Doctor Livingstone, I presume?
In 1869, New York Herald reporter Henry Morton Stanley was instructed to travel to Africa for the opening of the Suez Canal and to locate David Livingstone, the British missionary doctor who had been missing since 1866. Livingstone’s final expedition to central Africa had been undertaken to bring Christianity to the natives, to help eradicate the slave trade and to locate the source of the Nile. Stanley set out for the interior on March 21, 1871, with a caravan of much-needed medicine. On November 10 he reached Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika where he greeted the ailing Livingstone with the famous line, ‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume?’ The two explored Lake Tanganyika, but did not find the source of the Nile. When Stanley left on March 14, 1872, he begged the doctor to return to England with him, but Livingstone refused. He died in May 1873. Stanley returned to Africa a year later, the first of many subsequent African explorations.
Image: Library of Congress
