Henry Morton Stanley

Welsh explorer and travel writer Henry Morton Stanley was born John Rowlands (he may have been illegitimate). His father died when he was 2; his mother, a butcher's daughter, went into service in London and then married, and did not want him. Stanley's paternal grandfather, a prosperous farmer, refused to care for him. For a while his mother's brothers boarded him out, then they stopped paying for him and he was taken, at 6, to the workhouse at St. Asaph, where he remained until 1856, when he was 15. The schoolmaster there was a savage brute, afterward adjudged insane, and the boy's life was one long series of torture, in the midst of which somehow he gained an elementary education. At last he beat his tormentor, and ran away. For a while, a cousin at Brynford employed him as a pupil teacher in a National School, and after school he studied languages and mathematics. For several years, he went from one town and one poor and unwelcoming relative after another, working odd jobs. In 1859