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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] David Livingstone Biography LIVINGSTONE, David (1813–73). A famous missionary and explorer, born at Blantyre in Lanarkshire, Scotland, March 19, 1813. At the age of 10 he began work in a cotton factory and spent some 10 years as an operator, educating himself by private study and attending an evening school. In this manner he gained some knowledge of Latin and Greek and finally, after pursuing a course in medicine at Anderson College, Glasgow, and listening to the theological lectures of Dr. Wardlaw, professor of theology to the Scottish Independents, he offered his services to the London Missionary Society, by whom he was ordained as a medical missionary in 1840 and sent to South Africa, where he commenced his labors among the natives of Bechuanaland and the vast regions to the north. He secured the friendship and coöperation of the native chiefs, planted posts far beyond the civilized frontier, and systematically studied the languages and customs of the natives in order to establish a method of utilizing their efforts for their own civilization. In 1849 he pushed northward far beyond the Tropic of Capricorn and on August 1 discovered Lake Ngami. Continuing his explorations the following year, with his wife and children, he discovered the Zambezi River and reached Cape Town in April, 1852. After exploring the upper course of the Zambezi he struck out westward and in 1854 reached Loanda on the Atlantic Ocean. He then made his way back to the Zambezi and achieved the traverse of the continent by following that stream to its mouth in the Indian Ocean, which he reached in 1856. On this journey he discovered the Victoria Falls, the grandest cataract in the Old World. From Quilimane he sailed, in the beginning of 1856, for England, where he was overwhelmed with honors. In 1857 Livingstone published his Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. In the same year he severed his connection with the London Missionary Society and in 1858 was appointed British Consul at Quilimane for the East Coast of Africa and also commander of an expedition to explore East and Central Africa. He ascended the Shire, the lowermost of the large affluents of the Zambezi, and discovered Lake Shirwa and Lake Nyassa (Sept. 16, 1859). A narrative of the discoveries, The Zambesi and its Tributaries, was published during a visit paid to England in 1864–65. In the latter part of 1865 Livingstone returned to Africa to organize an expedition to discover the true source of the Nile and to labor for the suppression of African slavery. Early in 1866 he started for the interior by way of the Rovuma, and nothing was heard of him for two years. Livingstone's problem was, then, to determine whether the Zambezi joined the Nile or was a tributary of the Congo. At the beginning of 1867 he came to the Chambezi, a stream traversing in a southwesterly direction the region south of Lake Tanganyika, the end of which great body of water he reached in April, 1867. In his endeavors to penetrate farther into the continent he was continually thwarted by inundations, by the hostility of the slave dealers—both native and Arab—and by the want of supplies, which were constantly delayed and plundered. He nevertheless pressed on, discovered the Luapula (1867) and Lakes Mweru and Bangweolo. He arrived at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika in 1869, where he remained for some time before setting out on an extended exploration of the region to the west of the northern part of that lake. In 1871 he stood on the shores of the Congo at Nyangwe, but his previous explorations had not covered the ground sufficiently to admit of his being assured that the stream before him must be the Congo. Returning to Ujiji amid great privations and sufferings, he was (Nov. 10, 1871) met by a relief party, under H. M. Stanley, sent out by James Gordon Bennett, of the New York Herald. Livingstone renewed his stock of medicines and supplies, and, after exploring the northern end of Lake Tanganyika with Stanley, he parted from him in March, 1872, and proceeded to continue his explorations in the Luapula-Lualaba basin, hoping to solve the Nile-Congo problem. The great explorer was exhausted by continued hardship and privation and died on May 1, 1873, at the village of Tshitambo, a friendly chief, on the shore of Lake Bangweolo. His native followers cut out his heart and buried it at the foot of the tree beneath whose branches he died, cutting a rough inscription on the trunk to mark the spot. In 1898 Mr. Sharpe, the British administrator for this district, visited the spot and observed that the tree was rapidly decaying. He raised a subscription in England and procured a substantial stone monument, which now marks the spot. The section of the tree containing the inscription was cut out and sent to the rooms of the Royal Geographical Society in London, where it is preserved. The body was taken to England, and on April 18, 1874, was buried in Westminster Abbey. Livingstone's work in exploration is marked by rare precision and by a breadth of observation which will forever make it a monument to the name of one of the most intrepid travelers of the nineteenth century. His activity embraced the field of the geographer, naturalist, and benefactor of mankind, and it can justly be said that his labors were the first to lift the veil from the "Dark Continent." The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XIV (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 249-250. |