David Livingstone

David Livingstone was born into a poor family in a tenement at Blantyre, South Lanarkshire, and worked in a cotton mill from the age of ten.

Livingstone began medical studies at Anderson's College in Glasgow while preparing for missionary service with the London Missionary Society.

Livingstone landed at Cape Town and traveled to the mission station at Kuruman, beginning his life's work in Africa.

Livingstone married Mary Moffat, daughter of missionary Robert Moffat, at Kuruman; the couple had six children.

Livingstone traveled from the Zambezi headwaters to Luanda on the Atlantic and back across the continent to Quelimane on the Indian Ocean, one of the first documented transcontinental crossings of Africa by a European.

Livingstone reached the great waterfall on the Zambezi that the Kololo called Mosi-oa-Tunya and named it Victoria Falls after the British queen.

Livingstone commanded an official expedition to open the Zambezi River to commerce; it failed to find a navigable route and cost the life of his wife Mary, who died at Shupanga in 1862.

Livingstone returned to Africa to search for the Nile's source, exploring the Lualaba River and central African lakes while documenting slave-trade atrocities.

After years without contact with the outside world, Livingstone was found at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika by journalist Henry Morton Stanley, reputedly greeted with 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume?'

Livingstone died of malaria and dysentery at Chitambo in Ilala; his attendants buried his heart in Africa and carried his body to the coast, and he was interred in Westminster Abbey in 1874.