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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Wanna say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost, city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know. Because after listening to stuff you should know you will listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Alex Fumero and I host the new podcast more than a movie, American Me, a film directed by and starring Edward James Olmos. I'll be diving into the behind the scenes controversy, including an alleged backlash from the Mexican mafia. Several people who worked on the movie have been murdered. I don't want to speak about why would people be murdered for being in a movie. Listen to more than a movie, American me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I don't have an introduction. I'm I'm Robert Evans. This is behind the ******** podcast about the worst people in history. And we have as our as our national ventilator stockpile runs out. My national introduction stockpile has been completely exhausted. So these are 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 Southern boy Air Horn. Air horn. Air horn. But we have to do the air horns manually because the the air Horn stockpiles out as well. They're gone. They're gone. We used them all up. We used the hospitals need them. That's that's the new charity. It's air horns for hospitals. Really. Honestly, if you have an air horn or you have a vozila at home, maybe you went to the hospital, 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 OD ING friend. Soren, how are you doing today? I'm pretty good. Yeah, I feel good. I mean, I want to make sure my levels are OK and everything. I guess there's no way to even know that they're there. 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 I love and have loved for years. You are my former co-worker at at Cracked dot Internet. And you also host a podcast now with uh, 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. It's you. Do that makes sense. You want to put the face up front, I think. Yeah, yeah. Now, Soren, you, 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, like, 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 is like what you what you know about this dude. I hope you didn't really. No. I have a very cursory knowledge of of Henry Morton Stanley, or as I like to call him, HMS. He that's why British ships are named that, by the way. Don't look at us. I know that he's a knight. He's been knighted. Yeah, absolutely. He was famous for going and finding. He's the guy who says. Doctor Livingston, I presume? Yes, yes. He was his most famous line. Yeah, Doctor Livingston and then Doctor 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 in during all that time, he also got very involved with the slave trade, as far as I know. And let kind of everybody on his, every one 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 who finds the source of the Congo River and informs all the other white guys where it is. And he is, uh, he actually was very anti slavery. He was an abolitionist, but also in a way that morally doesn't really matter. Well, we'll talk. We'll be talking about that a lot this episode. This is a fun one, Soren. We're going to, we are going to have us a ****** ******* time if you can hear. 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 sort 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. Cracked you or not just when you had a call, but 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 and your 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 your your your concern with that you know looking back on eight 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, this is, 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 *** ** * *****. 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 and. Show a little bit earlier we talked about King Leopold, the second of Belgium, who's like the king who conquered central Africa and killed 13 million people making a rubber factory. Very ambitious. Very ambitious. Yeah. Rode a tricycle a lot. Weird dude and Stanley was like, we talked about Stanley a bit in that and I one of my sources is King Leopold's ghost, which is a really big, a really good book by Adam Hauschild. 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 100 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's 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 Giel published Stanley the impossible, Life of Africa's greatest explorer. And Geo was able to get access to a never before open trove of Stanley's private letters and journal entries. This is how we learned about stuff like Stanley lying about how many people he'd killed. And Jill 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 another Stanley has recently emerged neither a dauntless hero nor a ruthless control freak, this explorer prevailed in the wilderness not because his will was indomitable, but because he appreciated its limitations. Use long term strategies that social scientists are only now beginning to understand. This new version of Stanley was found, appropriately enough, by Livingston's biographer, Tim Giel, a British novelist and expert on Victorian obsessives. Gill 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, this article in Smithsonian is arguing that Stanley should be like a productivity guru that we take advice on from. 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? We Columbus maybe got a bad rap. Everybody maybe he got it, 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 *** time. So, Sir Henry Morton. Stanley was born on January 28th, 1841, under the name John Rowlands. He was born a ******* 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 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 shoot all connection with his illegitimate child. The important thing is that app 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 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. In other stories say his dad was a wealthy lawyer who was sued 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 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. Something like, now we don't. Nobody wants that kid that is soaring. Bowie's official stance. It's OK if some kids are unwanted. Yeah, it's if kids not wanted. That's your internal clock and internal compass telling you that's not a good kid. That's not a that's a bad one. That kid's gonna be a problem. 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. Hauschild describes Moses Perry as quote, a man who believed a boy needed a sound weapon if he misbehaved and kind of describes it as sort of an abusive relationship. Geal takes the completely opposite task and and argues that the two had a good relationship until Moses Perry fell down dead in the middle of a potato field on June 22nd, 1846 when John was five. And 1/2 years old. So John was left fully in the care of his two uncles, who did not infect 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 **** was going to take him to another aunt in a town nearby. And so John and **** went on an 8 mile walk together, and it was it was tragically sore and it was a walk of lies. As John later wrote quote. The way seemed interminable and tedious. It last **** sent 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 clanging noisily in the distant interior. A somber faced 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, **** had abandoned his stone building. Cakes. Yeah, as you do. You go into the woods, you find the nearest stone building. 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, uh, Geo writes quote. The false cajoling and treacherous endearments lavished upon him during that journey would live forever at Henry Stanley's memory. Since that dreadful evening Stanley would write in his 50s, my resentment has not a whit abated. It would have been far better for me if **** being stronger than I had employed composion instead of shattering my confidence and planting the first seeds of distrust in a child's heart. So this is a bad thing that happens. And I'm going to guess you've heard of workhouses, right? Soren. Yeah. I'm familiar. Yeah. Now, 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 6 gets put into the Saint Asaph Union Workhouse. So the British Government, which was at the time conquering big chunks of the world and stealing their ****. Did not like the 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. Ah, that's wonderful. It's awesome. You. It's kind of hard to exaggerate how bad England sucks in this period of time. Ah, it's just so bleak. It's so bleak. It's like this factory, benighted, cold drenched hellscape of of of dying kids and fancy people. It's it's the best. But, like, the kids are the working class. Like, that's your yeah, those are the ones who are doing all of the jobs. For some reason, they only made jobs available to children. Well, they're little hands. Can reach all sorts of things. Soren. Yeah. They make very good chimney sweeps. I'll say. Yeah, incredible chimney sweeps. So, inmates. That the the workhouse, and again, a lot of them are children are required to wake up at 6:00 AM, and they're locked in their dorms at 8:00 PM 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 wholly 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 OK, 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 on, 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 the 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, it's likely Saddam Hussein. Giant monsters, like, Oh yeah. And he was threatening his teachers. The gun when he was like 14. Yeah, that kind of scans. Yeah, I see where this evolution happens. Stalin was getting beat so bad that he was peeing blood and you're like, OK, I get it, I get it. Yeah, yeah, OK. That's not so hard to to draw these lines together. So it's and it's interesting, like that line that I just read above is certainly truthful. We have a lot of other accounts from work houses and they they sucked. But it's hard to trust Stanley on anything because he lied about everything, including his time at Saint Asaph's. He would go on to claim later in his writings that he saw a boy beaten to death by James Francis the the the school teacher and the general consensus of historians based on workhouse records and other people who are in that workhouse at the time is that nothing like this happened. 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. Uh, it's it's 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 Saint Asaph. 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. To observe 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. And we yeah, I love that the government has an inspector to go check out the workhouses. Yeah, like what is he hoping to find there? Yeah, you 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 created a prison for children when you go there where you're like, Oh no, they're having sex with each other. You 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 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 ******* mean a damn thing. Whatever. Yeah, 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. O 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 change, too. You don't walk through the woods with your your surrogate father, who's lavishing you with praise and then drops you off at a workhouse and be like, yeah, you know what? I'm going to let somebody else in. It feels like at 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 ******* get up? Yeah. So Stanley did at the least receive an education, which you know, 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, and king Leopold's ghost, Hauschild 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 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 a 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. Yeah, yeah, that's a rough one. He saw his mom at the so she was she then in the workhouse as well? She had two more kids and she wasn't going to take care of him, 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. It's 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 as he was, like, very dedicated to making his mom proud, and she clearly didn't give a **** about him and at best wanted his money. It's a ******* bummer. Jesus 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 ****** 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 Hauschild 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 his 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 ere I found myself swung upwards into the air by the color of my jacket and flung into a nerveless heap on the bench. The passionate brute pummeled me in the stomach until I fell backward, gasping for breath again, I was lifted, dashed. On the bench with the shock that almost broke my spine. And this is again all lies. One of the things that Hauschild notes, and in that general notes is that Stanley was at that point a very healthy 15 year old boy, while his teacher was an was a sick, middle-aged former coal miner who was missing a hand. And was he? He he was unlikely to have been doing a lot of throwing his the yeah incredible. Yeah. So most people seem to agree. If there had actually been a fight, the the 15 year old healthy boy probably would have beaten the Handless coal miner. But you know the the man with black lung and COPD. Yeah. Yeah he wasn't he wasn't a a price fighter and then of Stanley's classmates recalled anything like this happening and yeah again. They considered Francis to have been a nice guy in Stanley, to have been, uh, the teachers 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's you know, because like 15 people were considered. Yeah. So maybe this 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 on a magical. Journey, like that's a ******* Charles Dickens story, you know? Stanley would be throughout his life a big Dickens fan, probably influenced how he wrote his own biography. What? Yeah. Yeah, actually that. OK. So a lot of things are falling into place then. Yes, that's right. His, his writing style is so purple and like, yeah, I could see. Yeah, yeah. He's he's very influenced by Dickens and is a really fun note if anybody wants to know more about Charles Dickens from like an interesting perspective. George Orwell wrote so many ******* articles about Charles Dickens's writing and, like, analyzed him from, like, the perspective of a socialist is really interesting set up. There's a bunch of them in the collection. All art is propaganda. Which is a good chunk of Orwell's reading, if you're into that anyway. So yeah, 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. And 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 Windermere, 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 there weren't a lot of rules back in the day about this sort of thing. So feels like there were like 12 people in history. Yeah, like every time somebody wanted a job, they're like, oh, all right, I'll get you a job. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So he he does the the pretty normal thing for a poor kid at this part of the world at the time. And he gets a gig ******* 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 Windermere 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, ****. Everything was so much easier than that. Like, a lot of stuff was easier. You could just be like, you know what? I would have been I I feel like I wanna be in Louisiana. I will figure out a way to get there. And if I don't die of cholera, no one's gonna stop me, right? Yeah. Yeah. The thing you really had to worry about where diseases and abuse of people. But like, yeah, the opportunities beyond those horrific things were endless. Yeah, it wasn't hard to to just do **** like that, you know? If it yeah. Nobody was making you fill out a whole lot of paperwork, yes. Yeah. You're not being tracked for your like, his credit wasn't a consideration at that point. Yeah, no, it was not. And again, this is another one of one of what will become many different parts of the Stanley story, where his version of events and 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? That's your resume in the 1850s. Wow, just just a single word, I boy next to a dash. Wow. Uh God, what a gig to have. But this distinguished gentleman did in fact want a boy. He turned out to be a wealthy cot. Yes, I do need a boy. You know what? I came into town for one of those. I was gonna pick me up a boy at the workhouse, but this is this is faster. So so yeah, this 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 and again according to Stanley's version of events, which is a lie, Henry hopes 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 is that's true is that Stanley worked for James. Week and the reality is probably know that 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's 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. Yeah, totally. He can't help himself but lie to let to sound in any way, any like little tiny way grander. Yeah, yeah, they're all kind of everyone we talked about on this show is kind of the same person with the exception of L Ron Hubbard, who is is at the top of the heap. Robert I mean, before you get into it, do you know what time it is? I can't imagine what you're trying to lead me towards, Sophia. I don't know that just this thing that, you know, keeps this podcast afloat. Oh, oh, oh. You mean robbing merchant vessels on the Spanish main? Exactly. Yeah. For some information that oh, absolutely, Soren. Yeah, you did your did your gun not come in the mail? No, but I mean, I got a lot. This is OK. Fun. Yeah, this will be, this will be, this will be a real hoot. Yeah. Alright, well, we're gonna go find a merchantman 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. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. 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Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind. Better help from behind. Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. Anything, particularly young children out into nature so that they can experience it and take time off from this virtual world of being always on your cell phones and so on. And get the feel of nature so that you come to be fascinated, then you come to want to understand it, and then you come to love it, and at that point you want to protect it. And then we'll come to the sort of healthy world that I envision as a good future for us. And the rest of life on this planet. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Oh my gosh, that was some good pillaging, some good looting. Bloons 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. I want where they just like target. Take these, actually. Yeah, target does. Costco does not. They prefer pieces of eight, which are probably the same things, but whatever. **** 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 at working and like, this is like 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 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 ******* 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 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 on. Yeah, so it's cool. Yeah, it's. It's the opposite of cool. Yeah, it is. 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 grad smart gradually change. Yeah, that is not a bad call. What a great rebrand. Yeah, yeah, John Rowlands is a shin, a ****** name in anyway. Like Henry Morton Stanley. You just tell that name to someone and ask this is a famous person, what do you think they did? One of your first three guesses is going to be Explorer, right? Like. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm going to read a quote from King Leopold's ghost explaining the process of him stealing this this other man's name. In the 1860 New Orleans Census, he's listed as Jay rolling, 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, More Lake, and Moreland, before finally settling on Morton. So yeah, that's more or less the truth. And Tim Gill's revisionist history of Stanley, the one that's like, really pro Stanley, goes into the fact that he's lying about all of this, like Geo. 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 ****** I think is actually Geels personal conclusions about everything. But he he goes, he's very open about the fact that Henry Morton Stanley or lied about ******* everything, but he has all these really fun explanations and justifications. Or why Stanley lied in every case. Like he's defensive of this, 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 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 scams. Like, I'll give Gill that one later on. His justifications get worse. That one. Yeah, I could see that being the truth. So and Geo 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. Bill is he is as frustrated at people judging Stanley for this as he is at them judging Stanley for gunning people down in the Congo like it's just. Other have equal weight in his. Yeah, they they absolutely do. And it's it's fun. I want. I think they're not fun without meeting Jill. I'm pretty confident that he's a liar. You somebody who has lied in his passage like little kids lie because they're comfortable? Yes, yes, they do. But that's not why we're critical of Stanley now. Yeah. So anyway, for awhile Henry worked at a general store in a log cabin selling all sorts of tools that people needed as they kind of moved into the less. Little 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 the, you know, 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 they're like, we're extremely physically aggressive people as a matter of rule, something about owning hundreds of human beings. It seems like it makes you unwilling to listen to what anyone else has to say. Uh, yeah, and I'm Jill 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 any backwoodsman 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 man 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. So, yeah, I feel like that's still scare. 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 at all times. I've always said that, yeah. And if you're in a rural area, don't **** with anybody there. Absolutely not. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Don't argue with people out in the sticks, you know? Just move, move along. Just get going. Keep on, keep on trucking. So people who knew Stanley during this. Described him as talkative and intelligent, short but burly and confident. Unless he was asked about his family's. Questions about his family caused him to stutter and eventually mumble out. There is a mystery about my birth. 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 bad at it. 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 and Louisiana, Stanley's boss died and Stanley was forced to move to Cypress 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 ****** 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. Bad, yeah. This Victorian FOP who rolls through. Yeah. Big fan of. Yeah, big fan of seed color called Kerchiefs. Colorful kerchiefs really wants to be a British noble, even though he comes from, I mean, the the poorest ******* 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 throughout his life. Like a lot of fancy. British people will always treat him like **** even after he becomes rich and famous, because he comes from a lower class background. Well, like the Americans he works with, they're just like, yeah, whatever, like. You can shoot a pack thread at 30 paces. That's all I care about because we are gonna shoot at each other. I I come from the South. I can't not shoot somebody. I gotta. I haven't shot a single personal day. You're not my. 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. And this Hilaria, yeah, this happened 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, every he's always sick and dying like this guy in the Congo for a huge chunk of his life. He spends about like half of his life actively dying of some sort of horrible, contagious, 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 that's my **** 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 actual actuality these people are being dragged through their exploration. They're not actually out there cutting stuff, bushwhacking with their own machete or anything. They're being carried on a palanquin as they slowly wither away into nothing. Some of them are. Stanley is one of those guys. Who is famous for like always like like working his *** off like and 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. Like like the whole team would crack, would croak basically and stay. It would just be like Stanley and a bunch of like local people wandering into some town. Yeah it's he's it's funny to me that like the the stereotypical image of like one of these guys is kind of like the rock in those Jumanji movies or whatever. Like we're like big barrel chested wearing that shirt they all wore and like the reality is like they they looked like ******* concentration camp survivors a lot of the time because they just were had been dying for nine months. Like they had no calories left, they were ******** themselves uncontrollably like just couldn't keep food down 0 fat on their bones like that and that's that's Stanley's. Life. He's actively looks like a dead man most of his days. He's Christian Bale in the machinist his whole life. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's it's rough. And that's just 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 since I'm 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 ******** himself. Uncontrollably and like barely able to stay conscious. So Stanley lives, though, because he's he. One thing you can say for Stanley, he was a cussedly tough *** ** * *****. Yeah, and he doesn't die, as will be the long story with this guy. And, you know, during this time, as he's doing, working as a debt collector and dying, he had exactly 2 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. Of 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 shipped them off like a wet dog that ***** him up. Well, we are witches. Yeah. Yeah. He he's that kind of dude. And there is the thing he is scared West of. Like Stanley is, is the kind of guy who will repeatedly face down like wild animals, you know, with a a crude and unreliable rifle. But he cannot handle a woman being like, I think you're cute. Yeah, the most dangerous animal of all. Yeah, it's awesome and totally, totally to character. So, Jill 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 A4 poster with a youth called **** Heaton, who had also jumped ship. Although **** was so modest he would not retire by candlelight and walked in a suspiciously female manner, Stanley oddly twigged his true sex at the end of three days. Umm. And he like realizes this in bed when he sees when * ****** breasts. And I don't know if **** **** was actually like a transgender person or just like a lot of times in those days like if you were a woman who had to travel alone for some reason because you have money. It's just safer to present as male. Hard to say what the actual truth here, but he realizes ****. **** Heaton that's that's a **** name for that is. We have. Yeah, that is a good **** 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 **** **** has has breasts and and lady parts. You know, realize Stanley realizes that that **** **** is yeah anyway, and he like freaks out and **** has to flee the the the place. Like he doesn't tell anyone. Or at least Stanley claims he doesn't tell anyone. But **** 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, 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 real 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 ****. And it's something that horrified Stanley that he didn't talk about, I don't know, hard to say. Like we'll never know. This could have actually gone. That's 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 the Mike Pence soul inside of him is like, yeah, no, no, no, no. I need to lie down for a week. This is worse than 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 Gorrie with the son of his stores, biggest customer filled. Men, and obviously Dan Goree is a rich southern kid in 1860. Something to give you a guess as to where his political allegiances wound up being during the whole war thing. Stanley later wrote that he was informed quote the election of Abe Lincoln in November previous had created a hostile feeling in the South because the 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 and his father were people who owned other people for profit. The gory family had 120 slaves, which is a lot of what you say it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I 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. He 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 *** **** world, is reading. Tim Giel tried 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 *** **** thing. I mean, it's it's really, it's really amusing. I'm going to read you a selection from Tim Giel's book, Stanley, so you can hear this man explain how. Totally not racist. Stanley was, yes, though Henry expressed no revulsion toward slavery in the Deep South, which was legal and accepted by everyone he knew. He was not. He was not prejudice against black people. But it was fine, though remember that that's not. That doesn't mean you're prejudice. You can be racist and fight. You can be not anti racist and fine with slavery. It's it's possible. Totally possible. I guess that is an argument. 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, yeah, I love it. I love Jill that he's like, look, he yes, OK, 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 ******* quote. So he just explains how that he's not prejudice against black people. Indeed, he had lived in the New Orleans boarding house that was owned by a freed black woman and had been recommended to him by two of James speaks slaves. Uh 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. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying. Or for a family. And it meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. 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It's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time when you want to be a better problem solver therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind. Better help from behind. Hey it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo 's amazing wildlife podcast in this special episode. We sit down with doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans animals and the environment. If we don't help them find ways of making a living without destroying the environment, we can't save chimps, forests or anything else. And that becomes very clear when you look at poverty around the world. If you're living in poverty, you can't afford to ask as we can. Did this product harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals, like, was it factory farmed? Is it cheap because of unfair wages paid to people? And so alleviating poverty is tremendously important. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, we're back. Oh my gosh. Ohh those ads I I am just *******. You could 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, uh, yeah, OK, we are still making it through this ******* paragraph of Tim Geal 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, was owned by a free black woman. Quote a frenzy desire to fight the Yankees inflamed 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 Grays, 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, the real people, the actual human beings. Yeah. You do get that feeling from old Timmy G Timmy Jay so quote. Yeah, but upon receiving it, a parcel, a chemise, and a petticoat, such as a ***** ladies maid might wear, he felt compelled to ask, not least because suspecting that the sender was one of doctor 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. That's such a good burn for that time. Yeah. And it it it it's actually a really common thing. Historically, a similar thing happened in England during World War One. We're 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 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. No, no, no, 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 being don't 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. Yeah, yeah, not a great battle as far as battles go, 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. I ******* love Greg and crybaby. He ******* 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, 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. Henry. 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 wait. You're about to do exactly that to hundreds of people. Oh my gosh. So many more than 100, 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. The Union Army and fighting for the other side. Adam Hauschild of King Leopold's ghosts writes that he promptly agreed to do so, and this is one of the few places where Hauschild 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 conflicts. There's 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. So how could he not have known what this fight was about? That's great. So. It's awesome. It's it's so cool. Yeah. He. It's it's cool that he feels the need to explain how why leaving the Confederate Army was, quote, not unforgivable. That says a lot about Gene. That wasn't anyone's question, Tim. So anyway, Stanley next spent some time fighting for the Union as an artillerist 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. And eat piece of trivia. Well, not a lot of folks do that. Yeah. 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 he got around a bit. You know, not most, not a lot of people did that. So once the Civil War was over, Stanley used some of his army books to take a trip to Turkey with two of his friends, including a younger boy who basically worshipped Stanley named Louis. No, and this is a 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 bees 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. That's amazing. Yeah. It is like the child. It's like the the the career that I dreamed of having when I was nine. Yeah. Yeah. 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'm not opposed to reading something like that either. No, I 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 1800s were a real rough period for a lot of the globe. That's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah. But, you know, whatever. Well, 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, like Indiana Jones in Tin Tin Books Pass along where it's like, yeah, it seems super fun to go have adventures and meet kooky characters and strange places. To go get about that, go get into scrapes with the crazy savages. Oh, oh, Yep. OK yeah, there's. I see. Well, that's problematic. And the other people who did that got so many people killed. OK, 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 Lewis 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. 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 him, 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 Chesar. And here's how Jill describes what happens next. According to no, who came to hate Stanley. Before the trip was over, Stanley tried to murder a Turk in order to steal his horses. All perfect. She's going to kill me. Amanda, take his horses. Henry would later claim that the Turk had made obscene overtures to know and he Stanley had been slashed at him. The 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 an attempt to rob the man. So again, this is the guy who is the most sympathetic to Stanley. You could be. He was like maybe he used his friends sexual assault as pretext to commit armed robberies, he said. All right, guys. It's like, ah, man, we need some ******* horses. We gotta get us some horses. I'm gonna steal them. I'm gonna. I'll get him. I gotta make up a story about this guy wanting to have sex with my friend. Take his stuff. Yeah. It's cool. I'm going to continue geels paragraph because the the middle gymnastics here, 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. He's so fun, so reputation spotless. Still, let's move on. Everyone 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 know was raped at knife. Point repeatedly. They survived, though, and successfully brought suit against the men who'd attacked them. Stanley won a $1200 judgment, and he gave Lewis know the smallest share. Yeah, well, imagine the emotional turmoil. That's Henry Morton. Stanley had to go through his boy, get beaten like that. Yeah. 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 he his beat was the Indian Wars, which in 1867 were not at Super at a 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. The victims of a genocide and the genocide riders now. This is the area where Hauschild and Geel diverge substantially. Or at least one of them, the hauschild, 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 that's a bad one, yeah. That's a bad one. Geo 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, whose Hitler's like. Favorite novelist and read 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, like he did both simultaneously. And that was kind of pretty common in among Europeans. And Stanley did the same thing. So, yeah, it's it's cool. Later, when explaining why it's OK that Stanley vastly exaggerated the number of people that he killed Tim Giel 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. So there's a guy who's very sympathetic toward the Native Americans. Yes, yes, the the least racist person possible. Soren, come on, let's let's give him a break. Everybody. The funniest part of Geels 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 junior, 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 finagled 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. Their 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 Hauschild describing his 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 in 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 ***** up his fellow reporters, but not a dumb call. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And I 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 passed a checkpoint. And that is the most I could say about that story without being legally charged with something by the said company. So 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. So this was, you know, the first time in this story that Henry's life was in what you would call pretty good shape. You know, he's, he's a roving foreign correspondent, he's gotten a huge scoop, money starting to come in, and he's in in America. I don't know if you wouldn't call journalism respectable, but he has money, and that's respectable. And despite, you know, the fact that he fought for an empire founded on human ******* you could call this an inspiring journey. Abandoned child makes his way up to respected foreign correspondent. That's a 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, you know, 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 sort is where we're going to roll into in Part 2. Are you ready for this ****? This is where it gets real. This is really, really starts cooking. This is where he really starts, and I mean really starts killing people like he's been doing, he's he's been doing some killing, don't get me wrong, but he really, he really in some lives here. Alright, I can't wait. All right. Soren, you got anything to plug? Yeah, I I have my podcast, which is Soren and Dan. It's called. Quick question with Soren and Dan. Actually, I don't know the name of my own podcast. You could also find me on Twitter at Soren under score Ltd, and you can watch American dad. We got new episodes coming out in May. He sure does. You can find us on the Internet behindthebastards.com, and you'll have plenty of time to do that. But with the whole being stuck inside thing, you can you can buy T-shirts if you need to hire your nakedness. In these times, I'm actually shocked that we're we're our T-shirt sales are are more or less the same. Just because I 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 do have Anderson merch, and people should continue buying that so that they can use it to craft the flags that wave over the glorious revolution. Just wait until August that those shirt sales will start tanking, and then and then bio mug by a magnet by 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 you might spread the COVID. Hmm, that's true. Uh-huh. Which has bummed me out. I love how hugging strange cats. Anyway, follow Robert on Twitter and I write OK you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram at ******** pod. You can find the sources for this podcast under the episode description on all the apps you use. And wash your hands. Wash your hands. Just sanitize those cats before you hug them. You could do that still, Robert. I do, but they just hate they they you know what? They hate the tequila sprayer and I can't think of another way to sanitize a cat quickly. But then anyway, hugging much either, so it's not too much. It's kind of a wash for you, especially after I've sprayed them with the tequila. It is just not good anyway. Episodes over, yeah. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting creation distribution. And monetization of your podcast? Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Want to say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast, packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture, and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost, city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know. Because after listening to stuff, you should know. You will listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Alex Fumero and I host the new podcast more than a movie American Me, a film directed by and starring Edward James Olmos. I'll be diving into the behind the scenes controversy, including an alleged backlash from the Mexican mafia. Several people who worked on the movie have been murdered. I don't want to speak about why would people be murdered for being in a movie? Listen to more than a movie American me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.