Willpower

ordering men to be shot or flogged almost to death for trivial offenses. Most of his officers raised no objection. When some Pygmies living near the British fort—a mother and several children—were caught stealing food, parts of their ears were cut off. Other thieves were shot and decapitated so that their skulls could be displayed as warnings outside the fort. One of the officers in the Rear Column, a naturalist who was an heir to the Jameson whiskey fortune, paid for an eleven-year-old girl to be killed and eaten by cannibals—while he made sketches of the ritual.
    At this point, Joseph Conrad was just about to embark on his own journey up the Congo, and it would be another decade before he created Kurtz, the savage imperialist in Heart of Darkness who “lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts” because he was “hollow at the core” and “the wilderness found him out.” But the perils of the African wilderness already seemed quite clear to many Europeans once they read the nonfiction stories from Stanley’s Rear Column. Critics called for an end to such expeditions, and it was the last of its kind, much to Stanley’s dismay. He joined in the condemnation of his men’s behavior, and he certainly appreciated the dangers of the wilderness, but he didn’t regard them as insuperable.
    For while the Rear Column was going berserk, Stanley was maintaining discipline in a much wilder setting. He and the forward portion of the expedition spent months struggling to find a way through the dense Ituri rain forest. They suffered through torrential rains and waist-deep mud while fending off incessant swarms of stinging flies and biting ants. They were weakened by continual hunger, crippled by festering sores and ulcers, incapacitated by malaria and dysentery. They were maimed and killed, and sometimes eaten, by natives who attacked them with poisoned arrows and spears. At one point, several people were dying daily of disease and starvation. Of those who started with Stanley on this trek into “darkest Africa,” as he called that sunless expanse of jungle, fewer than one in three emerged with him.
    You would be hard-pressed to name any explorer in history who endured such sustained misery and terror so deep in the wilderness. Perhaps the only expedition as grueling was the previous transcontinental journey by Stanley that established the sources of the Nile and the Congo rivers. Yet Stanley persevered through all the travails, year after year, expedition after expedition. His European companions marveled at his “strength of will.” Africans called him Bula Matari: Breaker of Rocks. The African aides and porters who survived his expeditions went on to enlist again and again with him, admiring him not just for his hard work and resolve but also for his kindness and equanimity under hellish conditions. While others blamed the wilderness for turning men into savages, Stanley said he benefited from it: “For myself, I lay no claim to any exceptional fineness of nature; but I say, beginning life as a rough, ill-educated, impatient man, I have found my schooling in these very African experiences which are now said by some to be in themselves detrimental to European character.”
    What did that schooling teach him? Why didn’t the wilderness ever find him out? In his day, Stanley’s feats enthralled the public and awed artists and intellectuals. Mark Twain predicted that Stanley would be almost the only one of his contemporaries to remain famous a century later. “When I contrast what I have achieved in my measurably brief life with what Stanley has achieved in his possibly briefer one,” Twain observed, “the effect is to sweep utterly away the ten-storey edifice of my own self-appreciation and to leave nothing behind but the cellar.” Anton Chekhov declared that one Stanley was worth a dozen schools and a hundred good books. The Russian writer saw Stanley’s “stubborn invincible striving towards a certain goal, no matter what the privations, dangers and temptations for personal happiness,” as “personifying the highest moral strength.”
    But the establishment in Britain and much of Europe was always leery of this brash newspaperman from America, and there were jealous rivals eager to fault his exploration tactics, particularly after the scandal of the Rear Column. In the ensuing century, his reputation plummeted as biographers and historians criticized his expeditions and his