15. Livingstone, Missionary-Explorer

David Livingstone was born in Blantyre, Scotland, March 19, 1813. His father was a traveling tea-merchant who often acted as a colporter, distributing tracts, and showing a true missionary spirit. His mother was an active, sunny, loving woman. His home, enriched by little beyond the bare necessities of life, was happy and brightened by industry, cheerfulness, love for one another, and faith in God. He was a good boy to his mother, often helping her sweep and even scrub, “if she would bolt the door so none of the boys would see him,” because in Scotland it was thought beneath a man’s dignity to “help the women-folk.” It was the proud boast of his mother that in his sweeping, “he even swept under the door-mat.” He loved to climb the hills of beautiful Scotland, gathering wildflowers, curious stones, and mineral specimens. One day he climbed the highest tower in the ruins of Bothwell Castle and carved his name above those of the other boys. When he was ten he was sent to work as a piecer in a cotton-factory. With a part of his first week’s wages he purchased a Latin grammar. Although working from six in the morning until eight at night, he attended night-school from eight to ten, learning Latin and the sciences. At the age of sixteen he was familiar with Virgil and Horace and other classical authors. In his thirst for knowledge he placed his book on the spinning-jenny where he could read it as he walked back and forth at his work. When he was nineteen he gave up his work in the winter months to attend Glasgow University, where he studied Greek, medicine, and theology. He became deeply interested in missionary work and desired to go to China, but Dr. Robert Moffat persuaded him to go to Africa by telling him that “on a clear morning could be seen the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary had ever been.” So, in December, 1840, he began the long, five-months’ trip to the far-off African coast, studying the stars and taking observations by them, which experience was of great value to him later when in Africa he was deserted by his guides and had to blaze his own trail. He traveled inland, first learning the language and then preaching, healing, and teaching. In the forest one day he shot at a lion which sprang upon him, caught him by the shoulder, shook him as a terrier dog does a rat, crushed his arm, and would have ended his life at once if one of the natives had not appeared and quickly shot the lion dead. In 1844 David Livingstone married the daughter of Doctor Moffat. He went back to Scotland several times, where he wrote many books, one of which made him rich; but he used his wealth in further work of discovery and the suppression of the slave-trade. In 1863 he set out on his long search for the source of the Nile, and for seven long years amid sufferings, massacres, atrocities, disappointments, he traveled through the jungles of the black continent, until one day, in 1871, Henry M. Stanley, sent out by the New York Herald, appeared, “almost as an angel from heaven.” Stanley, who lived with him in the same house, boat, and tent for four months, said, “I never found a fault in him.” Stanley urged him to return, but Livingstone felt his task was unfinished, and so plunged again into the work, writing to the New York Herald: “All I can add in my loneliness is, may heaven’s rich blessing come down on every one, American, English, or Turk, who will help to heal the open sore of the world”—meaning the awful slave-traffic. Not long after, an attack of pneumonia made him so weak that he had to be carried to a hut, where his servants left him for the night. About four o’clock in the morning the boy who lay at the door keeping watch called in alarm. By the light of the candle still burning they saw him upon his knees by his bedside, as if in prayer. Then they knew that he had gone on his last journey, and without a single attendant. Lovingly his devoted servants embalmed his body and sent it to England to be buried in Westminster Abbey with the great of the earth. But his heart they buried by Lake Banguilo, in the land for whose people he had toiled so long, and for whom he gave up his life. On April 18, 1874, the great missionary-explorer was laid in his grave in Westminster Abbey, with sorrow and yet with rejoicing, for they knew well that his life had not been lived in vain.