By January 1871, fifty-eight-year-old David Livingstone was camped on the banks of the Lualaba River near the village of Nyangwe. If he had not been so ill, he would not have spent a day there. It was the worst place he had visited in all of Africa. Not only had the slave traders created havoc in the area, but the people in the village were themselves enthusiastic cannibals. To show how important they were, the men all wore necklaces decorated with human jawbones. David could hardly wait to get well enough to be on his way, and by October, he had found a more hospitable village called Ujiji.
Although David was happy to be away from Nyangwe, his life was still filled with concerns. He was too far from the coast to hear news from home or get fresh supplies. By the end of October, he had run out of just about everything. His teeth were shattered and broken from eating the tough local corn. And when his India ink supply ran out, he was forced to crush seeds to make a watery red ink, which he used to write his notes on the edges of pieces of old newspapers.
David lived in limbo. He was not well enough to go forward with his exploration, and he was far too stubborn to go back. Then on the morning of November 3, 1871, David’s faithful helper Susi came running into his hut.
“Master, master. I see an Englishman! He is like you! He is coming here,” Susi said excitedly.
David pulled himself up from his cot. “Calm down, Susi, and tell me exactly what you saw.”
Before Susi had time to explain, David saw for himself. Winding along the dusty trail was a large party of porters led by a single white man carrying an American flag. The group kept coming until it stopped in front of David.
The white man, who seemed to be about half David’s age, looked David in the eye and asked, “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”
David tipped his cap. “Yes,” he replied. “And who might you be?’
“I am Henry Stanley, Doctor, and I have been sent to find you!”
David laughed. As far he was concerned, he’d never been lost. “Come and sit down,” he said with a flourish, pointing to his tiny hut.
David Livingstone and Henry Stanley sat talking for a long time. Henry had with him the most precious cargo of all—letters from home. As David read them, he learned that his daughter Agnes had married, while son Thomas was alive, though still very sick, and his in-laws, Robert and Mary Moffatt, had returned to Scotland to live. There were newspapers, too, that told of huge breakthroughs. The Suez Canal had been opened, connecting the Red Sea with the Mediterranean. Now a person could sail from the east coast of Africa to England without having to travel overland through Egypt. And a railroad now joined the east and west coasts of the United States.
After David had read all his mail and the newspapers, Henry Stanley told him the purpose for his visit. He was a newspaper reporter for the New York Herald. David Livingstone had become a legend in America, and everyone wanted to know whether he was alive and what he was up to.
Despite being a reporter, Henry Stanley, like David, had a great sense of adventure. It was not long before the two men had decided to explore Lake Tanganyika together. Henry generously shared his provisions and food, the best David had eaten in months. Henry also bought a canoe for the exploration and a donkey for David to ride on. Even so, the pair made slow progress. It took them a month to discover that the water at the northern end ran into the lake and not out of it. It seemed very unlikely that the lake was the source of the Nile River, as David had hoped it would be.
David returned to Ujiji discouraged and ill once again. Henry Stanley stayed with him, nursed him, and helped him to put his journals into order. Over the next three months, Henry did everything he could think of to convince David Livingstone to return to the coast with him. He even offered to go with David to Scotland, where David could get good medical care and see his family. But as appealing as the offer was, David had set himself a goal. He would find a waterway into the interior of Africa, or he would die trying.
Finally, in May 1872, Henry Stanley said farewell to his new friend and headed back to the coast. With him he carried all of David’s journals and a large number of letters David had written to friends and family. It would be the last time any white person would see David Livingstone alive.
It was five months after Henry Stanley had departed before David felt strong enough to take his next trip. This time he decided to go south along the western shore of Lake Tanganyika. Then he would turn west down the Lualaba River and see where it led.
As on David’s previous trips, the African wilderness proved filled with unwelcome surprises. David’s small party of men found themselves slogging through swamps of waist-deep thick, black mud. They were also attacked by bees, and menacing lions hungrily stalked their campsites each night.
On March 19, 1873, David celebrated his sixtieth birthday, though it was not a happy occasion. He was now in constant pain and unable to travel for more than ten hours a week. For someone who had traversed more than forty thousand miles of African wilderness, this was pitifully slow progress, and David found it difficult to accept. But he had no alternative but to accept it; his body was worn and tired.
David continued writing in his journal, though even this tired him to the point where most days it took all his effort to write a sentence. During this time he made the following entries:
21 April—tried to ride, but was forced to lie down and they carried me back to the village exhausted.
22 April—carried in kitanda [stretcher] S.W. 2 1/2 [hours of travel].
23 April—ditto. 1 1/2 [hours].
24 April—ditto 1.
25 April—ditto 1.
26 April—ditto. 2 1/2 to Kalunganjofu’s.
Total for week = 8 1/2 [hours of travel].
On April 27, David was too weak to write anything in his journal. He was camped on the shore of Lake Bangwelo, and it was raining heavily. His African helpers quickly built him a hut to keep the rain out. The next morning, the chief of the area, Chitambo, came to visit David. For the first time in his life, David Livingstone was too weak to talk to a chief.
By April 30, 1873, it was clear to David that he was very seriously ill. He asked Susi to give him some medicine, and then he fell into a fitful sleep. Sometime during the next two hours, David climbed from his cot and got down on his knees. He rested his elbows on the edge of the bed and put his hands together to pray. He was still in that position when Susi and Chuma found him dead several hours later.
Chapter 18
Servant of Humanity
David Livingstone’s three African helpers, Susi, Chuma, and Jacob Wainwright, were faced with a problem. Their friend was dead, and they didn’t know what to do with his body. In the years they had been with David, they had come to understand he was considered a great man in his homeland, and they wondered if it was right to bury him in a tiny village on the shore of a lake deep in the heart of Africa. David would probably not have cared, but his three loyal helpers decided that somehow they would get his body back to Great Britain. It was no small task, but they promised one another they would do whatever was necessary to make it happen.
The first thing the three men did was cut David’s body open and remove all his internal organs, including his heart, which they buried under a mvula tree. Next they covered his body with salt and left it to dry in the sun for two weeks. They guarded his body day and night to make sure no wild animals tried to eat it. Once the body was dry, they wrapped it in tree bark and then sewed it inside a sheath of sailcloth. They lashed the sheath to a long pole and sealed it all with tar. Now the body was airtight and ready to be carried to the coast.
Although the journey was over one thousand miles, never once did the three Africans consider abandoning David Livingstone’s body. They carried it through war zones, swamps, and jungles. They even met an expedition of white men headed inland who tried to convince them it was too dangerous to continue on and they should bury David’s body where they were. But they would not. As they told one African who asked, “This is a very, very big man!”
Africans had many superstitions about carrying dead bodies, and at one stage, the men were attacked and harassed. After that, they rewrapped David’s body and told everyone it was a large bolt of cloth they were taking to market!
When they reached the coast eight months later, they delivered the body to the British authorities, who transported it to England aboard the HMS Vulture. Since Jacob Wainwright spoke better English than Susi and Chuma and could also read and write the language, he was chosen to accompany David’s body on its final journey. Once he reached London, an autopsy was carried out to ensure that it was in fact the body of Doctor David Livingstone. The broken bones in his upper left arm from his encounter with the lion were ample proof of his identity.
Now that everyone was assured it was the body of David Livingstone, April 18, 1874, was declared a day of national mourning throughout the British Isles. There was not a student or factory worker anywhere in the country who did not know that Britain’s greatest hero was being buried that day. Eleven-and-a-half months after he had died, David Livingstone was finally laid to rest during a huge funeral service at Westminster Abbey. Mourners overflowed the church into the streets outside.
Eight pallbearers carried the coffin. Among them were Thomas Steele, now Sir Thomas Steele, and Cotton Oswell, two friends from David’s early expeditions; Dr. Kirk, who had helped David explore the Zambezi River; Henry Stanley, the last white man to see David alive; and Jacob Wainwright, who had helped transport David’s body from the interior back to England. Robert Moffat, David’s father-in-law, sat in the front row, along with the Livingstone children.
A huge slab of black marble was placed on David Livingstone’s grave. On it were inscribed some words taken from a letter David had written to a friend a year before he died. David had been writing about his most passionate subject, ending slavery. The words read: “All I can say in my solitude is may Heaven’s rich blessings come down on everyone—American, English, Turk—who will help to heal this open sore of the world.”
A month after the funeral, the United Free Church of Scotland decided to establish a mission station in Central Africa in honor of David’s work there. The mission was to be built on the edge of Lake Nyassa, and it would be called Livingstonia. Ten thousand pounds was quickly raised from Scottish churches, and Livingstonia soon consisted of a mission, a school, an industrial settlement, and a hospital.
In 1913, the Royal Geographical Society held a special meeting to commemorate David Livingstone’s birth in Scotland one hundred years earlier. Lord Cruzon, president of the Society, summed up David Livingstone’s life perhaps better than anyone else: “In the course of his wonderful career, Livingstone served three masters. As a missionary, he was the sincere and zealous servant of God. As an explorer, he was the indefatigable servant of science. As a denouncer of the slave trade, he was the fiery servant of humanity.”
