry Morton Stanley, who—so it was claimed—uttered the words “Dr. Livingston, I presume?” upon finding missionary and abolitionist David Livingston in the jungles of Zanzibar (present-day Tanzania) at the behest of the New York Herald. The two would go on to explore the region extensively, an experience that would inform his later efforts on behalf of an employer who was the diametric opposite of anti-slavery Livingston: King Leopold II of Belgium, who hired Stanley to guide his forces into the Congo and establish Belgian colonial dominance. All of this happened about ten years after Stanley wrote the letter.
History has rarely seen such horrific consequences. The Congolese were forced into slavery and endured severe brutality. Leopold’s reign over the Congo Free State (a doublespeak distinction if ever there was one) was characterized by the cutting off of the hands and/or feet of any who disobeyed. By the time Leopold was forced to relinquish control in 1908, some 10-15 million people had been murdered.
Henry Stanley was instrumental in all of this. He led the Belgians into the Congo and was personally responsible for the founding of Leopoldville, which remains the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to this day. While he wrote and spoke on the humanity of African people and against slavery, his brutality toward them was well documented, and there is evidence that he himself participated in the slave trade, at least tangentially. They even named a waterfall near Leopoldville after him, and some maintain that he was the inspiration for Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Later research informed that the letter was from a batch of Stanley’s missives that were printed by newspapers shortly after his death in 1904, but this particular version is a photocopy of a typewritten pages bearing a handwritten note: Copied Aug 13, 1878 from Original—about a year before Stanley entered the service of Leopold and proceeding my grandfather’s birth by half a century. How and why it came into his possession is unknown.
I still haven’t had a chance to sort through the newspapers and further investigate what is to be found there. It’s now a decade hence and the box has remained in storage with the flashy globe and old clothes and books for all these years as I’ve lived and meandered through Mexico City, Zacatecas, Hanoi, Bangkok, Cairo, Carthage, Istanbul, Belgrade, Athens, Florence, Paris, Granada, and on and on. From time to time I’ve wondered about the letter and if there is anything else concealed between the pages of all that erstwhile news.
Is there any sapience to be deduced from all of this? Maybe not. Probably not. Possibly it contains some vague warning about how even we as the heroes of our own stories can turn into villains. Perhaps there is something to be inferred about the erratic transmission of history; the hidden things and esoteric connections, even between love and genocide. But most likely any meaning is far more gossamer than can be composed into words—the sort of sinister gnosis that emerges upon waking or falling asleep and one feels and sometimes fears but can never quite remember.
As always, questions persist. For example: Was Grandpa a fan of “Jesse’s Girl”? He would have been pushing sixty…
And I’m left wondering who he was and what legacy he’d foreseen. For a near universal misconception is that we build legacies over the course of a lifetime, but in truth they’re determined by others after we’ve gone.
