On November 10^th, 1871, David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley, now seen as the two greatest Western explorers of Africa of their time, met at Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, the last pitstop on the caravan route into Central Africa from Zanzibar.

Livingstone set out on what would prove to be his final expedition in 1866. He wasn’t sure about Speke’s attribution of Lake Victoria as the source of the Nile; the source of the River Congo was still unknown and there were gaps in the knowledge of the lake system in East and Central Africa - the African watershed. Nothing went well. Although only fifty-three years old, he was prematurely aged from his earlier explorations. He had suffered all his life with mental health issues, his mood swinging from wild elation to deep passivity and depression, and this only seemed to be getting worse.

His easiest course of action would have been to follow in the steps of the established caravans until reaching Ujiji but, driven by his abhorrence of slavery, he couldn’t bring himself to follow the slave route and went his own way. Wracked with bouts of malaria, pneumonia, ulcers, and depression, he was unable to keep control of his column. Within eighteen months he was reported as dead and it was a great relief when evidence was found that he was still alive in 1868. He wandered around what is now Tanzania, Zambia, and the DRC, buoyed by the belief he was on a mission from God, but he kept missing obvious signs that, if he had noticed them, could have made his expedition a triumph. Emaciated and delusional, down to his last pair of footwear, a too-tight pair of French patent leather shoes, he even started to believe that Ptolemy might have been right about the source of the Nile. A low point was reached when he accepted help from Arab slavers, something he would never have done before, convinced it was all part of God’s Plan.

Although the British public had been reassured by the fact that he was still alive in 1868, and he was seen as a towering, indestructible figure, unease grew as to his whereabouts. Nothing concrete was done about it until James Gordon Bennet, the owner of the New York Herald, commissioned his top reporter, Henry Morton Stanley, to ‘find Livingstone’. This prompted the British Government to get the Royal Geographical Society to organise their own relief expedition. Despite Stanley fulfilling other journalistic duties on the way, such as reporting on the opening of the Suez Canal, the Brits were too late. Stanley got his man. It must have been quite a culture shock, the dour Presbyterian Livingstone, a man who put his missionary work above all else, and Stanley, a brash thirty-year-old, a journalist who would have been very much at home working for a modern tabloid.  

Stanley marched into Ujiji with a procession headed by the Stars and Stripes, a band of horns and drums, with rifles firing salutes. Livingstone was stirred from his lodgings by the razzmatazz. Stanley approached him dressed to the nines on his horse. He dismounted, bowed, and said, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume.’ To which Livingstone replied, ‘Yes, that is my name’. Quite banal really.

Despite their differences the two men appear to have got on and spent several months travelling around the Lake. In the end however, Livingstone resisted Stanley’s efforts to persuade him to return to London and he died in Africa on May 1st 1873. Although there was a considerable degree of chauvinism in Britain at their great explorer-hero being rescued by an American, Stanley’s career skyrocketed. He made great discoveries, but his reputation has been diminished by, amongst other things, his cruelty towards the Africans in his employ, the complete opposite to Livingstone. Revealingly he wrote ‘I do not think I was made for an African explorer for I detest the land most heartily’. His account of the rescue expedition, How I found Livingstone, London, 1872, however, remains a beautifully written classic of African adventure and the first edition has become scarce.