aim throughout is to refute McLynn and portray a humane, compassionate, fully heterosexual Stanley.

Escaping from the workhouse, Stanley went first to Liverpool and then to the United States, landing in New Orleans, where he changed his name. Jeal did not discover the name change; in fact, it was included in Stanley’s own autobiography, published after his death. However, one of Jeal’s new claims is that Stanley’s account of how he came by his new name is false. Stanley was not adopted by a rich merchant by the name of Henry Stanley who bestowed his name on the penniless refugee. Instead, young John Rowlands simply appropriated the original Henry Stanley’s name in order to create a more impressive life story for himself. Again, Jeal is understanding, summoning popular psychology to the defense of his subject by saying, “Young people who lie usually do so because they feel bad about themselves and need to enhance their self-esteem.”

Jeal also defends Stanley’s desertions during the American Civil War, his threatening a U.S. Army officer with a gun after the war, and his violent attack on a Turk in an early exploration effort in the Middle East. Jeal either accepts Stanley’s version of events (he was acting in self-defense in Turkey) or calls his actions “not unforgivable.” Jeal’s book is very much the case for the defense, which mars it as much as a prosecutorial approach would. In the end, posterity cares little whether Stanley was a good or bad man; no doubt he was a mixture of the two. The real reason to write or read a biography about him is to understand his achievements.

Jeal certainly thinks Stanley had achievements, primarily as an explorer. Again, this will surprise those who have heard that Stanley was a journalist sent by the publisher of the New York Herald to find Livingstone. Jeal questions that story too, suggesting that the impetus for the mission came not from the publisher but from Stanley himself, who became obsessed with Africa and Livingstone.

Jeal also suggests that Livingstone was not lost at all, just as on a later mission, Emin Pasha, whom Stanley was supposedly going to rescue in the Sudan, did not really need rescuing. In the first instance, and perhaps in the second, the motivation was not that Livingstone was lost or that Emin Pasha was endangered but rather that Stanley himself sought to perform a great deed and make a name for himself. In fact, Stanley was worried that someone else would find Livingstone first and thus deprive him of the glory. Still, Livingstone, who was ill and short of supplies, was glad to see him, and the public was thrilled; it was a journalistic coup to find the famous explorer, a coup that Jeal does not make as much of as he might have, perhaps because he wants to portray Stanley as an explorer in his own right, not just as the discoverer of one.

This biography makes a case for Stanley’s achievements as an explorer. On a second expedition into Africa, he helped establish the sources of the Nile and became the first person to map the whole length of the Congo River. He also mapped various African lakes and established the first settlement at what became first Léopoldville and later Kinshasa. The latter work he did in the employ of the notorious King Leopold II of Belgium, who established the so-called Congo Free State, the site of numerous atrocities perhaps best known through Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899). Jeal argues that Stanley became associated with the atrocities even though he left the Congo region before most of them occurred. As for the other atrocities, they were mostly committed by his subordinates. Jeal spends a great deal of time going over the accusations against Stanley, in effect describing events twice over: when they actually happened, and when controversy erupted over them. This analysis adds unnecessarily to the length of the book, as does the tedious recounting of Stanley’s marches through the wilderness.

Whereas, according to Jeal, Richard Hall’s Stanley: An Adventurer Explored (1974) skimped on the details of Stanley’s exploration, Jeal’s biography certainly does not do that. He repeatedly describes the swampy terrain; men struck down by dysentery, malaria, or smallpox; men starving, being attacked by natives, attacking the natives, surviving rains and cataracts, trading with the natives, negotiating with them, fighting among themselves, and so on. The effect is probably the opposite of what Jeal intends. Instead of highlighting Stanley’s achievements, the writing drowns them in a mass of detail. Hall’s shorter, brisker book may give a better sense of the achievement, and it does so without resorting to debunking Stanley or defending him; he presents the record and lets readers judge for themselves.

Hall also presents a clear discussion of the confused issue of the date of Stanley’s birth (January 28, 1841, it appears). Jeal does not even mention Stanley’s birthday, except in a late footnote, oddly beginning his story when Stanley was five years old. However, Jeal has made some discoveries, for instance about how Stanley acquired his name and about the “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” incident, and most of all he raises the important issue of how we are to look on European colonialism in Africa.

Almost in passing, Jeal mentions that Stanley’s dispatches from Africa helped lead to the abolition of slavery in Zanzibar. He might have elaborated more on this; in general, he gives short shrift to Stanley’s writings, but it would be interesting to learn more about what Stanley said, what his ideas were, and whether he had an overarching philosophy. However, there is enough here to give pause to the reader with a limited knowledge of African history. Stanley was both a supporter of European colonialism and an opponent of slavery. Readers might think this contradictory, but they will learn from Jeal’s account that in East Africa at this time slavery was the province of Arab slave traders, and it was the Europeans who put an end to it.

Stanley thought that opening Africa to modern, European commerce and civilization was a noble cause, and Jeal seems to agree with him. He notes of course the terrible atrocities that occurred under colonial rule, notably in Leopold’s Congo, but his point seems to be that these were aberrations or perhaps unfortunately inevitable.

Jeal’s somewhat contradictory accompanying point is that Stanley did not commit atrocities on the scale of others and was against Leopold’s exploitive approach, at least once he understood it for what it was. That is, Jeal argues that others were more guilty than Stanley, but he also says that European guilt in general has been overstated and that in some respects the European entry into Africa was a good thing.

A biography is probably not the place to discuss the merits and demerits of colonialism, but if Jeal’s book can inspire a new look at what is now so easily condemned and dismissed, it will perhaps have done something useful.