 | A plaque of David LivingstoneDescription: Livingstone was a curious combination of missionary, doctor, explorer, scientist and anti-slavery activist. He spent 30 years in Africa, exploring almost a third of the continent, from its southern tip almost to the equator. Livingstone received a gold medal from the London Royal Geographical for being the first to cross the entire African Continent from west to east. He was the first white man to see Victoria Falls and though he never discovered the source of the Nile, one of his goals, he eliminated some possibilities and thereby helped direct the efforts of others.
|  | David Livingstone 1Description: It was the mighty Zambezi which led missionary Dr. David Livingstone on his greatest and final adventure. In search of a means to access the interior, Livingstone tagged the Zambezi "God's highway" to the Indian Ocean and set off down the river, discovering the great cataract native Africans called Mosi-o-Tunya, "the smoke that thunders." Livingstone christened the great waterfall Victoria Falls after his queen. Today, the great chasm has lost none of it's allure, still considered one of the great natural wonders of the world.
|  | David Livingstone 2Description: Dr. David Livingstone (1813-1873), Scottish doctor and missionary, considered one of the most important European explorers of Africa, also pioneering the abolition of the slave trade. Livingstone was born in Blantyre. After completing his medical course in 1840, Livingstone was ordained and sent as a medical missionary to South Africa. In 1841 he reached Kuruman, a settlement founded by Scottish missionary Robert Moffat in Bechuanaland (now Botswana). In 1849 Livingstone crossed the Kalahari Desert and became the first European to discover Lake Ngami. On another expedition (1852-1856), he followed the Zambezi River to its mouth in the Indian Ocean, thereby becoming the first European to discover Victoria Falls.
|  | David Livingstone 3Description: Mrs. J.H. Worchester writes in her book, David Livingstone: First To Cross Africa With The Gospel, that "as a missionary explorer, [Livingstone] stood alone, traveling 29,000 miles in Africa, adding to the known portion of the globe about a million square miles, discovering lakes N'gami, Shirwa, Nyassa, Morero and Bangweolo, the upper Zambesi and many other rivers, and the wonderful Victoria Falls. He was also the first European to traverse the entire length of Lake Tanganyika, and to travel over the vast water-shed near Lake Bangweolo, and through no fault of his own, he only just missed the information that would have set at rest his conjectures as to the Nile's sources."
|  | David Livingstone 4Description: "I am a missionary, heart and soul," wrote Livingstone. "God had an only Son, and He was a missionary and a physician. A poor, poor imitation of Him I am, or wish to be." In this service I hope to live; in it I wish to die." No other person has done more to further mission efforts than David Livingstone. He also raised in Europe so powerful a feeling against the slave trade that through him slavery may be considered as having received its death blow.
|  | David Livingstone 5Description: It is the word of a gentleman of the most strict and sacred honour, so there's an end of it!' says Livingstone to himself as he places his finger for the thousandth time on the text on which he stakes his life. He is surrounded by hostile and infuriated savages. During the sixteen years that he has spent in Africa, he has never before seemed in such imminent peril. Death stares him in the face. He thinks sadly of his life-work scarcely begun. For the first time in his experience he is tempted to steal away under cover of the darkness and to seek safety in flight. He prays! 'Leave me not, forsake me not!' he cries.
|  | David Livingstone 6Description: When, I wonder, did David Livingstone first make that text his own? I do not know. It must have been very early. He used to say that he never had any difficulty in carrying with him his father's portrait because, in 'The Cottar's Saturday Night,' Robert Burns had painted it for him. Down to the last morning that he spent in his old home at Blantyre, the household joined in family worship. It was still dark when they knelt down that bleak November morning. They are up at five. The mother makes the coffee: the father prepares to walk with his boy to Glasgow; and David himself leads the household to the Throne of Grace. The thought embedded in his text is uppermost in his mind. He is leaving those who are dearer to him than life itself; yet there is One on whose Presence he can still rely. 'Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.' And so, in selecting the passage to be read by lamplight in the little kitchen on this memorable morning, David selects the Psalm that, more clearly than any other, promises him, on every sea and on every shore, the Presence of his Lord. 'The LORD is thy keeper: the LORD is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. The LORD shall preserve thee from all evil: He shall preserve thy soul. The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.'
|  | David Livingstone 7Description: After prayers comes the anguish of farewell. But the ordeal is softened for them all by the thought that has been suggested by David's reading and by David's prayer. In the grey light of that wintry morning, father and son set out on their long and cheerless tramp. I remember, years ago, standing on the Broomielaw, on the spot that witnessed their parting. I could picture the elder man turning sadly back towards his Lanarkshire home, whilst David hurried off to make his final preparations for sailing. But, deeper than their sorrow, there is in each of their hearts a song -- the song of the Psalm they have read together in the kitchen -- the song of the Presence -- the song of the text!
|  | David Livingstone 8Description: If ever a man needed a comrade, David Livingstone did. Apart from that divine companionship, his is the most lonely life in history. It is doubtless good for the world that most men are content to marry and settle down, to weave about themselves the web of domestic felicity, to face each day the task that lies nearest to them, and to work out their destiny without worrying about the remote and the unexplored. But it is equally good for the world that there are a few adventurous spirits in every age who feel themselves taunted and challenged and dared by the mystery of the great unknown. As long as there is a pole undiscovered, a sea uncharted, a forest untracked or a desert uncrossed, they are restless and ill at ease. It is the most sublime form that curiosity assumes. From the moment of his landing on African soil, Livingstone is haunted, night and day, by the visions that beckon and the voices that call from out of the undiscovered. For his poor wife's sake he tries hard, and tries repeatedly, to settle down to the life of an ordinary mission station. But it is impossible.
|  | David Livingstone 9Description: The lure of the wilds fascinates him. He sees, away on the horizon, the smoke of a thousand native settlements in which no white man has ever been seen. It is more than he can bear. He goes to some of them and beholds, on arrival, the smoke of yet other settlements still further away. And so he wanders further and further from his starting point; and builds home after home, only to desert each home as soon as it is built! The tales that the natives tell him of vast inland seas and of wild tumultuous waters tantalise him beyond endurance. The instincts of the hydrographer tingle within him. He sees the three great rivers -- the Nile, the Congo and the Zambesi -- emptying themselves into three separate oceans, and he convinces himself that the man who can solve the riddle of their sources will have opened up a continent to the commerce and civilisation of the world.
|  | David Livingstone in AfricaDescription: 'It is His word of honour!' says Livingstone; and, nothing if not practical, he straightway proceeds to act upon it. 'If He be with me, I can do anything, anything, anything!' It is the echo of another apostolic boast: 'I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me!' In that unwavering confidence, and with an audacity that is the best evidence of his faith, Livingstone draws up for himself a programme so colossal that it would still have seemed large had it been the project of a million men. 'It is His word of honour!' he reasons; 'and if He will indeed be with me, even unto the end, He and I can accomplish what a million men, unattended by the Divine Companion, would tremble to attempt.' And so he draws up with a calm hand and a fearless heart that prodigious programme from which he never for a moment swerved, and which, when all was over, was inscribed upon his tomb in Westminster Abbey.
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