Behind the Bastards - Part One: Henry Morton Stanley: The Explorer Who Shot His Way Through Africa

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

Robert is joined by Soren Bowie to discuss Henry Morton Stanley.FOOTNOTES: Stanley: Africa's Greatest Explorer The Imperial History Wars: Debating the British Empire Henry Morton Stanley’s Unbreakable Will Stanley: the impossible life of Africa's greatest explorer Henry Morton Stanley: Reborn in New Orleans Henry Morton Stanley and His Critics: Geography, Exploration and Empire  Example of Stanley's Congo Treaties  King Leopold's Ghost Henry Stanley, The Man Who Stole The Congo An Apology for a Pathological Brute King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I don't have an introduction. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards podcast about the worst people in Russia. Behind the Bastards podcast about the worst people in history. And we have, as our national ventilator stockpile runs out, my national introduction stockpile has been completely exhausted. So these are desperate and dire times.

And I thank you all for tuning in. My guest today to help me navigate these troubled waters is Mr. Sauer and Bowie. Air horn, air horn, air horn. Yeah, we have to do the air horns manually, because the air horn stockpile is out as well. They're gone. We used them all up.

The hospitals need them. That's the new charity is Air Horns for Hospitals. Really, honestly, if you have an air horn or you have a Vuzela at home, maybe you went to the World Cup, donate it today. They need it more than you do. Just drive past the hospital and throw it at them as hard as you can. They will thank you.

Yeah, drive past the hospital and kick it out of your car like your ODing friend. Yeah. Soren, how are you doing today? I'm pretty good. Yeah, I feel good. I mean, I want to make sure my levels are okay and everything. I guess there's no way to even know that. There is, but we'll just move right past that. And our listeners will know if we got it right.

Soren, you are one of the writers on the TV show American Dad, which I love and have loved for years. You are my former co-worker at Cracked.Internet. And you also host a podcast now with my old boss and our mutual friend, Daniel O'Brien. That's right. Yeah, Daniel and I have a podcast called Quick Question with Soren and Dan. I get front billing. You do? That makes sense. You want to put the face up front, I think.

Yeah, yeah. Now, Soren, you guys did an episode of your show recently where you talked about the old days at Cracked. And you were talking particularly about some old sketches that we're glad we didn't get to make or you're glad that you didn't get to make. And during one of them, you brought up a guy that you had as a character in one of those sketches, Henry Morton Stanley. Yeah, weird that we wouldn't have done a sketch about Henry Morton Stanley. Yeah, yeah.

Especially because he was the hero in the sketch. So you want to talk about who you know Henry Morton Stanley as, what you know about this dude? I hope you didn't research. No, I have a very cursory knowledge of Henry Morton Stanley. Or as I like to call him, HMS. That's why British ships are named that, by the way. Don't look it up. I know that he's been knighted.

Yeah, absolutely. He was famous for going and finding, he's the guy who says Dr. Livingston, I presume. Yes, yes, that's his most famous line. Yeah, Dr. Livingston. And then Dr. Livingston at the time was like trying to find the source of the Nile. He went to go try and find Livingston, found him. And then Henry Morton Stanley spent a bunch of time trying to find the source of the Nile. And then during all of that time, he also got very involved with the slave trade as far as I know.

And let kind of everybody on his, everyone of his voyages die. Yeah, everyone on all of his voyages dies. He is the guy who actually finds the source of the Congo River. Or at least I should say he is the white guy who finds the source of the Congo River and informs all the other white guys where it is. And he is, he actually was very anti-slavery. He was an abolitionist, but also in a way that morally doesn't really matter. We'll be talking about that a lot this episode.

The fun one, Soren. We are going to have us a motherfucking time. I don't know if you can hear it, but I'm rubbing my hands together like, ooh, delicious. This hot dish in front of me, I can't wait to eat it. One of the reasons I'm excited to talk about this, Soren, is something else that came up in that episode you and Dan did of Quick Question, where you were talking about how, you know, when we all, when you, you had a column at Cracked, you, or not just when you had a column, when you were on a show that we did called After Hours, which was like a very popular show

and you were one of the characters and you guys discussed pop culture. The character was kind of like a caricature of, I think, how, how like you appear because you're, you're a very handsome, all-American looking fellow. And so your character is like the archetype of like the, the high school quarterback kind of guy, right? And, and... Yeah. Yeah. Sort of like monotonously handsome.

Yeah. And, and you're, you're, you're concerned with that, you know, looking back on it years later is that it kind of contributed to some, some people's like unrealistic attitudes about masculinity. And one of the fun things about this story is that Henry Morton Stanley did that in like the most dangerous way you possibly can. And now there's like a, because of the lies he told, he wasn't like, he wasn't, he didn't kill nearly as many people as he lied about killing. And as a result, a bunch of other people committed a lot of murder.

And now there is a whole industry devoted to actually saying that Henry Morton Stanley was a good guy because he lied about how many people he killed. It's a fun story. We're really going to, yeah. Oh, nice. Yeah. There will be a lot of fun opportunities for conversations about toxic masculinity in this, but let's, let's, let's, let's dig into this, this son of a bitch.

So I love people who lie in the wrong direction. That's wonderful. Yeah. It's really interesting. This is such a, such a wild tale. So we talked about Henry Morton Stanley on my show a little bit earlier, and we talked about King Leopold II of Belgium, who's the king who conquered Central Africa and killed 13 million people making a rubber factory.

Very ambitious. Very ambitious. Yeah. Wrote a tricycle a lot. Weird dude. And Stanley was like, we talked about Stanley a bit in that. And one of my sources is King Leopold's Ghost, which is a really big, a really good book by Adam Haaschild.

And the Stanley that Adam describes as a monster who shot his way through the Congo to discover the source of the river, shot his way back out and then connived a bunch of African chiefs to hand over their land by making them sign treaties they couldn't read and giving them cloth in return. And like I said, in the, in the, that was kind of most people's interpretation of Stanley for most of the last hundred years, right? Like he was popular during his lifetime and pretty quickly afterwards people were like, oh, this was a real, this guy was a bad dude.

But now there's a whole industry that sort of cropped up about rehabilitating not just him, but a lot of other British colonial figures. And one of my sources for today's episode is a book written by one of those people. In 2007, a guy named Tim Geel published Stanley, The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer. And Geel was able to get access to a never before open trove of Stanley's private letters and journal entries, which is how he learned about stuff like Stanley lying about how many people he'd killed.

And Geel is the guy who really starts trying to rehabilitate Stanley by like saying that he was a much better guy than people think he is. And it's, yeah, I'm going to quote a little bit from a 2011 Smithsonian magazine article that gives you an idea of how this is generally sold. Quote, This new version of Stanley was found appropriately enough by Livingston's biographer Tim Geel, a British novelist and expert on Victorian obsessives. Geel drew on thousands of Stanley's letters, yadda yadda yadda,

depicts a flawed character who seems all the more brave and humane for his ambition and insecurity, virtue and fraud. So, and I should say this article in Smithsonian is arguing that Stanley should be like a productivity guru that we take advice on. It's fun, like where this all has gone is real interesting. Oh, that's, I want those like Columbus apologists to do something like this. Just like, hey, you know what? Columbus maybe got a bad rap, everybody.

Maybe he didn't get a fair shake. Yeah, this, this is going to be full of a lot of that stuff. So I read Geel's book and I also went through King Leopold's ghost again. They did a bunch of other research and we're going to have a fun time here, Soren. We're just going to have us a good ass time. So, Sir Henry Morton Stanley was born on January 28, 1841 under the name John Rowlands. He was born a bastard in the literal sense of the word. So that's convenient for the show.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We don't really know who his dad was. His mom was a woman named Betsy Perry, who was by all accounts, a very promiscuous housemaid. She got around historically that is, that is the, that is widely discussed. And it has an impact on, on, on Stanley later. So his father was probably a guy named John Rowlands, who was a local town drunk who died from being the town drunk. But we don't really know. And other stories say his dad was a wealthy lawyer who was shewed all connection with his illegitimate child.

The important thing is that absolutely nobody wanted this kid around when he was born. Like wildly unwanted to an extent that is just heartbreaking actually. Like, yeah, it's, it's a bummer. I don't know. I've got a kid and I'm around a lot of other kids and sometimes you can just tell. Yeah, some of them, some of them. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So you're like, no, we don't, nobody wants that kid.

That is Soren Bowie's official stance. It's okay if some kids are unwanted. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck it. If a kid's not wanted, that's your internal clock and your internal compass telling you that's not a good kid. That's not a, that's a bad one. That kid's going to be a problem.

I shouldn't have that kid. So his mother abandoned him basically immediately and left him in the care of his uncles and his grandfather, Moses Perry. And Adam Haaschild describes Moses Perry as quote, a man who'd believed a boy needed a sound weapon if he misbehaved and kind of describes it as sort of an abusive relationship. Geel takes the completely opposite task and argues that the two had a good relationship until Moses Perry fell down dead in the middle of a potato field on June 22 1846 when John was five and a half years old. So John was left fully in the care of his two uncles who did not in fact care very much about him. They subcontracted the gig and paid a poor family to take him in. But eventually that family started asking for more money and the uncles refused. And so they told John that his older cousin Dick was going to take him to another aunt in a town nearby.

And so John and Dick went on an eight mile walk together and it was, it was tragically Soren. It was a walk of lies. As John later wrote, quote, the way seemed interminable and tedious. At last Dick set me down from his shoulders before an immense stone building and passing through tall iron gates. He pulled it a bell, which I could hear clinging noisily in the distant interior. A somber face stranger appeared at the door who despite my remonstrances seized me by the hand and drew me within. Now, as John was being pulled away, his cousin assured him that he would be right back. He was going to get him both cakes, but this was also a lie.

In reality, Dick had abandoned his stone building cakes, you know, as you do. You go out to the woods, you find the nearest stone building and it's like, I bet they got cake in there. So John just abandons his cousin to a workhouse. That was the plan from the beginning. Yeah, Gilles writes, quote, the false cajolings and treacherous endearments lavished upon him during that journey would live forever in Henry Stanley's memory. Since that dreadful evening, Stanley would write in his fifties, my resentment has not a wit abated. It would have been far better for me if Dick, being stronger than I, had employed compulsion instead of shattering my confidence in planting the first seeds of distrust in a child's art. This is a bad thing that happens.

And I'm going to guess you've heard of workhouses, right, Zoran? Yeah, I'm familiar. Yeah, most people probably have if only from the Christmas Carol. You know, there's a bit where Ebenezer Scrooge is asked to donate money to the poor and he asks, are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? And this is this is the kind of place that John Rowlands at age six gets put into the St. Asif Union Workhouse. So the British government, which was at the time conquering big chunks of the world and stealing their shit, did not like the idea of taking care of their own poor people. And in fact, the powers that be found it disgusting, the idea that they would provide good care for the poor.

So they had workhouses and these provided basic necessities, but they did so while treating the inmates as if they are prisoners, because they were considered to be basically criminal for needing assistance. So it's it's a child prison for poor kids. Oh, that's wonderful. It's awesome. You, um, it's kind of hard to exaggerate how bad England sucks in this period of time. Oh, it's just so bleak. It's so bleak, it's like this factory benighted, cold drenched hellscape of dying kids and fancy people.

It's the best. But like the kids are the working class. Like that's your, those who are doing all of the jobs. For some reason, they only made jobs available to children. Well, their little hands can reach all sorts of things, Soren. Yeah, they make very good chimney sweeps. I'll say that. Incredible chimney sweeps.

So inmates at the, uh, the workhouse and again, a lot of them are children are required to wake up at 6am and they're locked in their dorms at 8pm. They received only bread and gruel for food. Husbands and wives were separated as were parents and children. If you were poor enough to need state assistance, the state decided that you no longer deserve to have a family. Even siblings were kept apart. Poor children were seen as holy to blame for their circumstances. As an adult Stanley would write, it is a fearful fate that of a British outcast because the punishment afflicts the mind and breaks the heart. Which is certainly truthful.

It is, you read about this guy's background and it's like, not that this makes his crimes okay, but like, hard to imagine this ending well. Yeah, it does feel like a lot of these, and I've listened to a few of your podcasts, I'll say. And it seems like a lot of them, you kind of have to get on a dark bus for the beginning of it. Because you have to see where all this originated. And every single time, like, somebody teaches these people how to hate really well. Like, how to be really good at hating. Yeah, absolutely. Saddam Hussein, giant monster, was like, oh yeah, and he was threatening his teachers with a gun when he was like 14.

Yeah, that kind of scans. I see where this evolution happens. Stalin was getting beat so bad that he was peeing blood and you're like, okay, I get it. Yeah, I get it. Yeah, okay, it's not so hard to draw these lines together. So, and it's interesting, like, that line that I just read above is certainly truthful. We have a lot of other accounts from workhouses and they sucked. But it's hard to trust Stanley on anything because he lied about everything, including his time at St. Asif's.

He would go on to claim later in his writings that he saw a boy beaten to death by James Francis, the school teacher. And the general consensus of historians based on workhouse records and other people who were in that workhouse at the time, is that nothing like this happened while Stanley was at the school. And in fact, most people who recalled their time there seemed to think pretty fondly of this teacher. And so, yeah, it's interesting. And Stanley would later tell lies about, like, getting into a fight with this teacher himself and, like, beating him up and, like, being cheered on by the rest of the school. And these are almost certainly lies, but they were also probably a cover for something very sad, which is childhood sexual abuse. The year that Stanley was admitted to St. Asif's. Yeah, we don't really know.

But, like, the year he was admitted, 19 of the girls at the poor house were turned out as prostitutes and pimped by some of the male employees. And a government inspector who observed the school during this time noted that young male inmates regularly slept with each other and experimented sexually. And a lot of that experimentation was probably not consensual on both sides. I love that the government has an inspector to go check out the workhouses. Like, what is he hoping to find there? Yeah, you are kind of at a loss to, like, what would have been possibly the... Like, you're not doing anything to stop this from happening, so what's your hope here? You've created a prison for children.

When you go there, you're like, oh, no, they're having sex with each other. You've got to be kidding me. I have to raise the alarm. It turns out things are rather bleak at the child prison. So we don't know if Stanley engaged in any of this experimentation or if he was sexually abused. He would always claim in letters to, like, his romantic partners that he stayed pure at the school while writing about it later. But that doesn't fucking mean a damn thing. Whatever the truth, Stanley was noted the rest of his life by everyone who knew him for having an extreme terror of physical and sexual intimacy. And this terror remained with him for the entirety of his life.

So something happened. We don't really know what, but this boy walks out of it real changed. Yeah, I think he went in a little changed, too. You don't walk through the woods with your surrogate father who's lavishing you with praise and then drops you off at a workhouse and be like, you know what, I'm going to let somebody else in. It feels like the opportunity for me to open my heart to someone else. This is one of those stories that it reads like an experiment for like, how much can we damage a child? Like, if we really go all in, how badly can we fucking get up? Yeah, so Stanley did at the least receive an education, which generally was considered to be pretty decent where he went.

He learned how to read and write and he excelled at school while he was in the workhouse. He was awarded a fancy Bible from the local bishop for his scholastic excellence. Young John Rowlands, and again, that's his name at the time, that's his real name is John Rowlands, was particularly enamored by geography and penmanship. Throughout his life, he made a point of writing neatly, almost to an obsessive degree. In King Leopold's Ghost, Host Child writes, it was as if, through his handwriting, he were trying to pull himself out of disgrace and turn the script of his life from one of poverty to one of elegance,

which I think is probably a pretty accurate description. So, John may not have had the very worst childhood a boy could have in Wales, but it was pretty close to that. The defining moment of his early life came when he was 12. His supervisor, quote, came up to me during the dinner hour when all the inmates were assembled and pointed out a tall woman with an oval face and a great coil of dark hair behind her head. He asked me if I recognized her. No, sir, I replied.

What, do you not know your own mother? I started with a burning face and directed a shy glance at her and perceived she was regarding me with a look of cruel, critical scrutiny. I had expected to feel the gush of tenderness towards her, but her expression was so chilling that the valves of my heart closed with a snap. So that's, yeah, that's a bad thing to go through as a kid. Oh, no. Yeah, that's a rough one.

He saw his mom at the, so was she then in the workhouse as well? Well, she had two more kids and she wasn't going to take care of them, but they were also young enough that she couldn't just drop them out. The workhouse basically, I think, made her kind of hang around to finish breastfeeding them and stuff before she could abandon them. So she's there for a while with her other kids before she abandons them too. And yeah, not great. At least you know that the records, the record keeping there is good.

Yeah, it's really good record keeping, absolutely. They know, not only do they, they know that this was his mother, they're not just like taking in kids and being like, yeah, well, the parents didn't want you. We don't know who they are. They're like, no, we're going to keep track so that when you are old enough for the age of revenge, we'll give you a name on a piece of paper and you can go take care of it. It would be so much less depressing if he got revenge on her,

but the rest of his life, part of why he lied so much is he was like very dedicated to making his mom proud and she clearly didn't give a fuck about him and at best wanted his money. It's a fucking bummer, dude. So the workhouse remained John Rowland's life until the age of 15 when he escaped. Now, the reality of the situation seems to be that escape wasn't really hard and he basically just fucked off because he was old enough to do so, but Stanley felt the need to dream up a lurid lie about how he left the school. I'm going to quote from Adam Haas Child again.

He tells of leaving the Welsh Workhouse in melodramatic terms. He leapt over a garden wall and escaped, he claims, after leading a class rebellion against a cruel supervisor named James Francis who had viciously brutalized the entire senior class. Never again, I shouted, marveling at my own audacity, Stanley wrote. The words had scarcely escaped me, air I found myself swung upwards into the air by the collar of my jacket and flung into a nervulous heap on the bench. The passionate brute pummeled me in the stomach until I fell backward, gasping for breath.

Again, I was lifted, dashed upon the bench with a shock that almost broke my spine. This is, again, all lies. One of the things that Haas Child notes and that Geel notes is that Stanley was at that point a very healthy 15-year-old boy while his teacher was a sick middle-aged former cold miner who was missing a hand and he was unlikely to have been doing a lot of throwing. Incredible. Yeah, so most people seem to agree if there had actually been a fight

the 15-year-old healthy boy probably would have beaten the handless cold miner. The man with black lung and COPD. Yeah, he wasn't a prize fighter. And none of Stanley's classmates recalled anything like this happening. Again, they considered Francis to have been a nice guy and Stanley to have been the teacher's pet. And again, one of the really sad things about this is that one of the suspicions is that why he later developed such a grudge against John Francis

is that maybe Francis, who there's a good chance was gay, maybe Francis made a pass at him once he, you know, because like 15 people were considered. Yeah, so maybe the teacher made a pass at him or something more and that's why Stanley felt the need to attack him so much, but we really don't know. But something happened there too. Like there's a couple of points like this in his life where it's like, yeah, something happened to make you tell that specific kind of lie. And also what you're probably getting from this is that

young Stanley was a big fan of a C-Dick, Charles Dickens. And Dickens, like that's a very Dickensian moment. Like the child fights off the abusive teacher to like save his classmates and then winds up on a magical journey. Like that's a fucking Charles Dickens story. So Stanley would be throughout his life a big Dickens fan, probably influenced how he wrote his own biography. What? Actually that.

Okay, so a lot of things are falling into place then. Yes, yes. That's why his writing style is so purple and like, I could see, yeah. Yeah, he's very influenced by Dickens. And as a really fun note, if anybody wants to know more about Charles Dickens from like an interesting perspective, George Orwell wrote so many fucking articles about Charles Dickens's writing and like analyzed him from like the perspective of a socialist is really interesting setup.

There's a bunch of them in the collection, All Art is Propaganda, which is a good chunk of Orwell reading if you're into that. Anyway, so after he escapes from the workhouse or just kind of walks out the door because they don't really care all that much, Stanley winds up, you know, living with a series of relatives for brief periods of time, but none of them wanted to put him up for long. He eventually wound up living with an uncle in Liverpool, working as the delivery boy to a butcher.

And John got the feeling that he was going to be kicked out onto the street at any moment and he was probably right about that. And fortunately, at right around the same time, he wound up delivering meat to an American merchant ship called the Windemere, which was docked nearby. And as Stanley kind of describes it, and this is probably broadly accurate because this was an uncommon at the time, the captain basically looked him up and down and was like,

hey, you want to work on a boat? There weren't a lot of rules back in the day about this sort of thing. So it feels like there are like 12 people in history. Yeah. And like every time somebody wanted a job, they're like, oh, all right, I'll get you a job. Yeah, sure. Yeah.

So he does the pretty normal thing for a poor kid in this part of the world at the time and he gets a gig fucking working on a boat that takes him to the United States. And John very clearly was not a fan of sea life. And as soon as the Windemere landed in New Orleans in February of 1859, he jumped ship and basically just wandered into America and said, OK, I guess I'm going to have a life here. Because again, you could do that at the time. So in some ways, I'm like, I'm really, it's depressing to hear about history.

In other ways, I'm like, fuck, everything was so much easier than that. Like a lot of stuff was easier. You could just be like, you know what? I feel like I want to be in Louisiana. I will figure out a way to get there and if I don't die of cholera, no one's going to stop me. Right. Yeah.

The thing you really had to worry about were diseases and abusive people. But like, yeah, the opportunities beyond those horrific things were endless. Yeah. It wasn't hard to just do shit like that. You know? Yeah. Nobody was making you feel at a whole lot of paperwork. Yeah.

Yeah. You're not being tracked for your, like his credit was a consideration at that point. Yeah. No, it was not. And again, this is another one of what will become many different parts of the Stanley story where his version of events in reality diverge. But he claims that basically he's wandering around the streets of New Orleans and he sees a local business owner, like looks up at this guy who's wearing a nice suit and runs a business.

And he walks out, he just walks up to this guy and says, do you want a boy, sir? Oh my God. That's your resume in the 1850s. Wow. Just a single word boy next to a dash. Wow. God, what a gig to have. But this distinguished gentleman did in fact want a boy.

He turned out to be a wealthy cut. Yes, I do need a boy. You know what? I came into town for one of those. I was going to pick me up a boy at the workhouse, but this is faster. So funny. So yeah, this gentleman turned out to be the wealthy cotton salesman, Henry Hope Stanley, who was a real person and was a very successful merchant in New Orleans at the time.

And again, according to Stanley's version of events, which is a lie, Henry Hope Stanley instantly developed a liking for our boy John and became his mentor and surrogate father figure. He got him a job working for a shopkeeper named James Speak. And again, the only part of this that's true is that Stanley worked for James Speak. And the reality is probably... So we don't even know that he even met Henry Morton Stanley. And in fact, he probably did not. Stanley inserts Henry Hope Stanley into the story decades later.

The likely reality is that he was in fact wandering the streets, walked into this guy's shop and said, do you want a boy? And this guy was like, yeah, sure. And he worked at this guy's shop until he died. And then he went on with his life. But that Stanley has to lie. He judges up the story and he adds in this rich person who has the name that he later adopts. That's incredible.

He's got such like a Trumpian element to him. Totally. He can't help himself but lie to let to sound in any way. Any little tiny way grander. Yeah. Yeah. They're all kind of... Everyone we talk about on this show is kind of the same person with the exception of L. Ron Hubbard,

who is at the top of the heap. Robert, before you get into it, do you know what time it is? I can't imagine what you're trying to lead me towards, Sophie. I don't know that just this thing that keeps this podcast afloat. Oh, oh, oh, you mean robbing merchant vessels on the Spanish main? Exactly. Yeah. For some information.

We should do that. Oh, absolutely, Soren. Yeah. Did your gun not come in the mail? No, but I mean, I got a lot. Okay. This is gonna be fun. Yeah.

This will be a real hoot. Yeah. All right. Well, we're gonna go find a merchant man on the Spanish main. You do the same and we will all meet back to talk more about Henry Morton Stanley and divide up the booty. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aaronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Oh my gosh. That was some good pillaging, some good looting. I have a lot of doubloons now.

You do. You do. You're going to want to find a boy to help you with that. I need a fence for these. I don't even know. Does Target take these? Actually, yeah. Target does.

Costco does not. They prefer pieces of eight, which are probably the same things, but whatever. Fuck you. So Stanley starts working for this guy, James Speak, and he basically works as a boy in a shop. And he's really good at working. This is essentially like a grocery store type deal or a general store. And he's good at the job.

He has an incredible memory. Everybody seems to agree that about him. And so he's really good at keeping things stocked and knowing, you know, what needs to move. And yeah, he's a good worker. But Stanley's version of the story is very different. He claims that while he's working for James Speak, he and Henry Hope Stanley are growing very close, and that they basically spend two years traveling up and down the Mississippi

on business, and that the old man eventually tells Stanley, who becomes a surrogate son, that he's giving him the right to use the Stanley name. Yeah. So fucking Stanley will claim that Henry Hope Stanley died in 1861, which is a lie. He lived for like another 16 years. What a weird thing to lie about. Yeah. He lies about everything though.

So yeah, there's no evidence that he and Stanley arranged, exchanged so much as a word, but you don't understand like the real story and the fake story. The fake story is that, you know, he works with this guy, James Speak, who pays him very well. And then James Speak dies when a plague hits town and Stanley winds up needing to move out. Yeah. So it's cool.

Yeah. It's the opposite of cool. Yeah. Stanley is not a cool dude. He's not a cool dude. Throughout the early 1860s, though, he starts adopting the name of like one of the richest people in town and gradually change. Yeah.

That is not a bad call. What a great rebrand. Yeah. Yeah. John Rowlands is a shitty name anyway. Like Henry Morton Stanley. You just tell that name to someone and asks, this is a famous person. What do you think they did?

One of your first three guesses is going to be explorer. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So yeah, I'm going to read a quote from King Leopold's ghost explaining the process of him stealing this other man's name.

In the 1860 New Orleans census, he is listed as Jay Rowling, a woman who knew him at the time, remembered him as John Rowlands, smart as a whip and much given to bragging, big talk and telling stories. She said. Yeah. Within a few years, however, he began using the first and last name of the merchant who had given him his job. He continued to experiment with the middle names using Morley, Morley and Morland before

finally settling on Morton. So yeah, that's more or less the truth. And Tim Gilles revisionist history of Stanley, the one that's like really pro Stanley, goes in the fact that he's lying about all of this. Like Gilles, in a lot of ways, it's a very valuable book because again, he was like the first guy with access to this dude's notes. There's a lot of it that's in there that's interesting. The stuff that shitty, I think, is actually Gilles personal conclusions about everything.

But he he goes. He's very open about the fact that Henry Morton Stanley or lied about fucking everything. But he has all these really fun explanations and justifications for why Stanley lied in every case. Like he's defensive of these, his biography subject, and he feels the need to like explain why it's cool that he did all this. And his argument in favor of stealing a man's name is that Henry first told this lie to his mother after he was famous and that it became a part of his biography later.

And so he started lying about this because he wanted her to believe that somebody rich and powerful had adopted him, which is actually kind of plausible that like he wanted because he'd been abandoned by every single adult in his childhood. He wanted to be able to go back to them and be like, this guy was rich and cool and he thought I was good enough to be his son. He wanted me. Yeah, which is a bummer and kind of scans. Like I'll give Gilles that one later on, his justifications get worse.

That one, yeah, I could see that being the truth. So and Gilles goes on to note, and this is where we get into him being really defensive and I find it fun, yet his lies have led his critics to treat him with disdain and condescension ever since. His private lies to his mother were made public by her without his knowledge, thus making it all but impossible for him to be honest later. Young people who lie usually do so because they feel bad about themselves and need to enhance their self-esteem, that Stanley should have been trapped for the whole of his life

and by what he had said to his mother during his 20s was a personal tragedy for him and for his subsequent reputation. And one of the things that interesting about Gilles is he is as frustrated at people judging Stanley for this as he is at them judging Stanley for gunning people down in the cargo. Both of them have equal weight in his butt. They absolutely do, and it's fun. I think that without meeting Gilles, I'm pretty confident that he's a liar, that he's somebody who has lied in his past.

He's like, well, kids lie because they're uncomfortable. Yes, yes, they do, but that's not why we're critical of Stanley. Now, yeah, so anyway, for a while, Henry worked at a general store in a log cabin selling all sorts of tools that people needed as they moved into the less settled parts of Louisiana. He became particularly interested in different sorts of rifles and revolvers and became very knowledgeable about firearms, and this was as much out of necessity as interest. Southern culture at the time was brutal in ways we don't normally talk about because there was slavery, and that's kind of everyone's focus on how brutal that was, but the brutality

extended throughout every layer of southern culture and included the fact that plantation owners and their like, were extremely physically aggressive people as a matter of rule. Something about owning hundreds of human beings that seems like it makes you unwilling to listen to what anyone else has to say, and Gilles has actually a pretty good quote here. It shocked Henry after the civilities of the city to witness gunfights and to hear about murders and disappearances, with so many vain and violent men around him possessing natures as sensitive as hair triggers, he was careful not to argue with Eddie Backwood's men or planter who might draw a gun on the least provocation.

However, amiable they might originally have been, their isolation had promoted the growth of egotism. These southern gentlemen talked endlessly about their honor and often acted to avenge it. In this environment, it was every band for himself, so in case of trouble, Henry bought a Smith and Wesson revolver and practiced with it until he could sever a pack thread at 20 paces. Yeah, I feel like that's still, that's like a lesson you can still live by today.

Yeah. Yeah, if you're going to live in the south, learn how to sever a thread with a revolver and keep it on you all the time. Because I've always said that, yeah. And if you're in a rural area, don't fuck with anybody there. Absolutely not. Yeah, yeah, don't argue with people out in the sticks, you know, just move along, just get going.

Keep on truck it. So people who knew Stanley during this period described him as talkative and intelligent, short but burly and confident. As he was asked about his family, questions about his family caused him to stutter and eventually mumble out, there is a mystery about my birth. Wait, he's not even a good liar. No, no, no, no. I didn't even think about that in person when he was actually doing his lying.

He was not great. No, he doesn't seem to have been great at it. He was a good, he was a good writing liar. So after a year or so in Louisiana, Stanley's boss died and Stanley was forced to move to Cipher's Bend at the age of 19. He got a job at another store and rented a room at a cheap boarding house. And Stanley stood out there. His colorful neckerchiefs and his habitual cleanliness were at odds with the sort of

people who crashed it. What was essentially a mix between a shitty motel and a for-profit homeless shelter? Like, that's kind of what a boarding house is in this part of the world at the time. A lot of real rough customers moving through. And then you have kind of this, this fancy lad. Yeah, this Victorian fop who rolls through. Yeah, a big fan. Yeah.

A big fantasy. Colorful kerchiefs. Colorful kerchiefs really wants to be a British noble even though he comes from, I mean, the poorest fucking working class background you can. Right. This is an example of relying in the wrong direction. Like trying to establish himself as an aristocrat in a place where no one wants that. Yeah.

It's like, no, your background would help you here, Stanley. Yeah. Tell people the truth. Yeah. And it is one of those things where throughout his life, like a lot of fancy British people will always treat him like shit even after he becomes rich and famous because he comes from a low class background. Well, like the Americans he works with, they're just like, yeah, whatever.

You can shoot a pack threat at 30 paces. That's all I care about because we're going to shoot at each other. I come from the South. I can't not shoot somebody. I haven't shot a single personal day. You're not my buddy if we haven't gotten into an afternoon gunfight. Yeah. So Henry got malaria shortly after moving and dropped down to just 95 pounds.

Yeah, malaria. Yeah. This happens so many times there in his life. He will drop down to like the weight of a 10-year-old repeatedly just because, you know, he's always sick and dying. Yeah. It was in the Congo for a huge chunk of his life. Yeah.

He spends about half of his life actively dying of some sort of horrible contagious disease. And that's the case with every explorer. Like I do a lot of reading about the lives of great explorers because that's my shit. And they all are always dying of the illnesses they've picked up. Like the best of them were just constantly ill and just didn't quite die. I love that. In actuality, these people are being dragged through like their exploration. They're not actually out there cutting stuff, bushwhacking with their own machete or anything.

They're being carried on a paliquin as they slowly wither away into nothing. Some of them are. Stanley is one of those guys who is famous for like always like working his ass off. And a number of them were like what they would just always be sick and dying. And the ones that got famous are the ones who didn't die. Yeah. Like the whole team would crack, would croak basically. And it would just be like Stanley and a bunch of like local people wandering into some town.

Yeah, it's funny to me that like the stereotypical image of like one of these guys is kind of like the rock in those Jumanji movies or whatever like where like big barrel chested wearing that shirt they all wore. And like the reality is like they looked like fucking concentration camp survivors a lot of the time because they just had been dying for nine months. Like they had no calories left. They were shitting themselves uncontrollably like just couldn't keep food down, zero fat on their bones like and that's Stanley's whole life.

He's actively looks like a dead man most of his days. He's Christian Bale and the machinist. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's rough and that's just a call like everyone's sick all the time back in those days. So, yeah, he moves to the sticks and immediately almost dies and despite being on the verge

of death his new boss who's like working at a shop sends him out regularly to work as a debt collector and collect debts from customers, which is not a safe vocation. So he's like in armed standoffs with men as he's shitting himself uncontrollably and like barely able to stay conscious. So Stanley lives though because he's one thing you can say for Stanley. He was a cussedly tough son of a bitch. Yeah. Yeah.

And he doesn't die as will be the long story with this guy. And during this time as he's doing working as a debt collector and dying he had exactly two encounters with members of the opposite sex and both of them were profoundly sad. And Teal writes here, unlike most young men living in boarding houses frequented by sailors Stanley had avoided brothels. However, on one occasion only he had taken to a gilded parlor where he saw four young ladies in such scant clothing that he was, he wrote, speechless with amazement. When they proceeded to take liberties with my person they seemed to me to be so appallingly

wicked that I shook them off and fled. My disgust was so great that I never in after years could overcome my repugnance to females of that character. I love that he, these women started touching him and he shook them off like a wet dog. That fucks him up. Well, we are witches. Yeah. Yeah.

He's that kind of dude. And there is the thing he is scaredest of like Stanley is the kind of guy who will repeatedly face down like wild animals, you know, with a crude and unreliable rifle. But he cannot handle a woman being like, I think you're cute, the most dangerous animal of all. Yeah. It's awesome. And totally, totally to character.

So Gilles goes on to note, abandoned by a promiscuous mother, Henry's mistrust of prostitutes was not hypocritical. And he goes, he notes, another incident confirmed his sexual naivety. In his overcrowded boarding house, bed sharing was not unusual. Once Stanley slept on a four poster with a youth called Dick Heaton, who had also jumped ship. Although Dick was so modest he would not retire by candlelight and walked in a suspiciously female manner, Stanley only twigged his true sex at the end of three days.

And he like realizes this in bed when he sees one of Dick's breasts. And I don't know if like Dick was actually like a transgender person or just like a lot of times in those days, I think if you were a woman who had to travel alone for some reason, because you didn't have money, it's just safer to present as male. Hard to say what the actual truth here. But he realizes Dick, Dick Heaton, that's that's a porn name for sure. We have, yeah, that is a good porn name. So Stanley's recollection of this is that like they're sleeping together, you know,

that was pretty normal at the time. And Stanley realizes that Dick has has breasts and and lady parts, you know, realize Stanley realizes that that that Dick is, yeah, in any way, and he like freaks out and Dick has to flee the place like he doesn't tell anyone or at least Stanley claims he doesn't tell anyone. But Dick is gone the next day and Stanley hears nothing else about him. So I don't know. No, no, no, not a great story.

Yeah, I surely something, yeah, that's another one of those situations where something happened between the two of them. And Henry Morton Stanley is like, I never want to hear about this person again. He was just gone. He's gone from my memory. He's gone from the world. He doesn't exist anymore. I wouldn't be surprised if actually what happened is that he like turned him in or like made

other people aware and things went really bad for Dick. And it's something that horrified Stanley that he didn't talk about. I don't know. Hard to say. We'll never know. This could have actually gone just the way because I could also see Henry Morton Stanley being so shocked and horrified by this realization that he just is spellbound for hours. Yeah, like this this rocks the firmament of his world.

The Mike Pence soul inside of him is like, yeah, no, no, no, no, I need to lie down for a week. I'm just having a little malaria. Yeah, which he was dealing with constantly at the time. So in November of 1860, Abraham Lincoln, America's greatest president, not named Taft, was elected after a contentious vote as a foreigner. Henry didn't really see what the big deal was. But his friend Dan Goree, the son of his store's biggest customer, filled him in.

And obviously Dan Goree is a rich Southern kid in 1860. So I'm going to give you a guess as to where his political allegiances wound up being during the whole war thing. later wrote that he was informed, quote, the election of Abe Lincoln in November previous had created a hostile feeling in the South because this man had declared himself opposed to slavery. And as soon as he became president in March, he would do all in his power to free the slaves. Of course, said he, in that event, all slaveholders would be ruined.

Now as you could probably guess, Dan's and his father were people who owned other people for profit. The Gory family had 120 slaves, which is a couple of years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I apologize. Now, Dan told Henry that he suspected the South would secede over the issue of slavery

and whatever else you can say, he was not wrong about that. And as the civil war ramped up, Stanley's main concern was that the union had seized a series of forts at the mouth of the Mississippi. And he concluded that this meant that the election of Abraham Lincoln was going to ruin his business because he worked as a ship boy on the river. And so that's why he says he decides to volunteer for the Confederate army, or at least that's part of it. So one of the funniest things in the world, Soren, in the whole goddamn world is reading

Tim Geel try to explain how Henry Morton Stanley, a man who fought for the Confederate army, did not support slavery and was not a racist. He spends so much of this book arguing that Stanley wasn't a racist. And it is the funniest goddamn thing. I mean, it's really, it's really amusing. I'm going to read you a selection from Tim Geel's book, Stanley, so you can hear this man explain how totally not racist Stanley was. Yes.

Though Henry expressed no revulsion towards slavery in the Deep South, which was legal and accepted by everyone he knew, he was not, he was not prejudiced against black people. I thought it was fine to own them, but that's not, that doesn't mean you're prejudiced. You can be racist and fine. You can be not anti-racist and fine with slavery. It's possible, totally possible. I guess that is an argument. No, no, no, I think these people are perfectly equal to me in every way.

And I just own them from by dint of force. Like, I guess at least that's honest boy, oh boy, yeah, I love that. I love Jill that he's like, look, he, yes, okay, he, he lived with slavery and maybe it got advantages from it, but it was legal everybody. It's fine. It's legal. It's fine. Not just got advantages from it, like actively fought and was willing to kill for it.

It is a stance to take. Yes, he fought for slavery, but he wasn't racist. Excellent. It's, it's great, dude. So I'm not even done with this fucking quote. So he just explains how that he's not prejudiced against black people. Indeed, he had lived in a New Orleans boarding house that was owned by a freed black woman and had been recommended to him by two of James speaks slaves.

Oh boy. Now Soren, you know, who won't fight for slavery in 1860 Abraham Lincoln, that is accurate. That is accurate. And also the products and services that support this podcast, many of which are Abraham Lincoln. He's a big, big donor to the pod. The ghost of Abraham Lincoln. Here we go. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the

racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aaronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, alphabet boys as the FBI. Sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of alphabet boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver at the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse with like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to alphabet boys on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus.

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself

stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, we're back. Oh, my gosh. Oh, those ads, I, I am just fucking, you can hang a pipe rail gate off me. That's how hard I am. Anyway, let's roll back into the episode and not analyze that too much. So yeah, okay, we are still making it through this fucking paragraph of Tim Geel explaining why it's not racist to fight for the Confederacy. My God.

So he's just explained that he lived in a New Orleans boarding house. It was owned by a free black woman, quote, a frenzy desire to fight the Yankees and flamed most of the young men Stanley knew and most of the young women urged them on many customers of the store joined up after Captain Samuel G Smith raised a local company called the Dixie Greys because Henry felt the coral was not really his and was puzzled that whites meant to fight one another over the rights of blacks. He did not enlist, but on receiving. So he's not racist, but he doesn't see why it's worth fighting over the rights of other

people who aren't white, which I, Tim, are you reading the paragraph you're writing? Can't we all just get along? Not them. I mean us, us, the real people, us, the actual human beings. Yeah, you do get that feeling from old Timmy G, Timmy J. So quote, yeah, but upon receiving in a parcel a chemise and a petticoat such as a Negro ladies maid might wear. He felt compelled to ask, not least because suspecting that the sender was one of Dr. Goree's

beautiful daughters. So he gets sent ladies clothing by a woman he thinks is hot and she's basically being like you're a lady because you're not fighting for the South. Oh, that's such a good burn for that time. Yeah. And it's actually a really common thing historically. A similar thing happened in England during World War One where like women would get together to like shame men in town who hadn't volunteered to fight yet.

Variations of this have happened in a lot of places throughout history. And Stanley, if that's true, Stanley, that's absolutely part of what Stanley does this for is to not seem like a wimp, which, you know, scans. But on the other hand, a woman he liked just sent him some of her clothes. I mean, that's like silver lining there. It wasn't her clothes. It was the kind of ladies clothing that a black woman would wear. Oh, yeah.

I bet that was part of the insult like that. No, he did not like that. So he enlists as a private soldier under an officer named Henry H Stanley, which is weird. But nobody seems to make anything of it. So whatever. He wound up fighting with a unit called the Dixie Grace at the Battle of Shiloh, which was a pretty bad battle. Not a good time.

Familiar. Yeah. Yeah. If I had to be in a battle, wouldn't be top of my list. And yeah, he fought against the army of, I don't know about you, sword, but my favorite career alcoholic, Ulysses Simpson Grant. Yeah. What a hero.

Fucking love Grant. Yeah, alcoholic and cry baby. He fucking ruled, dude. Oh my gosh. So Stanley saw heavy nightmarish combat during the first day of the battle and many of his friends were shot dead immediately in front of him. He later wrote of his feelings while standing in the carnage that he felt shocked to see the quote that the human form we made so much of should now be mutilated, hacked and outraged,

and that life hitherto guarded as a sacred thing should be given up to death. So that's all right, Henry. Yeah. Yeah. Come on, man. Yeah. It's it's lame. You're about the 80 billionth person to write about that.

And what you're about to do is you're about to do exactly that to hundreds of people. Oh my gosh. So many more than hundreds, Soren. So he was captured on the second day of fighting and found himself imprisoned in a POW camp outside of Chicago. And this was not a nice place, although it probably compared favorably to the workhouse he'd grown up in. After a brief confinement, he was given the opportunity to free himself by enlisting

in the Union army and fighting for the other side. Adam Haaschild of King Leopold's Ghosts writes that he promptly agreed to do so. And this is one of the few places where Haaschild has kind of a more positive view of Stanley than Tim Jean does. But Tim Jean doesn't mean it that way. He disagrees with this and thinks that it was hard for Stanley to leave the Confederacy. Quote, Henry held out for six weeks before changing sides. He had been through hell with his fellow Southerners and felt disloyal, but as a foreigner embroiled

in the war by chance and having little understanding of the conflict's true significance, Stanley's behavior was not forgivable. And it's funny because he says that he really just didn't understand what all this fighting was about. And then later in the book, when Stanley becomes an anti-slavery crusader, makes a huge point about how good it was that he was an abolitionist. How could he not have known what this fight was about? That's great.

So it's awesome. It's so cool. Yeah, it's cool that he feels the need to explain why leaving the Confederate army was quote not unforgivable. That says a lot about Jean. That wasn't anyone's question, Tim. So anyway, Stanley next spent some time fighting for the Union as an artilleryist until he got sick from dysentery and received a medical discharge.

He spent a bit of time working as a sailor on the Atlantic before in 1864, he enlisted in the Union Navy and got a posting on the frigate Minnesota by virtue of his very nice penmanship. He worked as a ship's clerk and was present for a naval battle wherein his ship bombarded a Confederate fort in North Carolina. Henry Morton Stanley was one of a very small number of people to experience combat on both sides of the war in the land and on the sea. So that's a neat piece of trivia.

Not a lot of folks do that. So he was in the army and the Navy. He was in the Confederate army, the US army and the US Navy during the course of the Civil War. He got around a bit, not a lot of people did that. So once the Civil War was over, Stanley used some of his army bucks to take a trip to Turkey with two of his friends, including a younger boy who basically worshiped Stanley named Louis Know.

And this is a recurrent theme in Stanley's life. There's always a one or two or three young white boys hanging around who think he's the bee's knees and most of them die, but he seems to have, need to have adoring young men kind of hanging around him. So the object of Stanley's trip was to just kind of wander around Turkey and then quote write a great book of adventure. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, it is like the child, it's like the career that I dreamed of having when I was

nine. Yeah. Like go find yourself in this foreign country and then write a gripping book about it. Yeah. I mean, his eat, pray, love would involve shooting a lot of people, but like that was the idea, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I'm not opposed to reading something like that either. No, I too would like to travel somewhere different from what I'm used to and then write a great book of adventure. That does sound fun. Now the fact that people like me and people like you fight that fun is part of why the 18 hundreds were a real rough period for a lot of the globe. That's a good point.

That's a good point. But you know, whatever. What we were just describing was a very, very tame version of Manifest Destiny. Yeah. And it's like the version of Manifest Destiny that I don't know, like Indiana Jones and 10, 10 books pass along where it's like, yeah, it seems super fun to go have adventures and meet kooky characters in strange places. It's not about that.

Go get into scrapes with the crazy savages. Yeah. Oh. Oh. Yep. Okay. Yeah. There's.

I see why that's problematic. I get it. Yeah. The people who did that got so many people killed. Okay. Yeah. So unfortunately, before they could go off to Turkey, no and Stanley lost almost all of their guns and equipment to a boating accident in the United States.

And they suffered a further accident in Anatolia when they actually like get to Turkey and Louis know decided to start a campfire in the middle of a drought and it quickly raged out of control and the local police took Stanley and his other partner into custody. They got out, but Louis know freaked out because he was scared of how angry Stanley was going to be. And as soon as they got out of jail, he fled to a nearby island. So Stanley catches up with his boy a few days later and he gives what no would later call a sadistic flogging and then forces him to return to the expedition.

So the slavery hater has a long history of whipping people and making them work for them, but in ways that aren't slavery. Yeah, it's cool. It's cool. The voyage continued and the crew made their way 300 miles inland to Turkey with again, no clear goal, but adventure. They reach a village called Chihissar and here's how Geel describes what happens next. According to know who came to hate Stanley before the trip was over, Stanley tried to

murder a Turk in order to steal his horses. Oh, perfect. Just going to kill me a man and take his horses. Henry would later claim that the Turk had made obscene overtures to know and he Stanley had then slashed him with a sword to defend his young friend. Stanley's diary confirms that the Turk had been sexually drawn to know when they were riding together in a group, but Stanley may have used his disgust as a pretext to attack and attempt to rob the man.

So again, this is the guy who is the most sympathetic to Stanley. You can be, he was like, maybe he used his friend's sexual assault as pretext to commit armed robbery. All right, guy. It's like, oh man, we need some fucking horses. We got to get us some horses. I'm going to steal them. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to make up a story about this guy wanting to sex my

friend. So I can take his stuff. Yeah. Oh, it's cool. I'm going to continue Jill's paragraph because the middle gymnastics here are real fun. If he had really been contemplating murder, he would have surreptitiously loaded a gun in advance to be able to shoot the Turk without risking a hand to hand tussle with a man used to fighting with swords and daggers.

So both, both being like, look, here's what he would have done if he really wanted to kill the guy. And also going, of course, Turks naturally know how to fight with daggers. You always see them with those long curved swords. But Henry made no such preparation after his hands had been badly cut in the fight and he was desperate to end it. He failed to lay hands on a single loaded gun among the weapons he had brought with him. So like he also didn't kill him in vengeance.

So he's a good guy. So fun. So reputation spotless still. Let's move on, everyone. Yeah. Still a flawless man. Oh, man. Now, Stanley and his men were surrounded by angry Turks and they opted to surrender rather

than fight. They were beaten, tied up and robbed and Lewis Knoe was raped at Knife Point repeatedly. They survived though and successfully brought suit against the men who'd attacked them. Stanley won a $1,200 judgment and he gave Lewis Knoe the smallest share. Yeah. Well, imagine the emotional turmoil that's how Henry Morton Stanley had to go through during that encounter. See, his boy got beaten like that.

Yeah. Oh, good Lord. So Stanley returned to the United States and got a job as a reporter. And this is the first time in his life when Henry Morton Stanley was good at something. His beat was the Indian Wars, which in 1867 were not a super, at a hopeful point for the Native American side. And most of what Stanley saw in person were like, you know, we would call them desperate peace negotiations by the victims of a genocide and the genociders.

Now this is the area where Haas Child and Jeal diverged substantially or at least one of them. Haas Child claims that Stanley just lied and invented fake battles and massacres to basically rile up people's blood with lines like this. The Indians, true to their promises, true to their bloody instincts, true to their savage hatred of the white race, true to the lessons instilled in their bosoms by their progenitors are on the warpath. Yeah, that's a bad one.

That's a bad one. Jeal has a totally different attitude and says that Stanley did witness some horrible crimes by Native Americans, but that he also reported sympathetically on them because he thought they'd been mistreated by the white man. And he provides several examples of this. And the reality seems to be that, number one, it wasn't uncommon to both write lies about the brutality of Native Americans and also write sympathetically about their plight. That was huge in Europe.

There was this both all throughout. We talked about this in our Carl May episode, who's Hitler's favorite novelist and wrote a bunch of cowboy books. May simultaneously wrote about how tragic it was that Native Americans were being exterminated and also portrayed them as brutal, savage monsters. He did both simultaneously. And that was kind of pretty common among Europeans. And Stanley did the same thing.

So yeah, it's cool. Later explaining why it's okay that Stanley vastly exaggerated the number of people that he killed, Tim Jeal cites this as a justification, quote, the knowledge he had gained when reporting from the Indian wars that Americans like to read about red Indians being killed in retaliation for injuries. Yeah. So there's a guy who's very sympathetic toward the Native Americans. Yes.

Yes. The least racist person possible, Soren. Come on. Let's give him a break, everybody. The funniest part of Jeal's biography is the multiple points where he offhandedly expresses that he's cleared Stanley from any charges of racism. Just like, we can just dispense with that because I've proved he wasn't. It's so good.

So eventually the quality of Stanley's articles earned him the attention of James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the owner of the New York Herald, which was at the time one of the most profitable publications in the world at the moment. I would try to compare it to a modern publication, but I can't think of a profitable one. So we're just going to move on past that. Stanley finangled himself a job basically working for free to report on a war between the British government and the emperor of Abyssinia. So Stanley is one of those guys who like, yes, sometimes you get a right for free to

get exposure, which is not ideal, but also isn't wrong. Like that is kind of the way it works. And it sucks and unfairly rewards people who are already rich and come from wealth. But if you're willing to write for free, you can really jumpstart your career. Yeah. Or if you're either you're rich or you're used to living in absolute squalor your entire life. Yes.

That is the path I took and lived in a place where the ceiling collapsed on me more than once. Quote, here's talking about Adam Haaschild describing his first war corresponding gig. At Suez on his way to the war, Stanley bribed the cheap telegraph clerk to make sure that when correspondence reports arrived from the front, his would be the first cabled home. His foresight paid off and his glowing account of how the British won the war's only significant battle was the first to reach the world. In a grand stroke of luck, the trans-mediterranean telegraph cable broke just after Stanley's

stories were sent off. The dispatches of his exasperated rivals and even the British Army's official reports had to travel part of the way to Europe by ship. In a Cairo hotel in June 1868, Stanley savored his scoop in the news that he had been named a permanent roving foreign correspondent for the Herald. He was 27 years old, so really fucks up his fellow reporters but not a dumb call. I had someone do the big equivalent of that to me when I was in Mosul. I had an employee of a major news network bribe the Iraqi military to not let me and

a bunch of other journalists pass the checkpoint and that is the most I can say about that story without being legally charged with something by the said company. We're going to roll right along. It was a fun... We got where we wanted to go because we had better fixers than they did, but it sucked. This was the first time in this story that Henry's life was in what you would call pretty good shape. He's a roving foreign correspondent, he's gotten a huge scoop, money is starting to

come in and he's in America, I don't know if you wouldn't call journalism respectable, but he has money and that's respectable. Despite the fact that he fought for an empire founded on human bondage, you could call this an inspiring journey. A abandoned child makes his way up to respected foreign correspondent, that's a tale with an arc to it, but Stanley wasn't satisfied with these achievements. Journalism then is now was not a well-regarded profession in England. People in America, a little bit more positive towards them.

William Morton Stanley had been living as an American for more than a decade at this point but the opinions of English high society still very much mattered to him and he knew that the only real way for a man like him to sneak his way into the tippy top of English society was to become the most respected thing of that day, an African explorer. And that's where we're going to roll into in part two, are you ready for this shit? This is where it gets real, this is where he really starts cooking. This is where he really starts, and I mean really starts killing people. Like he's been doing some killing, don't get me wrong, but he really ends some lives.

Here. All right, I can't wait. All right, Soren, you got anything to plug? Yeah, I have my podcast, which is Soren and Dan, it's called Quick Question with Soren and Dan actually. I don't even know the name of my own podcast. You can also find me on Twitter at Soren underscore LTD and you can watch American Dead, we got new episodes coming out in May.

He sure does. You can find us on the internet at BehindTheBastards.com and you'll have plenty of time to do that, with the whole being stuck inside thing. You can buy t-shirts if you need to hire your nakedness in these times. I'm actually shocked that our t-shirt sales are more or less the same just because I didn't imagine, I thought a lot more people would be going shirtless during this period of time. And I haven't really processed my feelings on that, but I'm bummed. We have Anderson merch.

We do have Anderson merch. People should continue buying that so that they can use it to craft the flags that wave over the glorious revolution. Just wait till August. Those shirt sales will start tanking. And then buy a mug, buy a magnet, buy a sticker. If you still have money because the economy hasn't collapsed, if not continue enjoying our free content, check out some of the sources for this episode and go hug a cat.

You can still do that a lot of the time, if you already have one. Don't hug a stranger's cat. You might spread the COVID. That's true. Which has bummed me out. I love hugging strange cats. You can also follow Robert on Twitter at IWriteOK. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Bastard's Pod.

You can find the sources for this podcast under the episode description on all the apps you use and wash your hands. Just sanitize those cats before you hug them. You could do that still, Robert. I do. I just hate, you know what, they hate the tequila sprayer. And I can't think of another way to sanitize a cat quickly. But they don't like to hug you much either.

So that shouldn't be much. It's kind of a wash for you. Especially after I've sprayed them with the tequila. It is just not good. Anyway, episode's over. Yeah. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow hoping to become the youngest person to go to space?

Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.