In the winter of 1867, Henry Stanley stepped off the train in New York City and out of a brilliantly checkered past.

At 25 years old, he was a failed gold miner and merchant marine. He fought and was captured as a Confederate soldier during the Civil War. He was a turncoat, enlisting with the Union Navy.

On a trip to Turkey, he clocked jail time for assaulting a man, then stealing his horses.

The Welshman-cum-American was overdue for a turn of fortune. Fresh off a stint as a reporter covering the U.S. Cavalry's battles against the Great Plains Indians, he was headed for the offices of the city's most successful newspaper, the Herald. The young man dreamed of eventual fame and fortune in the wilds of Africa. But he knew this: New York — and the Herald, with its arrogant, innovative and spectacularly effective editor, James Gordon Bennett Jr. — held the key.

What Stanley didn't know was this: His fate was also in the hands of a man stranded in the middle of Africa. It was Stanley's destiny to prove to the world that explorer David Livingstone was alive and to deliver the line "Dr. Livingstone, I presume."

The path to that meeting stretched from Wales, where Stanley was born John Rowlands in 1841, to a village 700 miles from Africa's east coast where a starving Livingstone was abandoned by his porters and trapped for more than five years.

The first link in that chain of destiny was the cocksure confidence that carried Stanley to Bennett's office unannounced, past his secretary and into a pitch: He would travel to northeast Africa to cover a developing hostage crisis in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) for the Herald.

Read All Over

The Herald led the city's pack of 11 dailies. It sold 60,000 copies day, pulled in three-quarters of a million dollars a year in profit and had Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane in its stable of bylines.

A year older than Stanley, Bennett operated in the stratosphere of New York power brokers. It was a city in which "editors were more powerful than politicians and more famous than actors," wrote Martin Dugard in "Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone."

Bennett had built the Herald into a paper with an international reach. He had read Stanley's reports on the Indian campaigns. But he was a shrewd manager. And he was not, at that moment, of a hiring mind.

Stanley offered to work freelance, covering his expenses. His work would succeed on its own merits or not at all. Bennett saw possibilities and a no-risk opportunity. Soon, Stanley was sailing toward Paris, then to Annesley Bay in the Red Sea.

As the child John Rowlands, Henry Stanley had learned to navigate one brutal abyss after another. The son of a prostitute impregnated by a town drunk, his birth certificate read "bastard." He was deposited at an industrial sweatshop at 5 years old. Older boys routinely sexually abused younger boys.

At 12, Rowlands met his mother when she abandoned two other illegitimate children at the workhouse. "Her expression was so chilling that the valves of my heart closed, as with a snap," he later wrote.

The boy managed to get a rudimentary education at the workhouse and was released as a chubby, needy 15-year-old.

At 17, he was offered work as a cabin boy on a ship bound for New Orleans. Rowlands seized the opportunity, imagining equal parts adventure and escape.

Forced to climb frozen rigging during the midwinter crossing, Rowlands jumped ship in New Orleans in February 1859. He took the name of a cotton trader who explained America in terms that the far-from-home 18-year-old could understand. "With us, people are advanced not for what their parentage might have been," the elder Henry Stanley told the boy, "but for what they are themselves."

Fate led young Stanley through a series of jobs and into the Confederate army, where he was captured during the Battle of Shiloh.

When he arrived in Abyssinia in 1867, Stanley's ruthless brilliance showed immediately. The plan was to travel with a gaggle of journalists to where the British army intended to rescue 67 diplomats held hostage in the mountain stronghold of the country's president.

Before setting off, Stanley bribed the only telegraph operator in the region. So Stanley's messages were wired first after the troops rescued the hostages and killed the president. After he filed his work successfully, the undersea cable strangely broke, leaving competing journalists unable to send stories.

Thanks to Stanley's effort, his story of the British victory landed on the front page of the New York Herald a week ahead of London broadsheets such as the Times, Telegraph and Standard.

Stanley moved on to cover the civil war in Spain, then returned to Africa. By the time he pushed east from Zanzibar (now Tanzania) into the jungle in 1871, Livingstone had been missing for five years. Many in Britain assumed Livingstone was dead.

Stanley was just off a series of travel articles that carried him halfway round the globe. Bennett, wanting again to tweak the British press, threw open his checkbook and told the reporter to find Livingstone.

When he finally encountered Livingstone on Nov. 10, 1871, in the village of Ujiji in Tanganyika — now part of Tanzania — Stanley had traveled 975 miles in 236 days. The meeting took place amid what Stanley said seemed thousands of villagers.

"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

"Yes."

"I thank God, doctor, I have been permitted to see you."

"I feel thankful I am here to welcome you."

Stanley and Livingstone became fast friends in Ujiji. The two went by caravan to the nearest village where Stanley could buy food, medicine and other supplies.

They bid each other adieu in March 1872. On May 2, Stanley's first dispatches hit the pages of the world press, announcing Livingstone was safe — found and resupplied by an American reporter.

Stanley sailed from Zanzibar for London in late May, only to find himself swept into a debate over the validity of the reporter's claims.

Livingstone died in 1873. The next year, Stanley returned to Africa to complete the explorer's search and find the headwaters of the Nile River. He then marched across the continent to the Atlantic Ocean.

Stanley's reputation took a substantial hit near the end of his career. Belgium's King Leopold IV hired Stanley to negotiate trade contracts with hundreds of tribal chiefs in the Congo as a step toward dissolving the region's still-vital slave trade.

Stanley's Standing

Stanley's success played a large role in colonizing the territory and creating what would become the Belgian Congo. But Leopold's promise was worthless; the Congo brutally turned to slave labor to help feed the rubber boom that followed the invention of the rubber tire. Until his death from a stroke in 1904, Stanley couldn't shake his association with the Congo's turn to slavery.

His legacy survives in the written record, his contribution to journalism underlined in a February 1872 editorial by Bennett. The editor pointed to the funding of Stanley's effort by the newspaper, and the willingness of the reporter to risk death in the story's pursuit, saying the combination "marked a new era in journalism as the ripest phase of modern civilization."

BY ALAN R. ELLIOTT