Mr. Stanley, I Presume?

Famous for having found the great missionary and explorer Dr David Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika and immortalised as the utterer of perhaps the four most quoted words of greeting of all time - 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?' - Henry Morton Stanley was himself a man who characterised the great wave of exploring fever that gripped the nineteenth century. Yet his life and achievements are too little known and even his nationality has been mistaken.

Alan Gallop draws from books, newspaper dispatches, letters by Stanley and from family archives to give a truly fascinating account of a man whose name is well known but whose life is largely unfamiliar.

Often thought of, and portrayed as, an American, Stanley was born in Denbigh, Wales. Brought up in a workhouse, he fled to America in his teens and began his varied and exciting life by fighting as a soldier - on both sides - during the American Civil War and working as a journalist. It was this last job which led to the event that made him famous: he was commissioned by the New York Herald to find Dr Livingstone.

His success made him a hero and during the next few years Stanley attempted to discover the source of the Nile, explored and won the Congo for Belgium and mounted a daring and disastrous - expedition to rescue the mysterious Emin Pasha from certain death at the hands of rebel forces.

A rover and opportunist by nature, Stanley's journalistic outlook and forceful methods soon began to generate fierce criticism from a public who preferred their explorers to be gentlemen. Never fully accepted by the establishment - even during his more conservative later years - Stanley, as revealed by Alan Gallop, seems now more like a figure from the modern media world than from the nineteenth century.