Joseph Conrad's "Wild Story of a Journalist"

Abstract

Henry Stanley traveled to Africa in January 1871 with the following assignment from the New York Herald: Find out Livingstone, and get what news you can relating to his discoveries.1 Month after month readers watched the newspapers for reports of the silent explorer. News of Dr. David Livingstone's discoveries-and his own discovery, in this case-reached London in May 1872 to the delight of international audiences.2 One impressed reader was Joseph Conrad, who recalled hearing the accomplishments of explorers whispered to me in my cradle and reading as a boy Livingstone's Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857), a source of the sentimental daydreams that would one day make him a steamboat captain on the Congo.3 The newspaper itself read like an exploration narrative at such moments, never more so than in the journalism of Stanley, who introduced the press to territory formerly reserved for the explorer's lone voice. Stanley's dispatches gave audiences the impressions of a correspondent, the adventures of an explorer, and the plots of a novelist, all in a single column. Yet these dispatches also gave audiences a misleading perspective on events, as Conrad learned when his own African experiences failed to correspond with