David Livingstone

Its beginnings

Born the March 19th 1813 in a poor family with Blantyre, it must work as of the ten years age in a cotton factory. Its intellectual qualities point out it and allow him to lead studies of Théologie and Médecine to the Université of Glasgow. He works then with London, where according to the example of another Scot, Robert Moffat, he joined the Société missionary of London, and becomes priest Anglican.

In 1841 it is sent to the Cape then with the Bechuanaland (Botswana) by the Société missionary of London. In 1844, he marries the girl of Robert Moffat, Mary, which will travel some time with him, in spite of his pregnancy and the injunctions of his family. She will return finally to England with their child.

The first explorations: the Victoria falls

Starting from 1849 it starts to explore the center-south of the African continent. It crosses the desert of the Kalahari until the Lac Ngami. The following years, it goes up the Zambezi, then joined the Atlantic coast with Luanda in Angola. He discovers the falls of the Zambezi, which he baptizes of the name of the Victoria queen. Thanks to this forwarding, he is probably the first European to have crossed Africa of west in east.

Sources of the Nile

Livingstone sets out again under more modest conditions in 1866, towards the Lac Tanganyika in Tanzania, in the hope to find the sources of the Nile there. Patient and given up by his carriers, it then loses completely contact with the outside world. He withdraws himself in Ujiji, on the edges of the lake Tanganyika. He establishes at that time that the hydrographic system of the Lualaba, does not form part of the hydrographic system of the Zambezi as he a long time thought (in particular by the Zambezi bringing together/Chambeshi), but he thinks of this one for the sources of the the Nile.

Henry Morton Stanley, financed by the newspaper New York Herald in 1869, finally finds it in 1871. Their meeting and their maintenance are unforgettable, traditional of the history of explorations: Does Stanley require “Doctor Livingstone, I suppose? ” (Doctor Livingstone, I supposes?), which answers “brought You to me a new life”, they discuss then what Livingstone missed: the conflict Free-Prussian, Suez Canal, the transatlantic telegraph, and Livingstone accompanies it some time, to explore the north of the lake Tanganyika, but refuses to follow it when Stanley turns over to England. Their roads separate with Unyanyembe. He dies on May 1st 1873 of the Dysenterie on the edges of the Lac Bangwelo in current the Zambia, always with the research of the sources of the Nile. A forwarding will repatriate its body in the United Kingdom and it will be buried the following year with the Abbaye of Westminster.

See too

The explorer gave his name to the town of Livingstone, in Zambia, near the Chutes Victoria. The city was the first capital of Rhodesia of North.

The Chutes Livingstone is the name given by Stanley to the whole of rapids between the Pool Malebo and Matadi, on the lower Congo. David Livingstone however never ventured in this part of Africa.

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