HENRY MORTON STANLEY was born in Denbigh, Wales in January 1841. His mother, Betsy Parry, was nineteen years old at the time of his birth. According to Stanley himself, his father, John Rowlands, was an alcoholic. There is some doubt as to his true parentage. The parents were unmarried, so his birth certificate refers to him as a 'bastard,' and the stigma of illegitimacy weighed heavily upon him all his life.

After completing an elementary education, he was employed as a pupil teacher in a National School. In 1859, at the age of 18, he made his passage to the United States in search of a new life. Upon arriving in New Orleans, he became friendly with a wealthy trader named Stanley, whose name he later assumed. This adoptive parent soon died. Henry assumed a local accent and began denying being a foreigner.

He participated reluctantly in the American Civil War, first with the Confederate Army, and was soon taken prisoner. He promptly went over to the other side and may have deserted.  He then joined the Navy, but deserted again. He then began a career as a journalist, visiting mines, reporting on a conflict with Native Americans, and joined an expedition to establish the course of a river. He organized an expedition to the Ottoman Empire that ended in catastrophe when he got mixed up in a sword fight with a Turk. He finished up in jail, but somehow talked himself out of it and even got damages for lost equipment.

Then, in 1867, Stanley was recruited by Colonel Samuel Forster Tappan (a one-time journalist) of the Indian Peace Commission to serve as a correspondent to cover the work of the Commission for several newspapers. Stanley was soon retained exclusively by James Gordon Bennett, founder of the New York Herald, who was impressed by Stanley's exploits and by his direct style of writing. This early period of his professional life is described in Volume I of his book My Early Travels and Adventures in America and Asia (1895).

Stanley became one of the Herald's overseas correspondents and, in 1869, was instructed by Bennett's son to find the Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone, who was known to be in Africa but had not been heard from for some time. Actually Stanley had lobbied his employer for several years to mount this expedition that would presumably give him  fame and fortune.

Stanley traveled to Zanzibar in March 1871 and outfitted an expedition with the best of everything and required no fewer than 200 porters. This 700-mile expedition through the tropical forest became a nightmare. His thoroughbred stallion died within a few days by tsetse fly; many of his carriers deserted and the rest were decimated by tropical diseases. To keep the expedition going, he had to take stern measures, flogging deserters. He had to fight his way through tribal lands, but always first tried diplomacy and the exchanging of gifts before opening fire. Stanley's diaries show that he had exaggerated the brutal treatment of his carriers in his books, to pander to the taste of his Victorian public.

He found Livingstone on November 10, 1871, in Ujiji near Lake Tanganyika in present-day Tanzania, and may have greeted him with the now famous, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" This famous phrase may be a fabrication, as Stanley has torn out the pages of this encounter in his diary. Even Livingstone's account of this encounter doesn't mention these words. Stanley joined Livingstone in exploring the region, establishing for certain that there was no connection between Lake Tanganyika and the River Nile. On his return, he wrote a book about his experiences : How I Found Livingstone, Travels, Adventures and Discoveries in Central Africa.

This brought him into the public eye and gave him some financial success. Stanley had evoked in his book a fine picture of Livingstone while hiding his annoying sides. This made Livingstone almost an instant saint in the eyes of the public and he would become an example for many future missionaries. In 1874 the New York Herald, in partnership with Britain's Daily Telegraph, then financed him on another expedition to the African continent, one of his achievements being to solve the last great mystery of African exploration by tracing the course of the River Congo to the sea.

Leaving from Zanzibar, this would become an epic, sometimes nightmarish expedition through dark Africa that still appeals to one's imagination. He used sectional boats to pass the great cataracts. As he had seen before in his previous expedition, inner Africa was being plundered by slave traders. Previously thriving areas had become bare and depopulated. This convinced him that the slave trade had to be stopped. After 999 days, on 9 August 1877, Stanley reached a Portuguese outpost at the mouth of the river Congo. Starting with 356 people, only 114 had survived of which Stanley was the only European. He wrote about his trials in his book Through the Dark Continent, describing his expedition as if it were a conquest.

Stanley was next approached by the ambitious Belgian king, Leopold II, who in 1876 had organized a private holding company disguised as an international scientific and philanthropic association which he called the International African Society. The king spoke about his plans to introduce Western civilization and to bring religion to this part of Africa, but didn't mention he also wanted to claim the lands. Stanley returned to the Congo, negotiated with tribal chiefs and obtained fair concessions that were later falsified to his advantage by King Leopold. But Stanley refused to impose treaties on the chiefs that yielded sovereignty over their land.

In 1886, Stanley led the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition to rescue Emin Pasha, the governor of Equatoria in the southern Sudan. King Leopold II demanded that Stanley take the longer route, via the Congo river, hoping to acquire more territory and perhaps even Equatoria. After immense hardships and great loss of life, Stanley met Emin in 1888, discovered the Ruwenzori Range and Lake Edward, and emerged from the interior with Emin and his surviving followers at the end of 1890.

This expedition tarnished Stanley's name because of the conduct of the other Europeans: British gentlemen and army officers. An army major was shot by a carrier, after behaving with extreme cruelty. Previous expeditions had given Stanley satisfaction, but this one only had caused disaster. Stanley's two-volume account of the expedition, IN DARKEST AFRICA, Or The Quest, Rescue and Retreat of Emin, was published in two volumes in 1890.

On his return to Europe, he married Welsh artist Dorothy Tennant and they adopted a child, Denzil. Stanley entered Parliament as a Liberal Unionist member for Lambeth North, serving from 1895 to 1900. He became Sir Henry Morton Stanley when he was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in 1899, in recognition of his service to the British Empire in Africa. Stanley died in London on May 10, 1904.