Sick heart river

Love can drive a man to his grandeur. H. M. Stanley, greatest of all of Africa’s explorers — let us agree with this fine biographer, Tim Jeal, on Stanley’s pre-eminence — was driven by the reverse: love denied, love rebuffed. And with Stanley, that deprivation was a good deal more complex. ‘This poor body of mine has suffered terribly,’ he was reflecting in his diary in June 1877, closing upon the final desperate stretch of his descent of the Congo river, having solved one of the last big geographical conundrums of central Africa:

it has been degraded, pained, wearied and sickened and has well nigh sunk under the task imposed on it; but it is a small portion of myself. For my self lay darkly encased, and was ever too haughty and soaring for such miserable environments as the body that encumbered it daily.

Serving him still, when that entry was made, was the Lady Alice, the 24-foot boat he had had carried up in sections from Zanzibar to navigate lakes Victoria and Tanganyika.