Dates

• Existence: 28 January 1841 - 10 May 1904

Biography

Sir Henry Morton Stanley was born John Rowlands on 28 January 1841 in Denbigh, Wales.

Henry had a hard upbringing as he was born out of wedlock and abandoned by his teenage mother. His father died shortly after his birth and Henry was brought up by his grandfather until he was five years old, when his grandfather died. Eventually Henry was sent to the St. Asaph Union Workhouse for the Poor, where he endured squalid living conditions and a culture of endemic abuse.

In 1859, aged eighteen, Henry immigrated to America, landing in New Orleans, where he allegedly met wealthy trader Henry Hope Stanley, with whom he developed such a close relationship that he adopted his name. Three years later the American Civil War started and Henry reluctantly joined the Confederate States Army. He fought in the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, where he was taken prisoner and later joined the Union Army for a brief period. During the following two years Henry worked on several merchant ships before joining the US Navy in July 1864.

After the war Stanley became a journalist and explorer and organised various expeditions to the Ottoman Empire and Africa between the late 1860s and the 1880s, including the one to find David Livingstone, the one to liberate Emin Pasha and to the one to locate the source of the Nile.

On his return to Europe in the 1890s, Stanley became a politician serving as a Liberal Unionist member for Lambeth North in parliament between 1895 and 1900. He was knighted in 1899 in recognition of his service to the British Empire in Africa and year later he was given the Grand Cordon of the Order of Leopold by King Leopold II.

Stanley died on 10 May 1904.

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