LIVINGSTONE, livfing•ston. DAVID (1813 73). An African missionary and explorer, born at Blantyre in Lanarkshire. Scotland, March 19, 1813. At the age of ten lie began work in a cotton factory. and spent some ten 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 Scotch Independents, he offered his services to the London Missionary Society, by whom he was ordained as a medical mission ary in 1840, and sent to South Africa. where he commenced his labors among the natives of Bechuanaland and the vast regions to the north. Ile secured the friendship and cooperation of the native chiefs, planted posts far beyond the civil ized 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 north ward far beyond the Tropic of Capricorn, and on August 1st discovered Lake Ngami. In 1852 he set out on a fresh expedition which brought him to the Zambezi, a river at that time barely known to Europeans. He explored the upper course of the stream, thence 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 follow ing that stream to its mouth in the Indian Ocean, which he reached in 1856. On this jour ney 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 Routh Africa. In the same year he severed his connection with the London Alissionary Society, and in 1858 was appointed British Consul at Qnilimane for the East Coast of Africa, and also commander of an expedition to explore Eastern and Central Africa. He as cended the Shire, the lowermost of the large affluents of the Zambezi, and discovered Lake Shirwa and Lake Nyassa (September 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. 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 Chambesi, 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 plun dered. He nevertheless pressed on, discovered the Luapula (1867). and Lakes Mweru and Bang weolo. 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 .Nyang,we, but his previous explorations had not covered the ground sufficiently to admit of his being assured that the stream before him must he the Congo. Returning to Ujiji amid great privations and sufferings, he was (Novem ber 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 Stan ley, he parted from him in March, 1872, and pro ceeded to continue his explorations in the Lua pula-Lualaba basin, hoping to solve the Nile Congo problem. The great explorer was exhaust ed by continued hardship and privation, and died cn Slay 1, 1873, at the village of Tshitambo, a friendly chief, on the shore of Lake Bangwvolo. 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 Brit ish administrator for this district, visited the spot and observed that the tree was rapidly de caying. He raised a subscription in England and procured a substantial stone monument, which DOW 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 IS, 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.' Besides the works above mentioned by Liv ingstone, there was published, in 1874, The Last Journals of David Livingstone, from 1865 to His Death, edited by Horace Walter (London). For other accounts, see Stanley, Hole I Found Liv ingstone (London, 1872) : Blaikie, Personal Life of David Livingstone (1882) : Hughes, David Livingstone, in "Men of Action Series" (London, 1891) ; Johnston, Livingstone and the Explora tion of Central Africa (London, 1897).