David Livingstone
David Livingstone crossed Africa from coast to coast, named the Victoria Falls, failed as a missionary by his own count of converts - one, who lapsed - and did more than any single man to make Britain's public feel it had a duty in the continent, which the map of Africa shows the consequences of. He was born in Blantyre near Glasgow in 1813, went into the cotton mill at ten, taught himself Latin from a grammar propped on the spinning frame, qualified in medicine, and went to southern Africa for the London Missionary Society in 1841. He preached little and walked a great deal. He went north across the Kalahari to Lake Ngami in 1849, then from 1852 to 1856 up the Zambezi and west to Luanda and back east to the Indian Ocean, the first recorded crossing by a European, seeing the falls in 1855 and giving them the queen's name. Missionary Travels made him the most famous man in Britain. The argument it carried - that Christianity, commerce and civilisation would come together up a navigable Zambezi and end the slave trade from the inside - got him a government expedition in 1858 that found the Zambezi blocked by the Cabora Bassa rapids, lost his wife to fever on its banks, and was recalled in 1864. He went back in 1866 anyway, alone but for his African companions, looking for the source of the Nile, was lost to the world for years, witnessed the massacre of a market crowd by Arab slavers at Nyangwe in 1871, and was found at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika that November by Henry Stanley, who had been sent by a New York newspaper and said the line. He would not go home. He died kneeling by his bed in a village in Zambia in May 1873; his attendants Susi and Chuma buried his heart under a tree, dried the body, and carried it fifteen hundred miles to the coast, and it was buried in Westminster Abbey. The Scottish missions that followed him into Nyasaland were the beginning of Malawi, whose commercial capital is named Blantyre, and the report of Nyangwe closed the Zanzibar slave market within weeks of his death.
- Lived: 1813 CE – 1873 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: explorer, missionary, physician
