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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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David Livingstone
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(1813–73)
Scottish missionary and explorer who opened up the centre of Africa to European interests. Born in a one-room tenement in Blantyre in Lanarkshire (kept now with adjoining houses as a museum) and working in a cotton mill from the age of ten, he began to educate himself and took a medical degree in 1840. He then joined the London Missionary Society and was sent to South Africa.
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The world thought him lost on an expedition begun in 1866, until his famous discovery by H.M. *Stanley. His final journey across Africa was as dramatic as any. He died in swamps near Lake Bangweulu, whereupon two of his servants carried his embalmed body some 480km/300m before they made contact with a British expedition. Their action made it possible for him to be buried in Westminster Abbey.
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Expeditions into unknown parts of Africa filled the rest of his life, first to establish more mission centres, then to find trade routes which would bring prosperity to central Africa and so undercut the economic basis of the slave trade, and finally for purposes of pure exploration – in particular to find the sources of the three great African rivers, the Zambezi, Congo and Nile. In 1855 he discovered the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi (described in his Missionary Travels 1857), and in 1859 he found Lake Nyasa.
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