From
Smithsonian magazine:
"Imagine for a moment that you are Henry Morton Stanley early one morning in 1887, long after his first journey into Africa as a journalist, when he'd become famous by finding the Scottish missionary Dr. Livingstone. You emerge from your tent in the Ituri Rain Forest in Africa. It's dark. It's been dark for months. Your stomach, long since ruined by parasites, recurrent diseases and massive doses of quinine and other medicines, is in even worse shape than usual. You and your men have been reduced to eating berries, roots, fungi, grubs, caterpillars, ants and slugs - when you're lucky enough to find them. Dozens of people were so crippled - from hunger, disease, injuries and festering sores - that they had to be left behind at a spot in the Forest grimly referred to as Starvation Camp. You've taken the healthier ones ahead to look for food, but they've been dropping dead along the way, and there's still no food to be found. But as of this morning, you're still not dead. Now that you've arisen, what do you do?
For Stanley, this was an easy decision: shave. As his wife, Dorothy Tennant, whom he married in 1890, would later recall: "He had often told me that, on his various expeditions, he had made it a rule, always to shave carefully. In the Great Forest, in 'Starvation Camp,' on the mornings of battle, he had never neglected this custom, however great the difficulty." Stanley himself once said, "I always presented as decent an appearance as possible, both for self-discipline and for self-respect."
"Imagine for a moment that you are Henry Morton Stanley early one morning in 1887, long after his first journey into Africa as a journalist, when he'd become famous by finding the Scottish missionary Dr. Livingstone. You emerge from your tent in the Ituri Rain Forest in Africa. It's dark. It's been dark for months. Your stomach, long since ruined by parasites, recurrent diseases and massive doses of quinine and other medicines, is in even worse shape than usual. You and your men have been reduced to eating berries, roots, fungi, grubs, caterpillars, ants and slugs - when you're lucky enough to find them. Dozens of people were so crippled - from hunger, disease, injuries and festering sores - that they had to be left behind at a spot in the Forest grimly referred to as Starvation Camp. You've taken the healthier ones ahead to look for food, but they've been dropping dead along the way, and there's still no food to be found. But as of this morning, you're still not dead. Now that you've arisen, what do you do?
For Stanley, this was an easy decision: shave. As his wife, Dorothy Tennant, whom he married in 1890, would later recall: "He had often told me that, on his various expeditions, he had made it a rule, always to shave carefully. In the Great Forest, in 'Starvation Camp,' on the mornings of battle, he had never neglected this custom, however great the difficulty." Stanley himself once said, "I always presented as decent an appearance as possible, both for self-discipline and for self-respect."
