So geographers, in Afric-maps
With savage-pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.
Jonathan Swift, ‘On Poetry’ (1733), l. 177f
By 1871 it had been two years since anything had been heard from Dr David Livingstone, the world’s best-known missionary, traveller, geographer and ‘Her Majesty’s Consul to all the native states in the African interior’. The last letter, received by the British Consul in Zanzibar in May 1869, was brought on foot by a messenger who had hiked 900 miles from Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Livingstone complained about the disreputable conduct of a buffalo driver sent to deliver animals and requested the British Consul to be kind enough to send 30 pieces of sheeting, 40 pieces of blue cloth, £420 of red coral beads and a pair of new shoes.
Snippets of conflicting information about Livingstone arrived in Zanzibar from time to time. Some men who had deserted Livingstone near Lake Nyassa turned up in Zanzibar claiming that hostile tribesmen had killed the doctor. Obituaries began appearing in some British newspapers, while others demanded to see a body before they would believe the news. The Royal Geographical Society chose not to believe it and raised £1,200 for an expedition that aimed finally either to prove or disprove the theory.
Other information said that Livingstone was old, sick and in a state of utter destitution, stranded at the mercy of Arab slavers at a village deep in the interior and with no means of getting out. By 1871, following a disastrous expedition up the Zambezi River, Livingstone’s lustre as the subject for sparkling news copy had begun to wane and more cynical newspapers now speculated that the doctor was dead, lost, or – most fantastic of all – attached to an African princess and nicely settled down somewhere in the interior.
Livingstone’s African expeditions and discoveries had turned him into a travelling hero. He was the first European to cross the African continent from coast to coast, admired for missionary zeal and bravery as the roving representative of a rich, powerful and moral nation chosen by God to bring progress and liberty to those living in darkness in the darkest of all continents. He was known to be headstrong, stubborn, but totally committed to his work. And now he was missing. . . .
David Livingstone was born in March 1813, one of five sons and two daughters of poor parents, Neil and Agnes. They lived together in a tiny single room at the top of a whitewashed tenement building called Shuttle Row in the industrial town of Blantyre, near Glasgow. Shuttle Row housed twenty-four families, each living in the cramped accommodation built for workers at a local cotton mill. Neil, a God-fearing, teetotal Sunday school teacher, worked as a lowly paid tea salesman, handing out paper bags full of tea with one hand and religious tracts with the other. After two sons died in infancy, Neil earned extra funds by putting his three remaining lads to work at the mill. At the age of ten, David was employed as a piercer, a job perfectly suited to a child’s small, delicate hands, scuttling about under spinning jennies, joining together pieces of broken thread. The job was dirty and noisy and employees worked from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. six days a week for 2s 6d.
Despite tiredness and aching limbs, David attended evening school between 8 and 10 p.m. on weekdays, where he learned to read and write. From his first wage packet, his mother allowed him to buy a Latin grammar book. Back at Shuttle Row, he would read until midnight before falling asleep, repeating the process again next day.
The earnest young mill piercer was promoted to spinner at the age of nineteen, working a spinning jenny on which he propped books so that he could read sentence after sentence as he operated his machine. Fellow spinners were amused by his attempt to weave and learn at the same time, but he was determined to improve his knowledge and get out of Blantyre as quickly as possible.
Young Livingstone’s head was always in a book and he read widely about plants, animals, travel, science and religion. His father disapproved of all books except religious texts, saying they were ungodly and undermined the Almighty’s power. So as not to antagonise Neil, David saved his other books to read at the spinning jenny, taking only religious works to Shuttle Row.
In later years Livingstone admitted that his life had changed after reading Thomas Dick’s The Philosophy of a Future State, which propounded the theory that Christian belief and complex scientific issues were intimately linked. It was this book, not the Bible, which led nineteen-year-old Livingstone to devote his life to God. He wrote: ‘It is my desire to show my attachment to the cause of Him who died for me by devoting my life to His service.’
Livingstone toiled at the mill for thirteen years, finally leaving at the age of twenty-three when he trudged through the snow to Glasgow to begin studying for a medical degree at the Andersonian University. He would never regret his mill years, stating that the experience was an important part of his early life and if he had his time again, he would live ‘in the same lowly state and pass through the same hardy training’.
His medical education was costly and money was needed for lodgings, training fees, books and food. Livingstone had set his heart on a career as a medical missionary in China, a mysterious and exotic land, that would satisfy his desire to please God as well as his romantic longing to travel to remote corners of the earth. He found a room in Glasgow’s Rotten Row for 2s a week and began an intensive period of study. Between terms, he returned to mill work at Blantyre, attempting to save money for remaining medical school fees.
In the course of his second session in Glasgow, Livingstone applied to the London Missionary Society, the LMS, offering his services as a missionary-physician in China. He had learned that the organisation’s objectives were to take the gospel to the world’s heathens using missionaries from different Churches and allowing converts to choose the form of worship they considered most in accordance with the word of God. The Society’s aims were identical to Livingstone’s own and his father approved, too. His application was accepted and in September 1838 he was called to London to meet the organisation’s directors.
After passing his first medical examinations at the age of twenty-five, he was accepted by the LMS and sent to begin his missionary training in Chipping Ongar, Essex. There he studied Latin and Greek. But Livingstone wanted to learn Chinese, the language he expected to use when his real missionary work began, only to be informed that the directors would not consider sending anyone to the Orient while an opium war was raging. The West Indies were proposed instead, but he turned the offer down, suggesting South Africa as an alternative.
Livingstone had heard about the work of Robert Moffat, a fellow Scot who had established a number of South African mission stations away from the traditional Cape Colony. During a fund-raising visit to Britain, Livingstone met Moffat and asked outright if he, too, might be suitable for the South African mission field. Moffat recalled: ‘I said I believed he would, if he would not go to an old station, but would advance to unoccupied ground, specifying the vast plain to the north, where I had sometimes seen, in the morning sun, the smoke of a thousand villages, where no missionary had ever been. At last Livingstone said: “What is the use of my waiting for the end of this abominable opium war? I will go at once to Africa.” The directors concurred, and Africa became his sphere.’
In 1840, the LMS brought Livingstone south for more medical experience before he returned to Glasgow to sit his final examinations. On 8 December he boarded the George for a three-month voyage to Cape Town. Dr David Livingstone’s personal mission and lifelong love of Africa and its people were about to begin.
For the next fifteen years and for a salary of £100 a year, Livingstone was constantly on the move in and out of Africa’s interior, creating a dual reputation as a missionary dedicated to saving souls and an arch-enemy of Portuguese and Arab slave traders. An exhausting 700-mile journey by ox-cart brought Livingstone to Moffat’s mission station at Kuruman, Bechuanaland (now Botswana), the most remote in southern Africa and located on a lion-infested plain. This would be his home for the next two years and he immediately fell foul of white colleagues with whom he disagreed on every issue under the hot African sun.
Livingstone’s life nearly came to a grizzly end in February 1844 near his second missionary station at Mabotsa, 250 miles away from Kuruman. In a letter to his parents, dated 27 April 1844, he writes about lion attacks at a nearby village:
. . . one of the lions destroyed nine sheep in broad daylight on a hill just opposite our house. All the people immediately ran over to it, and, contrary to my custom, I imprudently went with them in order to see how they acted, and encourage them to destroy him. They surrounded him several times, but he managed to break through the circle. I then got tired. In coming home I had to come near to the end of the hill. They were then close upon the lion, and had wounded him. He rushed out from the bushes, which concealed him from view, and bit me on the arm so as to break the bone. It is now nearly well, however, feeling weak only from having been confined in one position for so long; and I ought to praise Him who delivered me from so great a danger. I hope I shall never forget His mercy. You need not be sorry for me, for long before this reaches you it will be quite as strong as ever it was. Gratitude is the only feeling we ought to have in remembering the event. Do not mention this to any one. I do not like to be talked about.
In order not to distress his parents, Livingstone deliberately understated what had happened. The lion had, in fact, leapt out, knocked him to the ground, seized his shoulder and crushed the bone of his upper left arm, leaving him crippled for life in that part of his body. For the next thirty years, he experienced pain whenever he lifted his left arm above shoulder height.
Livingstone did not mention that an elderly native nearby had saved his life by diverting the lion with a shot from his double-barrelled shotgun. The shot missed but caused the animal to leave the doctor alone and turn on the unfortunate African, biting into his thigh. The lion then went on to attack another man before falling dead from the effects of shots fired earlier. Livingstone tended his own wounds and was weeks recovering from the experience, travelling back to Kuruman to convalesce.
In a letter to a friend, Livingstone had observed that daughters of European missionaries possessed ‘miserably contracted minds’ and he was considering ‘sending home an advertisement to the Evangelical Magazine, and if I get very old, it must be for some decent sort of widow’. But soon after Moffat and his family returned to Kuruman from England Livingstone was making ‘the necessary arrangements with Mary, the eldest daughter of Mr. Moffat’. They were married in January 1845.
Mary Moffat was twenty-three years old and had spent nineteen of them living with her parents in African mission stations. She was plain, unworldly and unsophisticated, qualities which Livingstone found admirable. She was a good housekeeper, could cook, clean, make clothes and would be the perfect wife for the kind of man she had known all her life – a missionary.
The marriage may initially have been one of convenience, but later letters written by Livingstone to his wife show their relations soon turned to love. Neither the doctor nor Mary had many suitors to choose from miles from civilisation. He needed a partner to help with his work and she needed an excuse to get away from her domineering mother and have a home of her own. Marriage was the perfect solution for both of them.
Describing his wife in a letter to a friend, he said that the best wife for a missionary was ‘a plain, commonsense woman, not a romantic. Mine is a matter-of-fact lady, a little thick black haired girl, sturdy and all I want’. To another he wrote that Mary was ‘a good deal of an African in complexion with a stout stumpy body’.
Mary Livingstone was a good missionary partner but did not enjoy an easy married life to the man from Blantyre. She would bear him five children – Robert, Thomas, Agnes, Oswell and Anna – but life together was hard and her health suffered. When pregnant for the fourth time in 1850, she crossed the Kalahari Desert with her husband. She lost the baby and suffered partial paralysis afterwards. The other children caught malaria and, when they finally reached Kuruman again, were so weak they could hardly stand.
In later years, Livingstone would admit: ‘I did not feel it to be my duty, while spending all my energy on reaching the heathen, to devote a special portion of my time to play with my children. But generally I was so exhausted with the mental and manual labour of the day that in the evening there was no fun left in me. I did not play with my little ones while I had them, and they soon sprung up in my absences, and left me conscious that I had none to play with.’
Against her parents’ wishes, Livingstone took Mary, who was pregnant again, on another journey of exploration in 1851. His excuse was that there were thousands of primitive natives in the interior who needed to hear God’s word. Mary was required to assist him with this task. His true motivation, however, was somewhat different. As well as saving souls, Livingstone also wanted to explore Africa’s deep interior and follow the course of its rivers. He was curious to know what lay inside the heart of the dark continent – and if he could save souls along the way, so well and good. He told London Missionary Society directors that it was ‘imperatively necessary to extend the gospel to all the surrounding tribes. This is the only way which permits the rational hope that when people do turn to the Lord it will be by groups.’
Wherever Livingstone went, his dutiful wife followed. The intense heat, jolting wagon, insects, shortage of fresh food and water took their toll on the woman, who gave birth to their third son shortly after their return. Mary pleaded with her husband to give her more security and the children a proper education. She wanted to return home to Scotland.
Livingstone refused to give up Africa and in April 1851 told his directors that ‘it has occurred to me that, as we must send our children to England, it would be no great additional expense to send them now along with their mother. . . . To orphanise my children will be like tearing out my bowels. . . . If I were to follow my own inclinations they would lead me to settle down quietly with . . . some small tribe and devote some of my time to my children; but Providence seems to call me to the regions beyond, and if I leave them anywhere in this country, it will be to let them become heathens. If you think it right to support them, I believe my parents in Scotland would attend to them otherwise.’
Instead of waiting for a reply, Livingstone took his family to Cape Town and put them on a British-bound ship, unaware of what provision, if any, might be available to support them on their homecoming. When the Livingstone family arrived in Cape Town they were mistaken for paupers. Livingstone had not bought new clothes for himself or his family for ten years. One commentator described them as being dressed ‘somewhat in the style of Robinson Crusoe’.
William Cotton Oswell, a big-game hunter and amateur explorer with a private income and whom Livingstone later described as ‘the best friend we have in Africa’, gave Mary £200 to buy new clothing for her and the children to wear on the journey home.
Once in Scotland, Mary and her children lived on the brink of poverty, staying in a series of dark and damp lodgings. They began by moving in with Livingstone’s parents who now lived in a small cottage in Hamilton. It was a disaster. Neil and Agnes Livingstone were elderly, set in their ways, and observed a quiet and strictly religious way of life, which was disrupted when the daughter-in-law they had never met, arrived unannounced with four children in tow, all under the age of seven. After six months Mary left, telling her in-laws that they should not attempt to find out where she was going or enquire after the children. In a letter to LMS directors, Neil stated that he wanted nothing further to do with her ‘until there is evidence she is a changed person’.
Mary and the children moved from place to place, sometimes staying with her husband’s friends, sometimes renting rooms paid for from an LMS pittance. Two years passed without any word from Livingstone mentioning a homecoming. His letters told Mary not to spoil the children and to be patient because ‘patience is great virtue’. He told his poverty-stricken children that he had seen women in chains, so they should think themselves lucky that Jesus had been kind to them.
By the end of the fourth year of separation, Mary Livingstone was in despair. She had turned to the LMS, her husband’s parents and his friends and they had all let her down. Next she turned to the bottle, which became her close companion for the next ten years. By 1854 she was ill, destitute and unable to pay the doctor his fees. She wrote another letter to her husband pleading with him to come home.
Between 1849 and 1851, Livingstone took several diversions from missionary work, undertaking surveying and scientific expeditions into Africa’s unexplored interior. In August 1849, this resulted in his discovery of Lake Ngami, a shallow expanse of water situated beyond the Kalahari Desert at the south-western corner of the 10,400 km sq Okavango Swamp, in an area known today as Botswana. Thanks to his rich friends William Cotton Oswell and Mungo Murray, who together funded the expedition, Livingstone was one of the first Europeans to set eyes on the lake. His account was published in the March 1850 edition of the Missionary Magazine, generating positive publicity for the LMS and recognition from the Royal Geographical Society, the RGS, which awarded him a gold medal and £25 prize. The expedition forged a lifelong association between Livingstone and the RGS, which championed his interests in England and encouraged his inclinations to spend more time exploring – and less time engaged in missionary work.
Livingstone was eager to promote his African trinity, ‘the three Cs’ – Christianity, commerce and civilisation – which he fervently believed would open up Africa, turn its people away from primitive rituals, convert them, encourage trade which would create benefits, bring education and a way of life which better mirrored England’s civilised ways. In a letter to his brother-in-law, Robert Moffat, he wrote: ‘I shall open a path into the interior, or perish. I never have had the shadow of a shade of doubt as to the propriety of my course, and wish only that my exertions may be honoured so far that the gospel may be preached and believed in this dark region.’
In November 1853, Livingstone had arrived at the approaches to the Zambezi River in the country of the Makololo people. With only a small group of Makololo and little equipment, he journeyed north-westwards for six months searching for a route to the Atlantic coast that would permit legitimate commerce and weaken the slave trade. After an arduous journey, he reached St Paul de Loanda (Luanda) and collapsed at the house of a British Commissioner. Soon after arriving, he became ill with fever and dysentery and had to be nursed back to health.
As soon as he was well enough to travel, Livingstone collected his Makololo people and headed back towards the Zambezi. He had been absent for nearly a year. Three weeks later he was off again to explore the Zambezi to its mouth on the Indian Ocean.
On previous expeditions, Livingstone had been within four or five days of a vast waterfall east of Sesheke village and known locally as ‘mosi-oatunya’ – or ‘the smoke that thunders’. He was resolved to be the first white man to look on it. On 16 November 1855, Livingstone first heard and then saw the grandeur of 47 million gallons of Zambezi River rushing and roaring headlong every minute over the 1¼ mile wide, 355ft deep falls. He later described the scene as ‘so lovely, it must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight’. He named the rushing torrents Victoria Falls, after his Queen living thousands of miles away in distant England – a land which he was now beginning to feel he ought to visit again.
Livingstone emerged on Africa’s east coast on 25 May 1856, sixteen years after first setting foot on the continent and almost four years after setting out on his 5,000-mile journey on foot to follow the Zambezi’s course. During that time he had encountered a myriad of problems that African travellers before and after would experience: hard work, fatigue, privation, fever, attacks on life, danger and separation from family and friends. There was also the ever-present heat, torrential rain, huge areas of mud, demands by tribal chiefs for hongo (payment in the form of cloth, beads and brass wire in return for permission to pass through their territory), porters deserting, food shortages, delays by hospitable chiefs and inhospitable tribesmen, demands on missionary and medical skills and threats of malaria which brought the good doctor to a standstill on more than thirty occasions during those first sixteen years.
It was time to return home.
In December 1856, a Times reporter observed Livingstone on the voyage home and noted that when he boarded the ship Frolic, he had difficulty speaking a single sentence in English, ‘having got out of the language habit years before’. The report continued:
Dr. Livingstone has been absent from England for 17 years. He crossed the great African continent almost in the centre, from west to east; has been where no civilised being has even been before, and has made many notable discoveries of great value. . . . He is rather a short man [Livingstone was 5ft 8in], with a pleasing and serious countenance, which betokens the most determined resolution. He continued to wear the cap he wore while performing his wonderful travels. On board ship he was remarkable for his modesty and unassuming manners. He never spoke of his travels, except in answer to questions.
On the voyage, Livingstone received news that his father, Neil, had died. London Missionary Society directors also sent him a terse letter discouraging further exploration, while expressing ‘appreciation upon which for some years past, your energies have been concentrated, but are nevertheless restricted in their power of aiding plans connected only remotely with the spread of the Gospel. The financial circumstances of the Society are not such as to afford any definite period, to venture upon untried, remote, and difficult fields of labour.’
In the days and weeks following Livingstone’s arrival, he was awarded the RGS Patron’s gold medal, made a freeman of half a dozen cities, awarded an honorary doctorate at Oxford, was received by Prince Albert and Palmerston, the Prime Minister, accepted 2,000 guineas collected by public subscriptions in England and Scotland, was wined and dined by the great and the good, wrote and published his book Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa and became the best known missionary on the planet. The press called him ‘devoted . . . a truly apostolic preacher of Christian truth’. People expecting to see a saint mobbed him in streets and in churches. Dr David Livingstone was becoming a legend in his own lifetime. And wherever he went, he wore his distinctive blue peaked cap.
On 13 February 1858, Livingstone was summoned to an audience with Queen Victoria and turned up wearing his usual black coat, blue trousers and cap. A newspaper reported:
The Queen conversed with him affably for half an hour on the subject of his travels. Dr. Livingstone told her Majesty that he would now be able to say to the natives that he had seen his chief, his not having done so before having been a constant subject of surprise to the children of the African wilderness. He mentioned to Her Majesty also that the people were in the habit of inquiring whether his chiefs were wealthy; and that when he assured them she was very wealthy, they would ask how many cows she had got, a question at which the Queen laughed heartily.
Although Livingstone could now house his family in better accommodation and take care of his children’s education, they had to share him with hundreds of others during the fifteen months he spent in England. He had been separated from them for four and a half miserable years and was now unable to spend as much time with them as he wished. Everyone wanted Livingstone as a guest, to give a lecture or chair a meeting. Occasionally Mary was at his side. When not travelling, he was writing – and wrestling with the problem of how to separate himself from the LMS while still maintaining a presence in Africa.
Sir Roderick Murchison, a fellow Scot and president of the Royal Geographical Society suggested to Foreign Secretary Lord Clarendon, that Livingstone be appointed a consul with a roving commission taking care of territories extending from Africa’s east coast and inland to the west. This would make him a government employee, include a salary of £500 per year, relieve him of his missionary duties and allow him to conduct new expeditions into the interior on behalf of the RGS. Murchison believed that missionary work stood in the way of good exploration and he secretly hoped Livingstone would not spend too much energy saving souls, preferring him to use his time more productively seeking new discoveries.
Livingstone felt that his next expedition should follow the course of the Zambezi River as far as Victoria Falls where regular trade could be established between the Makololo people and other tribes dwelling on the Batoka plateau. He was certain that missionaries, settlers and traders could live in perfect harmony with local tribes and that new converts would be made across a great sweep of Africa.
In December 1858, Parliament voted £5,000 for ‘Dr. Livingstone to embark on a voyage of discovery upon the Zambezi’ exploring Eastern and Central Africa. The money was spent acquiring a small ‘tin kettle’ of a steamer, built in collapsible sections that could be bolted together and used to navigate the river and discover as much as possible about the region’s agricultural potential and mineral wealth.
Other expedition members included a naval commander, a geologist, an official artist, an engineer and Livingstone’s younger brother, Charles, an American-educated Nonconformist minister who had not seen his older brother for eighteen years. Charles was engaged as the expedition’s ‘moral agent’, Livingstone’s personal assistant and official photographer, this despite the fact that the younger Livingstone was inexperienced with a camera. A 25-year-old Scottish physician called Dr John Kirk also joined the group as ‘economic botanist’. He had served in the Crimean War and came to the venture highly recommended by Edinburgh doctors and the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. Later he would figure prominently in events surrounding Livingstone and Stanley.
Mary Livingstone, unwilling to be separated from her husband for another day, completed the party. Now that the family had sufficient money for several years of independence, they placed their children in the care of guardians and left them in Scotland, apart from the youngest, Oswell, aged seven, who would travel to Africa with his Pa and Ma.
On 10 March 1858, David and Mary Livingstone, their young son and members of the expedition, sailed from Liverpool on the Colonial Office steamer Pearl. Also on board were the prefabricated sections of the steam launch Livingstone had purchased with his government grant and called Ma Robert, the native name given to Mary Livingstone following the birth of her eldest son, Robert. This time Livingstone was travelling to Africa as ‘British Consul at Quelimane for the Eastern Coast and independent districts of the interior and commander of an expedition for exploring Eastern and Central Africa, for the promotion of commerce and civilisation with a view to the extinction of the slave trade’. A tall order.
Everyone suffered seasickness on the voyage, but they recovered, apart from Mary, who continued to vomit and remained in her cabin. Days later Livingstone confirmed that Mary was pregnant again, rendering her unable to travel into the interior. She would leave the Pearl at Cape Town and remain with Oswell at her parents’ missionary station in Kuruman before returning to Scotland. It would be another four years before Livingstone would see his wife again. The rest of the expedition party were quietly pleased as they felt that the African interior was no place for a woman and small child.
The Pearl arrived at the wide mouth of the Zambezi in the Mozambique Channel on 14 May 1858. There had been tension on board. Commander Norman Bedingfeld, in overall charge of the Pearl and her navigation, had fallen out with the ship’s master, Captain Duncan, over her course. Following a stand-up argument between the men – one a Royal Naval officer and the other a merchant seaman – Livingstone intervened, taking Duncan’s side and causing Bedingfeld to request his release from the expedition. He was soon on his way back to England, relieved he no longer had to deal with people he had come to detest, particularly Livingstone.
When the engineer George Rae bolted parts of the ‘tin kettle’ Ma Robert, together and lowered her into the river, there was more disappointment. The vessel consumed too much fuel and leaked. Her furnace had to be ignited hours before the steamer became serviceable; she ‘snorted’ so offensively that expedition members renamed her ‘The Asthmatic’ – and she moved so slowly that canoes passed her.
Over 300 miles further up the Zambezi, the little tin kettle became holed above the waterline and expedition members had to abandon the vessel and continue on foot. The thermometer registered 130 degrees and the terrain was rough, with huge boulders piled one on top of another. Everybody was falling out with each other. Charles Livingstone, the most idle man in the party, complained about trivial matters. He had taken a dislike to the expedition’s young geologist and its official artist. Livingstone senior also began acting out of character, criticising both men. They, too, were sent home.
Livingstone told the remaining group that he would travel onwards alone, but Dr Kirk insisted on accompanying him. Native porters refused to travel. They were exhausted, disillusioned, their feet covered in sores and blisters – but Livingstone pleaded with them to continue. They told him that they had thought their master had a heart, but now they could see that he had none and told him to his face that he was mad.
Livingstone and Kirk discovered something that would have become apparent if the Pearl had covered this part of the journey – rapids, running over a series of treacherous waterfalls, higher than a tree and known locally as Cabora Bassa. Navigation by boat was now impossible. What made matters worse was that the porters seemed to know all about the waterfalls but had said nothing to their master, who raged at them in an unchristian fashion, telling them they could remain there forever as far as he was concerned. His hopes of finding a navigable route along the Zambezi were now in ruins.
There was only one thing for it: return to the Pearl, sail back and explore another river called the Shire, said to be fed from a large inland lake which flowed into the Zambezi 100 miles from the coast. Livingstone reasoned that if the lake could be found and claimed by the expedition as a new discovery, the unfortunate detection of the Cabora Bassa rapids might be discounted. He also hoped that banks either side of the Shire might be suitable for settlement and trading and he might save the expedition and his diminishing reputation.
On 20 December 1858, the Pearl chugged 200 miles downriver to the point where the Shire flowed into the Zambezi. They entered the new and uncharted river and continued without mishap for several days, discovering more rapids and waterfalls along the way, which Livingstone named the Murchison Falls after Sir Robert Murchison of the Royal Geographical Society.
The expedition turned east where they discovered a magnificent inland lake, Lake Shirwa, which Livingstone described in a letter home to his daughter, Agnes, as ‘very grand . . . all around it are mountains much higher than any you see in Scotland. . . . The country is quite a highland region, and many people live on it. Most of them were afraid of us.’
Livingstone considered the Shire Highlands perfect for European settlement. They were fertile, well irrigated, easy to reach – the perfect location for a missionary settlement and trading post. But despite having contributed a large sum of money towards the expedition, the British government was starting to lose interest in Livingstone and Africa, declining to become further involved with the region.
Livingstone’s health began to deteriorate. On the journey back to the mouth of the Zambezi, painful haemorrhoids caused him to lose blood from his bowels. His diary entry for 14 October reads: ‘Very ill with bleeding from the bowels and purging. Bled all night. Got up at one a.m. to take latitude.’ But there was also better news. On 4 November, family letters reached him. His diary reads: ‘A letter from Mrs. L. says we are blessed with a little daughter of 16th November 1858 at Kuruman. A fine healthy child. The Lord bless and make her His own child in heart and life!’ Little Anna Mary Livingstone had been nearly a year in the world before her father heard of her existence.
On 31 January 1860, Livingstone and party rendezvoused with the naval ship Gorgon, which brought a new prefabricated steamer called the Pioneer to replace the Ma Robert. The naval ship sent out the signal: ‘I have steamboat in the brig – wife aboard.’ Mary had left the new baby in Scotland, where she had returned after giving birth to Anna at her parents’ mission in Kuruman. Thanks to royalties from her husband’s writing, Mary had more funds to support her family. Despite her husband’s fame and renown, life was still hard for Livingstone’s wife and her children. Letters to her husband revealed that she had lost her Christian faith and entered a period of ‘spiritual darkness’. His replies were full of tenderness and encouragement, although none gave any impression that he was expecting her to leave the children and rejoin him in Africa, travelling on the Gorgon with a missionary party Livingstone had encouraged to establish mission stations along the Shire.
On the outward voyage, Mary had been drinking again, often becoming difficult and hysterical. She borrowed money from other passengers to buy more alcohol and when one refused she shouted abuse. Everyone on board knew that Mary was a disturbed woman and of little value to her husband’s work in Africa.
As Livingstone’s expedition continued on the Pioneer, he discovered the full extent of the grievances Mary had been harbouring since he had left her in Cape Town in May 1858. She now openly and loudly reproached him for deserting her and the children, failing to make provision for their education or providing a proper home for their expanding family. She blamed him for being the cause of their eldest son, Robert, becoming a problem child and running away from boarding school. She accused her husband of being the reason why she had lost her faith and why she had turned to the bottle and away from God.
A week after returning to the Zambezi delta, Mary succumbed to malaria. She remained in her cabin and many on board the Pioneer thought she was drunk again. Her condition worsened; she was vomiting every quarter of an hour which prevented the quinine prescribed by her husband from being absorbed into her body. She became delirious, fell into a coma and Livingstone recognised that his wife was close to death.
Livingstone sat next to her bed throughout, weeping like a child. Mary died, aged forty-one, on 27 April and was buried in the shadow of a huge baobab tree at Shupanga. A guard stood vigil next to the grave until a stone cairn could be built to protect the body from wild animals. Two weeks later, Livingstone wrote in his journal: ‘For the first time in my life I feel willing to die. — D.L.’
The loss of his wife did not prevent Livingstone from completing the last stage of the Zambezi expedition. Remaining expedition members were kept occupied preparing to assemble and float his portable paddle steamer Lady Nyassa on the waters of Lake Nyassa and prevent the region’s slavers from making further headway down the Shire.
Civil war had been raging through the Shire Highlands and the area was in the grip of famine. There were so many corpses floating in the river that the steamer had to stop to clear bodies from the floats. Livingstone wrote: ‘Wherever we took a walk, human skeletons were seen in every direction.’ What had once been a green, fertile and populated valley ‘was now literally strewn with human bones’. Livingstone decreed: ‘The destruction of life . . . however great, constitutes but a small portion of the waste and made us feel that unless the slave trade – that monster iniquity which has so long brooded over Africa – is put down, lawful commerce cannot be established.’
Dr Kirk and Charles Livingstone now became ill and returned to England. On the voyage home, Kirk noted his impressions of Livingstone in his journal: ‘Dr. L. is a most unsafe leader. He never thinks of getting back. All he cares for is accomplishing his object at any risk whatever. It is useless making any remark to him . . . I can only say that his head is . . . what is termed “cracked”.’
A letter was received from the Foreign Secretary, Earl Russell, informing Livingstone that the six-year-long expedition was to be cut short and remaining members recalled to England. Russell stated that Livingstone was not at fault, but because the Zambezi was not navigable by ship, the government no longer shared the doctor’s optimism about economic and political development in the region. He had not accomplished the objectives for which it had been designed and the expedition had cost more than expected.
The Times, previously complimentary towards Livingstone, was not so kind to the doctor on 20 January 1863: ‘We were promised cotton, sugar, indigo . . . and of course we got none. We were promised converts and not one has been made. In a word, the thousands subscribed by the Universities and contributed by the Government have been productive only of the most fatal results.’
The Zambezi expedition was not a total failure. It had collected a mass of scientific information about the Zambezi and its feeder rivers, including the Shire, and their navigability. It had ascertained the capacity of the soil along the route and found it admirably adapted for the cultivation of indigo and cotton as well as tobacco, castor oil and sugar. Highlands above the Shire were proven to be free of tsetse fly and mosquitoes. And the party had discovered Lake Nyassa and was able to assess the region’s potential for European settlement and trading opportunities. The expedition had provided the foundation upon which the British Central Africa Protectorate would be established in 1893, which later became Nyasaland and, in 1966, the Republic of Malawi.
Livingstone could have sailed directly home to visit his motherless children – including his youngest daughter, whom he had yet to see – and face the critics awaiting his return. Instead, he planned to allow the dust to settle and quietly slip home to England after everyone had time to forget his failure. He returned to Zanzibar, travelling up the eastern coast of the Indian Ocean in the Lady Nyassa manned by a small native crew; there he planned to sell the steamer and use the money to part-fund more explorations.
On reaching the mouth of the Zambezi, Livingstone spied the British man of war HMS Orestes whose commander offered to tow the doctor and his steamboats all the way to Mozambique. The doctor was assigned quarters on the ship, but chose to remain on the Lady Nyassa, something he regretted when a violent typhoon nearly wrenched his steamboats from their tow lines at Orestes’ stern. From Mozambique, Livingstone made his way to Zanzibar in the Lady Nyassa, where he hoped to sell the vessel for something like the £6,000 he had originally paid for the craft. Offers were made but none of them was anything like the asking price Livingstone expected to recoup from the sale. In a bold move which would buckle the sea legs of the most experienced sailor, Livingstone decided he would sail Lady Nyassa across the Indian Ocean to Bombay, where he would renew attempts to sell her.
Rae, Livingstone’s Scottish engineer, said he had been offered another job with good prospects and would not be making the voyage, leaving the doctor to recruit a crew to perform duties of stoker, carpenter and general deck hands. Seven local natives, none of whom had ever been to sea, were hired to cook, clean and perform other duties which might arise. One was a young man called James Chuma, a former slave who had worked at mission stations and who would be associated with Livingstone for the rest of the doctor’s life.
With 14 tons of coal in her hold, the Lady Nyassa set out on 20 April to cross 2,500 miles of ocean. Livingstone was convinced he could cross it in eighteen days and they made good headway before hitting calm waters, rendering the sail useless. A full head of steam only created sufficient power to creep across the water. The crew became ill as the sea became glassy calm and sharks swam around the little steamer. One month later, a breeze sprang up and gathered in intensity. Livingstone knew that the annual monsoon was only days away and he needed to sight land before the full impact of the weather sank his little tin kettle.
They finally crept into the port at Bombay on 13 June, fifty-five days after leaving Zanzibar – thirty-seven days more than Livingstone had expected to take to cover the distance. The Lady Nyassa was so small that no one at the port noticed its arrival and the authorities remained unaware until Livingstone went ashore to ask where he should berth his steamer.
Before travelling home to England, Livingstone arranged for Chuma and another native boy called Wikatani to be taken in at a local mission school. Then he set about finding a buyer for the Lady Nyassa. By the time Livingstone left Bombay, the steamer was still unsold, forcing him to entrust her to an agent for safekeeping in the expectation that he would arrange the vessel’s sale and transfer money for its asking price into the doctor’s bank account.
In July 1864, instead of travelling north to Scotland for a reunion with his children, Livingstone checked into London’s Tavistock Hotel. No sooner had he arrived, than he began building bridges with former associates in the hope of mounting another expedition. He met members of the Royal Geographical Society, visited several receptions where he noted that the ladies were ‘wonderfully beautiful – rich and rare were the gems they wore’ and called on Gladstone whom he found ‘affable’. There were no official receptions or banquets for the African hero this time, no mobbing in the streets or royal audiences.
Livingstone finally reached Scotland in August and knocked at the door of his mother’s cottage in Hamilton. She did not recognise her son who had aged considerably since she had last seen him. Here he met his daughter, Anna Mary, now aged six – ‘a nice sprightly child’ – for the first time. The following day his other children came to the house. He wrote: ‘Agnes, Oswell and Thomas came. I did not recognise Tom, he has grown so much. Has been poorly a long while; congestion of the kidney, it is said. Agnes quite tall, and Anna Mary a nice little girl.’
A doctor recommended an operation to remove the haemorrhoids that had troubled him ever since his first great journey in Africa, but Livingstone declined because he thought the story would find its way into the newspapers and he hated the idea of the public speaking about his infirmities.
The launch of a new Turkish frigate on the Clyde gave Livingstone a rare opportunity to take his seventeen-year-old daughter Agnes on an outing. Following the ceremony, Livingstone and daughter shared a railway carriage with the Turkish ambassador. They were cheered at the railway station. ‘The cheers are for you,’ Livingstone told the ambassador. ‘No,’ said the Turkish diplomat, indicating the crowd, ‘I am only what my master made me; you are what you made yourself.’
Livingstone and Agnes accepted an invitation to stay at Newstead Abbey, near Nottingham, previously the residence of Lord Byron and now home to William Webb, a former big-game hunter who had originally met the doctor in southern Africa. Webb was aware that Livingstone needed someone to care for him while he regained his energy and wrote his next book, A Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and its Tributaries. The book was a careful account of the last expedition, conveniently failing to mention the arguments, dismissals and resignations but concentrating on the geography, flora and fauna. Because Charles Livingstone had loaned his diaries, he benefited from being credited as co-author and received royalties from American sales.
Livingstone remained at Newstead Abbey for eight months, writing and getting to know his teenage daughter, who helped copy his manuscript. It was at Newstead that the doctor received news that his eldest son, Robert, aged eighteen, had joined the American army and had died in a prison camp. The restless youth had left school, intending to join his father on the Zambezi where they would together discuss his future. He arrived in Natal penniless and discovered it would be impossible to reach his father in such a remote region. He was press-ganged into joining a Boston-bound ship and on arrival forced to enlist in an army embroiled in fighting a civil war. He was in the thick of the conflict as a private with the 3rd New Hampshire Regiment and in letters to Agnes expressed regret at the course his life had taken. In America he had traded on his father’s name, but after enlisting assumed the name ‘Rupert Vincent’. In a letter to his father he confessed: ‘I am convinced that to bear your name here would lead to further dishonours to it.’ Robert was wounded by Confederate gunfire at Laurel Hill, Virginia and, like Henry Morton Stanley, taken prisoner and sent to a prison camp in North Carolina, where he died in December 1864 shortly before his nineteenth birthday. He is buried in an unmarked grave in the American national cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
On 5 January 1865, Livingstone received a letter from Sir Roderick Murchison of the Royal Geographical Society:
My dear Livingstone – As to your future, I am anxious to know what your own wish is as respects African exploration. Quite irrespective of missionaries or political affairs, there is at this moment a question of intense geographical interest to be settled: namely the watershed, or watersheds of South Africa. Now, if you would really like to be the person to finish off your remarkable career by completing such a survey, unshackled by other avocations than those of the geographical explorer, I should be delighted to consult my friends of the Society, and take the best steps to promote such an enterprise. . . . Various questions might be decided by the way, and if you could get to the west, and come out on that coast, or should be able to reach the White Nile, you would bring back an unrivalled reputation, and would have settled all the great disputes now pending . . . I have heard you so often talk of the enjoyment you feel when in Africa, that I cannot believe you now think of anchoring for the rest of your life on the mud and sand banks of England.
Livingstone accepted, stating he was not yet ready to hang up his compass but would only return to Africa as a missionary and not ‘simply as a geographer’. The region would also place him right at the heart of the Arab slave trade where he hoped to suppress its activities and do as much harm to the ‘industry’ as possible.
He left England for the last time on 13 August 1865 and returned to his beloved Africa via Bombay after collecting £2,300 for the sale of the Lady Nyassa; £4,000 less than the vessel’s true value, but the best that could be raised in the circumstances. He was advised to invest the money in an Indian bank until he needed it. Two years later the bank collapsed, resulting in the loss of the entire £6,000 Livingstone had sunk into the steamer in which he had risked his life to sail from Africa to India.
Livingstone headed into the dark continent on his final journey in March 1866 as a single white man travelling with thirty-six natives from the different regions through which he expected to pass. They included Abdullah Susi and Amoda who had cut wood to power the boiler on board the Pioneer and James Chuma and Wikatani, whom Livingstone had arranged to be taken in at a Bombay mission school while he was seeking a buyer for the Lady Nyassa. Compared to other European expeditions, this was a small party. It also included an assortment of pack mules, donkeys, buffalo, cows and camels to carry supplies, tents, navigational equipment plus cloth and beads with which to trade throughout the journey. He was exhilarated to be back on the move and wrote in his journal: ‘The mere animal pleasure of travelling in a wild unexplored country is very great. . . . The sweat of one’s brow is no longer a curse when one works for God.’
The doctor planned to march inland along the Rovuma River and, after passing Lake Nyassa’s southern shore, head north towards Lake Tanganyika where he expected to find the source of the Nile. Early into the march, Livingstone discovered that some of his men were troublemakers who treated their animals badly, others were thieves and so idle that a group of Johanna porters, originating from the Comoros Islands, were ordered back to the coast.
As the remaining party advanced, the horrors of the slave trade became more evident. Women were found dead, tied to trees, lying shot or stabbed because they had been unable to keep up with the rest of the party. To prevent them becoming the property of someone else, their ‘masters’ had killed them.
Rain, hostile tribes, illness and the slave trade all played their part in delaying Livingstone’s expedition. By 8 August, he had reached Lake Nyassa and the scores of slave colonies along its banks. He attempted to cross the lake, but slave owners had commandeered all the dhows and refused to loan their vessels, forcing him to walk around the southern shore, where he witnessed further massacres and destruction of native settlements.
To advance without delay, Livingstone had to travel with Arab slavers. Not only did this guarantee safe passage through hostile territory, but also provided an opportunity to learn about the slave trade and its evils at first hand. He also wrote to his family in Scotland and Dr Kirk in Zanzibar entrusting them to Arabs making their way out of the interior towards the coast. A letter, addressed to the Foreign Office in London, stated that he had discovered two more lakes, Moero and Bangweulu, and that the latter ‘might be the source of the Nile’. He wrote: ‘I am standing on the threshold of the unexplored.’
Back in Zanzibar, the Johanna porters ordered back to the coast were telling stories that the great African traveller had been murdered by a savage who had crushed the doctor’s skull with an axe somewhere along the shores of Lake Nyassa. The story began appearing in newspapers; first to break the news was the British-owned Times of India, which reported on 13 March 1867: ‘The hopes raised by the news and rumoured safety of Dr. Livingstone have speedily been dispelled, and there can be no longer doubt that he was killed by a savage of the Mafite tribe. . . .’
The Johanna men were closely questioned by British consular staff, who asked them about the territory where the murder was purported to have taken place. The diplomats were satisfied that the land they described was the same territory that Dr Kirk had passed through with Livingstone during the Zambezi expedition. They grudgingly accepted that the grim news might be true.
On 10 December 1866, Dr Edward Seward of the British High Commission in Zanzibar sent a telegraph to the Foreign Office:
My Lord, I send you the saddest news . . . if the report of some fugitives from his party be true, this brave and good man has ‘crossed the threshold of the unexplored’ – he has confronted the future and will never return. . . . On his sad end being known, the British flag was lowered at this Consulate . . . I may state that no papers, effects or relics of Livingstone are likely to be recovered.
The Times of India article was reproduced in English and American newspapers, prompting the obituary writers to reach for their pens. But not everyone believed the story. Sir Roderick Murchison wrote to The Times in London casting serious doubts on the rumour started by the Johanna men. To confirm the story one way or another, Sir Roderick called on the government to dispatch an expedition to ascertain the truth. Volunteers were called for, hundreds applied, and a hand-picked group was selected under the command of Edward Daniel Young, a naval warrant officer and Lieutenant Henry Faulkner of the 17th Lancers. They left London on 11 June 1867 and in December reported back that while they had not seen Dr Livingstone, they could produce ample and satisfactory evidence that the story of his murder ‘was a tissue of the greatest falsehoods’.
In February 1867, letters written by Livingstone the previous year were delivered to Sir Roderick Murchison. They explained that he had been ill and had been staying for a long period with an Ajawa chief called Mataka until his health improved. He said that slave traders, who would murder him if his presence in Mataka’s camp was discovered, had prevented him from communicating earlier.
Another letter in Livingstone’s hand was received by the British Consul in Zanzibar dated 30 May 1869. It stated that he was now at Ujiji, an Arab trading community on the eastern shores of Lake Tanganyika and working hard tracing various water courses flowing in and out of the lake in the hope of proving, once and for all, where the source of the Nile was located.
Then the trail went quiet again, apart from rumours in Arab circles confirming that Livingstone was still in the Lake Tanganyika region and now in a state of utter destitution. The majority believed that because there had been no recent letters, sightings or clues, there could only be one conclusion – ‘that the illustrious man had passed the threshold of the unexplored, that bourn whence no traveller returns’.
Livingstone was neither lost nor dead – but he had come close to being both on several occasions. Malaria, anal bleeding and ulcers on his feet had made walking impossible. In July 1871, the doctor attempted to purchase canoes from Arab traders in order to continue his explorations. He had been staying in the town of Manyuema, when he had heard rifle shots in a market and witnessed hundreds of people being driven into the Lualaba River by Arabs, who fired indiscriminately into the crowd. With the cruel objective of frightening tribes into obedience, the Arab slavers massacred over four hundred people at Manyuema that day, plus hundreds of others in surrounding villages.
Sickened by what he had seen, Livingstone returned to Ujiji, where on his last visit in 1869 he had left 3,000yd of calico and 700lb of beads paid for by the Royal Geographical Society and sent on Dr Kirk’s instructions to use as barter. He arrived at the lakeside looking like a living skeleton to discover that an Arab, Sherif Bosher, charged by Dr Kirk to deliver the goods, had sold them and used the proceeds to buy ivory and slaves. He had been told that Livingstone was dead. A tribal war was raging in the vicinity and the doctor’s hopes of receiving further supplies from Zanzibar were dashed.
Livingstone would now have to rely on the goodwill of Arab slavers. He was old, broken, destitute, ill and in need of a Good Samaritan – who finally arrived, not in the form of an angel with wings, but in the shape of a young white man marching towards him at the head of a large caravan and under the stars and stripes of the American flag.