ABSTRACT
In late December 1876 the Welsh-American explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley, leader of the Anglo-American Expedition across equatorial Africa, was stranded on the upper reaches of the Congo River. This chapter considers Stanley's strategic appropriation of Tennyson as emblematic of some of the ways in which readers experienced the mobility of texts in the nineteenth-century colonial world. Whether or not Stanley ever made his pledge to 'toil on, and on' to the Western sea, the oration – as recorded in Through the Dark Continent – is certainly a later invention and was possibly re-written in light of Edwin Arnold's comparison with 'Ulysses'. Stanley frequently urged his readers to look at Africa through the lens of English poetry. Arnold's final epic, The Voyage of Ithobal, which recounts a legendary African odyssey, also bears the mark of his friendship with Stanley. Arnold's insertion of modern geographical knowledge into an epic poem divided critics.
