Livingstone The Last Explorers

I'm not dressed like this for fun, you know!

Oh, this is ridiculous!

I can't see my hand in front of my face.

It's like being inside a cloud!

This is Mosi-oa-Tunya - the smoke that thunders.

Until the 17th of November 1855, the only name these falls had

was the one given to them by the Africans who lived nearby...

..but on that day a white man arrived

accompanied by over 200 Africans.

His name was David Livingstone.

"Their beauty was so lovely," he said,

"they must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight."

Livingstone was so awestruck that he named them for his Queen.

The Victoria Falls.

But despite their grandeur,

Livingstone wasn't here to discover the natural wonders of this world,

his eyes were fixed firmly on the next.

He was here to save souls.

David Livingstone was one of a small group of explorers

who took the stage as the great age of exploration

was drawing to a close.

Many before them sought adventure and fortune,

staked claims to vast territories in the name of God and country...

..but The Last Explorers didn't plant flags, they planted ideas.

Ideas that helped shape the modern world we know today.

David Livingstone was a 43-year-old Scotsman.

In 1855, he was halfway through a journey

which had begun in Cape Town.

It was his first time in Central Africa.

It's mine too.

He was searching for a highway into the interior of the continent.

This was a place where few Europeans had been...

and no-one had mapped.

It had acquired an adjective...

Darkest Africa.

During the journey Livingstone would make frequent stops

so that he could take observations with a sextant and chronometer.

He was making a map.

'But he wasn't actually trained in mapmaking or geography.

'Not properly.'

He'd had a few lessons from a ship's captain in navigation,

and a few tips from a professional in Cape Town.

The equipment he carried was professional, but he wasn't.

He was, however, a qualified doctor

and an employee of the London Missionary Society,

a charity which sent Christian missionaries

wherever they thought heathens and benighted savages would benefit.

Four years before discovering the Victoria Falls,

Livingstone witnessed a scene that would change him for ever.

In a small town nearby called Sesheke,

he saw a boy, no more than 14, being traded for a gun.

And on that day, Livingstone had seen his duty, crystal clear.

He would stop the slave trade.

Although the trade in slaves

had been abolished in Britain for nearly half a century,

demand on the other side of the Atlantic remained high.

To counter this,

the British Navy imposed a blockade on Africa's West Coast,

but, rather than stopping the slave trade,

traders started making raids in Central Africa

and transported the slaves to the East Coast markets instead.

Livingstone believed to the core of his being

in the basic equality of the races

and that it was God's plan for him to save Africans from slavery and themselves.

The Victoria Falls lay on what Livingstone thought was the solution...

the Zambezi river itself.

The Zambezi is one of four great rivers

that originate in equatorial Africa

and branch out across the continent like giant tentacles.

If Livingstone could prove the Zambezi was navigable all the way to the Indian Ocean,

then Christian traders would bring legitimate commerce

to replace the slave trade

and missionaries would come to convert the Africans to Christianity.

But Livingstone was a poor, obscure missionary,

he didn't even have a boat.

So how could he interest his countrymen in East Africa's plight?

He didn't know.

Not yet.

Just imagine Livingstone, the first time he actually saw this river,

and he looked upon this as being, I think, a magnificent highway,

like they have in Europe, the Thames bringing up into London,

opening it up, and he just thought this would be it.

-It does look like a big blue motorway.

-It's incredible.

What was the walking routine

and how many miles did they expect to cover on a good day?

Well, he was... he was an unbelievable optimist.

He just thought, "Well, yeah, we can do it."

Some days they would probably do five miles, some days 15, some days 20.

It all depended on the terrain.

Other days they probably wouldn't even get a mile

because they were hacking their way through dense forest.

How much of a...benefit to him do you think his religion was?

Was that how he was able to drive himself through the physical?

I think so.

Often in his writings he would say,

"To God be the Glory, God will see us through.

"If we are in the will of God, then surely no harm will come to us,"

and he had that unbelievable faith that surely God will take us through

and he said, "Cannot the faith of the Christian

"take him further than the hatred of the slaver?"

Assured of God's will

and with 114 African tribesmen to guide and support him,

Livingstone headed downriver, east towards the Indian Ocean.

With no means of transport on land or river,

Livingstone and his men walked.

He was used to walking.

It was part of the Livingstone method.

As a youth, working in a cotton factory, south of Glasgow,

he'd walked everywhere.

As a trainee missionary he'd walked all the time too.

Carriages and trains were a wasteful luxury,

shoe leather was cheap.

But of course walking in Africa was different from walking in Scotland.

This part of Africa was hardly known at all.

Expeditions sent to explore it had a nasty habit of never returning.

There were hostile tribes and malaria...

..there were hippos in the river...

and crocodiles too...

and if they didn't get you...

there were the prides of lions lying in wait in the bush.

On occasion, Livingstone was forced to hide from these predators

in the most surprising of places.

-It's quite a monster, that tree.

-Yeah, you can see it's very huge.

It's a big one!

Livingstone famously took refuge in this Baobab tree.

'Actually, there are three trees in one.'

There's a Baobab and two types of figs.

-Right, so they're all knotted together?

-Yeah.

But the first tree to grow, it was the baobab,

but now it seems like the figs, they're taking it over.

-OK.

-Yeah.

-And do we know for certain that Livingstone was connected to this tree?

-Yes.

This is one of the trees which he spend the night in.

-Can we go in?

-Yeah.

-Yeah?

Right.

HE CHUCKLES

Wow, it's huge!

What an amazing space!

-There's room for a few people in here.

-Yes.

So, when do people use it now? Do they still come in?

Yeah, they still come in as they are waiting for the ferry.

Sometimes they do get elephants, this is the park,

if they are surrounded by elephants they just come inside here and hide.

-This is the strangest ferry terminal I have ever been inside!

-Is it?

THEY LAUGH

Six months after leaving the Victoria Falls,

exhausted and ill with malaria,

Livingstone approached the Indian Ocean.

It was an astounding achievement.

Livingstone was the first European

to cross the entire African continent from west to east.

Accompanied only by Africans, he had discovered the Victoria Falls

and mapped the entire journey with incredible accuracy...

but as Livingstone reached the coast,

the accomplishment was soured.

Bands of slave traders were ravaging the countryside

and the people behind them were the Portuguese,

through whose territory he now travelled.

Together with the Arabs, the Portuguese were capturing slaves

and sending them to markets on the east coast.

The Portuguese had a reputation

as some of the most brutal and merciless slave traders in Africa.

These jagged rocks were the end of the road for slaves

who had defied their masters or sought to escape.

They'd be brought here, thrown onto the rock

and then, with their arms and legs broken,

they'd be taken by the Indian Ocean.

This was the stark reality of the ownership of one people by another.

Livingstone arrived

in the Portuguese colonial seaport of Quelimane in May 1856.

With brightly painted facades, leafy streets and attractive squares,

he found Quelimane to be a picturesque town.

It was founded by the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama

350 years before.

The thriving slave market had been there for almost as long.

But freeing Africa from slavery would have to wait.

Livingstone was now seriously ill with malaria

and the Portuguese treated him with exceptional generosity.

The irony wasn't lost on Livingstone,

but it was outweighed by his gratitude.

In the house of a Portuguese commandant,

he slowly began to recover from his ordeal.

While he was there,

Livingstone received some letters bearing some extraordinary news.

He was no longer an insignificant missionary...

he was famous now.

'Early in the journey,'

he had managed to send maps and letters back to Britain.

Word began to spread about this lonely, destitute,

humble Scots missionary

who had travelled from one end of the continent to another.

He had drawn a line across the least known and most dangerous quarter of the world.

It was as explosive as man walking on the moon.

One of the letters he received was an offer,

from the publisher John Murray,

to print Livingstone's account of his journey.

There was a letter too from the head of the Royal Geographic Society

telling him he had accomplished,

"the greatest triumph in geographical research of our times".

Back in Britain, David Livingstone was a national hero.

Glory awaited.

For months, Livingstone swung back and forth,

between life and death's door.

When he recovered he took a ship for Britain.

He arrived in December 1856.

He had been away for 16 years.

It seemed unreal...

..it was like a fever dream.

And here were his wife and children.

They were hard to speak to...

he had lost touch with his own language.

Five years previously he'd sent them home from Africa.

Mary had fallen out with his parents.

She'd needed handouts to survive.

They had suffered.

No money, sometimes no home...

always no father.

And now here he was, transformed...

received as a hero, bathed in glory.

Just three weeks after Livingstone returned to England,

he settled down to write an account of his first great journey across Africa.

As well as being an adventure story, Livingstone used the book to make

an impassioned appeal.

A Christian vision for Africa's future.

"There must be an all-out assault on slavery," he wrote.

"On its supply, and its demand."

Legitimate trade in African cotton

would replace the illegitimate trade in African flesh.

Cotton from Africa,

produced by Africans paid a decent wage,

would replace American cotton produced by the labour of slaves.

This was Livingstone's master plan to stop the slave trade in Africa.

He called it the three Cs.

Christianity would save their souls,

commerce would open up the region for legitimate trade

and civilisation would enlighten the so-called savage.

Livingstone's personal recipe for the final end of slavery.

Missionary Travels made Livingstone a small fortune and even more fame.

All that he needed to return to Africa.

Fame had transformed everything.

His cause was now as famous as he was himself.

The success of Missionary Travels led to lectures at Oxford and Cambridge,

audiences with the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston,

and with the Queen herself.

It also led to a brand-new expedition.

Livingstone was granted two years of government funding.

The plan was to sail up the Zambesi to the Barotse Highlands,

which lay just north of the Victoria Falls.

The Highlands, hoped Livingstone, would be fertile, healthy and free of malaria.

Here in the dark heart of Africa, commerce, Christianity

and civilisation would be made real.

David Livingstone's promised land.

On the 14th of May 1858, a large British steamer, the HMS Pearl,

approached the mouth of the Zambesi, on the east coast of Africa.

Livingstone was back and every inch the explorer.

The team that Livingstone had gathered together was a bit like Mission: Impossible

and here are the members...

Richard Thornton, miner and geologist. he was just 20 years old.

Then there was John Kirk. He was a botanist.

He was a respected scientist, recommended by the experts at Kew.

Then there was Charles Livingstone.

The name was no coincidence, he was Livingstone's younger brother.

He was the expedition photographer.

Thomas Baines.

He was a storekeeper and he was also the expedition artist.

Unknown to Livingstone,

years previously he'd been in the habit of shooting the natives in South Africa.

One person who wasn't there was Mary.

She had gone aboard the Pearl in Liverpool with the rest of the team,

but during the journey south it'd become apparent that she was pregnant with their sixth child.

Livingstone described Mary as "the main spoke in my wheel".

But he left her behind at Cape Town to give birth.

It was not like his first great journey at all.

He had Europeans for company. He had funds, food, and equipment.

In the hold of the Pearl there was another ship waiting to be assembled -

a collapsible steamer, 75 feet long,

one of the very first steel ships ever constructed.

She was named the Ma Robert.

This expedition was like an exercise in the application of cutting-edge techniques.

It was the Apollo moonshot of its day.

Livingstone had been allowed to write the instructions for the expedition himself,

and objective number one read,

"To make the Zambesi a path for commerce into the Interior and thus end the slave trade."

On reaching the delta,

Livingstone ordered the assembly of the Ma Robert and headed up the Zambesi.

It's difficult to imagine what it must have been like

for Livingstone's men to enter this strange landscape

of sounds and smells.

It must have felt like an alien world...

..to be presented with an intoxicating place

of possibility and potential,

but at the same time, having to face danger,

extreme heat and the great unknown.

But Livingstone's Missionary Travels did promise one certainty -

a Zambesi that should be navigable for a good 600 miles inland.

This is what he said. "The river has not been surveyed,

"but at the time I came down, there was abundance of water for a large vessel.

"If a steamer were sent to examine the Zambesi,

"I would recommend one of the lightest draught,

"and the months of May, June and July for passing through the Delta.

"In the months referred to no obstruction would be incurred in the channel below Tete.

"20 or 30 miles above that point we have a small rapid,

"of which I regret my inability to speak, as I did not visit it."

So...

no problem.

But the problems started as soon as they left the Delta.

The Zambesi was too shallow even for the Ma Robert.

She's been specially designed and constructed for the expedition,

and she drew just three feet of water.

But at certain points, and for stretches hundreds of yards long,

the Zambesi resolutely refused to be any deeper than two.

She had to be dragged through those parts.

This is probably as close to Africa as I've been on the trip so far.

So I am tricking myself into feeling I'm quite close to nature.

But look at the reality.

I'm in this fantastically well-designed chalet,

I've got all home comforts. hot and cold running water,

flushing toilets, mosquito screens, electric light.

And so the truth of it all is,

I am just pretending to be out in the wilds.

They had no IDEA of the reality of the world they were coming out to,

and far less bringing all the home comforts and medicines that I take for granted.

They were out here with little more than

they would have taken with them on a trip around the British countryside.

After several months, the expedition only got as far as Tete.

Livingstone was behind schedule and growing impatient.

He'd heard rumours that upriver there were some small rapids

in a gorge called the Kebrabasa.

Heavy rains had prevented Livingstone visiting them

during his first expedition, and the success of the second

rested on the Zambesi being navigable by boat.

Anxious to put his mind at rest, Livingstone decided to lead

an advance party to investigate, on foot.

That's the path!

It is.

Is that legal?

THEY LAUGH

I don't think Livingston would've had it this easy, though.

No ladders.

No, no ladders.

'As they progressed towards the gorge,

'Livingstone noted the temperature was 130 degrees.'

It's broken-ankle territory right there.

'The rocks cooked any hand or foot that rested on them for more than a few seconds.

'Finally they came here.'

"Things look dark for our enterprise," wrote Livingstone.

"This Kebrabasa is what I never expected.

"No hint of its nature ever reached my ears."

Does the landscape around the river give you any warning or any clues

about what's about to happen on the approach to the gorge?

Yeah, very, very much so.

Leaving Tete, the area is quite flat,

it's very vegetated all the way down to the river bank

and, as you leave, you start to get this feeling that you're entering a gorge

and you can physically see it as the area rises on either side.

The narrowing of the river,

the speed of the river,

everything about it tells you that you're going to run into trouble around the next corner.

What was the view that they beheld?

Just sheer cliffs of dark, shiny rocks and white water

pretty much straight into your face.

The amount of water that pours through the Kebrabasa gorges a year,

it's COMPLETELY unnavigable.

And he had told the entire British population

and the Royal Geographical Society that it was navigable

and that he had found a highway into the Interior.

I don't know whether he could, sort of, face the fact that it was all untrue.

The expedition was government-funded.

Livingstone was painfully aware that he was accountable.

On the 17th of December he wrote a letter to the Foreign Secretary.

"We are all of the opinion," he wrote,

"that a steamer of light draught would pass the rapids without difficulty

"when the river is in full flood."

And after he'd sent that letter to the Foreign Secretary,

David Livingstone became something else.

He was a liar.

He had to lie.

The lie was anything but selfish, though.

Honesty would have led to the cancellation of the entire expedition.

And that was something that Livingstone simply couldn't allow.

He was here to end slavery and save souls.

And save lives too.

The lie wasn't the real problem.

Much worse was the wishful thinking.

Very well, Livingstone's promised land would have to be found somewhere else.

He announced the Kebrabasa rapids were a signpost, not an obstacle,

and that God was directing them not up the Zambesi,

but to another river.

The Shire.

The Shire joined the Zambesi from the north,

little more than 100 miles from the coast.

It flowed through territory that Livingstone had not explored at all.

But it was a river, and it was flowing in Africa.

And that would have to do.

On New Year's Day 1859,

they began their cruise up the Shire.

Unlike the troublesome Zambesi,

the peace and beauty of this river was beguilingly seductive.

"It was very pleasant to be away again from all civilisation," wrote Livingstone.

I think I understand what he meant.

This lush and verdant landscape,

and the wild animals that live here, have barely changed

since Livingstone passed this way 150 years ago.

I can see why Livingstone at last

believed this to be the Promised Land he'd been searching for.

As the expedition progressed up the Shire, Livingstone's hopes rose.

The land was impressively fertile.

Cotton, tea and coffee could be grown in the soil

and to the east was an area of higher land that could well

prove a healthy place, free of fever,

to establish a settlement.

A village chief told Livingstone that several days' journey upstream

would take him to a great lake.

The thought of another great discovery, like the Victoria Falls,

spurred Livingstone onwards.

But, just a few miles upriver,

Livingstone discovered something else...

..yet more rocks on God's highway.

They were 30 miles long.

The thought that it took Livingstone and his men 11 months

and hundreds of miles of blood, sweat and tears to get this far,

only to find yet another enormous obstruction,

I honestly don't know what that would have done to my head.

To any normal man, these falls would have spelled disaster,

the end to the expedition.

But reading his journals,

it seems that Livingstone was not a normal man, rather a blind one.

A man blinded by sheer determination.

Neither rocks nor people would stand in his way.

This cross is a memorial to Richard Thornton,

who was an engineer in Livingstone's service.

Livingstone sacked him for laziness

and he subsequently died of fever and dysentery.

And there were other casualties. Thomas Baines, the artist

and storekeeper of the expedition.

He was cut adrift.

There was a Makololo stoker on the Ma Robert who had

the misfortune to break part of the ship's engine,

and Livingstone dealt him a severe beating in punishment.

Livingstone would not hesitate to get rid of and leave behind

anyone who was in the way or was lacking in spirit or determination.

Standing still was not an option, so Livingstone walked.

Up past the cataracts and beyond.

Looking for the real fuel on which his expedition, reputation

and future truly depended.

A great discovery.

On the 17th September, 1859,

Livingstone stood on the shores of Lake Nyasa.

350 miles long, 50 miles wide,

this was the very great lake of which the village chief

had spoken. The fourth largest lake in the world.

Strictly speaking, Lake Nyasa had been discovered before,

by Portuguese traders.

But Livingstone knew very well how much great discoveries

could help maintain his fame.

Behind the tranquil scenes and balmy waters, however,

lurked some horrifying realities.

Livingstone saw Arab slave ships plying back and forth,

forcing African people for hundreds of miles around to flee the slavers.

He also discovered that the tribes

around the lake were locked in tribal war.

One in particular, the Yao, sought to dominate the entire Shire region.

Livingstone had walked into a war zone.

But he chose to ignore these realities.

Instead, in a series of extraordinary letters,

he recommended it.

It was an excellent area,

he insisted in letter after letter, for commerce.

Not only that, Livingstone asked for an extension on the expedition's funding.

He asked the Foreign Office to appeal for colonists.

He even recommended the area to the Universities' Mission to Central Africa.

Livingstone had convinced himself that the arrival of colonists,

the mission, a British vessel,

would change everything, would change the Shire Highlands

into what they could be.

A stable and prosperous place,

from which the ending of the slave trade could ripple outwards.

He wrote his letters of recommendation believing

they could bring about a better world, they would become true.

The most important lies he told were always to himself.

He was forced to wait, of course, for answers.

But the lies worked.

The Foreign Office sent word at last, congratulating him

on the discovery of Lake Nyasa. A new boat was coming,

and so too were the members of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa.

Good news? It certainly sounded like it.

And if the Shire Highlands had actually been the place he'd described in all the letters,

it would have been good news indeed.

But the Highlands he'd described existed only in his imagination.

The members of the new mission arrived early in 1861,

led by a newly appointed bishop, Charles Mackenzie,

and a young missionary, Henry Burrup.

Their first task was to establish a mission.

The Shire River was manifestly not the God-given highway into

the Interior that Livingstone had stated it to be, but nevertheless,

he led the sorry band of evangelists into the Promised Land

to find a location for the Universities' Mission in the hills above.

3,000 feet above the heat of the valley floor,

the Highlands proved to be cool and well watered.

As the party passed through the territory of the Mang'anja people,

it became increasingly clear the pace of the slave trade had quickened.

Palls of smoke rising from the hills and valleys were clearly to be seen.

A steady stream of refugees told of attacks by Yao fighters,

and bands of slave raiders ravaging the countryside nearby.

Soon word arrived that a large gang of slave traders

was moving in their direction.

This proved to be a defining moment for Livingstone. What should he do?

Free the slaves and the Portuguese might retaliate,

let the slave gang pass unopposed and the local tribes would see

Livingstone and the missionaries as supporting this evil practice.

In the end, the slave gang made the decision for them.

They turned and fled,

leaving 84 captives for the missionaries to look after.

The legend of David Livingstone, liberator of slaves, was born.

Despite the volatile situation, Livingstone and Mackenzie

chose a site for the Universities' Mission.

Fertile, cool, and malaria-free, Magomero was perfect

apart from one thing - it was in the middle of a war zone.

Mackenzie wasn't fazed, however.

With a cross in one hand and a gun in the other,

his brand of Christianity was particularly muscular.

Once again, Livingstone appeared blind to reality.

Rather than staying to help, he set off for further explorations around

Lake Nyasa, leaving Bishop Mackenzie and his fellow missionaries

to blunder into a tribal civil war he didn't fully understand.

In mid-January 1862, Bishop Mackenzie

and Henry Burrup paddled in a dugout canoe down the Shire

to these marshes for a meeting with Livingstone.

They were 11 days late.

After five months in Livingstone's Shire Highlands, Bishop Mackenzie

was a different man. More experienced,

more tired, a better fighter.

He had been forced to lead his staff in several violent sallies

against the Yao.

But by helping the Mang'anja defeat their enemy,

Mackenzie didn't stop the slave trade.

Quite the opposite.

The Mang'anja proved every bit as willing as the Yao to prey

on those weaker than themselves.

The missionaries soon realised the human trade they so deplored

was universal.

Now here they were,

stuck beside this mosquito-infested river in a mosquito-infested marsh.

Mackenzie and Burrup's canoe had overturned.

They lost all their quinine. So on the 16th January they settled down to wait,

without preventative medicine.

What Mackenzie and Burrup didn't realise was that Livingstone

had sailed past here three days before.

Livingstone had been delayed, stuck on a sandbank for almost a month.

He'd stopped to look for Mackenzie and Burrup,

seen no sign of them, and sailed on,

downstream, leaving them to their fate.

Livingstone had another appointment to keep.

On the 31st January, 1862, he was reunited with his beloved Mary.

To Livingstone, it must have seemed like a new beginning.

Here was his wife. They'd been so long apart.

In some ways, it was a new beginning.

It was the beginning of the end.

200 miles away, here on the River Shire, Bishop Charles Mackenzie

died of malaria on the very same day.

Henry Burrup was still alive, but only barely. The African tribesmen

carried him back to the Magomero mission on a litter,

where he later died.

Those deaths would be laid at Livingstone's door.

The dream was over.

It was supposed to have been about Christianity,

commerce and civilisation.

But Christianity had failed to take root in East Africa.

And the Shire Highlands were not a promised land for trade.

And as for civilisation,

Africa stubbornly refused to be tamed.

Livingstone should have opened his eyes to reality

when the people around him started to die.

But by then he was no longer a man on a mission,

he was a man in the grip of an obsession.

Livingstone received the news

that Mackenzie and Burrup were dead some weeks later.

He was hardly sympathetic.

"This will hurt us all," he said.

Livingstone never hesitated to judge others.

His body was a part of his world.

It did its walking in the better place he was trying to bring about.

It was a beast of burden that he whipped to the edge of extremity

and beyond.

He always found it hard to understand why other people

could not do likewise.

That other people lived in the real world, and died there, too.

His wife was a case in point.

They sailed a little way inland,

to a place called Shupanga.

Livingstone was desperate to get his wife out of the unhealthy,

malarial district in which they were now moored,

but the steamer's engines were damaged and in need of repair.

After three months, they were still there,

and on April 21st, Mary Livingstone went down with fever.

Her decline was horrifyingly rapid.

On the evening of the 27th, Livingstone knelt beside her.

She had lost the power of speech.

He embraced her and said,

"My dearie, my dearie, you're going to leave me.

"Are you resting on Jesus?"

And of course, she couldn't answer.

She died later that night.

She was buried beneath a baobab tree.

In his journal, Livingstone wrote, "I loved her when I married her,

"and the longer I lived with her, I loved her the more.

"For the first time in my life,

"I feel willing to die."

News of the deaths and disappointments accumulated back in England.

Livingstone's reputation slowly putrefied.

On the 20th of January 1863,

The Times published an anonymous assault

on everything Livingstone had offered.

"We were promised cotton, sugar, and indigo,

"and of course we get none.

"We were promised converts to the Gospel,

"and not one has been made.

"The thousands subscribed by the universities,

"the thousands contributed by the government,

"have been productive only of the most fatal results."

The glory was gone at last. There was no more fame.

Everything Livingstone had promised

tuned out to be an expensive failure.

On 3rd July 1863, a letter from the Foreign Office arrived recalling the mission.

He was ruined.

And of course his fame hadn't just evaporated.

He just became famous for something else.

Famous for recklessness, dishonesty,

the waste of public money, and several deaths.

Back in England, there were no crowds,

no welcoming committees, no cheers, and no wife, of course.

There was just a hotel in Covent Garden, which he booked into himself.

There was a meeting with the Prime Minister, the next day, but it was secretive.

Livingstone was no longer the sort of company you kept openly if you were seeking re-election.

He produced an account of what had happened.

Called A Narrative Of An Expedition To The Zambezi,

it entered the minefield of the last six years very carefully,

and avoided anything explosive.

Sales were moderate.

Even so, the narrative made enough money to set aside, for the children, in trust.

Their futures were secure.

But what was Livingstone to do with himself?

He would go back to Africa to find the source of the Nile.

There were currently two contenders.

Lake Victoria, or Lake Tanganyika, further south.

But Livingstone had a sneaking suspicion

that there might be a connection with his old friend, the Zambezi River.

Livingstone knew that if he could return from Africa

having discovered the source of the Nile, he would restore his fame,

and also his leverage.

He would once again be able to apply pressure to bring the slave trade to an end.

He had several photographs taken with his youngest daughter, Anna Mary.

Looking at her...

..looking down on her, as though he was the moon.

He would be going very far away.

And, very likely, not returning.

On 22nd March 1866, Livingstone arrived back in Africa.

He was glad to return, but this time the wonderful country would kill him,

but it would take seven years of increasing agony to do so.

Illness and fever set in and his mind became muddled.

He looked for evidence that Moses had visited Africa,

and finding the source of the Nile

became increasingly confused with myths and ancient writings.

Livingstone found himself a prophet lost in the wilderness,

a man failing in every way.

When Henry Morton Stanley found Livingstone, he was a shell of a man.

Not the legend,

someone altogether more tragic.

-Hi, Jack.

-Good to meet you.

-You, too.

'It was this meeting that would give rise to the mythic words, "Dr Livingstone, I presume?"'

By the time that Stanley's encountering Livingstone,

what do you think is Livingstone's state of mind?

What's his psychological condition?

He'd become obsessive. In fact, he was always obsessive.

Those who are very sympathetic to Livingstone would call him single-minded,

and those who aren't quite so sympathetic

might call him bloody-minded.

He just wanted to keep going, whether it made rational sense or not.

He was in extremely bad health, chronically bad health,

dysentery, internal disorders of various sorts,

all his teeth were falling out, his feet had ulcers on them.

Though he did his best right up until the very end

to make notes in his pocket notebook he carried everywhere.

His favourite expression about himself was he was a missionary explorer,

and he liked to put those two together, so right to the very end he was a sort of scientist,

but a scientist with failing health, and perhaps one might even say with failing faculties.

Stanley spent five months with Livingstone,

and his respect for him grew into adoration.

He saw Livingstone as a kind of saint,

a man, he said, "without spleen or misanthropy".

But Stanley was a journalist and he had a story to file.

When the article was published, on 2nd July 1872, in the New York Herald,

he gave himself equal billing. "How I Found Doctor Livingstone."

It's not even clear that he ever actually uttered the words, "Dr Livingstone, I presume,"

because he tore from his own journal the only pages that might have confirmed the fact.

But in any case, the article's effect on Livingstone's fame was like an electric shock.

It brought it back to life.

"He is no angel," wrote Stanley,

"but he approaches to that being as near as the nature of a living man will allow."

The angel was still in Africa, but his infirmity was increasing.

Through it all, an image of the better world he was working for burnt brightly in his head.

At last the words "I don't know where we are" appeared in his journal.

The bleeding from his intestines was constant now.

And then, in a village called Ilala, on the 1st of February 1873, he died.

His servants found him knelt by his bed,

in an attitude of prayer, his face buried in his hands, and cold.

They buried his heart beneath a tree, and then hung his body over a branch to dry it.

Then they embalmed it by wrapping it in bark, and sailcloth coated in tar.

Then they collected up his notes and journals and instruments, and began to march.

The party reached the coast in February 1874.

Ten had died on the way. They had marched for nine months.

One of the bearers, Jacob Wainwright,

accompanied the coffin all the way back to London.

THEY SING

David Livingstone was buried in Westminster Abbey on the 18th of April 1874.

The Queen herself sent wreaths to be laid by the coffin.

As the congregation stood there, they forgot the failures and deaths,

and instead remembered his wishful thinking.

What he'd been working for - the end of slavery.

And just a few weeks after the funeral,

the British government brought pressure to bear on the Arabs of Zanzibar,

the centre of the slave trade in East Africa, and secured a commitment to end it.

This church is in the city of Blantyre.

It's named after David Livingstone's home town of Blantyre in Scotland.

Some years after his death, missionaries returned to Lake Nyasa and the territory around it,

known today as the Republic of Malawi.

They established a colony and built this church,

of which Livingstone would wholeheartedly have approved.

A Christian community, whose aim was not the extension of empire.

A colony whose purpose was to set an example,

a Christian one, of course, for the Africans nearby.

But what followed was less attractive.

Other European empires became interested in Africa,

at least in part because explorers like Livingstone had mapped great swathes of it.

The scramble for Africa was an opportunity,

and also a ruse to throw tribal populations under the yoke

and create a system of exploitation that was legal, but every bit as shameful as the slave trade.

Livingstone's fame had drawn all of Europe's eyes to Africa.

He'd made their maps for them.

So it was altogether a blessing that he couldn't see the ugly future

when he died that night in May 1873.

That night, he could see what he had done, and why he had done it, but not the consequences.

During the second half of the 20th century,

Europe's African empires unravelled.

One nation after another achieved independence.

Look at the map today.

Look at all those straight lines, the mad post-imperial patchwork,

evidence of negotiations and agreements

that rarely had much to do with tribal realities.

Zambia was one of those new nations.

By 1964, they were very glad indeed to be free of the imperialist yoke.

They celebrated.

And one of Zambia's first great celebrations

took place at the village of Ilala, where Livingstone had died.

President Kenneth Kaunda gave a speech

in which he described Dr David Livingstone as "their first freedom fighter".

You can see the people here around us today, you know,

when they hear the name David Livingstone, what does he make them think of?

Well, er, he is renowned for having fought against the slave trade.

For that reason, you'll find that, after independent Africa,

the tendency was to remove all colonial names,

but here in this part of the world, we kept the name Livingstone and kept the name Victoria Falls.

At that time, besides slavery, there were tribal wars.

With the will of God, we became brothers. There was no need to fight each other.

We stopped the tribal wars. We started living in peace among ourselves.

For that reason, he's a saint in this part of the world.

We have sanctified him here.

Livingstone was blind to the present tense,

and that made life difficult for the several Europeans who died as a result, his wife among them.

But what the people of East Africa remember is his vision, of a future without slavery,

the fundamental equality of the races and the rights of Africans to independent lives.

For all his human weaknesses,

Livingstone's greatest strength was that he believed in something better.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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