It was strange for David and Mary to see each other again. It had been four years since they had last been together, and David was now much gaunter. He assumed that Mary would travel up to the new mission station at Magomero with the other wives and stay there, but Mary had other ideas. She told David she would not be separated from him, no matter what he said. Realizing how stubborn his wife was, David gave in, though he hated to think of her living in the swampy areas that his responsibilities seemed to keep him in.
As it turned out, either choice would have been fatal. The missionary wives were to be met halfway to Magomero by their husbands and so set out with their guides. It had rained for days in the area, and the husbands were delayed. While they waited for the men to arrive, the wives succumbed to dysentery, malaria, and hunger. They were all dead by the time their husbands arrived to meet them.
Mary and David spent two-and-a-half happy months together. David was busy assembling a small steamboat that had been sent out from England on the same ship that brought Mary and the missionary wives. The boat, which David had designed himself, was called the Lady Nyassa, after the lake he hoped to explore with her. David had paid six thousand pounds for the boat, most of the money coming from sales of his book, but as he worked on her, he knew it would be worth it. She was a sturdy vessel and well-suited to shallow river work.
In April 1862, Mary became ill with malaria. It was her first encounter with the disease, and her body did not respond well. With David and Dr. Kirk attending to her night and day, she had the best medical care in Africa, but it was not enough. Her health slipped away, and on April 27, within a week of falling ill, Mary died at the age of forty-one. David buried her under a huge baobab tree. As he stood at his wife’s grave, he recalled the words from her poem, written with such tenderness and hope: I may tend you while I’m living, you will watch me when I die.
It had been true. Mary had come to be at his side, to help him and take care of his needs, and now he had watched her die. Africa had claimed the life of the one he loved the most, and for the first time since arriving on the continent, David wondered whether he had the will to go on. In his journal he wrote, “I wept over her who well deserved many tears. I loved her when I married her, and the longer I lived with her I loved her the more…. For the first time in my life I feel willing to die.”
But it was not time for David Livingstone to give up. He still had important work to do.
Chapter 17
Still Headed Inland
“India!” gasped George Rae. “You can’t be serious, Livingstone. You’re going to sail the Lady Nyassa to India? Whatever would make you want to go on such a suicide trip?”
David looked at his old friend. George Rae was the last man still with him from the group who’d come to Africa six years before to help explore the Zambezi River. “I need to go home,” he said. “The two years since Mary died have not been easy. I need to see my children again. Little Anna Mary is five now, and I’ve never laid eyes on her. And now that I’ve explored five hundred miles up the Rovuma River, I need to go and report that it’s too shallow for a steamboat to navigate.”
“Yes, yes, I understand all that. And quite right, too. It’s a good thing to regroup in Scotland, but what does that have to do with sailing the Lady Nyassa to India?” pressed George Rae.
David smiled wearily. “I’ve spent my life trying to find ways to stop the slave trade, and I will not leave my boat in Africa where it can fall into the hands of slave traders and be used to further their evil practice. Besides, I paid for it with money from my book, and I’ve been thinking I might sell it and use the money for the two youngest children’s education. I’m sure I can find someone in India who would use it for a good purpose.”
“But you’ll never make it to India.” blurted George Rae. “You can’t be thinking straight. India is twenty-five hundred miles away, and there are monsoons in that part of the world. The Lady Nyassa is a riverboat, not an oceangoing vessel. She’s only forty feet long from stem to stern and doesn’t have sails—only a tiny steam engine. It’s insane! She’ll break apart at the first big wave, and you’ll all be drowned.”
“I take it you’re not coming with me, then?” asked David dryly.
“I’d follow you to the ends of the earth, but not to the bottom of the ocean!” George Rae replied. “Be reasonable for once, David. This scheme of yours will not work.”
However, the Lady Nyassa did set sail for India on April 30, 1864, with twelve crew members aboard, three white men and nine Africans. None of the men had any ocean sailing experience, and seven of the Africans came from inland villages and had never even seen the ocean before the voyage. Still, somehow David managed to keep his crew from jumping overboard and sail the Lady Nyassa up the east coast of Africa to Zanzibar. From there the boat sailed east to Bombay, India, arriving on June 13, 1864.
In Bombay, no one was expecting a small riverboat from Africa, and no welcoming committee was waiting. However, David was viewed as a hero throughout the British Empire, and once he was able to convince the port authorities that he really had sailed all the way from Africa, he was given an official welcome. He even had an audience with Sir Bartle Frere, the governor of Bombay. Sir Bartle Frere was captivated by David’s efforts to end slave trading and offered to help in any way he could. However, he could not recommend a buyer for the Lady Nyassa, so David left the boat in the care of a British naval officer. He found a new home in Bombay for his African crew, and caught a ship bound for England.
David arrived in London on July 23, 1864, and much to his surprise he received a hero’s welcome. His first night home he was swept off to a reception at Prime Minister Palmerston’s home. For the rest of the week he kept busy with appointments to see the foreign secretary and other important government officials.
By the end of the week, David was anxious for all the formalities to be over so that he could visit his family. Once in Scotland, the reunion with his family was a mixture of joy and sadness. His eighty-year-old mother was now senile and didn’t recognize him. His two sisters, Janet and Agnes, were overworked taking care of their mother and raising his children, especially since Zouga and Anna had been sent to Scotland from Kuruman. Much to David’s dismay, his eighteen-year-old son Robert had gone off to Africa in search of him. When he couldn’t locate David, he had drifted on to the United States, where he’d enlisted in the Union Army to fight in the Civil War. The whole family waited nervously for news from him. Meanwhile, fifteen-year-old Thomas was ill with kidney disease. David knew it was a serious condition and worried about his son’s recovery. The other three children, seventeen-year-old Agnes, twelve-year-old Zouga, and five-year-old Anna, all seemed to be well, though Anna was very shy around the father she had not previously met.
While in Scotland, David began writing a second book, entitled the Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and Its Tributaries. He also gave lectures on how Africa needed to be opened up to commerce and how the slave trade needed to be stopped.
Since his official duties exploring and mapping the Zambezi River area were now complete, the British government gave David five hundred pounds to return to Africa and look for ways to end the slave trade. The Royal Geographical Society also gave him five hundred pounds. As well, James Young, David’s old friend from his days at Anderson College, gave David another one thousand pounds. James Young had made a fortune inventing paraffin oil, which was used widely in lamps because it was so clean burning.
In August 1865, David Livingstone left England for the last time. As he left, his heart was heavy. His mother had died during his time at home, and just before boarding the ship, he received news that his oldest son Robert had died in a prisoner-of-war camp in North Carolina.
The ship took David back to Bombay so that he could sell the Lady Nyassa and collect his crew and take them back to Africa. In Bombay, Sir Bartle Frere took an active interest in David’s work and raised one thousand pounds to help pay for David’s next expedition. David also found a buyer for the Lady Nyassa, though he got only 2,300 pounds for it. This was much less than it was worth, but as it turned out, it did not matter. David put the money in a bank in Bombay, planning to send it to Scotland later to pay for Zouga and Anna’s education. Within weeks of depositing the money, however, the banks in India failed, and David lost every penny he’d received for the boat.
Besides giving David the thousand pounds, Sir Bartle Frere offered David and his men a free trip to Zanzibar aboard the Thule, a steamship he was sending as a gift to the Sultan of Zanzibar. In Zanzibar, David was reunited with Dr. Kirk, who was now the British consul there.
From Zanzibar, David caught another ship down the coast to Mikindani at the mouth of the Rovuma River. In Mikindani, David hired a fresh group of men to go with him on his next expedition. Among them were Susi and Chuma, two ex-slaves whom David had freed. These two men proved to be faithful helpers, but David did not have the same experience with his choice of other helpers. Many of the men in his expedition deserted him, and on January 20, 1867, two men fled with David’s most important possession, his medicine box. David knew it was only a matter of time before he came down with another bout of malaria or dysentery, which, without medicines, he knew could kill him. Still, stubborn as he was, he chose to keep going. What he did not know was that the two men were cunning enough to return to Mikindani and report David Livingstone’s death so that they could receive their wages. They offered David’s medicine box as proof of his death. No one knew for sure whether their story was true. Was the great explorer really dead, or was he still slogging on through the bush somewhere?
A search party was organized, and although it did not catch up with David, its members became convinced that he was still alive and still headed inland. And he was. On April 4, 1867, David arrived at the southern end of Lake Tanganyika. By then, the sicknesses he feared had caught up with him, and he had to rest for several weeks before going on. He decided to explore the western side of the lake.
The sights that awaited him there turned his stomach more than his sickness did. Everywhere there were signs of slave trade. Huts were burned, villages destroyed, and dead bodies strewn along the trails. At one point, David came upon a woman with her three-year-old son. The child, who was about to be sold into slavery, clung to his mother and wept bitterly. David watched in despair as the boy was handed over in return for four yards of fabric.
The slave traders in this area were Arabs, and while David despised what they were doing, he recognized that they needed to hear the gospel message. Because of this, he struck up many friendships with the slave traders, often traveling with them. He was always respectful towards them and took every opportunity possible to tell them about the gospel message and how God wanted them to stop their horrible trade. The slave traders in turn were kind to David, and without their help, David may well have died from recurring bouts of malaria.
For the next three years, David Livingstone explored the inland areas. Sometimes he traveled with only six helpers, and sometimes he traveled with large groups of Arabs. Wherever he went, he took notes and made maps of everything he saw. In the course of his travels, he discovered two more lakes, Bangwelo and Moreo. Then in 1870, he heard that he was very close to a river the Africans called Lualaba. It was said that the river was as wide as twenty canoes and very deep, and it flowed north. David wondered whether this could be the upper reaches of the Nile. That would be quite a discovery. If it was the Nile, it would most likely be navigable all the way to Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea. The alternative was that the Lualaba was part of the Congo River system. If it was, it would be useless as a way to open up the interior of Africa. The Congo River, which flowed into the Atlantic Ocean, was not navigable seventy-five miles from its mouth because of a series of rapids that stretched inland for a hundred miles. Of course, there was only one way to discover whether the Lualaba was part of the Congo River or the Nile. David would have to canoe down it and see where it took him.
