'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'
This is surely one of the most famous in all history. After of trekking through the dangerous and inhospitable heart of Africa, the ace reporter Henry Morton Stanley, British-born but working for an American newspaper, had finally tracked down the explorer David Livingstone, of whom nothing had been heard for more than five years.
Livingstone was already internationally famous. A doctor and missionary, he had devoted his life to converting the people of Africa to Christianity and at the same time to stamping out what was, for him, the great evil of the age the slave trade. Stanley, on the other hand, was devoted solely to his own career and his discovery of Livingstone was to crown all his and project him to the super-star status that he craved.
Considering their entirely different for risking their through some of the most dangerous on earth, they got on surprisingly well with each other when they met. Perhaps the explanation for this mutual friendliness and respect lies more in their than in the and that they shared, so to understand this it's necessary to explore their a bit and go right back to their early days.
David Livingstone was born on March, at Blantyre near Glasgow in Scotland. He grew up in extreme poverty, living with his mother and father and four and in a tiny, one room tenement flat. There's no doubt that they were sustained in these wretched by their devout Christianity. At the age of ten David was sent to work in a cotton factory as a 'piecer' cutting out fabric, from six in the morning until eight o'clock at night. While he worked he would prop a Latin or Greek dictionary above his bench and school himself through the long, hard . After work he attended evening until ten pm and, on his rare off, he would roam the countryside collecting , and . This fascination with the natural world remained with him and he continued to admire and collect for the rest of his life.
Eventually he did so well at school that he was accepted into a local college to study medicine, though he still had to work in the cotton mill through the and could only study full time in the winter. At the age of he decided to combine his medical with his other passion, his religious faith. He applied to the London Missionary Society, who accepted him as a trainee medical missionary. When he had completed his training his original plan was to go to China, but the continuing war between the Chinese and the British at this time made it impossible. Quite by chance he happened to meet Robert Moffat, who ran a successful mission station in Southern Africa, and who agreed that new were needed to spread the faith further inland. Livingstone immediately applied to go and the London Missionary Society agreed to send him. In November, he qualified as a doctor and went home to Glasgow to accept his degree. He was able to spend only one night with his family before setting off on a trip from which he might never return. On December, in London, he was ordained a priest and he embarked on the sailing ship George for Port Elizabeth on the Cape of Good Hope. On the voyage, the Captain taught him how to use a quadrant to fix his position by the , a skill that was to prove absolutely essential on his to come.
When he arrived at Port Elizabeth he set off by ox-cart for Robert Moffat's mission station at Kuruman, which lay just south of the Kalahari desert in modern-day Botswana. This was a journey of seven hundred miles across mostly wild and dangerous country, teeming with , , , , , and all of venomous . This first journey through Africa was, said Livingstone, 'so pleasant I never tired of it'. But when he reached Kuruman he was disappointed. The had made very few among the African and seemed content to stay there in the relative comfort of their settlement. Livingstone yearned to travel into the unknown wilderness beyond and decided to set up his own mission station, confident of more success than the complacent whom he had met so far.
For the next two he travelled by ox-cart, sometimes with only one or two , and covered more than fourteen hundred . Wherever he went he preached Christianity to the Africans, though with little success. Far more respected was his reputation as a doctor. Sometimes he was literally besieged by of wherever he stopped, some of whom had travelled great on foot for treatment. To help him deal with his he studied hard, and learned to speak a number of African languages. He made detailed and of everything he saw around him people, , and . Most important of all, wherever he went he took on the and his hand-sketched and were the first accurate of of square of central Africa.