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King Leopold's Ghost-Walking into Fire

" I shall Not Give Up The Chase"
On january 28, a quarter-century after Tuckey's failed expedition, the man whowould spectacularly accomplish what Tuckey tried to do was born in the small Welsh market town of Denbigh. He was entered on the birth register of St. Hilary's Church as "John Rowlands, Bastard" - an epithet that was to mark the boy for the rest of his life, a life obsessively devoted to living down a sense of shame. Young John was the first of five illegitimate children born to Betsy Parry, a housemaid. His father may have been John Rowlands, a local drunkard who died of delirium tremens, or a prominent and married lawer named James Vaughan Horns, or a boyfriend of Betsy Parry's in London, where she had been working.

After giving birth, Betsy Parry departed from Denbigh in disgrace, leaving her baby behind in the home of his two uncles and his maternal grandfather, a man who believed a boy needed a "sound whipping" if he misbehaved. When John was five, his grandfather died, and the uncles immediately got rid of their unwanted nephew by paying a local family half a crown a week to take him in. When the family asked for more money, the uncles refused. One day the foster family told young, John that their son Dick would take him to visit his "Aunt Mary" in another village.

The way seemed interminable and tedious.... At last Dick set me down from his shoulders before an immense stone building, and, passing through tall iron gates, he pulled at a bell, which I could hear clanging noisily in the distant interior. A sombre faced stranger appeared at the door, who, despite my remon-strances, seized me by the hand and drew me within, while Dick tried to sooth my fears with glib promises that he was only going to bring Aunt Mary to me.The door closed on him and, with the echoing sand, I experienced for the first time the awful feeling of utter desolateness.

Six-year-old John Rowlands was now an immate of the St.Asaph Union Workhouse. Records of life at St.Asaph's are generally covered by a viel of Victorian euphemism, but a local newspaper complained that the master of the workhouse was an alcoholic who took "indecent liberties" with women on his staff.

An investigative commission that visited the workhouse in 1847, about the time John Rowlands arrived, reported that male adults" took part in every possible vice", and that children slept two to a bed, an older child with a younger, resulting in their starting" to practice and understand things they should not." For the rest of his life, John Rowlands would show a fear of sexual intimacy in any form.

Whatever John may have endured or seen in the workhouse dormitory, in its schoolroom he thrived. Foe his achievements he won a prize Bible from the local bishop. He was fascinated by geography. He had an unusual ability to mimic someone else's handwriting after studying it for a few minutes. His own penmanship was strikingly graceful;his youthful signature was stylish and forward-leaning, with the stems and tails of the letters sweeping dramatically far above and below the line.

it was as if, through his handwriting, he was trying to pull himself out of disgrace and turn the script of his life from one of poverty to one of elegance.

One evening, when John was twelve, his supervisor " came up to me during the dinner-hour, when all the inmates were assembled, and, pointing out a tall woman with an oval face, and a great coil of dark hair behind her head, asked 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 of cool, 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."

Adding to his shock was the fact that his mother had brought two new illegitimate children to St. Asaph's wwith her, a boy and a girl. Some weeks later, she left the workhouse. For John, it was the latest in a chain of abandonments.At fifteen, John left St. Asaph's and stayed with a succession of relatives, all of whom seemed queasy about sheltering a poorhouse cousin.

At seventeen, while he was living with an uncle in Liverpool and working as a butcher's delivery boy, he feared he was about tobe turned out once more. One day he delivered some meat to an American merchant ship at the docks, the Windermere. The captain eyed this short but sturdy-looking young man and asked,"How would you like to sail in this ship?"

In February 1859, after a seven-week voyage, The Windermere landed in Nerw Orleans, where the young newcomer jumped ship. He long remembered the city's fascinating array of smells: tar, brine, green coffee, rum, and molasses. Roaming the streets in search of work, on the porch of a warehouse he spied a middle-aged man in a stovepipe hat, a cotton broker, as it turned out, and approached him:"Do you want a boy sir?"
The cotton broker, impressed by John's only reference, the prize Bible with the bishop's inscription, took on the Welsh teenager as an employee.

Soon afte, youn John Rowlands, now living in the New World, decided to give himself a new name. The procedure was gradual. In the 1860 New Orleans census, he is listed as "J.Rolling." A woman who knew him at this time remembered him as John Rollins: "smart as a whip, and much given to bragging, big talk and telling stories."

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 middle names,using Morley, Morelake, and Moreland before finally settling on Morton. And so the boy who had entered the St. Asaph Union Workhouse as John Rowlands became the man who would soon be known worldwide as Henry Morton Stanley.

Reference:Adam Hochschild