Jeannette Expedition New York early in 1874; the newspaperman was impressed by De Long, and assured him that his Arctic ambitions would have the enthusiastic support of the "Herald". In the meantime De Long had applied to the Navy Department for an Arctic command, a request that he was informed would "receive due attention". James Gordon Bennett Jr., had succeeded his father as proprietor of the "New York Herald" in 1866. He had won renown in 1872, when his reporter Henry Morton Stanley, sent by Bennett to Africa in search of the British missionary-explorer David Livingstone, cabled that Livingstone had been found.
Henry Morton Stanley singled out for his supposed excesses in Africa, while other European explorers, often responsible for far more loss of life than Stanley, receive sympathetic treatment." For example, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, who was revered in France, had shot Africans in self-defence but, unlike Stanley, never spoke of it. Samuel Baker killed far more Africans than Stanley did and, in 1873, was mauled in the press for "cold blooded murder". David Livingstone shot dead several African Yao slave traders in 1861, when they attacked the mission at Magomero. In "Through the Dark Continent", Stanley wrote that "the savage only respects force,