Summary of Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost

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#1

John Rowlands, the man who would accomplish what Tuckey tried to do, was born in 1841. He was the first of five illegitimate children born to Betsy Parry, a housemaid. His father may have been John Rowlands, a local drunkard who died of delirium tremens, or a prominent and married lawyer named James Vaughan Horne.

#2

At fifteen, John left St. Asaph's and went to live with a succession of relatives. He was afraid he would be thrown out again, and so he decided to give himself a new name. He became Henry Morton Stanley.

#3

Stanley’s autobiography is full of exaggerations and lies. He left the Welsh workhouse in melodramatic terms: he leaped over a garden wall and escaped, he claims, after leading a class rebellion against a cruel supervisor named James Francis. But workhouse records show Stanley leaving not as a runaway but to live at his uncle's while going to school.

#4

Stanley's life was so entwined with disgrace that he had to invent events in his autobiography and journal entries about a dramatic shipwreck and other adventures that never happened. He went first to St. Louis, and then to San Francisco.