David Livingstone
David Livingstone- A Famous Scottish Missionary & Explorer
David Livingstone (1813 - 1873) After qualifying in medicine his strong theological bent led him to become a missionary. Owing to the Opium War his original desire to work in China could not be fulfilled, and in December 1840 he was allotted to a mission in Bechuanaland (now Botswana), where he arrived in July 1841. After exploring the country in the course of his missionary duties for eight years he decided to extend his journeys northwards and north-eastwards. This resulted in the survey of a vast area in the Zambezi basin and in 1849 he discovered Lake Ngami. Turning toward Angola, he reached the Atlantic coast at Sao Paulo de Loanda on May 30th 1854. Thence he returned to the interior and discovered the falls of the Zambezi, naming them the Victoria Falls in honour of his queen. Continuing eastward, he reached Quelimane, on the coast of the Indian Ocean in Mozambique.
Between 1858 and 1863 Livingstone made accurate surveys of the zone between the river Zambezi and Lake Nyasa. In March 1866 he moved westward, discovering Lakes Bangweulu and Mweru, and surveyed the upper course of the river Lualaba. Three years later he turned his attention to the coasts of Lake Tangaanyika. Subsequently his whereabouts ceased to be known, and the New York Times organised a relief expedition under Henry M. Stanley, who in October 1871, succeeded in finding Livingstone at Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Stanley brought him fresh supplies, and thus enabled him to continue his exploration. But on May 1st 1873, overcome by the privations and illnesses endured for so many years in some of the least accessible and most poverty-stricken and unhealthy regions of Africa, he died on the shores of Lake Bangweulu.
Apart from the philanthropic sapects of his work as a missionary, Livingstone's explorations laid a sound basis for further knowledge of Bechuanaland, Angola, Mozambique, and the southern Congo. He was the first European to cross equatorial Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean. Though his supposition that the river Lualaba was part of the Nile system was proved erroneous by the subsequent discovery that it was a tributary of the river Congo, it remains incontestable that Livingstone contributed very largely to solving what had long been puzzling topographical problems in the vast region of Africa containing the grea equatorial lakes and the course of the Zambezi. His explorations were also leisurely, giving him time carefully to observe and record the ways of the people he met, who almost without exception treated him as a superior being. His example inspired countless others.
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