David Livingstone

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David Livingstone explored Africa as a Scottish medical missionary for the London Missionary Society. His extreme fame stemmed from his working-class background, his dedicated missionary exploration, and his fierce support of ending slavery. His anti-slavery sentiments drove his desire to discover the source of the Nile River to earn enough fame and respect to call for the end of the slave trade.

Youth and Education

Dr. David Livingstone was born on March 19, 1813, and grew up in a single tenenement room in Blantyre, Scotland. Born to cotton mill worker parents Neil and Agnes Livingston, he was the second child out of seven. Livingston began working in the local cotton mill in Blantyre Works owned by Henry Monteith and Company at 10 years
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He believed the best way to open up the rest of Africa to missionary work involved exploring and mapping rivers to navigate the interior. So from 1852 to 1856, Livingstone explored central Africa and documented almost the entirety of the Zambezi. He stumbled upon Mosi-oa-Tunya waterfall during his journey and renamed it Victoria Falls. Dr. Livingstone crossed Africa from the Atlantic, in Luanda, to the Indian Ocean, in Quelimane, one of the first Europeans to do so, between 1854 and 1856. Livingstone left the London Missionary Society in 1857 when they rejected his plan of opening new missions in Zambesi. [[[The Society could not reconcile Livingstone’s desire to open up trade routes to end slavery while still evangelizing.]]] The British government chose to sponsor his idea and he started on his Zambezi Expedition from March 1858 to 1864. He discovered the river to be impassable due to severe rapids. During this expedition he stated one of his most famous quotes, "I am prepared to go anywhere, provided it be …show more content…
Livingstone returned in January 1866 to explore Zanzibar and discover the Nile River’s source. He spent the subsequent years, prior to his death in 1873, discovering new geographical locations, falling extremely ill, being captured and put on display in Bambara, and eventually the July 15, 1871, massacre of 400 Africans by slavers near the Lualaba River. Livingston returned to Ujiji disheartened and ill. On November 10, 1871, Henry Morton Stanley said the most famous of quotes about David Livingstone when Stanley approached him and inquired, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” The New York Herald sent Stanley in 1869 to track down Dr. Livingstone. This may be a fictional account as Stanley ripped the pages from his journal, but the quote ran in the Herald’s editorial on

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