Meanwhile a letter was received from Earl Russell recalling the
expedition by the end of the year. In the end of April 1864
Livingstone reached Zanzibar in the “Lady Nyassa,” and on
the 23rd of July Livingstone arrived in England. He was
naturally disappointed with the comparative failure of this
expedition. Still the geographical results, though not in extent
to be compared to those of his first and his final expeditions,
were of high importance, as were those in various departments
of science, and he had unknowingly laid the foundations of the
British protectorate of Nyasaland. Details will be found in his
Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and its Tributaries,
published in 1865.
By Sir Roderick Murchison and his other staunch friends Livingstone was as warmly welcomed as ever. When Murchison proposed to him that he should go out again, although he seems to have had a desire to spend the remainder of his days at home, the prospect was too tempting to be rejected. He was appointed British consul to Central Africa without a salary, and government contributed only £500 to the expedition. The chief help came from private friends. During the latter part of the expedition government granted him £1000, but that, when he learned of it, was devoted to his great undertaking. The Geographical Society contributed £500. The two main objects of the expedition were the suppression of slavery by means of civilizing influences, and the ascertainment of the watershed in the region between Nyasa and Tanganyika. At first Livingstone thought the Nile problem had been all but solved by Speke, Baker and Burton, but the idea grew upon him that the Nile sources must be sought farther south, and his last journey became in the end a forlorn hope in search of the “fountains” of Herodotus. Leaving England in the middle of August 1865, via Bombay, Livingstone arrived at Zanzibar on the 28th of January 1866. He was landed at the mouth of the Rovuma on the 22nd of March, and started for the interior on the 4th of April. His company consisted of thirteen sepoys, ten Johanna men, nine African boys from Nasik school, Bombay, and four boys from the Shiré region, besides camels, buffaloes, mules and donkeys. This imposing outfit soon melted away to four or five boys. Rounding the south end of Lake Nyasa, Livingstone struck in a north-north-west direction for the south end of Lake Tanganyika, over country much of which had not previously been explored. The Loangwa was crossed on the 15th of December 1866. On Christmas day Livingstone lost his four goats, a loss which he felt very keenly, and the medicine chest was stolen in January 1867. Fever came upon him, and for a time was his almost constant companion; this, with other serious ailments which subsequently attacked him, and which he had no medicine to counteract, told on even his iron frame. The Chambezi was crossed on the 28th of January, and the south end of Tanganyika reached on the 31st of March. Here, much to his vexation, he got into the company of Arab slave dealers (among them being Tippoo-Tib) by whom his movements were hampered; but he succeeded in reaching Lake Mweru (Nov. 1867). After visiting Lake Mofwa and the Lualaba, which he believed was the upper part of the Nile, he, on the 18th of July 1868, discovered Lake Bangweulu. Proceeding up the west coast of Tanganyika, he reached Ujiji on the 14th of March 1869, “a ruckle of bones.” Livingstone recrossed Tanganyika in July, and passed through the country of the Manyema, but baffled partly by the natives, partly by the slave hunters, and partly by his long illnesses it was not till the 29th of March 1871 that he succeeded in reaching the Lualaba, at the town of Nyangwe, where he stayed four months, vainly trying to get a canoe to take him across. It was here that a party of Arab slavers, without warning or provocation, assembled one day when the market was busiest and commenced shooting the women, hundreds being killed or drowned in trying to escape. Livingstone had “the impression that he was in hell,” but was helpless, though his “first impulse was to pistol the murderers.” The account of this scene which he sent home roused indignation in England to such a degree as to lead to determined and to a considerable extent successful efforts to get the sultan of Zanzibar to suppress the trade. In sickened disgust the weary traveller made his way back to Ujiji, which he reached on the 13th of October. Five days after his arrival in Ujiji he was inspired with new life by the timely arrival of H. M. Stanley, the richly laden almoner of Mr Gordon Bennett, of the New York Herald. With Stanley Livingstone explored the north end of Tanganyika, and proved conclusively that the Rusizi runs into and not out of it. In the end of the year the two started eastward for Unyamwezi, where Stanley provided Livingstone with an ample supply of goods, and bade him farewell. Stanley left on the 15th of March 1872, and after Livingstone had waited wearily in Unyamwezi for five months, a troop of fifty-seven men and boys arrived, good and faithful fellows on the whole, selected by Stanley himself. Thus attended, he started on the 15th of August for Lake Bangweulu, proceeding along the east side of Tanganyika. His old enemy dysentery soon found him out. In January 1873 the party got among the endless spongy jungle on the east of Lake Bangweulu, Livingstone’s object being to go round by the south and away west to find the “fountains.” The doctor got worse and worse, and in the middle of April he had unwillingly to submit to be carried in a rude litter. On the 29th of April Chitambo’s village on the Lulimala, in Ilala, on the south shore of the lake, was reached. The last entry in the journal is on the 27th of April: “Knocked up quite, and remain—recover—sent to buy milch goats. We are on the banks of the Molilamo.” On the 30th of April he with difficulty wound up his watch, and early on the morning of the 1st of May the boys found “the great master,” as they called him, kneeling by the side of his bed, dead. His faithful men preserved the body in the sun as well as they could, and, wrapping it carefully up, carried it and all his papers, instruments and other things across Africa to Zanzibar. It was borne to England with all honour, and on the 18th of April 1874, was deposited in Westminster Abbey. His faithfully kept journals during these seven years’ wanderings were published under the title of the Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa, in 1874, edited by his old friend the Rev. Horace Waller. In Old Chitambo’s the time and place of his death are commemorated by a permanent monument, which replaced in 1902 the tree on which his native followers had recorded the event.
In spite of his sufferings and the many compulsory delays, Livingstone’s discoveries during these last years were both extensive and of prime importance as leading to a solution of African hydrography. No single African explorer has ever done so much for African geography as Livingstone during his thirty years’ work. His travels covered one-third of the continent, extending from the Cape to near the equator, and from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Livingstone was no hurried traveller; he did his journeying leisurely, carefully observing and recording all that was worthy of note, with rare geographical instinct and the eye of a trained scientific observer, studying the ways of the people, eating their food, living in their huts, and sympathizing with their joys and sorrows. In all the countries through which he travelled his memory is cherished by the native tribes who, almost without exception, treated Livingstone as a superior being; his treatment of them was always tender, gentle and gentlemanly. By the Arab slavers whom he opposed he was also greatly admired, and was by them styled “the very great doctor.” “In the annals of exploration of the Dark Continent,” wrote Stanley many years after the death of the missionary explorer, “we look in vain among other nationalities for a name such as Livingstone’s. He stands pre-eminent above all; he unites in himself all the best qualities of other explorers. . . . Britain . . . excelled herself even when she produced the strong and perseverant Scotchman, Livingstone.” But the direct gains to geography and science are perhaps not the greatest results of Livingstone’s journeys. His example and his death acted like an inspiration, filling Africa with an army of explorers and missionaries, and raising in Europe so powerful a feeling against the slave trade that through him it may be considered as having received its deathblow. Personally Livingstone was a pure and tender-hearted man, full of humanity and sympathy, simple-minded as a child.
