Open the Abbey doors, and bear him in
To sleep with king and counsellor, chief and sage,
The Missionary, come of weaver-kin,
But great by work that brooks no lower wage.
He needs no epitaph to guard a name
Which men shall prize while worthy work is known;
He lived and died for good – be this his fame –
Marbles decay; this is a Living-stone.
Punch, 25 April 1874
After Stanley had left Livingstone near Unyanyembe on 14 March 1872, the old doctor had nothing better to do than sit it out, waiting for men and supplies his young American friend would send from Zanzibar. On 19 March – Livingstone’s fifty-ninth birthday – he recorded in his journal: ‘My Jesus, my King, my Life, my All; I again dedicate my whole self to Thee. Accept me, and grant, O gracious Father, that ere this year is gone I may finish my task. In Jesus’ name I ask it. Amen. So let it be.’
Livingstone also contemplated how he might cause further harm to Africa’s barbaric slave trade. On 1 May he completed an article for the New York Herald which included the phrase which would eventually find its way onto his tombstone in Westminster Abbey: ‘All I can say in my loneliness is, may heaven’s rich blessing come down on every one – American, English, Turk – who will help to heal this open sore of the world.’ Exactly one year later, Livingstone was dead.
Livingstone had plenty of time to consider his next enterprise, attempting to prove that the River Lualaba was the source of the Nile. He planned to head south, marching around Lake Tanganyika, crossing the Zambezi and following the southern portion of Lake Bangweolo before travelling west along its southern shore.
Stanley’s fifty-six handpicked men arrived in Unyanyembe on 8 August and Livingstone was overjoyed. The men joined five others, the only remainder of Livingstone’s original followers. He wrote: ‘How thankful I am, I cannot confess.’ The men were employed at salaries of up to $30 a year for a period of two years, paid in advance by the New York Herald, and their contracts stipulated that should the doctor wish to continue working after that time, they should remain until new porters were engaged.
The men also brought a letter from Stanley, written at Zanzibar, in which he told Livingstone that ‘very few amongst men have I found I so much got to love as yourself’. He said that both England and America expected their people to do their duty. ‘Do yours as persistently as heretofore & come back to your friends and country to be crowned with the laurel, and I will go forth to do mine.’ Stanley reminded the doctor: ‘Do not forget the Herald, please. The Herald will be grateful to me for securing you as a Correspondent.’ Livingstone was true to his word.
The final journey began on 25 August 1872. By 8 October, he had reached Lake Tanganyika where the expedition rested. Livingstone’s dysentery and bowel disorder had returned. He continued losing blood and several of his men were also sick. As the season advanced, the rain returned, swelling rivers and streams and turning the ground into a quagmire. It was still raining incessantly in January 1873. Their path lay across flooded rivers and Livingstone often had to be carried on the shoulders of his men.
By 19 September, Livingstone had taken no food for a week. Tribes were unfriendly and unwilling to sell food. They continued for the next four months on rations. The doctor wrote:
Carrying me across one of the broad, deep, sedgy rivers is really a very difficult task. One we crossed was 2,000 feet broad. The first part, the main stream, came up to Susi’s mouth, and wetted my seat and legs. One held up my pistol behind, then one after another took a turn, and when he sank deep into an elephant’s footprint he required two to lift him, so as to gain a footing on the level, which was over waist deep. It took us a full hour and a half to cross over. The water was cold, and so was the wind. We are anxious about food. The lake is near, but we are not sure of provisions. Our progress is distressingly slow. Wet, wet, wet; sloppy weather, truly.
The end of April marked the final days of Livingstone’s travels. When he awoke on the 28th, he found it difficult to walk, so his men carried him across rivers and swamps until they came to Chitambo’s village – named after the local chief – in Ilala (now Zambia), where they built a primitive shelter in which the doctor could rest until he was well enough to travel. The men laid him on a rough bed in the shelter, where he spent the night.
When his men peered through the doorway the following morning, they found Livingstone still asleep and left him undisturbed. Later his mind seemed to wander as he asked vague questions about the country they were in and sighed in pain, ‘Oh dear, dear’, and drifted back into sleep. Later he awoke and asked Susi to boil water and bring his medicine chest, from which he took calomel to calm his fever.
At daybreak the next morning, Majwara, the sixteen-year-old Ugandan boy who acted as Livingstone’s gun carrier and slept close to his master’s doorway, called in alarm to Susi: ‘Come to master, I am afraid; I don’t know if he is alive.’ Worried his master might be dead, Susi roused Chuma and three others and the party carefully entered the hut. By the light of a candle still burning by his bed, they saw the doctor kneeling in prayer, his back to them, his body stretched forward and head buried in his hands on the pillow. They were afraid to approach him, not wishing to disturb their master at prayer. Seeing no movement, they drew closer and one of them touched his cheek. It was cold. David Livingstone had died several hours before, alone and in the act of prayer.
What should now be done with their master’s body? The men conferred; he must be taken home on a final journey to the distant land over the seas from where he had originally come to Africa thirty years before. They agreed they must carry him to Zanzibar from where they knew large ships sailed to a place called England where Queen Victoria lived.
The undertaking was fraught with danger. They ran the risk of encountering tribes deeply superstitious of a dead body passing through their territory, who would confiscate the corpse if it were discovered and use it at witchcraft rituals. Livingstone’s attendants, Susi and Chuma, were elected to lead the caravan. One of the men, Farijala, knew how to prepare a body. A hut was constructed without a roof and open to the skies as Jacob Wainwright, who had been educated at a missionary school, uttered Christian prayers. The doctor’s skin and bone corpse was laid on the ground, Farijala cut the body open and had the heart, intestines and internal organs removed, placed in a tin box and buried. While removing the organs, Susi and Chuma saw a blood clot several inches in diameter obstructing Livingstone’s lower intestines, confirming that the doctor had almost certainly died in excruciating pain. Salt was placed inside the body and the corpse exposed to the sun. No other means were taken to preserve it, apart from placing a small amount of brandy in the mouth and hair.
When the body was completely dry two weeks later, Livingstone’s legs were folded underneath his knees. It was wrapped in calico, slid into a cylinder of tree bark and stitched in sailcloth. Finally, this strange ‘coffin’ was tarred to make it waterproof. It was now ready to begin its journey to Zanzibar, lashed to a pole and carried by two men.
Jacob Wainwright carved an inscription on the Mpundu tree under which the body had rested and where the tin box was buried. The tree remained standing on the site of Chitambo’s camp at Lake Bangweolo for twenty-six years, until it became diseased and was cut down. The inscribed section was removed and sent to London where it is today part of a collection owned by the Royal Geographical Society.
It took nine months for the men to carry their master’s body, clothes, papers, instruments and personal possessions to the coast. Ten men died of fever on the way. As expected, they encountered unfriendly tribes on their journey, but told them their ‘cargo’ contained supplies. At one village the chief was unhappy with this explanation and Livingstone’s loyal men had to fight their way out with their precious consignment.
In Unyanyembe the men were met by another Royal Geographical Society-funded expedition, unaware of the doctor’s death and, according to the Society, bringing ‘the best equipped expedition which ever left Zanzibar for the purpose of exploration’. Its leader, Lieutenant Lovett Cameron, RN insisted that Livingstone’s body be buried there and then, but the men were determined to take it to the coast. Cameron demanded to examine the contents of the crates and tin boxes containing Livingstone’s possessions and told the men he was commandeering them on behalf of the British Consul. Susi, Chuma and Jacob Wainwright protested, but Cameron insisted on removing Livingstone’s geographical instruments for his own use.
Chuma was sent ahead to prepare the British authorities in Zanzibar for the arrival of their master’s body. Dr Kirk was on leave in England and naval attaché Captain William Prideaux, acting in his absence, was informed on 24 February 1874 that a group of weary men had arrived at the mission in Bagamoyo carrying a strange load. They claimed its contents was ‘mwilli wa Daudi’ – ‘the body of David’. Prideaux sent a warship to collect the corpse. Uncertain what to do with the brave and loyal men who had carried Livingstone through the interior for the last nine months and concerned about how his actions might be interpreted by Kirk when he returned, Prideaux paid them from his own pocket, dismissed them and sent them home.
Devoted men who had risked their lives to walk hundreds of miles with the remains of their master, facing numerous perils along the way, were treated like ordinary porters. Their devotion to the white man who had never beaten them or bound them in chains but had shown only kindness, was later rewarded by the Society which struck a medal for every man who had helped to bring Livingstone’s body to the coast. By the time the medals reached Zanzibar, the group had broken up and gone their separate ways. Most of them never received their decoration. Susi and Chuma pleaded to be allowed to travel to England to accompany their master’s coffin, but only a single African sailed with the body, Jacob Wainwright – the man who had carved Livingstone’s name on the tree at Chitambo’s camp. He had been with Livingstone for only a year, but because he had attended a Church Missionary Society school, was considered ‘civilised’ and his passage to England and the cost of a new suit were funded by a Zanzibar church hoping he might raise funds on his travels.
Livingstone’s body was removed from the cylinder, placed in a conventional coffin and stowed on the hold of the P & O steamship Malwa travelling to Southampton. Stanley was part of a reception committee waiting on the quayside on 15 April 1874 to witness the arrival of the coffin. Crowds looked on silently as it was lifted from the cargo hold and settled onto the deck. Jacob Wainwright sat on one of Livingstone’s tin trunks and rested his elbow on his master’s coffin as one of the ship’s passengers took his photograph looking forlorn and awkward in his new suit. He had written some words in an unsteady hand on a piece of card: ‘To the memory of Dr. Livingstone, friend of the African’.
The flag-draped coffin was conveyed by a black horse-drawn hearse through Southampton’s silent streets to the station and so transferred to London. The city came to a standstill as another hearse and mourning coaches took the coffin to the Savile Row headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society. There the remains were ‘positively identified’ by Sir William Ferguson and a small number of Livingstone’s Society colleagues, including Dr Kirk.
When the coffin was opened and the body unwrapped from its primitive coverings, it was unrecognisable. Nearly one year after his death, the only thing proving the decaying corpse on the table was that of Dr David Livingstone was a lump on the bone of the left humerus, damaged by the lion that had attacked him thirty years before. Thanks to the doctor’s own account of this incident in his book on missionary travels, this was the only proof needed by the learned gentlemen that what lay before them was all that remained of Dr David Livingstone.
Inside one of Livingstone’s trunks was an undated letter (probably written after Christmas 1872) addressed to Stanley. Again it expressed the old man’s gratitude to his young friend for ‘finding him’ and stated:
I am . . . devoutly thankful to the loving Father above for helping you through all your manifold Masika [rainy season] toils, and bringing you safely to Zanzibar, with your energies unimpaired, and with a desire to exert yourself to the utmost in securing all the men and goods needed for this my concluding trip. I am perpetually reminded that I owe a great deal to you for the drilling of the men you sent . . . I keep most of your handsome presents of champagne for a special occasion. . . . I thank you very much and very sincerely for all your kind generosity.
Over the next few days, thousands filed past Livingstone’s coffin where it lay in the Royal Geographical Society map room at Savile Row. A nationwide appeal was launched by Livingstone’s friends ‘for means to support the family of the traveller’. On 18 April, the funeral took place at Westminster Abbey. Stanley led the eight pallbearers, who also included Dr Kirk, William Cotton Oswell, William Webb and Jacob Wainwright. The Daily Telegraph reported:
Most notable among the throng as they carry the coffin to the grave, are the African travellers who constitute such a natural guard of honour for this dead man. Foremost among them in right of gallant special service and nearest to Livingstone’s head, stands Stanley – suntanned anew from Ashanti. . . . But for Stanley, Livingstone would have died long back, without aid or news from us.
The polished oaken coffin was carried to its last resting place, a dark cavity in the Abbey floor in the centre of the western part of the nave, halfway between the western doors and the choir. The coffin contained a brass plate with the inscription: ‘David Livingstone, born at Blantyre, Lanarkshire, Scotland, 19th March 1813, died at Ilala, Central Africa, 4 May, 1873.’ The newspaper noted:
the solemn dusky faces of the two Africans, Wainwright and little Kalulu, Mr. Stanley’s boy, who are standing among the nearest, and the mind reverts to the widely different scene a year ago, when Livingstone, after much pain, which is not spared to the best and kindliest, gave up his gallant, loving, pious spirit to his Master and Maker, and when yonder Negro [Joseph Wainwright] had read over him the very service which has now again been so grandly celebrated for him with pomp and rolling music, like a King. The African – a simple-looking, quiet, honest lad – attracts many eyes as he stands by the grave; he knows alone of all present the aspect of that other burial spot, and to him more than all this one must be impressive. But he takes his wonder, like his duty, stolidly – his thoughts appear to be lost in his master’s memory.
Wreath upon wreath was dropped into the tomb and Stanley and Kalulu took ‘a long parting glance at the great traveller’s resting place’ before leaving ‘the good, great-hearted, loving, fearless and faithful David Livingstone’ for the final time. As they rode through London’s streets, Stanley was fired with a resolution to complete Livingstone’s work and ‘to be, if God willed it, the next martyr to geographical science, or, if my life was to be spared, to clear up . . . the secrets of the Great River throughout its course’.