During his travels as a missionary, David Livingstone beheld many previously unknown wonders of the African interior. He put Victoria Falls and Lake Ngami on the map, and was the first white man to cross the African continent. Diaries, reports and letters are combined to create a wonderful narration of Livingstone's travels in a widely unknown continent. Included in this harrowing tale is Livingstone's narrow escape from a lion's wrath, his negotiations with an African chief, and his account of the Portuguese slave traders brutally punishing slaves after their attempt to escape. The Life and African Explorations of Livingstone also reveals Livingstone's deeply-rooted Christian beliefs and the strength he took from them, strength that allowed him to live and thrive amid the hardships of equatorial Africa.
David Livingstone (1813-73) was a Scottish missionary and medical doctor who explored much of the interior of Africa. Livingstone's most famous expedition was in 1866-73, when he traversed much of central Africa in an attempt to find the source of the Nile. This book contains the daily journals that Livingstone kept on this expedition, from his first entry on January 28, 1866, when he arrived at Zanzibar (in present-day Tanzania), to his last on April 27, 1873, four days before he died from malaria and dysentery in a village near Lake Bangweulu in present-day Zambia. In his more than seven-year journey, Livingstone was assisted by friendly African chiefs and at times by Arab slave traders, whose activities he abhorred. His journals contain detailed observations on the people, plants, animals, topography, and climate of central Africa, as well as on the slave trade. The journals also provide Livingstone's account of his meeting with Henry Morton Stanley in the fall of 1871. Stanley had been sent by the New York Herald to find the explorer, but was unable to convince him to return to England. Livingstone's last entry reads: "Knocked up quite, and remain--recover--sent to buy milch-goats. We are on the banks of the Molilamo." After Livingstone's death, his African servants Susi and Chuma saved the journals for transport to England, where they were edited and published by Livingstone's friend Horace Waller.
A powerful, moving, and revelatory novel set in nineteenth-century Africa--the captivating story of the loyal men and women who carried the body of explorer and missionary David Livingstone from Zambia to Zanzibar so that his remains could be returned home to England. Dawn, 1 May 1873, on the outskirts of Chitambo's village, near Lake Bangweulu in modern-day Zambia. The Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone has died. He had been heading south in the African interior on an increasingly maniacal mission to penetrate the greatest secret of Victorian exploration. He wanted to find the source of the world's longest river, the Nile. Instead, on an isolated and swampy floodplain, Dr. Livingstone found his death. How Livingstone is to be buried will be decided by his African companions, a group of sixty-nine men, women, and children. They decide that come what may, Livingstone, his papers and maps, must all be carried to England. They bury his heart and other organs under a tree and dry his flesh like jerky in the sun. Over nine months, battling severe illness and hunger, hostile chiefs and unknown terrain, all while taking a tortuous route of more than 1,000 miles to the coast to avoid marauding slave traders, they march with Livingstone's body and the evidence of his explorations. Their journey has been called "the most extraordinary story in African exploration." In this novel, their story is retold anew in the distinct, indelible voices of Livingstone's sharp-tongued female cook, Halima; a repressed, formerly enslaved African missionary named Jacob Wainwright; and the collective voice of the retainers. The result is a profound and tragic journey--an epic like no other--that encompasses all of the hypocrisy of slavery and colonization while celebrating resilience, loyalty, and love. In Out of Darkness, Shining Light, Petina Gappah has created an ambitious and artful masterpiece.
What really happened to Dr. David Livingstone? The New York Times bestselling coauthor of Survivor: The Ultimate Game investigates in this thrilling account. With the utterance of a single line—“Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”—a remote meeting in the heart of Africa was transformed into one of the most famous encounters in exploration history. But the true story behind Dr. David Livingstone and journalist Henry Morton Stanley is one that has escaped telling. Into Africa is an extraordinarily researched account of a thrilling adventure—defined by alarming foolishness, intense courage, and raw human achievement. In the mid-1860s, exploration had reached a plateau. The seas and continents had been mapped, the globe circumnavigated. Yet one vexing puzzle remained unsolved: what was the source of the mighty Nile river? Aiming to settle the mystery once and for all, Great Britain called upon its legendary explorer, Dr. David Livingstone, who had spent years in Africa as a missionary. In March 1866, Livingstone steered a massive expedition into the heart of Africa. In his path lay nearly impenetrable, uncharted terrain, hostile cannibals, and deadly predators. Within weeks, the explorer had vanished without a trace. Years passed with no word. While debate raged in England over whether Livingstone could be found—or rescued—from a place as daunting as Africa, James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the brash American newspaper tycoon, hatched a plan to capitalize on the world’s fascination with the missing legend. He would send a young journalist, Henry Morton Stanley, into Africa to search for Livingstone. A drifter with great ambition, but little success to show for it, Stanley undertook his assignment with gusto, filing reports that would one day captivate readers and dominate the front page of the New York Herald. Tracing the amazing journeys of Livingstone and Stanley in alternating chapters, author Martin Dugard captures with breathtaking immediacy the perils and challenges these men faced. Woven into the narrative, Dugard tells an equally compelling story of the remarkable transformation that occurred over the course of nine years, as Stanley rose in power and prominence and Livingstone found himself alone and in mortal danger. The first book to draw on modern research and to explore the combination of adventure, politics, and larger-than-life personalities involved, Into Africa is a riveting read.
This study about David Livingstone is different from all other publications about him. Here, Livingstone is not the main topic of interest; the focus of the author is on nutrition and health in pre-colonial Africa and Livingstone is his key informant. David Livingstone and the Myth of African Poverty and Disease is an unusual book. After a close examination of Livingstone’s writings and comparative reading of contemporary authors, Sjoerd Rijpma has been able to draw cautious conclusions about the relatively favourable conditions of health and nutrition in southern and central Africa during the pre-colonial period. His findings shed new light on the medical history of Sub-Saharan Africa. The surprise awaiting travellers in and also before 19th century Africa was that the inhabitants of the interior, even the ‘slaves’, were healthier and better fed than many of their contemporaries in Europe’s Industrial Revolution. “An impressive piece of scholarship, truly forensic in its close reading and re-reading of Livingstone’s published works and those of other travellers during the same era, clearly a labour of love which has taken years to complete” (Joanna Lewis).
David Livingstone was a Scottish physician and pioneer Christian missionary with the London Missionary Society. He was also an explorer in Africa and one of the most popular British heroes of the late 19th-century Victorian era. This biography was prepared by the British historian and a member of the Parliament, C. Silvester Horne. The author tried hard to portray Livingston from lesser-known sides of his personality: as an abolitionist, researcher, and scientist.
David Livingstone has gone down in history as a fearless explorer and missionary, hacking his way through the forests of Africa to bring light to the people - and also to free them from slavery. But who was he, and what was he actually like? "He was an extraordinary character- according to biographer Stephen Tomkins -spectacularly bad at personal relationships, at least with white people, possessed of infinite self-belief, courage, and restlessness. He was an almost total failure as a missionary, and so became an explorer and campaigner against the slave trade, hoping to save African lives and souls that way instead. He helped, however unwittingly, to set the tone and the extent of British involvement in Africa. He was a flawed but indomitable idealist." Fascinating new evidence about Livingstone's life and his struggles have come to light in the letters and journals he left behind, now accessible to us for the first time through spectral imaging. These form a significant addition to the source material for this excellent biography, which provides an honest and balanced account of the real man behind the Victorian icon.
David Livingstone (1813-73) was a Scottish missionary and medical doctor who explored much of the interior of Africa. In a remarkable journey in 1853-56, he became the first European to cross the African continent. Starting on the Zambezi River, he traveled north and west across Angola to reach the Atlantic at Luanda. On his return journey he followed the Zambezi to its mouth on the Indian Ocean in present-day Mozambique. Livingstone's most famous expedition was in 1866-73, when he explored central Africa in an attempt to find the source of the Nile. Not heard from for years, he was believed lost. Both the Royal Geographical Society and the sensationalist New York Herald organized expeditions to find him. Henry M. Stanley (1841-1904), a British-born reporter who was to become a noted explorer in his own right, led the Herald's expedition. On November 10, 1871, Stanley found Livingstone in the town of Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, in present-day Tanzania. News of the discovery caused a worldwide sensation. This book, which appeared in Chicago in 1872, was part of the effort by publishers to capitalize on the demand from the public for information about Livingstone and Stanley and about Africa in general.
