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Dr Livingstone I Presume?

David Livingstone’s last journey

“The mere animal pleasure of travelling in a wild unexplored country is very great … the mind works well, the eye is clear, the step is firm, and a day’s exertion always makes the evening’s repose thoroughly enjoyable.

Livingstone’s Journal at the start of his last journey, 26 March 1866

WHEN

1866–73

ENDEAVOUR

Livingstone planned to find the source of the Nile in a region south of Lake Tanganyika.

HARDSHIPS & DANGERS

He faced many difficulties, including desertion of porters, lack of supplies, poor weather, attacks, and recurrent illness, which led to his death, his journey uncompleted.

LEGACY

With this, and his other journeys, Livingstone vastly increased western knowledge of large areas of central Africa.

The memorable meeting of Stanley with Livingstone, at Ujiji, now in Tanzania, as portrayed in Stanley’s book, How I Found Livingstone. Stanley’s party brought much needed supplies, making Livingstone less dependent on assistance from the local Arab slave traders, seen here standing behind him.

The source of the River Nile was for centuries a matter of wonder. Where did the continuous flow of water in the Nile come from? South of Khartoum, the river divided. The Blue Nile flowed from the Ethiopian Highlands, and its source was confirmed by James Bruce, a Scottish explorer, in 1770. The source of the White Nile proved more elusive.

David Livingstone set out on his last African journey with the aim of finding what he thought was its source, to the south of Lake Tanganyika. He was unconvinced by John Speke’s claim that it was Lake Victoria, a claim first made in 1858 and corroborated by Speke and James Grant in 1860–63 and by Samuel Baker and Florence von Sass in 1863.

This photograph of Livingstone was taken in 1864 by the renowned Glasgow photographer, Thomas Annan, who was a neighbour of Livingstone’s sisters.

His first humble steps

Livingstone was born in 1813 at Blantyre, Lanarkshire, in a tenement block for workers at Monteith’s cotton mill, and, by the age of ten, he was working in the mill. Even so, he managed two hours of schooling as well, and so grew the steely determination to improve himself and push against the odds. In the 1830s, he decided to be a medical missionary, starting his medical training in Glasgow in 1836, paid for out of his savings. He qualified in 1840, and, supported by the London Missionary Society, was sent to Kuruman, north of the Orange River in South Africa. He went as a missionary and as a campaigner against the slave trade, still actively controlled by Arab traders in eastern Africa.

As he learned local languages and gained a greater understanding of traditional customs, his enthusiasm moved from direct missionary work to exploration. In 1849, he made an extended journey, which took a year. He became the first European to see Lake Ngami, and received a prize from the Royal Geographical Society. He became convinced that exploring and using rivers would open the region.

In November 1855, Livingstone reached the waterfall known locally as Mosi-oa-Tunya (‘the smoke that thunders’) which he named the Victoria Falls, after Queen Victoria.

A man with a mission

His first great journey took place in 1853–6. Starting at Linyanti, near the River Zambesi, he travelled northwest, reaching the Atlantic coast at Luanda in Angola in May 1854. He returned to Linyanti and then followed the Zambesi east to the Mozambique coast at Quelimane, arriving in May 1856. On that journey, in November 1855, he reached the waterfall known locally as Mosi-oa-Tunya (‘the smoke that thunders’) where the Zambesi, there over 1.6 km (1 mile) wide, plunges down around 108 m (355 ft), more than twice the drop of Niagara Falls. Livingstone named this mighty cataract the Victoria Falls.

He returned to Britain at the end of the year and was greatly lauded by the public. His enthusiasm for making the Zambesi the route into central Africa led to his over-ambitious next journey along it (1858–64). The party was too large, the use of a small steamship problematic, and the six-year length three times as long as originally planned, while the results were relatively small.

Livingstone’s sketch map of his explorations made around Lake Nyasa (now also known as Lake Malawi), during the Zambesi expedition (1858–64). Such maps were essential in increasing European knowledge of central Africa.

The hunt for the source of the Nile

After just over a year away in Britain, he returned with support for a smaller expedition to find the source of the Nile. Starting in Mikindani, now in southern Tanzania, he set out as the sole European leading an assorted group of porters, along with donkeys and camels (to see if they fared better against the Tsetse fly than pack horses; they did not). His porters quickly proved unreliable, and within the four months it took to reach Lake Nyasa, he had dismissed some and others had deserted. Livingstone recorded the brutal evidence of Africans killed by slave traders on the route from the coast. By the start of 1867, his chronometers had been damaged, making it impossible for him to accurately fix his location, while another deserter left with the party’s medicines.

His hopes of going straight to Lake Bangweulu were thwarted as the rainy season had turned the route into a quagmire, and so he travelled to Lake Tanganyika. He was the first European to visit Lake Mweru (1867) and Lake Bangweulu (1868). Illness struck him and he eventually made it across Lake Tanganyika in 1869 to Ujiji, where some stores sent from the coast awaited him. At the end of that year, with some assistance of Arab traders, he journeyed to the Lualaba River, a previously unknown ‘mighty river about 3000 yards broad and deep … It flows fast towards the North’, as he recorded in his Field Diary. In 1871, he reached Nyangwe, the furthest west any European had journeyed, and hoped to canoe down the river to prove that it was part of the Nile. His porters objected and ensured that no canoes were available, while he refused Arab help after they had taken part in a brutal local massacre. He would have been disappointed, for the river is the largest headwater of the Congo River.

Lost and found

After five months at Nyangwe, he returned to Ujiji. On the journey he was mistaken for a slave trader and was ‘waylaid by spearmen, who all felt that if they killed me they would be revenging the death of relations’. When he reached Ujiji, he found that supplies sent by the British government had been stolen by local traders. His desperate situation was quickly saved by the unlikely appearance of H. M. Stanley, the Welsh-born, American-raised adventurer and journalist, who had been sent to ‘find Livingstone’ by the New York Herald’s editor, Gordon Bennett. So it was, in November 1871, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika that the famous greeting ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’, was uttered. In his Journal, Livingstone noted ‘I am not of a demonstrative turn; as cold, indeed, as we islanders are usually reputed to be, but this disinterested kindness … was simply overwhelming … I am a little ashamed at not being more worthy of the generosity.’ With Stanley for company, they explored the northern end of Lake Tanganyika by boat, and established that there was no outlet to feed Lake Victoria or Lake Albert.

In March 1872, they parted, with Stanley heading back to the coast with his news and a mission to send supplies back to Livingstone. Once these arrived, he planned to find the source of the Lualaba (and hence, he thought, the Nile), to the west of Lake Bangweulu. His certainty wavered and in his Journal he noted: ‘In reference to this Nile source I have been kept in perpetual doubt and perplexity. I know too much to be positive.’

A final halt

However, wet weather, his declining health and the strange boggy nature of the land around the lake thwarted him. Now seriously ill, he had to be carried on a litter and on 1 May he died at the village of Chitambo, now in northern Zambia. Five members of his original party remained, and they arranged for his body to be embalmed and brought it back to the coast, reaching Bagamoyo in February 1874. From there the body was sent back to Britain, and a funeral service in Westminster Abbey was held on 18 April 1874.

Livingstone was an intellectually curious explorer, who recorded in great detail the life and geography of central Africa. Not always easy to deal with, his abhorrence of slavery remained central to him, as did his pre-Imperial dislike of racial superiority, ‘the most pitiable puerility’.

A map, taken from Livingstone’s Last Journals, published in 1874 after his death, that shows the route of his last journey, as well as his two previous expeditions. European knowledge of the area was limited — Lake Victoria, for example, is drawn as a series of unconnected lakes.