Henry Morton Stanley

Update June 2020 - relating to controversy over statue of Stanley in Denbigh.

There is a picture of Stanley as a violent man who went to Africa to kill people is a travesty, but Tim Jeal has an alternative, well researched opinion as he explains here and why, it needs saying that for the illegitimate and rejected son of a Denbigh barmaid and an alcoholic farm labourer, to escape St Asaph workhouse to become a top American journalist, and then an explorer, who for the first time circumnavigated and mapped Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria, is extraordinary. But then to sail down the Congo for 1,800 miles, from the place where Livingstone had left it, until reaching the Atlantic - having in the meantime solved the Nile mystery, and the origins of the River Congo - is frankly miraculous. Stanley lost half his African assistants on that epic journey and all his white colleagues to disease, starvation, drowning, or indigenous attacks.