Livingstone Coffee Blend

David Livingstone 

(19 March 1813 – 1 May 1873)

David Livingstone was a Scottish physician, explorer, pioneer Christian missionary and one of the most popular British heroes of the late 19th-century Victorian era.

He had a mythic status that operated on a number of interconnected levels: Missionary martyr, working-class “rags-to-riches” inspirational story, scientific investigator and explorer, imperial reformer, anti-slavery crusader, and advocate of British commercial and colonial expansion.

Livingstone’s fame as an explorer and his obsession with learning the sources of the Nile River was founded on the belief that if he could solve that age-old mystery, his fame would give him the influence to end the East African Arab–Swahili slave trade. “The Nile sources”, he told a friend, “are valuable only as a means of opening my mouth with power among men. It is this power [with] which I hope to remedy an immense evil.”

His subsequent exploration of the central African watershed was the culmination of the classic period of European geographical discovery and colonial penetration of Africa. At the same time, his missionary travels, “disappearance”, and eventual death in Africa—subsequent glorification as a posthumous national hero in 1874—led to the founding of several major central African Christian missionary initiatives carried forward in the era of the European “Scramble for Africa”.

Zambezi expedition
In December 1857 the Foreign Office proposed a huge expedition. Livingstone had envisaged another solo journey with African helpers, in January 1858 he agreed to lead a second Zambesi expedition with six specialist officers, hurriedly recruited in the UK.

The prefabricated iron river steamer Ma Robert was quickly built in portable sections, and loaded onto the Colonial Office steamer Pearl, which took them out on its way to Ceylon. They left on 10 March, at Freetown collected twelve Kru seafarers to man the river steamer, and reached the Zambezi on 14 May. The plan was for both ships to take them up the river to establish bases, but it turned out to be completely impassable to boats past the Cahora Bassa rapids, a series of cataracts and rapids that Livingstone had failed to explore on his earlier travels. Pearl offloaded their supplies on an island about 40 miles (64 km) upstream. From there, Ma Robert had to make repeated slow journeys, getting hauled across shoals. The riverbanks were a war zone, with Portuguese soldiers and their slaves fighting the Chikunda slave-hunters of Matakenya (Mariano), but both sides accepted the expedition as friends.

He brought the ships downriver in 1864 after the government ordered the recall of the expedition. The Zambezi Expedition was castigated as a failure in many newspapers of the time, and Livingstone experienced great difficulty in raising funds to further explore Africa. John Kirk, Charles Meller, and Richard Thornton, scientists appointed to work under Livingstone, contributed large collections of botanical, ecological, geological, and ethnographic material to scientific Institutions in the United Kingdom.

Nile River
In January 1866, Livingstone returned to Africa, this time to Zanzibar, and from there he set out to seek the source of the Nile. Richard Francis Burton, John Hanning Speke, and Samuel Baker had identified either Lake Albert or Lake Victoria as the source (which was partially correct, as the Nile “bubbles from the ground high in the mountains of Burundi halfway between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria”), but there was still serious debate on the matter. Livingstone believed that the source was farther south and assembled a team to find it consisting of freed slaves, Comoros Islanders, twelve Sepoys, and two servants from his previous expedition, Chuma and Susi.

Livingstone set out from the mouth of the Ruvuma river, but his assistants gradually began deserting him. The Comoros Islanders had returned to Zanzibar and (falsely) informed authorities that Livingstone had died. He reached Lake Malawi on 6 August, by which time most of his supplies had been stolen, including all his medicines. Livingstone then travelled through swamps in the direction of Lake Tanganyika, with his health declining. He sent a message to Zanzibar requesting that supplies be sent to Ujiji and he then headed west, forced by ill health to travel with slave traders. He arrived at Lake Mweruon 8 November 1867 and continued on, travelling south to become the first European to see Lake Bangweulu. Upon finding the Lualaba River, Livingstone theorised that it could have been the high part of the Nile River; but realised that it in fact flowed into the River Congo at Upper Congo Lake.

Geographical discoveries
Livingstone was wrong about the Nile, but he identified numerous geographical features for Western science, such as Lake Ngami, Lake Malawi, and Lake Bangweulu, in addition to Victoria Falls mentioned above. He filled in details of Lake Tanganyika, Lake Mweru, and the course of many rivers, especially the upper Zambezi, and his observations enabled large regions to be mapped which previously had been blank. Even so, the farthest north he reached was the north end of Lake Tanganyika – still south of the Equator – and he did not penetrate the rainforest of the River Congo any farther downstream than Ntangwe near Misisi.

Livingstone was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society of London and was made a Fellow of the society, with which he had a strong association for the rest of his life