DAVID LIVINGSTONE
BENJAMIN BRAWLEY
When Livingstone began his work of exploration in 1849, practically all of Africa between the Sahara and the Dutch settlements in the extreme South was unknown territory. By the time of his death in 1873 he had brought this entire region within the view of civilization. On his first journey, or series of journeys (1849-1856,) starting from Cape Town, he made his way northward for a thousand miles to Lake Ngami; then pushing on to Linyanti, he undertook one of the most perilous excursions of his entire career, his objective for more than a thousand miles being Loanda on the West Coast, which point he reached after six months in the wilderness.
Coming back to Linyanti, he turned his face eastward, discovered Victoria Falls on the Zambesi, and finally arrived at Cuilimane on the coast. On his second series of journeys (1858-1864) he explored the Zambesi, the Shire, and the Rovuma rivers in the East, and discovered Lake Nyasa. On his final expedition (1866-1873), in hunting for the upper courses of the Nile, he discovered Lakes Tanganyika, Mweru, and Bangweolo, and the Lualaba River. His achievement as an explorer was as distinct as it was unparalleled. His work as a missionary and his worth as a man it is not quite so easy to express concretely; but in these capacities he was no less distinguished and his accomplishment no less signal.
There had been missionaries, and great ones, in Africa before Livingstone. The difference between Livingstone and consecrated men was not so much in devotion as in the conception of the task. He himself felt that a missionary in the Africa of his day was to be more than a mere preacher of the word—that he would have also to be a Christian statesman, and even a director of exploration and commerce if need be. This was his title to greatness; to him "the end of the geographical feat was only the beginning of the enterprise." Knowing, however, that many honest persons did not sympathize with him in this conception of his mission, after 1856 he declined longer to accept salary from the missionary society that originally sent him out, working afterwards under the patronage of the British Government and the Royal Geographical Society.
His sympathy and his courtesy were unfailing, even when he himself was placed in the greatest danger. Said Henry Drummond of him: "Wherever David Livingstone's footsteps are crossed in Africa the fragrance of his memory seems to remain." On one occasion a hunter was impaled on the horn of a rhinoceros, and a messenger ran eight miles for the physician. Although he himself had been wounded for life by a lion and his friends insisted that he should not ride at night through a wood infested with wild beasts, Livingstone insisted on his Christian duty to go, only to find that the man had died and to have to retrace his footsteps.
Again and again his party would have been destroyed by some savage chieftain if it had not been for his own unbounded tact and courage. To the devoted men who helped him he gave the assurance that he would die before he would permit them to be taken; and after his death at Chitambo's village Susi and Chuma journeyed for nine months and over eight hundred miles of dangerous country to take his body to the coast.
Livingstone was a man of tremendous faith, in his mission, in his country, in humanity, in God. He wrote on one occasion: "This age presents one great fact in the Providence of God; missions are sent forth to all quarters of the world,—missions not of one section of the Church, but from all sections, and from nearly all Christian nations. It seems very unfair to judge of the success of these by the number of the conversions that have followed. These are rather proofs of the missions being of the right sort. The fact which ought to stimulate us above all others is, not that we have contributed to the conversion of a few souls, however valuable these may be, but that we are diffusing a knowledge of Christianity throughout the world. Future missionaries will see conversions follow every sermon. We prepare the way for them. We work for a glorious future which we are not destined to see—the golden age which has not been, but will yet be. We are only morning-stars shining in the dark, but the glorious morn will break, the good time coming yet. For this time we work; may God accept our imperfect service."
Of such quality was David Livingstone—Missionary, Explorer, Philanthropist. "For thirty years his life was spent in an unwearied effort to evangelize the native races, to explore the undiscovered secrets, and abolish the desolating slave trade of Central Africa." To what extent after sixty years have we advanced toward his ideals? With what justice are we the inheritors of his renown?