David Livingstone
Scottish explorer and
missionary
Griten By George Albert Shepperson
David
Livingstone, (born
March 19, 1813, Blantyre, Lanarkshire, Scotland—died
May 1, 1873, Chitambo [now in Zambia]), Scottish missionary and explorer who
exercised a formative influence on Western attitudes toward Africa.
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Early life
Livingstone grew up in a distinctively Scottish family environment of personal piety, poverty,
hard work, zeal for education, and a sense of mission. His father’s family was
from the island of Ulva, off the west coast of Scotland.
His mother, a Lowlander, was descended from a family
of Covenanters, a group of militant
Presbyterians. Both were poor, and Livingstone was reared as one of seven
children in a single room at the top of a tenement building for the workers of
a cotton factory on the banks of the Clyde.
At age 10 he had to help his family and was put to work in a cotton mill, and
with part of his first week’s wages he bought a Latin grammar. Although he was
brought up in the Calvinist faith of the established
Scottish church, Livingstone, like his father, joined an independent Christian
congregation of stricter discipline when he came to manhood. By
this time he had acquired those characteristics of mind and body that were to
fit him for his African career.
Blantyre:
David Livingstone's birthplaceShuttle Row, the tenement house where David Livingstone was born; the
building is now part of the David Livingstone Centre, Blantyre, South
Lanarkshire, Scotland.
In 1834, an appeal by
British and American churches for qualified medical missionaries in China made
Livingstone determined to pursue that profession. To prepare himself, while
continuing to work part-time in the mill, he studied Greek, theology, and
medicine for two years in Glasgow. In 1838, the London Missionary
Society accepted him. The first of the Opium
Wars (1839–42) put an end to his dreams of going to China, but a
meeting with Robert Moffat, the notable Scottish
missionary in southern Africa, convinced him that Africa should be his sphere
of service. On November 20, 1840, he was ordained as a missionary; he set sail
for South Africa at the end of the year and
arrived at Cape Town on March 14, 1841.
Initial explorations
For the next 15 years,
Livingstone was constantly on the move into the African interior: strengthening
his missionary determination; responding wholeheartedly to the delights of
geographic discovery; clashing with the Boers
and the Portuguese, whose treatment of the Africans he came to detest; and
building for himself a remarkable reputation as a dedicated Christian, a
courageous explorer, and a fervent antislavery advocate. Yet so
impassioned was his commitment to Africa that his duties as husband and father
were relegated to second place.
Maps |
Explorations of David
Livingstone.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
From Moffat’s mission at Kuruman
on the Cape frontier, which Livingstone reached on July 31, 1841, he soon
pushed his search for converts northward into untried country where the
population was reputed to be more numerous. This suited his purpose of
spreading the Gospel through “native agents.” By the summer of 1842, he had
already gone farther north than any other European into the difficult Kalahari country and had familiarized himself with
the local languages and cultures. His mettle was dramatically
tested in 1844 when, during a journey to Mabotsa to establish a mission
station, he was mauled by a lion. The resulting injury to his left arm was
complicated by another accident, and he could never again support the barrel of
a gun steadily with his left hand and thus was obliged to fire from his left
shoulder and to take aim with his left eye.
On January 2, 1845, Livingstone
married Moffat’s daughter, Mary, and she accompanied him on many of his
journeys until her health and the family’s needs for security and education
forced him to send her and their four children back to Britain in 1852. Before
this first parting with his family, Livingstone had already achieved a small
measure of fame as surveyor and scientist of a small expedition responsible for
the first European sighting of Lake Ngami (August 1,
1849), for which he was awarded a gold medal and monetary prize by the British Royal Geographical Society. This was
the beginning of his lifelong association with the society, which continued to
encourage his ambitions as an explorer and to champion his interests in
Britain.
Slaves caravans |
Ngami, LakeDavid Livingstone's expedition to Lake Ngami
(now in Botswana), 19th-century chromolithograph.Photos.com/Thinkstock
Opening the interior
With his family safely in
Scotland, Livingstone was ready to push Christianity, commerce, and
civilization—the trinity that he believed was destined to open up
Africa—northward beyond the frontiers of South Africa and into the heart of the
continent. In a famous statement in 1853 he made his purpose clear: “I shall
open up a path into the interior, or perish.” On November 11, 1853, from
Linyanti at the approaches to the Zambezi
and in the midst of the Makololo peoples whom he considered eminently suitable
for missionary work, Livingstone set out northwestward with little equipment
and only a small party of Africans. His intention was to find a route to the
Atlantic coast that would permit legitimate commerce to undercut the slave
trade and that would also be more suitable for reaching the
Makololo than the route leading through Boer
territory. (In 1852 the Boers had destroyed his home at Kolobeng and attacked
his African friends.) After an arduous journey that might have wrecked
the constitution of a lesser man, Livingstone reached Luanda
on the west coast on May 31, 1854. In order to take his Makololo followers back
home and to carry out further explorations of the Zambezi,
as soon as his health permitted—on September 20, 1854—he began the return
journey. He reached Linyanti nearly a year later on September 11, 1855.
Continuing eastward on November 3, Livingstone explored the Zambezi regions and
reached Quelimane in Mozambique on May 20,
1856. His most spectacular visit on this last leg of his great journey was to
the thundering, smokelike waters on the Zambezi at which he arrived on November
16, 1855, and with typical patriotism named Victoria Falls after his queen.
Livingstone returned to England on December 9, 1856, a national hero. News from
and about him during the previous three years had stirred the imagination of
English-speaking peoples everywhere to an unprecedented degree.
Victoria falls |
Victoria Falls on the
Zambezi River as seen from Zambia.G. Holton/Photo Researchers
Livingstone recorded his
accomplishments modestly but effectively in his Missionary Travels and
Researches in South Africa (1857), which quickly sold more than 70,000
copies and took its place in publishing history as well as in that of
exploration and missionary endeavour. Honours flowed in upon him. His increased
income meant that he was now able to provide adequately for his family, which
had lived in near poverty since returning to Britain. He was also able to make
himself independent of the London Missionary Society. After the completion of
his book, Livingstone spent six months speaking all over the British
Isles. In his Senate House address at Cambridge on December 4, 1857, he
foresaw that he would be unable to complete his work in Africa, and he called
on young university men to take up the task that he had begun. The publication
of Dr. Livingstone’s Cambridge Lectures (1858) roused almost as much
interest as his book, and out of his Cambridge visit came the Universities’
Mission to Central Africa in 1860, on which Livingstone
set high hopes during his second expedition to Africa.
Livingstone, DavidDavid Livingstone, illustration from The
Life & Explorations of Dr. Livingstone.Photos.com/Thinkstock
David Livingstone
Quick Facts
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born
March 19, 1813
Blantyre, Scotland
Blantyre, Scotland
died
May 1, 1873 (aged 60)
Chitambo, Zambia
Chitambo, Zambia
The Zambezi
expedition
This time Livingstone
was away from Britain from March 12, 1858, to July 23, 1864. He went out originally as British consul at Quelimane:
Livingstone, DavidDavid Livingstone, engraving.Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C. (Digital File Number: cph 3a18736)
for the Eastern Coast and
independent districts of the interior, and commander of an expedition for
exploring eastern and central
Africa, for the promotion of Commerce and Civilization with a view
to the extinction of the slave-trade.
This expedition was
infinitely better organized than Livingstone’s previous solitary journeys. It
had a paddle steamer, impressive stores, 10 Africans, and 6 Europeans
(including his brother Charles and an Edinburgh doctor, John
Kirk). That Livingstone’s by then legendary leadership had its
limitations was soon revealed. Quarrels broke out among the Europeans, and some
were dismissed. Disillusionment with Livingstone set in among members both of
his own expedition and of the abortive Universities’ Mission that followed it
to central Africa. It proved impossible to navigate the Zambezi by ship, and
Livingstone’s two attempts to find a route along the Ruvuma
River bypassing Portuguese territory to districts around Lake
Nyasa (Lake Malawi) also proved impractical. Livingstone and his
party had been the first Britons to reach (September 17, 1859) these districts
that held out promise of colonization. To add to Livingstone’s troubles, his
wife, who had been determined to accompany him back to Africa, died at Shupanga
on the Zambezi on April 27, 1862. His eldest son, Robert, who was to have
joined his father in 1863, never reached him and went instead to the United
States, where he died fighting for the North in the Civil War on December 5, 1864.
The British government
recalled the expedition in 1863, when it was clear that Livingstone’s optimism
about economic and political developments in the Zambezi regions was premature.
Livingstone, however, showed something of his old fire when he took his little
vessel, the Lady Nyassa, with a small untrained crew and little fuel, on
a hazardous voyage of 2,500 miles (4,000 km) across the Indian
Ocean and left it for sale in Bombay (now Mumbai).
Furthermore, within the next three decades the Zambezi expedition proved to be
anything but a disaster. It had amassed a valuable body of scientific
knowledge, and the association of the Lake Nyasa regions with Livingstone’s
name and the prospects for colonization that he envisaged there were important factors
for the creation in 1893 of the British Central Africa Protectorate, which in
1907 became Nyasaland and in 1966 the republic of Malawi.
Back in Britain in the
summer of 1864, Livingstone, with his brother Charles, wrote his second book, Narrative
of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries (1865). Livingstone was
advised at this time to have a surgical operation for the hemorrhoids that had
troubled him since his first great African journey. He refused, and it is
probable that severe bleeding hemorrhoids were the cause of his death at the
end of his third and greatest African journey.
Quest for the Nile
Livingstone returned to
Africa, after another short visit to Bombay, on January 28, 1866, with support
from private and public bodies and the status of a British consul at large. His
aim, as usual, was the extension of the Gospel and the abolition of the slave
trade on the East African coast, but a new object was the
exploration of the central African watershed and the possibility of finding the
ultimate sources of the Nile. This time Livingstone went
without European subordinates and took only African and Asian followers.
Trouble, however, once more broke out among his staff, and Livingstone,
prematurely aged from the hardships of his previous expeditions, found it
difficult to cope. Striking out from Mikindani on the east coast, he was
compelled by Ngoni raids to give up his original
intention of avoiding Portuguese territory and reaching the country around Lake Tanganyika by passing north of Lake Nyasa. The
expedition was forced south, and in September some of Livingstone’s followers
deserted him. To avoid punishment when they returned to Zanzibar, they concocted the story that
Livingstone had been killed by the Ngoni. Although it was proved the following
year that he was alive, a touch of drama was added to the reports circulating
abroad about his expedition.
Drama mounted as
Livingstone moved north again from the south end of Lake Nyasa. Early in 1867 a
deserter carried off his medical chest, but Livingstone pressed on into central
Africa. He was the first European to reach Lake
Mweru (November 8, 1867) and Lake
Bangweulu (July 18, 1868). Assisted by Arab
traders, Livingstone reached Lake Tanganyika in February 1869. Despite illness,
he went on and arrived on March 29, 1871, at his ultimate northwesterly point,
Nyangwe, on the Lualaba leading into the Congo
River. This was farther west than any European had penetrated.
Lake Zambia |
Zambia: Lake BangweuluSwamps of Lake Bangweulu, Zambia.Mehmet
Karatay
When he returned to Ujiji
on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika on October 23, 1871, Livingstone was a
sick and failing man. Search parties had been sent to look for him because he
had not been heard from in several years, and Henry M. Stanley, a correspondent of
the New York Herald, found the
explorer, greeting him with the now famous quote, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
(The exact date of the encounter is unclear, as the two men wrote different
dates in their journals; Livingstone’s journal suggests that the meeting took
place sometime in October 24–28, 1871, while Stanley reported November 10.)
Stanley brought much-needed food and medicine, and Livingstone soon recovered.
He joined Stanley in exploring the northern reaches of Lake Tanganyika and then
accompanied him to Unyanyembe, 200 miles (320 km) eastward. But he refused all
Stanley’s pleas to leave Africa with him, and on March 14, 1872, Stanley
departed for England to add, with journalistic fervour, to the saga of David
Livingstone.
Livingstone and Stanley |
Henry Morton Stanley,
raising his hat at left, meeting David Livingstone at Ujiji (now in Tanzania),
1871. The Granger Collection, New York
Livingstone moved south
again, obsessed by his quest for the Nile sources and his desire for the
destruction of the slave trade, but his illness overcame him. In May 1873, at
Chitambo in what is now northern Zambia,
Livingstone’s African servants found him dead, kneeling by his bedside as if in
prayer. In order to embalm Livingstone’s body, they removed his heart and
viscera and buried them in African soil. In a difficult journey of nine months,
they carried his body to the coast. It was taken to England and, in a great
Victorian funeral, was buried in Westminster Abbey on April 18, 1874. The
Last Journals of David Livingstone were published in the same year.
With affection,
Ruben
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