Word: stanleys
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...questioning friends, how-nowing him for choosing so buried a biographical subject as Henry Morton Stanley. Author Wassermann retorted: "Stanley's triumphs were gained when I was an adolescent; the whole world was talking of him then; he was the hero of the lads of my generation; his name was a trumpet-call; his mere existence stirred us as a child is stirred by a fairy-tale." Able Novelist Wassermann, better at spinning new fairytales than at retelling old ones, fails to bring to life the hero of his adolescence, but his book will serve to remind the world...
...Henry Morton Stanley's real name was John Rowlands. Born (probably illegitimate) in North Wales about 1841. he spent most of his hard childhood in a workhouse, ran away at 15 and shipped as a cabinboy to the U. S. He got a job in New Orleans, was adopted by Merchant Henry Stanley, who died without leaving him a penny. During the Civil War young Stanley made the curious record of serving in both the Confederate and Union Armies. the Union Navy. Captured (as a Confederate) at Shiloh, he was offered freedom if he would enlist in the Union...
When pious, eccentric Explorer David Livingstone vanished into Africa's interior and nothing was heard of him for over three years, he was regarded as "lost"; his disappearance became a newsworthy fact. Most resoundingly newsworthy fact, thought Editor Bennett, would be Livingstone's "discovery." He picked Stanley for the job, gave him carte blanche, sent him to Africa by a circuitous route. It took Stanley two years, cost him 23 bouts of tropical fever, cost Bennett a pretty penny, but Stanley got his man. Every continent chuckled over his famed greeting. Said Stanley: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Livingstone...
...Stanley made two other African journeys: across the continent and down the Congo River to the Atlantic (an exploration which resulted in the formation of Congo Free State); and his most famed exploit-the relief expedition to Emin Pasha. When "Chinese'' Gordon was cut off in Khartoum by the Mahdi's fanatics, the only Egyptian force in the Sudan to escape annihilation was one commanded by Emin Pasha (real name: Eduard Schnitzer). To rescue Emin Pasha became The Thing in England: Stanley was put in charge of the expedition. Practically everything that could go wrong...
...time he was 58. Stanley had had enough: he retired to the English countryside, was knighted. Once he met "Grand Old Man" Gladstone, who characteristically held forth on the absurd nomenclature visited by explorers on their discoveries. Two that riled him were the Gordon Bennett and Mackinnon-Mountains. "Who called them by those absurd names?" he boomed. Stanley had to admit that...