Willpower

association in the early 1880s with King Leopold II, the profiteering Belgian monarch whose ivory traders would later provide the direct inspiration for Heart of Darkness. As colonialism declined and Victorian character building lost favor, Stanley came to seem less like a paragon of self-control and more like a selfish control freak. He was depicted as a brutal exploiter, a ruthless imperialist who hacked and shot his way across Africa. This cruel conquistador was often contrasted with the saintly Dr. Livingstone, the solitary traveler who crossed the continent selflessly looking for souls to save.
    But recently yet another Stanley has emerged, a much more intriguing one for modern audiences than either the dauntless hero or the ruthless control freak. This explorer prevailed in the wilderness not by selfishness, not because his will was indomitable, but because he appreciated its limitations and used long-term strategies that psychologists are now beginning to understand.
    This new version of Stanley was found, appropriately enough, by Dr. Livingstone’s biographer, Tim Jeal, a British novelist and expert on Victorian obsessives. From researching David Livingstone’s life, Jeal was suspicious of the conventional Livingstone-Stanley dichotomy. When thousands of Stanley’s letters and papers were unsealed in the past decade, Jeal drew on them to produce a revisionist tour de force, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer. The acclaimed biography depicts a deeply flawed character who seems all the more brave and humane for his mixture of ambition and insecurity, virtue and fraud. His self-control in the wilderness becomes even more remarkable considering the secrets he was hiding at his core.

The Empathy Gap
    If self-control is partly a hereditary trait—which seems likely—then Stanley began life with the genetic odds against him. He was born in Wales to an unmarried eighteen-year-old woman who went on to have four other illegitimate children by at least two other men. He never knew his father. His mother promptly abandoned him to her father, who cared for him until he died when the boy was six. Another family took him in briefly, but then one of the boy’s new guardians took him on a journey. Told he was going to his aunt’s home, the confused boy instead ended up inside a large stone building. It was a workhouse, and the adult Stanley would never forget how, in the moment his deceitful guardian fled and the door slammed shut, he “experienced for the first time the awful feeling of utter desolateness.”
    The boy, who was then named John Rowlands, would go through life trying to hide the shame of the workhouse and the stigma of his illegitimate birth. After leaving the workhouse at age fifteen and traveling to New Orleans, he began denying his Welsh roots and pretending to be an American, complete with the accent. He called himself Henry Morton Stanley and told of taking the name from his adoptive father, a wonderfully kind and hardworking cotton trader in New Orleans. In the tales he concocted about his adoptive family, Stanley claimed to be raised by parents who taught self-control. The dying words he ascribed to his fantasy mother were “Be a good boy.”
    “Moral resistance was a favourite subject with him,” Stanley wrote of his fantasy father. “He said the practice of it gave vigour to the will, which required it as much as the muscles. The will required to be strengthened to resist unholy desires and low passions, and was one of the best allies that conscience could have.” Not surprisingly, this advice from an imaginary parent happened to jibe precisely with Stanley’s own regimen for avoiding the vices of his real parents. At age eleven, despite living in what could hardly be called luxurious conditions at the workhouse in Wales, he was already “experimenting on Will” by imposing extra hardships on himself:
    I rose at midnight to wrestle in secret with my wicked self, and, while my schoolfellows sweetly reposed, I was on my knees, laying my heart bare before Him who knows all things.... I would promise to abstain from wishing for more food, and, to show how I despised the stomach and its pains, I would divide one meal out of the three among my neighbours; half my suet pudding should be given to Ffoulkes, who was afflicted with greed, and, if ever I possessed anything that excited the envy of another, I would at once surrender it.
    Virtue, he discovered, took time.