Stanley Finds Livingstone

In November 1871, the Welsh-born American journalist Henry Morton Stanley located the Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone at the town of Ujiji, on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika in present-day Tanzania. The meeting became one of the most famous episodes of Victorian exploration. It showed the power of the new mass-circulation press, and it helped turn Livingstone into a lasting symbol of British humanitarian and imperial ambition in Africa.

Livingstone had become a national hero in Britain after crossing southern Africa in the 1850s and publishing accounts of his travels. In 1866 he set out on an expedition to find the source of the Nile, a question that preoccupied European geographers. He pushed into the interior beyond the reach of regular communication, and for years little reliable news of him reached the coast. Rumors of his death circulated, and public concern grew. Livingstone was also a vocal opponent of the East African slave trade, which he had witnessed firsthand, and this added moral weight to interest in his fate.

James Gordon Bennett Jr., owner of the New York Herald, saw both a news story and a circulation boost, and he commissioned Stanley to find him. Stanley, who had reported on wars and expeditions, organized a large caravan and left the coast near Zanzibar in early 1871. The journey inland was difficult, with disease, desertion, and conflicts with local leaders along the route. Livingstone, meanwhile, was ill and short of supplies, having been disappointed by the failure of provisions sent to him.

Stanley reached Ujiji in November, and the two men met in front of a crowd. According to Stanley's own account, he greeted the older man with the now-famous line, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Historians note that the only surviving evidence for the exact words is Stanley's own reporting, and the pages in Livingstone's journal that might have confirmed it are not known to survive in a form that settles the matter. Stanley supplied Livingstone with food and medicine, and the two explored the northern end of Lake Tanganyika together for a time.

Stanley urged Livingstone to return home, but Livingstone refused to abandon his search for the Nile's source. He died in 1873 in what is now Zambia, and his African companions carried his body and papers to the coast, a remarkable feat. Stanley's dispatches made him famous, and he later led major expeditions across central Africa, including work in the Congo that served the interests of King Leopold II of Belgium. The Livingstone story, widely retold, helped feed European enthusiasm for African exploration in the years just before the "Scramble for Africa."