ON THIS DAY: 10 November 1871 – Dr. David Livingstone, who had been searching for the source of the Nile, was found by Henry Morton Stanley, a young Welsh-American journalist and adventurer.
Dr. David Livingstone (1813-1873) was a Scottish missionary, physician and explorer. He had gone deep into central Africa to continue his missionary work and to search for the source of the Nile River, one of the great geographical mysteries of the 19th century. Over time, contact with him was lost – no one in Europe had heard from him for several years, and many feared he was dead.
The New York Herald newspaper sent Henry Stanley (1841-1904), a Welsh-American journalist and explorer on an expedition to find Livingstone. He left Zanzibar in March 1871, leading a large and well-supplied caravan through difficult and dangerous terrain. Along the way, he battled disease, hostile encounters, and the many hardships of African exploration.
On 10 November 1871, Stanley arrived in Ujiji on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. The townspeople told him of a white man living among them – it was indeed Dr. Livingstone. When they met, Stanley reportedly greeted him with the now-legendary words: ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’
Livingstone was ill and weak, but alive. Stanley helped resupply him and tried to persuade him to return to Britain, but Livingstone refused, determined to continue his exploration. The two men travelled together for several months, exploring parts of Lake Tanganyika (in present-day Tanzania). Stanley later returned to Europe, where his dramatic story of the encounter made him famous.
Livingstone spent his final years travelling through swampy, disease-ridden, and politically unstable regions, enduring repeated attacks of malaria and dysentery, and suffering from severe malnutrition. The emotional toll of isolation and the horrors of the slave trade he witnessed were carefully recorded in his journals.
By April 1873, Livingstone and his few loyal attendants were moving through the swamps of Chief Chitambo’s village near Lake Bangweulu, in what is now Zambia. He was extremely weak unable to walk unaided and often had to be carried on a litter.
On the night of 30 April 1873, his servants heard him kneeling beside his bed as if in prayer. When they checked on him early the next morning, 1 May 1873, they found him still in that position – dead, likely from malaria compounded by internal bleeding caused by dysentery. He was 60 years old.
Livingstone’s loyal African attendants, Chuma and Susi, buried his heart and internal organs under a tree in the village, near the spot where he died. Local people still know the site today as the Livingstone Memorial at Chitambo. Then, they embalmed his body and carried it over 1,000 miles (1,600 km) to the east coast of Africa – an astonishing journey that took nine months. From there, it was sent by ship back to Britain, where it was buried with great ceremony in Westminster Abbey on 18 April 1874.