His name was Dr. David Livingstone, and his story doesn't involve beetles getting stuck in his ear, but it does involve some disease, exploration, and Christianity.
In part two of our mini-series, we are going to talk about the adventures of Dr. David Livingstone and his quest to find the origin of the Nile.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part two of our mini-series on the quest to find the true origin of the river Nile.
[00:00:28] In this episode, we will be following the adventures of another man, or perhaps the “mission” of another man is a better way of putting it.
[00:00:37] His name was Dr David Livingstone, and his story doesn’t involve beetles getting stuck in his ear, but it does involve some disease, slavery, exploration, Christianity, and, of course, the ongoing search for the origin of the river Nile.
[00:00:54] And a quick admin point: just in case you haven’t listened to it yet, I’d highly recommend listening to part one before this episode, as we’ll be picking up the story from then, and everything will make a lot more sense if you’ve listened to part one.
[00:01:11] OK then, Dr Livingstone and the quest to find the origin of the Nile
[00:01:17] If you remember from our last episode, we had learned about one of the most intense rivalries in British exploration, that between Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke.
[00:01:30] Our story ended as the pair were scheduled to debate the true origin of the White Nile, with Burton proposing that it was Lake Tanganyika and Speke claiming it was Lake Victoria.
[00:01:45] The debate never happened, as Speke was found dead by his own shotgun the afternoon before.
[00:01:52] And the public was none the wiser, the answer to the question of the origin of The Nile was still unsolved.
[00:02:01] Just two years later, another British explorer decided to take his shot.
[00:02:08] But this man was very different from Burton and Speke.
[00:02:12] He was not an aristocrat, not a soldier, and he wasn’t even English.
[00:02:18] He was a Scottish doctor from a working-class background called David Livingstone.
[00:02:25] He had been in Africa for most of his adult life, arriving in the continent in 1841 at the age of 28.
[00:02:34] He had gone to Africa not for personal gain or out of a sense of adventure, but for two interlinked reasons.
[00:02:43] He went as a Christian missionary, to convert people to the world of God.
[00:02:49] The reason for this was partially for “traditional” missionary reasons, to spread the word of Christianity.
[00:02:56] But he was also a fervent believer in the horrors of slavery, referring to it as “the curse of Africa”.
[00:03:06] He first travelled to Africa because he believed that spreading the word of God and converting people to Christianity would be the most effective thing he could do to stop the slave trade.
[00:03:20] Now, he was actually a terrible missionary, and there is only evidence of one person that he personally converted, and that person went on to convert many more people than Livingstone did.
[00:03:33] But he was an excellent explorer, and made a series of expeditions northwards from South Africa.
[00:03:42] This exploration turned out to be not only exploration for exploration’s sake; there was an ulterior motive for doing it.
[00:03:51] Livingstone realised that the interior of southern Africa was connected by a large variety of rivers.
[00:04:01] He hypothesised that if he could map these rivers, and show Europeans how they could sail up these rivers and trade with African people, this would be an important step towards accomplishing Livingstone’s main goal: to stop the slave trade.
[00:04:19] And to clarify, by the time Livingstone had arrived in Africa, the Atlantic slave trade was all but over. The United States had made it illegal to import slaves in 1808.
[00:04:32] The slave trade Livingstone was focussed on was the Arab slave trade, where African people were captured or sold into slavery to Arab traders, who would then transport them typically to India or the Middle East.
[00:04:48] Now, why is this relevant in the context of Livingstone?
[00:04:52] Well, the African people who were sold into slavery were often sold by other Africans.
[00:04:59] Livingstone saw that much of the African continent that he travelled to was very rich in natural resources, there were plenty of things that could be traded - woods, ivory, and so on.
[00:05:12] But what was traded were slaves, because the Arab slave traders were the main group of foreigners who would travel any real distance from the coast, and they only really wanted one thing: slaves.
[00:05:27] So, Livingstone thought that the most important thing he could do to stop the slave trade was to open up other forms of trade.
[00:05:37] Indeed, his motto, and the words that are etched onto a statue of him at the Victoria Falls, are "Christianity, Commerce and Civilization"
[00:05:50] So, much of his early time in Africa was spent exploring African rivers.
[00:05:56] He became the first European to go all the way up and down the Zambezi river, Africa’s fourth longest river, and the one that runs through modern Zambia, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
[00:06:10] On his return to the UK, in 1856, he found that he was something of a celebrity.
[00:06:18] He was made a fellow of the Royal Society, granted an audience with Queen Victoria, and was essentially the country’s most famous explorer, and the foremost expert on all things Africa.
[00:06:33] After finding that his fame meant it was easy to raise funds for another expedition, he returned to Africa a couple of years later.
[00:06:41] But it seems that the fame had somewhat got to his head.
[00:06:46] He started to believe that he was on some form of divine mission, led by God, and would not listen to anyone else’s advice.
[00:06:56] His team members on this second expedition reported that he was an ineffective leader, he was abandoned by many of his men, this expedition was a failure, and Livingstone’s credibility took a bit of a dent.
[00:07:11] But still, his “mission”, in the grand sense, was far from complete.
[00:07:17] He had barely converted anyone, and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were still being sold into slavery every year.
[00:07:27] Livingstone needed to go back; he longed to return to Africa. But after the failure of his previous mission, he didn’t find that people were so eager to cough up, to finance, another similar expedition.
[00:07:42] He needed to find a popular cause for which he could raise money, something that he knew he could get financial support for.
[00:07:52] The answer was right in front of his eyes: the ongoing unsolved question of the true origin of the Nile.
[00:08:01] Now, initially at least, Livingstone was pretty uninterested in the true source of the Nile, but he believed that if he could “solve” this mystery, then it would help him rebuild his credibility, and further his quest to end the East African slave trade.
[00:08:20] He managed to raise enough money, £2,000, which is around €250,000 in today’s money.
[00:08:29] Given the size of the voyage ahead of him, it was a very modest amount, but it was enough to get started.
[00:08:37] He set out in 1866 on a mission that was supposed to be two years long.
[00:08:45] Like Burton and Speke before him, he set off from Zanzibar with a team of mainly freed slaves and servants.
[00:08:53] And the journey would take him through modern Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
[00:09:03] His journey was, in many ways, even more arduous than his predecessors.
[00:09:08] He was robbed multiple times and within a few months practically all his supplies were gone.
[00:09:16] He got malaria a total of 26 times.
[00:09:20] He fell incredibly ill, and with his medicines gone, it looked like he would be lucky even to live two years, let alone get home alive.
[00:09:31] He was forced to seek help from the very people he despised and had fought against, the Arab slave traders. In what must have been a difficult and confusing experience, his life was saved by slave traders, he lived with the slave traders, and developed a friendly relationship with them.
[00:09:53] On the one hand, these slave traders looked after him, gave him medicine, fed him, and ultimately saved his life.
[00:10:03] On the other hand, he knew exactly what they were, merchants of human flesh.
[00:10:10] And in one horrific incident, he received a shocking reminder of the true character of the men who had looked after him, when he saw slave traders massacring a group of 400 Africans, mainly women, right in front of him.
[00:10:26] In fact, this incident was so brutal that it even surpassed Livingstone’s expectations about what the slave traders were capable of.
[00:10:36] He had seen the inhumanity of the slave trade upfront for 30 years, but the fact that literally hundreds of people could be murdered in cold blood, this would alter his perception of the deep injustice of the slave trade forever.
[00:10:53] This was in 1871, and by this time his location was completely unknown to the outside world.
[00:11:03] Indeed, shortly after he had started his journey, several of his assistants had deserted him, returned to Zanzibar and told everyone that he was dead.
[00:11:15] He had written letters home, or at least, sent letters to Zanzibar, but only one out of 44 made it there. In one that was only recently made public, he wrote to an anti-slavery campaigner in Zanzibar saying "I am terribly knocked up but this is for your own eye only, doubtful if I live to see you again."
[00:11:39] Now, as a quick language point, you might have heard “knocked up” being used to mean pregnant. Obviously that’s not what it means here; it’s a slightly old expression, but it means exhausted, very tired.
[00:11:54] And in the case of Livingstone, it is something of a euphemism. By this time, he was at death’s door. He had had cholera, pneumonia, and as you heard, he had malaria 26 times, as well as a whole host of other tropical diseases, and all of his money, food and supplies had run out.
[00:12:17] He had even run out of paper, so was keeping a diary by writing on an old copy of a British newspaper that he had cut up into 32 different “pages”.
[00:12:29] He had made some progress with the stated mission of the expedition, to find the true source of the river Nile. He had located several rivers and lakes, but realised that none of them solved the mystery of the river Nile.
[00:12:47] Nobody knew about this, of course. To the outside world, he was dead, or at least he had completely disappeared.
[00:12:56] And to underline, to remind you, he was a household name, he was famous, he was one of the world’s most famous explorers.
[00:13:05] His mission had been widely publicised, and he had completely disappeared.
[00:13:12] Then, an American newspaper, the New York Herald, decided to take on the challenge of finding him.
[00:13:20] Or rather, a Welsh-American journalist called Henry Morton Stanley had pitched the owner of the newspaper on the project, saying “let me go and look for him. I know the probability of me returning alive is slim, but if I can return with news of Livingstone, it will be the most amazing story”.
[00:13:41] The paper agreed, and in 1869 the then 26-year-old Stanley set off with the challenge of finding the famous Dr Livingstone.
[00:13:53] Now, this individual, the young Henry Morton Stanley, is a fascinating and complicated character, and he will be the focus of our next episode, but let me give you some background to the man, which might help you understand him in the context of Dr Livingstone.
[00:14:12] Stanley’s mother had him when she was only 18 years old, then abandoned him shortly after birth. He had been sent to live with relatives, but was then completely abandoned by his family and sent to a workhouse, a place for abandoned children.
[00:14:31] As you might imagine, this experience was horrific, he was forced to work from dawn to dusk, he was sexually abused, it was just terrible.
[00:14:42] When he was 18, he boarded a ship for America, seeking to reinvent himself in a country full of opportunities. He fought in the civil war, realised he had quite the talent for journalism, and carved out a path for himself as a freelance journalist.
[00:15:02] And when he was briefly in London, he read about the story of Dr David Livingstone, the world’s most famous explorer, lost in the heart of Africa, and he decided that he would make it his mission to find him.
[00:15:18] After all, he had had an awful life up to this point, he had literally been disowned by his family as a child, and he had nothing to lose; this was his big chance.
[00:15:31] Of course, he knew the dangers of the mission, and its low probability of success.
[00:15:37] Livingstone was probably dead.
[00:15:40] Even if he was alive, Stanley only had a rough idea of where Livingstone might be.
[00:15:46] And there were all the standard complications of an expedition into completely unknown territory: disease, getting lost, and of course finding people who were not best pleased that you have intruded on their land.
[00:16:01] But on another level, Livingstone was a white man from Scotland. If he was alive, he would be the only white man in hundreds of kilometres.
[00:16:11] Someone would know something about where he was.
[00:16:16] And Stanley would stop at nothing.
[00:16:20] Indeed, one of his diary entries read:
[00:16:23] “I have taken a solemn, enduring oath, an oath to be kept while the least hope of life remains in me, not to be tempted to break the resolution I have formed, never to give up the search, until I find Livingstone alive, or find his dead body....No living man, or living men, shall stop me, only death can prevent me. But death—not even this; I shall not die, I will not die, I cannot die!”
[00:16:52] On November 10th, 1871, Stanley arrived at the town of Ujiji on the banks of Lake Tanganyika and did indeed find a man who looked a little different from everyone else.
[00:17:07] He greeted him, so the legend goes at least, the way a Victorian gentleman might greet another at a fashionable social event, “Dr Livingstone, I presume?”
[00:17:19] He had presumed correctly, and finally Dr Livingstone had been located.
[00:17:26] But, if Stanley had thought that Livingstone would have been overjoyed to see him and have got on the first ship back to Britain, he was much mistaken.
[00:17:36] Livingstone still had work to do, and refused to leave.
[00:17:42] Surprisingly, perhaps, Dr Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley struck up a close bond and became good friends.
[00:17:52] Livingstone was 58 when the pair met, while Stanley was 30.
[00:17:58] Livingstone would write to friends saying that Stanley was like a son to him, and Stanley would write that the doctor nursed him like a father when he was ill.
[00:18:11] The pair parted ways, with Stanley returning to the United States, and Livingstone refusing to leave Africa.
[00:18:19] After all, he still had work to do.
[00:18:23] Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be, and the then 60-year-old Livingstone died 18 months later in modern-day Zambia from malaria and dysentery.
[00:18:35] So, what did this perhaps unlikely pair get up to?
[00:18:39] What was their contribution to the discovery of The Nile?
[00:18:44] After the famous meeting, Livingstone and Stanley explored the rest of Lake Tanganyika, which you might remember was what Sir Richard Burton believed to be the source of The Nile.
[00:18:56] They found one river that could potentially lead to the river Nile, on the west side of the lake, but they were unable to say definitively whether it was or it wasn’t.
[00:19:08] And in terms of the contribution that Dr Livingstone made towards the holy grail of the true source of the White Nile, it was both important and limited.
[00:19:20] He did succeed in charting large parts of southern Africa that had been, until then, unmapped by Europeans.
[00:19:27] So, he eliminated some possibilities, which was of course helpful, but not conclusive.
[00:19:34] And, of course, he died before he was ever able to complete this research.
[00:19:40] It would take the man he had treated like a son, Henry Morton Stanley, to solve the problem once and for all.
[00:19:48] And that, my fellow explorers, is the story that we’ll tell in part three.
[00:19:53] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Dr Livingstone and his attempts to find the origin of The White Nile.
[00:20:02] Stay tuned for part three, as we will be hearing about the amazing final chapter of this story, with the big reveal of where The Nile actually comes from, as well as reflecting on this quest more widely.
[00:20:14] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:19] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part two of our mini-series on the quest to find the true origin of the river Nile.
[00:00:28] In this episode, we will be following the adventures of another man, or perhaps the “mission” of another man is a better way of putting it.
[00:00:37] His name was Dr David Livingstone, and his story doesn’t involve beetles getting stuck in his ear, but it does involve some disease, slavery, exploration, Christianity, and, of course, the ongoing search for the origin of the river Nile.
[00:00:54] And a quick admin point: just in case you haven’t listened to it yet, I’d highly recommend listening to part one before this episode, as we’ll be picking up the story from then, and everything will make a lot more sense if you’ve listened to part one.
[00:01:11] OK then, Dr Livingstone and the quest to find the origin of the Nile
[00:01:17] If you remember from our last episode, we had learned about one of the most intense rivalries in British exploration, that between Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke.
[00:01:30] Our story ended as the pair were scheduled to debate the true origin of the White Nile, with Burton proposing that it was Lake Tanganyika and Speke claiming it was Lake Victoria.
[00:01:45] The debate never happened, as Speke was found dead by his own shotgun the afternoon before.
[00:01:52] And the public was none the wiser, the answer to the question of the origin of The Nile was still unsolved.
[00:02:01] Just two years later, another British explorer decided to take his shot.
[00:02:08] But this man was very different from Burton and Speke.
[00:02:12] He was not an aristocrat, not a soldier, and he wasn’t even English.
[00:02:18] He was a Scottish doctor from a working-class background called David Livingstone.
[00:02:25] He had been in Africa for most of his adult life, arriving in the continent in 1841 at the age of 28.
[00:02:34] He had gone to Africa not for personal gain or out of a sense of adventure, but for two interlinked reasons.
[00:02:43] He went as a Christian missionary, to convert people to the world of God.
[00:02:49] The reason for this was partially for “traditional” missionary reasons, to spread the word of Christianity.
[00:02:56] But he was also a fervent believer in the horrors of slavery, referring to it as “the curse of Africa”.
[00:03:06] He first travelled to Africa because he believed that spreading the word of God and converting people to Christianity would be the most effective thing he could do to stop the slave trade.
[00:03:20] Now, he was actually a terrible missionary, and there is only evidence of one person that he personally converted, and that person went on to convert many more people than Livingstone did.
[00:03:33] But he was an excellent explorer, and made a series of expeditions northwards from South Africa.
[00:03:42] This exploration turned out to be not only exploration for exploration’s sake; there was an ulterior motive for doing it.
[00:03:51] Livingstone realised that the interior of southern Africa was connected by a large variety of rivers.
[00:04:01] He hypothesised that if he could map these rivers, and show Europeans how they could sail up these rivers and trade with African people, this would be an important step towards accomplishing Livingstone’s main goal: to stop the slave trade.
[00:04:19] And to clarify, by the time Livingstone had arrived in Africa, the Atlantic slave trade was all but over. The United States had made it illegal to import slaves in 1808.
[00:04:32] The slave trade Livingstone was focussed on was the Arab slave trade, where African people were captured or sold into slavery to Arab traders, who would then transport them typically to India or the Middle East.
[00:04:48] Now, why is this relevant in the context of Livingstone?
[00:04:52] Well, the African people who were sold into slavery were often sold by other Africans.
[00:04:59] Livingstone saw that much of the African continent that he travelled to was very rich in natural resources, there were plenty of things that could be traded - woods, ivory, and so on.
[00:05:12] But what was traded were slaves, because the Arab slave traders were the main group of foreigners who would travel any real distance from the coast, and they only really wanted one thing: slaves.
[00:05:27] So, Livingstone thought that the most important thing he could do to stop the slave trade was to open up other forms of trade.
[00:05:37] Indeed, his motto, and the words that are etched onto a statue of him at the Victoria Falls, are "Christianity, Commerce and Civilization"
[00:05:50] So, much of his early time in Africa was spent exploring African rivers.
[00:05:56] He became the first European to go all the way up and down the Zambezi river, Africa’s fourth longest river, and the one that runs through modern Zambia, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
[00:06:10] On his return to the UK, in 1856, he found that he was something of a celebrity.
[00:06:18] He was made a fellow of the Royal Society, granted an audience with Queen Victoria, and was essentially the country’s most famous explorer, and the foremost expert on all things Africa.
[00:06:33] After finding that his fame meant it was easy to raise funds for another expedition, he returned to Africa a couple of years later.
[00:06:41] But it seems that the fame had somewhat got to his head.
[00:06:46] He started to believe that he was on some form of divine mission, led by God, and would not listen to anyone else’s advice.
[00:06:56] His team members on this second expedition reported that he was an ineffective leader, he was abandoned by many of his men, this expedition was a failure, and Livingstone’s credibility took a bit of a dent.
[00:07:11] But still, his “mission”, in the grand sense, was far from complete.
[00:07:17] He had barely converted anyone, and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were still being sold into slavery every year.
[00:07:27] Livingstone needed to go back; he longed to return to Africa. But after the failure of his previous mission, he didn’t find that people were so eager to cough up, to finance, another similar expedition.
[00:07:42] He needed to find a popular cause for which he could raise money, something that he knew he could get financial support for.
[00:07:52] The answer was right in front of his eyes: the ongoing unsolved question of the true origin of the Nile.
[00:08:01] Now, initially at least, Livingstone was pretty uninterested in the true source of the Nile, but he believed that if he could “solve” this mystery, then it would help him rebuild his credibility, and further his quest to end the East African slave trade.
[00:08:20] He managed to raise enough money, £2,000, which is around €250,000 in today’s money.
[00:08:29] Given the size of the voyage ahead of him, it was a very modest amount, but it was enough to get started.
[00:08:37] He set out in 1866 on a mission that was supposed to be two years long.
[00:08:45] Like Burton and Speke before him, he set off from Zanzibar with a team of mainly freed slaves and servants.
[00:08:53] And the journey would take him through modern Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
[00:09:03] His journey was, in many ways, even more arduous than his predecessors.
[00:09:08] He was robbed multiple times and within a few months practically all his supplies were gone.
[00:09:16] He got malaria a total of 26 times.
[00:09:20] He fell incredibly ill, and with his medicines gone, it looked like he would be lucky even to live two years, let alone get home alive.
[00:09:31] He was forced to seek help from the very people he despised and had fought against, the Arab slave traders. In what must have been a difficult and confusing experience, his life was saved by slave traders, he lived with the slave traders, and developed a friendly relationship with them.
[00:09:53] On the one hand, these slave traders looked after him, gave him medicine, fed him, and ultimately saved his life.
[00:10:03] On the other hand, he knew exactly what they were, merchants of human flesh.
[00:10:10] And in one horrific incident, he received a shocking reminder of the true character of the men who had looked after him, when he saw slave traders massacring a group of 400 Africans, mainly women, right in front of him.
[00:10:26] In fact, this incident was so brutal that it even surpassed Livingstone’s expectations about what the slave traders were capable of.
[00:10:36] He had seen the inhumanity of the slave trade upfront for 30 years, but the fact that literally hundreds of people could be murdered in cold blood, this would alter his perception of the deep injustice of the slave trade forever.
[00:10:53] This was in 1871, and by this time his location was completely unknown to the outside world.
[00:11:03] Indeed, shortly after he had started his journey, several of his assistants had deserted him, returned to Zanzibar and told everyone that he was dead.
[00:11:15] He had written letters home, or at least, sent letters to Zanzibar, but only one out of 44 made it there. In one that was only recently made public, he wrote to an anti-slavery campaigner in Zanzibar saying "I am terribly knocked up but this is for your own eye only, doubtful if I live to see you again."
[00:11:39] Now, as a quick language point, you might have heard “knocked up” being used to mean pregnant. Obviously that’s not what it means here; it’s a slightly old expression, but it means exhausted, very tired.
[00:11:54] And in the case of Livingstone, it is something of a euphemism. By this time, he was at death’s door. He had had cholera, pneumonia, and as you heard, he had malaria 26 times, as well as a whole host of other tropical diseases, and all of his money, food and supplies had run out.
[00:12:17] He had even run out of paper, so was keeping a diary by writing on an old copy of a British newspaper that he had cut up into 32 different “pages”.
[00:12:29] He had made some progress with the stated mission of the expedition, to find the true source of the river Nile. He had located several rivers and lakes, but realised that none of them solved the mystery of the river Nile.
[00:12:47] Nobody knew about this, of course. To the outside world, he was dead, or at least he had completely disappeared.
[00:12:56] And to underline, to remind you, he was a household name, he was famous, he was one of the world’s most famous explorers.
[00:13:05] His mission had been widely publicised, and he had completely disappeared.
[00:13:12] Then, an American newspaper, the New York Herald, decided to take on the challenge of finding him.
[00:13:20] Or rather, a Welsh-American journalist called Henry Morton Stanley had pitched the owner of the newspaper on the project, saying “let me go and look for him. I know the probability of me returning alive is slim, but if I can return with news of Livingstone, it will be the most amazing story”.
[00:13:41] The paper agreed, and in 1869 the then 26-year-old Stanley set off with the challenge of finding the famous Dr Livingstone.
[00:13:53] Now, this individual, the young Henry Morton Stanley, is a fascinating and complicated character, and he will be the focus of our next episode, but let me give you some background to the man, which might help you understand him in the context of Dr Livingstone.
[00:14:12] Stanley’s mother had him when she was only 18 years old, then abandoned him shortly after birth. He had been sent to live with relatives, but was then completely abandoned by his family and sent to a workhouse, a place for abandoned children.
[00:14:31] As you might imagine, this experience was horrific, he was forced to work from dawn to dusk, he was sexually abused, it was just terrible.
[00:14:42] When he was 18, he boarded a ship for America, seeking to reinvent himself in a country full of opportunities. He fought in the civil war, realised he had quite the talent for journalism, and carved out a path for himself as a freelance journalist.
[00:15:02] And when he was briefly in London, he read about the story of Dr David Livingstone, the world’s most famous explorer, lost in the heart of Africa, and he decided that he would make it his mission to find him.
[00:15:18] After all, he had had an awful life up to this point, he had literally been disowned by his family as a child, and he had nothing to lose; this was his big chance.
[00:15:31] Of course, he knew the dangers of the mission, and its low probability of success.
[00:15:37] Livingstone was probably dead.
[00:15:40] Even if he was alive, Stanley only had a rough idea of where Livingstone might be.
[00:15:46] And there were all the standard complications of an expedition into completely unknown territory: disease, getting lost, and of course finding people who were not best pleased that you have intruded on their land.
[00:16:01] But on another level, Livingstone was a white man from Scotland. If he was alive, he would be the only white man in hundreds of kilometres.
[00:16:11] Someone would know something about where he was.
[00:16:16] And Stanley would stop at nothing.
[00:16:20] Indeed, one of his diary entries read:
[00:16:23] “I have taken a solemn, enduring oath, an oath to be kept while the least hope of life remains in me, not to be tempted to break the resolution I have formed, never to give up the search, until I find Livingstone alive, or find his dead body....No living man, or living men, shall stop me, only death can prevent me. But death—not even this; I shall not die, I will not die, I cannot die!”
[00:16:52] On November 10th, 1871, Stanley arrived at the town of Ujiji on the banks of Lake Tanganyika and did indeed find a man who looked a little different from everyone else.
[00:17:07] He greeted him, so the legend goes at least, the way a Victorian gentleman might greet another at a fashionable social event, “Dr Livingstone, I presume?”
[00:17:19] He had presumed correctly, and finally Dr Livingstone had been located.
[00:17:26] But, if Stanley had thought that Livingstone would have been overjoyed to see him and have got on the first ship back to Britain, he was much mistaken.
[00:17:36] Livingstone still had work to do, and refused to leave.
[00:17:42] Surprisingly, perhaps, Dr Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley struck up a close bond and became good friends.
[00:17:52] Livingstone was 58 when the pair met, while Stanley was 30.
[00:17:58] Livingstone would write to friends saying that Stanley was like a son to him, and Stanley would write that the doctor nursed him like a father when he was ill.
[00:18:11] The pair parted ways, with Stanley returning to the United States, and Livingstone refusing to leave Africa.
[00:18:19] After all, he still had work to do.
[00:18:23] Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be, and the then 60-year-old Livingstone died 18 months later in modern-day Zambia from malaria and dysentery.
[00:18:35] So, what did this perhaps unlikely pair get up to?
[00:18:39] What was their contribution to the discovery of The Nile?
[00:18:44] After the famous meeting, Livingstone and Stanley explored the rest of Lake Tanganyika, which you might remember was what Sir Richard Burton believed to be the source of The Nile.
[00:18:56] They found one river that could potentially lead to the river Nile, on the west side of the lake, but they were unable to say definitively whether it was or it wasn’t.
[00:19:08] And in terms of the contribution that Dr Livingstone made towards the holy grail of the true source of the White Nile, it was both important and limited.
[00:19:20] He did succeed in charting large parts of southern Africa that had been, until then, unmapped by Europeans.
[00:19:27] So, he eliminated some possibilities, which was of course helpful, but not conclusive.
[00:19:34] And, of course, he died before he was ever able to complete this research.
[00:19:40] It would take the man he had treated like a son, Henry Morton Stanley, to solve the problem once and for all.
[00:19:48] And that, my fellow explorers, is the story that we’ll tell in part three.
[00:19:53] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Dr Livingstone and his attempts to find the origin of The White Nile.
[00:20:02] Stay tuned for part three, as we will be hearing about the amazing final chapter of this story, with the big reveal of where The Nile actually comes from, as well as reflecting on this quest more widely.
[00:20:14] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:19] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part two of our mini-series on the quest to find the true origin of the river Nile.
[00:00:28] In this episode, we will be following the adventures of another man, or perhaps the “mission” of another man is a better way of putting it.
[00:00:37] His name was Dr David Livingstone, and his story doesn’t involve beetles getting stuck in his ear, but it does involve some disease, slavery, exploration, Christianity, and, of course, the ongoing search for the origin of the river Nile.
[00:00:54] And a quick admin point: just in case you haven’t listened to it yet, I’d highly recommend listening to part one before this episode, as we’ll be picking up the story from then, and everything will make a lot more sense if you’ve listened to part one.
[00:01:11] OK then, Dr Livingstone and the quest to find the origin of the Nile
[00:01:17] If you remember from our last episode, we had learned about one of the most intense rivalries in British exploration, that between Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke.
[00:01:30] Our story ended as the pair were scheduled to debate the true origin of the White Nile, with Burton proposing that it was Lake Tanganyika and Speke claiming it was Lake Victoria.
[00:01:45] The debate never happened, as Speke was found dead by his own shotgun the afternoon before.
[00:01:52] And the public was none the wiser, the answer to the question of the origin of The Nile was still unsolved.
[00:02:01] Just two years later, another British explorer decided to take his shot.
[00:02:08] But this man was very different from Burton and Speke.
[00:02:12] He was not an aristocrat, not a soldier, and he wasn’t even English.
[00:02:18] He was a Scottish doctor from a working-class background called David Livingstone.
[00:02:25] He had been in Africa for most of his adult life, arriving in the continent in 1841 at the age of 28.
[00:02:34] He had gone to Africa not for personal gain or out of a sense of adventure, but for two interlinked reasons.
[00:02:43] He went as a Christian missionary, to convert people to the world of God.
[00:02:49] The reason for this was partially for “traditional” missionary reasons, to spread the word of Christianity.
[00:02:56] But he was also a fervent believer in the horrors of slavery, referring to it as “the curse of Africa”.
[00:03:06] He first travelled to Africa because he believed that spreading the word of God and converting people to Christianity would be the most effective thing he could do to stop the slave trade.
[00:03:20] Now, he was actually a terrible missionary, and there is only evidence of one person that he personally converted, and that person went on to convert many more people than Livingstone did.
[00:03:33] But he was an excellent explorer, and made a series of expeditions northwards from South Africa.
[00:03:42] This exploration turned out to be not only exploration for exploration’s sake; there was an ulterior motive for doing it.
[00:03:51] Livingstone realised that the interior of southern Africa was connected by a large variety of rivers.
[00:04:01] He hypothesised that if he could map these rivers, and show Europeans how they could sail up these rivers and trade with African people, this would be an important step towards accomplishing Livingstone’s main goal: to stop the slave trade.
[00:04:19] And to clarify, by the time Livingstone had arrived in Africa, the Atlantic slave trade was all but over. The United States had made it illegal to import slaves in 1808.
[00:04:32] The slave trade Livingstone was focussed on was the Arab slave trade, where African people were captured or sold into slavery to Arab traders, who would then transport them typically to India or the Middle East.
[00:04:48] Now, why is this relevant in the context of Livingstone?
[00:04:52] Well, the African people who were sold into slavery were often sold by other Africans.
[00:04:59] Livingstone saw that much of the African continent that he travelled to was very rich in natural resources, there were plenty of things that could be traded - woods, ivory, and so on.
[00:05:12] But what was traded were slaves, because the Arab slave traders were the main group of foreigners who would travel any real distance from the coast, and they only really wanted one thing: slaves.
[00:05:27] So, Livingstone thought that the most important thing he could do to stop the slave trade was to open up other forms of trade.
[00:05:37] Indeed, his motto, and the words that are etched onto a statue of him at the Victoria Falls, are "Christianity, Commerce and Civilization"
[00:05:50] So, much of his early time in Africa was spent exploring African rivers.
[00:05:56] He became the first European to go all the way up and down the Zambezi river, Africa’s fourth longest river, and the one that runs through modern Zambia, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
[00:06:10] On his return to the UK, in 1856, he found that he was something of a celebrity.
[00:06:18] He was made a fellow of the Royal Society, granted an audience with Queen Victoria, and was essentially the country’s most famous explorer, and the foremost expert on all things Africa.
[00:06:33] After finding that his fame meant it was easy to raise funds for another expedition, he returned to Africa a couple of years later.
[00:06:41] But it seems that the fame had somewhat got to his head.
[00:06:46] He started to believe that he was on some form of divine mission, led by God, and would not listen to anyone else’s advice.
[00:06:56] His team members on this second expedition reported that he was an ineffective leader, he was abandoned by many of his men, this expedition was a failure, and Livingstone’s credibility took a bit of a dent.
[00:07:11] But still, his “mission”, in the grand sense, was far from complete.
[00:07:17] He had barely converted anyone, and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were still being sold into slavery every year.
[00:07:27] Livingstone needed to go back; he longed to return to Africa. But after the failure of his previous mission, he didn’t find that people were so eager to cough up, to finance, another similar expedition.
[00:07:42] He needed to find a popular cause for which he could raise money, something that he knew he could get financial support for.
[00:07:52] The answer was right in front of his eyes: the ongoing unsolved question of the true origin of the Nile.
[00:08:01] Now, initially at least, Livingstone was pretty uninterested in the true source of the Nile, but he believed that if he could “solve” this mystery, then it would help him rebuild his credibility, and further his quest to end the East African slave trade.
[00:08:20] He managed to raise enough money, £2,000, which is around €250,000 in today’s money.
[00:08:29] Given the size of the voyage ahead of him, it was a very modest amount, but it was enough to get started.
[00:08:37] He set out in 1866 on a mission that was supposed to be two years long.
[00:08:45] Like Burton and Speke before him, he set off from Zanzibar with a team of mainly freed slaves and servants.
[00:08:53] And the journey would take him through modern Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
[00:09:03] His journey was, in many ways, even more arduous than his predecessors.
[00:09:08] He was robbed multiple times and within a few months practically all his supplies were gone.
[00:09:16] He got malaria a total of 26 times.
[00:09:20] He fell incredibly ill, and with his medicines gone, it looked like he would be lucky even to live two years, let alone get home alive.
[00:09:31] He was forced to seek help from the very people he despised and had fought against, the Arab slave traders. In what must have been a difficult and confusing experience, his life was saved by slave traders, he lived with the slave traders, and developed a friendly relationship with them.
[00:09:53] On the one hand, these slave traders looked after him, gave him medicine, fed him, and ultimately saved his life.
[00:10:03] On the other hand, he knew exactly what they were, merchants of human flesh.
[00:10:10] And in one horrific incident, he received a shocking reminder of the true character of the men who had looked after him, when he saw slave traders massacring a group of 400 Africans, mainly women, right in front of him.
[00:10:26] In fact, this incident was so brutal that it even surpassed Livingstone’s expectations about what the slave traders were capable of.
[00:10:36] He had seen the inhumanity of the slave trade upfront for 30 years, but the fact that literally hundreds of people could be murdered in cold blood, this would alter his perception of the deep injustice of the slave trade forever.
[00:10:53] This was in 1871, and by this time his location was completely unknown to the outside world.
[00:11:03] Indeed, shortly after he had started his journey, several of his assistants had deserted him, returned to Zanzibar and told everyone that he was dead.
[00:11:15] He had written letters home, or at least, sent letters to Zanzibar, but only one out of 44 made it there. In one that was only recently made public, he wrote to an anti-slavery campaigner in Zanzibar saying "I am terribly knocked up but this is for your own eye only, doubtful if I live to see you again."
[00:11:39] Now, as a quick language point, you might have heard “knocked up” being used to mean pregnant. Obviously that’s not what it means here; it’s a slightly old expression, but it means exhausted, very tired.
[00:11:54] And in the case of Livingstone, it is something of a euphemism. By this time, he was at death’s door. He had had cholera, pneumonia, and as you heard, he had malaria 26 times, as well as a whole host of other tropical diseases, and all of his money, food and supplies had run out.
[00:12:17] He had even run out of paper, so was keeping a diary by writing on an old copy of a British newspaper that he had cut up into 32 different “pages”.
[00:12:29] He had made some progress with the stated mission of the expedition, to find the true source of the river Nile. He had located several rivers and lakes, but realised that none of them solved the mystery of the river Nile.
[00:12:47] Nobody knew about this, of course. To the outside world, he was dead, or at least he had completely disappeared.
[00:12:56] And to underline, to remind you, he was a household name, he was famous, he was one of the world’s most famous explorers.
[00:13:05] His mission had been widely publicised, and he had completely disappeared.
[00:13:12] Then, an American newspaper, the New York Herald, decided to take on the challenge of finding him.
[00:13:20] Or rather, a Welsh-American journalist called Henry Morton Stanley had pitched the owner of the newspaper on the project, saying “let me go and look for him. I know the probability of me returning alive is slim, but if I can return with news of Livingstone, it will be the most amazing story”.
[00:13:41] The paper agreed, and in 1869 the then 26-year-old Stanley set off with the challenge of finding the famous Dr Livingstone.
[00:13:53] Now, this individual, the young Henry Morton Stanley, is a fascinating and complicated character, and he will be the focus of our next episode, but let me give you some background to the man, which might help you understand him in the context of Dr Livingstone.
[00:14:12] Stanley’s mother had him when she was only 18 years old, then abandoned him shortly after birth. He had been sent to live with relatives, but was then completely abandoned by his family and sent to a workhouse, a place for abandoned children.
[00:14:31] As you might imagine, this experience was horrific, he was forced to work from dawn to dusk, he was sexually abused, it was just terrible.
[00:14:42] When he was 18, he boarded a ship for America, seeking to reinvent himself in a country full of opportunities. He fought in the civil war, realised he had quite the talent for journalism, and carved out a path for himself as a freelance journalist.
[00:15:02] And when he was briefly in London, he read about the story of Dr David Livingstone, the world’s most famous explorer, lost in the heart of Africa, and he decided that he would make it his mission to find him.
[00:15:18] After all, he had had an awful life up to this point, he had literally been disowned by his family as a child, and he had nothing to lose; this was his big chance.
[00:15:31] Of course, he knew the dangers of the mission, and its low probability of success.
[00:15:37] Livingstone was probably dead.
[00:15:40] Even if he was alive, Stanley only had a rough idea of where Livingstone might be.
[00:15:46] And there were all the standard complications of an expedition into completely unknown territory: disease, getting lost, and of course finding people who were not best pleased that you have intruded on their land.
[00:16:01] But on another level, Livingstone was a white man from Scotland. If he was alive, he would be the only white man in hundreds of kilometres.
[00:16:11] Someone would know something about where he was.
[00:16:16] And Stanley would stop at nothing.
[00:16:20] Indeed, one of his diary entries read:
[00:16:23] “I have taken a solemn, enduring oath, an oath to be kept while the least hope of life remains in me, not to be tempted to break the resolution I have formed, never to give up the search, until I find Livingstone alive, or find his dead body....No living man, or living men, shall stop me, only death can prevent me. But death—not even this; I shall not die, I will not die, I cannot die!”
[00:16:52] On November 10th, 1871, Stanley arrived at the town of Ujiji on the banks of Lake Tanganyika and did indeed find a man who looked a little different from everyone else.
[00:17:07] He greeted him, so the legend goes at least, the way a Victorian gentleman might greet another at a fashionable social event, “Dr Livingstone, I presume?”
[00:17:19] He had presumed correctly, and finally Dr Livingstone had been located.
[00:17:26] But, if Stanley had thought that Livingstone would have been overjoyed to see him and have got on the first ship back to Britain, he was much mistaken.
[00:17:36] Livingstone still had work to do, and refused to leave.
[00:17:42] Surprisingly, perhaps, Dr Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley struck up a close bond and became good friends.
[00:17:52] Livingstone was 58 when the pair met, while Stanley was 30.
[00:17:58] Livingstone would write to friends saying that Stanley was like a son to him, and Stanley would write that the doctor nursed him like a father when he was ill.
[00:18:11] The pair parted ways, with Stanley returning to the United States, and Livingstone refusing to leave Africa.
[00:18:19] After all, he still had work to do.
[00:18:23] Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be, and the then 60-year-old Livingstone died 18 months later in modern-day Zambia from malaria and dysentery.
[00:18:35] So, what did this perhaps unlikely pair get up to?
[00:18:39] What was their contribution to the discovery of The Nile?
[00:18:44] After the famous meeting, Livingstone and Stanley explored the rest of Lake Tanganyika, which you might remember was what Sir Richard Burton believed to be the source of The Nile.
[00:18:56] They found one river that could potentially lead to the river Nile, on the west side of the lake, but they were unable to say definitively whether it was or it wasn’t.
[00:19:08] And in terms of the contribution that Dr Livingstone made towards the holy grail of the true source of the White Nile, it was both important and limited.
[00:19:20] He did succeed in charting large parts of southern Africa that had been, until then, unmapped by Europeans.
[00:19:27] So, he eliminated some possibilities, which was of course helpful, but not conclusive.
[00:19:34] And, of course, he died before he was ever able to complete this research.
[00:19:40] It would take the man he had treated like a son, Henry Morton Stanley, to solve the problem once and for all.
[00:19:48] And that, my fellow explorers, is the story that we’ll tell in part three.
[00:19:53] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Dr Livingstone and his attempts to find the origin of The White Nile.
[00:20:02] Stay tuned for part three, as we will be hearing about the amazing final chapter of this story, with the big reveal of where The Nile actually comes from, as well as reflecting on this quest more widely.
[00:20:14] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:19] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
