David Livingstone

Life and work

Livingstone worked in a Scottish cotton mill as a child before training as a doctor and being sent by the London Missionary Society to southern Africa in 1841. He soon concluded that establishing scattered isolated mission stations was less effective than exploring and opening routes for what he called the "three Cs": Christianity, commerce, and civilization, believing legitimate trade could undercut the slave trade.

Between the 1850s and his death, Livingstone undertook a series of major expeditions across the African interior, becoming the first European to see and name Victoria Falls (after Queen Victoria) in 1855, and mapping substantial portions of the Zambezi River system, though several expeditions, including the disastrous Zambezi Expedition, ended in failure and loss of life.

Livingstone became increasingly consumed by exploring the sources of the Nile and campaigning against the brutal Arab-Swahili slave trade he witnessed devastating communities in the region he traveled; his vivid published accounts of slave trade atrocities helped galvanize British anti-slavery opinion and later contributed to the 1873 closure of the Zanzibar slave market.

Cut off from contact for years, Livingstone was famously located by journalist Henry Morton Stanley in 1871 near Lake Tanganyika, greeted by Stanley's now-legendary (if likely partly embellished) line "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Livingstone died in Africa in 1873; his heart was buried in Africa at his own wish, while his body was returned to England for burial in Westminster Abbey.

Historical evidence

In their own words

"I am prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward."attributed

Further reading

• Encyclopedia Britannica: David Livingstone