Dr Livingstone, I presume
David Livingstone was born on 19 March 1813 in a one-room tenement in Blantyre, Lanarkshire, to a family of modest means. He started working in a cotton mill at the age of ten, attending evening classes after twelve-hour shifts. Through extraordinary determination, he educated himself, studied medicine at the University of Glasgow, and became a missionary with the London Missionary Society.
Livingstone spent over 30 years in Africa, exploring vast regions of the interior that were unknown to Europeans. He was the first European to see Victoria Falls (which he named after Queen Victoria), traced the course of the Zambezi River, and mapped large portions of central and southern Africa. His three great expeditions — across the Kalahari, along the Zambezi, and through central Africa searching for the source of the Nile — made him the most famous explorer of the Victorian age.
But Livingstone was far more than an explorer. He was a passionate opponent of the slave trade, and his detailed accounts of the horrors of slavery in East Africa galvanised the abolitionist movement in Britain. His reports were instrumental in pressuring the British government to act against Arab and Portuguese slave traders. He believed that commerce and Christianity together could end slavery — a vision that, whatever its colonial complications, was driven by genuine moral conviction.
Livingstone died in 1873 at Chitambo in present-day Zambia. His African companions carried his body 1,500 miles to the coast — a journey that took nine months. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. The David Livingstone Birthplace Museum in Blantyre tells his story and remains one of Scotland's most significant biographical museums.