Chapter Eighteen.
Travels of Dr Livingstone—first expedition.
His parentage and early life—Sets out for Africa as a missionary from the London Missionary Society—Arrives at Cape Town—Lepelole—Mabotsa—Sechele—Dr Livingstone finds him at Kolobeng—A missionary’s necessary accomplishments—The Kalahara Desert described—Starting—The banks of the Zouga—Lake Ngami—Return to Kolobeng—Return to Lake Ngami—Fever—Set out again and reach the Chobe—Sebituane—Banks of the Zambesi—Returns to Kolobeng—Arrives at Cape Town, where his wife and children embark for England—Reaches Kuruman—The Dutch Boers—Linyanti—Received by the Makololo—Fever.
David Livingstone comes of a race whose chief pride was that they were honest men. His great grandfather fell at the battle of Culloden. His grandfather was a small farmer in Ulva, one of the western islands of Scotland. Here his father was born, but his grandfather after that event migrated to a large cotton factory at the Blantyre Works, situated on the Clyde, above Glasgow. His uncles all entered His Majesty’s service either as soldiers or sailors, but his father remained at home, and his mother, being a thrifty housewife, in order to make the two ends meet, sent her son David, at the age of ten, to the factory as a piecer.
He was fond of study, and with part of his first week’s wages he purchased “Ruddiman’s Rudiments of Latin,” and for many years afterwards studied that language at an evening school after his work was done. He also, when promoted at the age of nineteen to cotton-spinning, took his books to the factory, and read by placing one of them on a portion of the spinning-jenny, so that he could catch sentence after sentence as he passed at his work. He was well paid, however, and having determined to prepare himself for becoming a medical missionary in China, was enabled, by working with his hands in summer, to support himself while attending medical and Greek classes in Glasgow in winter, as also the divinity lectures of Dr Wardlow. He was thus able to pass the required examinations, and was at length admitted a licentiate of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons.
The war in China preventing him from proceeding thither, he offered himself as a missionary to the London Missionary Society, and embarked for Africa in 1840.
After reaching Cape Town, he went round to Algoa Bay, whence he proceeded about eight hundred miles into the interior to Kuruman, the missionary station of the Reverend R. Moffat, whose daughter he afterwards married.
Thence he went to Lepelole, where, to gain a knowledge of the language and habits of the inhabitants, the Bakwains, he cut himself off from European society for six months. The Bakwains, however, being driven by another tribe from their country, he was unable, as he had intended, to form a station at that place.
He was more successful at Mabotsa, also inhabited by the Bakwains, to which place he removed in 1843. It was here, while in chase of a lion, that he nearly lost his life. He had fired both the barrels of his gun, and was re-loading, when the lion, though desperately wounded, sprang upon him, catching his shoulder, both man and beast coming to the ground together. Growling horribly, the fierce brute shook the doctor as a terrier dog does a rat. The shock produced a stupor similar to that which seems to be felt by a mouse after the first shake of a cat. The gun of his companion, a native
