He chased the Nile to silence the East African slave trade
Scottish physician and Congregationalist David Livingstone (1813–1873), a mill boy turned London Missionary Society pioneer, became a Victorian icon through his African journeys. He hunted the Nile’s sources believing the fame would give him the power to choke the East African Arab–Swahili slave trade.
He was born on 19 March 1813 in a workers’ tenement beside a cotton mill on the Clyde at Blantyre, the second of Neil and Agnes Livingstone’s seven children. From ten until twenty-six he worked at the Monteith mill, first joining broken threads as a piecer and later spinning, on shifts that ran from six in the morning to eight at night. A handful of mill children still managed the village school afterwards, and he was one of them. His father, a teetotal tea pedlar who handed out religious tracts, distrusted science, yet the boy hunted fossils and plants in local limestone quarries.
At fifteen he quit the Church of Scotland and joined a Congregational chapel, drawn by Ralph Wardlaw’s rejection of predestination. At twenty-one a pamphlet relaying Karl Gützlaff’s appeal for medically trained missionaries to China changed his course. A Catholic neighbour, Daniel Gallagher, coached him in Latin for medical school, and he kept paying his way with mill work. The London Missionary Society, which welcomed Congregationalists, took him on probation in 1838; he studied further at Charing Cross and qualified in Glasgow on 16 November 1840.
The First Opium War closed China to him. Instead, at a London boarding house he kept questioning the visiting missionary Robert Moffat about Africa, and Moffat’s talk of pushing north beyond Bechuanaland won him over. He sailed on 17 November 1840, learning Dutch and Tswana and taking navigation lessons from the captain, and landed at Simon’s Bay on 15 March 1841. An ox-cart trek brought him to Moffat’s Kuruman mission, and by 1843 he was helping build a new station at Mabotsa.
He later married Moffat’s daughter Mary. Livingstone told a friend the Nile springs mattered only because solving that riddle would give him a voice powerful enough to fight slavery.
Source: David Livingstone
