A voyage of five months saw Livingstone at Algoa Bay, preparing for his
first journey into the interior of Africa, the grave of so many
reputations, but the land of his renown. Until within a short time of
his departure from London he had hoped and intended to go to China as a
medical missionary. But the “Opium War” was still in progress; and for
the time being China was impossible. Moreover, Livingstone was brought
under the influence of one of the greatest personalities in modern
missionary enterprise. Robert Moffat was home on furlough, and his
wonderful story no less than his striking presence, exerted their spell
over the young Scot and changed the goal of his ambition. Dr. Moffat was
wont to describe the numberless African villages stretching away to the
north where no missionary had yet penetrated; and his appeal found a
ready response in Livingstone’s heart. None of us who have heard the old
man eloquent, and on whose memories the stately striking figure, with
the flowing beard, and the iron-grey tousled hair, made an indelible
impression, will wonder that any young man’s imagination should be
kindled by his address, or should discover in the mysterious depths of
the vast African continent the field for his life work. It was to Dr.
Moffat’s station at Kuruman that David Livingstone took his first
journey. The distance was seven hundred miles; and he immediately
surrendered to the interest and delight of travel by ox waggon, the
freedom of the open air life, the variety of the scenery and sport, and
the attractiveness of the natives, who engaged his sympathy from the
first. It was now that his hardy training in Scotland stood him in good
stead. He knew how to put up with inconveniences cheerfully, and face
difficulties with resolution, while his resourcefulness was as
inexhaustible as his kindliness. That “characteristic forward tread” of
which Isaac Taylor had spoken which “meant getting there” was put to the
proof and not found wanting. To him there was a way out of every
situation, however critical; and the “bold free course” which he took
with the natives, together with his medical skill and unwearying
goodness, won their loyalty. They recognised him as a great chief, and
his whole career is eloquent of the extraordinary devotion which he
inspired in them. At the end of May, 1841, he was at Kuruman, with
instructions from the Directors of the Society to turn his attention to
the North--instructions that absolutely coincided with his own
aspiration. It is notable that he formed the very highest opinion of the
value of Christian missions from the results that he saw. Let it be
remembered that he was always a slow, cautious Scot in all his
judgments, with a severely truthful and scientific mind, and his
testimony becomes the more valuable. “Everything I witnessed surpassed
my hopes,” he writes home; “if this is a fair sample the statements of
the missionaries as to their success are far within the mark.” He is
full of the praises of the Christian Hottentots, who are “far superior
in attainments to what I had expected;” their worship reminded him of
the old covenanters. It was thus, then, that with his zeal for his
mission of evangelism greatly stimulated, he started north to the
country of the Bakwains.
A short circuit sufficed to reveal the problem, and he returned to
Kuruman to think out the best plan of campaign. The first step was a
characteristic one. It was to isolate himself absolutely from all
European society and live among the natives, so as to learn their
language and study their habits and their laws. For six months he
rigorously pursued his plan, and found his reward in the new
appreciation he gained of the native character and mode of thinking, and
the extent to which he conquered their confidences. So far advanced had
he become in the knowledge of their language that he was able to enjoy a
laugh at himself for “turning poet.” One can believe that to
Livingstone this was no easy work; but he succeeded in making Sechuana
translations of several hymns which were afterwards adopted and printed
by the French missionaries. “If they had been bad,” he says in his naïve
way, “I don’t see that they can have had any motive for using them.”
He was waiting now for the final decision of the directors authorising
the advance into the unoccupied district of the north. The decision was
long in coming. We must recognise that such a resolution was not an easy
one for those who carried all the responsibilities at home. Even their
most trusted advisers on the actual field were not agreed. Dr. Philip,
the special representative of the Society at the Cape, and a man of
great personal power and sagacity, shook his head over Livingstone’s
impetuosity and talked about the dangers. “If we wait till there is no
danger,” said Livingstone, “we shall never go at all.” It was quite
true; but there were big problems of policy to be decided. Many held by
the watchword “concentration,” which is always plausible, and often
conclusive. Settlements for educational and industrial developments had
proved their value. On the other hand Livingstone had unanswerable logic
on his side when he argued that the missionaries in the South had too
scanty a population and that the call to possess the North was urgent,
for the traders and the slavers were pushing out there, and the gospel
of humanity was imperatively needed.
There was long delay, but in the meantime Livingstone was making proof
of his ministry. His medical knowledge helped to spread his fame. He
fought the rainmakers at their own arts with the scientific weapon of
irrigation and won his battle. He made friends with the Bechuana Chief,
Sechele, one of the most intelligent and interesting of the many great
natives who surrendered to the charm of Livingstone. Sechele was deeply
impressed by the missionary’s message, but profoundly troubled in
spirit. He said, “You startle me--these words make all my bones to
shake--I have no more strength in me. But my forefathers were living at
the same time yours were, and how is it that they did not send them word
about these terrible things sooner. They all passed away into darkness
without knowing whither they were going.” When Livingstone tried to
explain to him the gradual spread of the Gospel knowledge, the chief
refused to believe that the whole earth could be visited. There was a
barrier at his very door--the Kalahari desert. Nobody could cross it.
Even those who knew the country would perish, and no missionary would
have a chance. As for his own people there was no difficulty in
converting them, always assuming that Livingstone would go to work in
the right way. “Do you imagine these people will ever believe by your
merely talking to them? I can make them do nothing except by thrashing
them, and if you like I will call my head-men and with our litupa (whips
of rhinoceros hide) we will soon make them all believe together.” It
must be confessed, however, that Sechele’s state-church principles did
not commend themselves to the mind of an ardent voluntaryist like
Livingstone. “In our relations with the people,” he writes, “we were
simply strangers exercising no authority or control whatever. Our
influence depended entirely on persuasion; and having taught them by
kind conversation as well as by public instruction, I expected them to
do what their own sense of right and wrong dictated.” He then sets on
record “five instances in which by our influence on public opinion war
was prevented,” and pays a high tribute to the intelligence of the
natives who in many respects excel “our own uneducated peasantry.” This
attitude of appreciation and respectful sympathy was the secret of
Livingstone’s unparalleled influence over the African tribes. It was on
a return from a visit to Sechele in June, 1843, that Livingstone heard
the good news of the formal sanction of the forward movement. He hailed
the decision, as he said, “with inexpressible delight”; and in a fine
letter written to Mr. Cecil declared his fixed resolve to give less
attention to the art of physical healing and more to spiritual
amelioration. He has no ambition to be “a very good doctor but a useless
drone of a missionary.” He feels that to carry out this purpose will
involve some self-denial, but he will make the sacrifice cheerfully. As
for the charge of ambition, “I really am ambitious to preach beyond
other men’s lines.... I am only determined to go on and do all I can,
while able, for the poor degraded people of the north.”
In less than two months he was ready for the new move. The first journey
was two hundred miles to the north-east, to Mabotsa, which he had
previously noted as suitable for a station. Here he built a house with
his own hands, and settled down for three years’ work among the
Bakatlas. During this period two events occurred that were especially
notable. The first went far towards ending his career. The facts are
well-known from Livingstone’s own graphic but simple description. He had
gone with the Bakatlas to hunt some lions which had committed serious
depredations in the village. The lions were encircled by the natives but
broke through the line and escaped. As Livingstone was returning,
however, he saw one of the beasts on a small hill, and fired into him at
about thirty yards’ distance. Loading again, he heard a shout, and
“looking half-round saw the lion just in the act of springing upon me.”
The lion seized him by the shoulder and “growling horribly close to my
ear, he shook me as a terrier dog does a rat.” We now see the advantage
of a scientific education. Livingstone was able to analyse his own
feelings and emotions during the process of being gnawed by a lion. He
observed that “the shock produced a stupor, a sort of dreaminess”; there
was “no sense of pain, nor feeling of terror.” He compares it to the
influence of chloroform; and argues that “this peculiar state is
probably produced in all animals killed by the carnivora, and if so is a
merciful provision by our benevolent Creator for lessening the pain of
death.” In this judgment he anticipated some
[Illustration: LIVINGSTONE ATTACKED BY A LION.]
weighty modern conclusions by noted physiologists. So interesting does
Livingstone find these observations, that it seems as if he must have
been almost disappointed when the lion released him and turned his
attention to others less well equipped for scientific investigation. On
the whole Livingstone escaped marvellously well, but the bone was
crunched into splinters, and there were eleven teeth wounds on the upper
part of his arm. The arm indeed was never really well again. It will be
remembered that it was by the false joint in this limb that the remains
of Livingstone were identified on their arrival in England. It will also
be remembered that, as has been so well said, “for thirty years
afterwards all his labours and adventures, entailing such exertion and
fatigue, were undertaken with a limb so maimed that it was painful for
him to raise a fowling-piece, or in fact to place the left arm in any
position above the level of the shoulder.”
This was a bad business. But Providence has a way of making up to good
men for afflictions of this kind; and Livingstone’s compensation came
to him in the following year, when he had something to face that
demanded more daring than a mere every-day encounter with lions. He had
been a bachelor in Africa for four years, and he had resolved to try his
fortune with Mary Moffat, Dr. Moffat’s eldest daughter. The proposal was
made “beneath one of the fruit trees” at Kuruman in 1844. He got the
answer he desired and deserved, and Mary Moffat took him with all his
erratic ways, and became his devoted wife. “She was always the best
spoke in the wheel at home,” he writes; “and when I took her with me on
two occasions to lake Ngami, and far beyond, she endured more than some
who have written large books of travels.” In course of time three sons
and a daughter came to “cheer their solitude,” and increase their
responsibilities. But from the first they set themselves to fulfil what
Livingstone called the ideal missionary life, “the husband a
jack-of-all-trades, and the wife a maid-of-all-work.” The catalogue of
necessary accomplishments sounds somewhat embarrassing, and one
realises that the ordinary college training is in many respects
incomplete. Here it is, as Livingstone expresses it--“Building,
gardening, cobbling, doctoring, tinkering, carpentering, gun-mending,
farriering, waggon-mending, preaching, schooling, lecturing on physics,
occupying a chair in divinity, and helping my wife to make soap,
candles, and clothes.” It was certainly a busy and catholic career. He
was carrying the whole of his world upon his own broad shoulders, and
was guide, philosopher, and friend to a vast district. He had his
enemies, too, as those who champion the rights of the poor and helpless
are sure to have. To the north were to be found settlements of
unscrupulous and marauding Boers, who held by all the unenlightened
views of the relation of the white races to the black which were only
recently extinct in England where the financial interest in slavery died
hard in 1833. These Boer marauders lived largely on slave-labour and on
pillage; and Livingstone was brought into open conflict with them. On
one side they may be said to have barred his advance. The tribes he
served and loved lived under the shadow of a Boer invasion. The time was
to come when the cloud would burst over Sechele and his unoffending
people, when his wives would be slain and his children carried away into
slavery; when many of the bravest of his people would be massacred, and
Livingstone’s house sacked and gutted in his absence. This complicity of
the northern Boers in those outrages on native tribes which history most
frequently associates with the Portuguese, earned Livingstone’s stern
indignation and detestation; though he never did the Boers of South
Africa the injustice of confounding the lawless raiders with the main
body of settlers, of whom he wrote “the Boers generally ... are a sober,
industrious, and most hospitable body of peasantry.”
He had, however, already begun to have glimpses of what his life-witness
was to be. He saw that the curse of Africa lay not only in the eternal
conflicts of tribe with tribe. That form of misery was original to the
continent and its savage inhabitants. But a new curse had fallen upon
the unhappy people by the intrusion of those who united with a higher
material civilisation a more developed and refined form of cruelty. The
diabolical cunning and callousness that, under the guise of trading,
would gain the confidence of a peaceful tribe, only at last to rise up
some fatal night, murder the old, enslave the young, burn the huts, and
march the chained gang hundreds of miles to the sea, have made the
records of African Slavery the most awful reading in human history.
Imagination carries the story one step further. We hardly need the
genius of a Turner to suggest to us the horror of a slave-ship under the
torrid tropical skies, with its dead and dying human freight. When the
slave-trade is realised in all its accumulated horrors, it is easy to
understand how, to a man of Livingstone’s noble Christian sensibility,
the manifest duty of the Church of Christ was to engage in a
war-to-the-death struggle against this darkest of all inhumanities.
He was planning his campaign during the years when he passed with his
wife and children from one settlement to another. Three houses he built
with his own hands, and made some progress in the cultivation of gardens
round them. The first was at Mabotsa. It was the home to which he
brought his young bride and to leave it went to his heart. His going was
the result of the attitude adopted towards him by a brother missionary.
Sooner than cause scandal among the tribe he resolved to give everything
up and go elsewhere. “Paradise will make amends for all our privations
and sorrows here,” he says simply. It is something to know that the
missionary who did him this injustice lived “to manifest a very
different spirit.” Livingstone next cast in his lot with Sechele and his
people, and built his second house at Chonuane, some forty miles from
Mabotsa. It was hard work, and it made a big drain on his very small
income, but it was not his way to complain. The hardship fell more
severely on his wife and infant children, and he felt the deprivations
and inconveniences most for them. The house was finished in course of
time, and a school was erected too, where the children were instructed,
and services held. But nature was against a long settlement at Chonuane.
A period of prolonged drought set in. Supplies were exhausted. The
people had to go further afield, and the position became untenable.
There was nothing for it but for the Livingstones to go too. All the
labour of rebuilding had to be undertaken again, this time at Kolobeng,
another forty miles on. Providence was indeed to Livingstone “like as an
eagle stirring up the nest.” Such of the tribe as were left went with
him and a new village was constructed. Livingstone and his family lived
for a year in “a mere hut.” In 1848 the new house was actually built,
despite some serious personal accidents of which he made light in his
usual way. “What a mercy to be in a house again!” he writes home; “a
year in a little hut through which the wind blew our candles into
glorious icicles (as a poet would say) by night, and in which crowds of
flies continually settled on the eyes of our poor little brats by day,
makes us value our present castle. Oh Janet, know thou, if thou art
given to building castles in the air, that that is easy work compared to
erecting cottages on the ground!” Such was the building of his third
house, the one that was afterwards sacked by the Boers. Then he built no
more houses. Indeed, he never had a home of his own in Africa
afterwards. The dark problem of Central Africa had him in its grip. He
sent his wife and children home to England; and he himself became like
that Son of Man whose example he followed so nearly, one “who had not
where to lay his head.”
Before that time came, however, he had laid the foundations of his fame
as an explorer by crossing the Kalahari Desert, and discovering Lake
Ngami. The circumstances that gave rise to this journey are easily
detailed. The drought continued at Kolobeng as pitilessly as at
Chonuane. Only the power of Livingstone’s personality sufficed to
retain the faith and loyalty of the tribes. He writes that they were
always treated with “respectful kindness” and never had an enemy among
the natives. His enemies were among the “dirty whites,” who knew that he
was the most dangerous obstacle to the slave-raids, and who objected to
his policy of training Christian native teachers to be evangelists among
their own kinsfolk. But though the tribes remained loyal, the fact
remained that Livingstone had led a migration which had not resulted in
a permanent settlement; neither could he command the rain as their own
rainmakers professed to be able to do. The heathen superstition that
hostile doctors had put their country under an evil charm so that no
rain should fall on it, prevailed even against their faith in the
missionary. Sechele’s more enlightened mind found it difficult to
understand why Livingstone’s God did not answer the prayer for rain. Yet
the work went forward at Kolobeng. The chief Sechele, after long
hesitation on Livingstone’s part, was baptised and entered into
communion with the little church. Trouble followed when he “went home,
gave each of his superfluous wives new clothing, and all his own goods,
which they had been accustomed to keep in their huts for him, and sent
them to their parents with an intimation that he had no fault to find
with them, but that in parting with them he wished to follow the will of
God.” It was his solution of a social problem that can never be
satisfactorily solved, and it was both courageous and generous, but the
result was seen in the fiercer resentment of the relatives of the women;
and while little or none of this fell upon Livingstone, it served
seriously to prejudice the religion which was responsible for Sechele’s
action. On every count, it was desirable to find the new and permanent
station, where that central training-ground for native missionaries
could be established which Livingstone had constantly in view, and where
the water supply would be less likely to fail. But where to go? In the
south, the field was well supplied with missionaries. To the east were
the unfriendly Dutch, bent on making mischief. To the north lay the
Kalahari desert, which Sechele had pronounced to be an impassable
barrier to the progress of Christianity. “It is utterly impossible even
to us black men,” he said. But the word “impossible” was not in
Livingstone’s dictionary.
If my readers will take the trouble to look at an old map of South
Africa they will find the whole vast track of the west which lies to the
north of the Orange River, and includes Bechuana Land and Damara Land,
described as desert, and the Kalahari Desert in the eastern portion of
it. Kolobeng lay at the extreme west of what we know to-day as the
Transvaal, some two hundred and fifty miles from Pretoria, and was more
than four thousand feet above sea level, near the sources of the Limpopo
River, which flows north and east, until it finally joins the ocean at
Delagoa Bay. A straight line to Lake Ngami would have taken the
travellers in a north-westerly direction a distance of little more than
three hundred miles. But it is doubtful whether they could have survived
such a journey across an untrodden route, even if they had known
accurately where the great lake lay. They were certainly well inspired
to go due north to the Zouga River, and then follow it westward to the
lake, though this route must have added two hundred miles to their
journey. Three other Europeans, Colonel Steele, Mr. Murray, and Mr.
Oswell--the latter one of Livingstone’s life-long friends and a mighty
African hunter, joined the expedition, which started on June 1st, 1849,
and reached the lake on August 1st. Livingstone has given us a most
graphic and detailed description of the desert with its sandy soil, its
dry beds of ancient rivers, its trackless plains, its prairie grass, its
patches of bushes, and the singular products of its soil with roots like
large turnips that hold fluid beneath the soil, and above all the desert
water-melons on which the Bushmen as well as the elephants and
antelopes, and even lions and hyænas subsist. The Bushmen he found a
thin, wiry, merry race capable of great endurance, as indeed the
denizens of the desert must be. They existed under conditions that
inspired the Bechuana with terror, for to add to the other dangers the
desert was at times infested with serpents.
It was a hazardous enterprise to which Livingstone and his fellow
travellers were committed, and, humanly speaking, its success depended
wholly on the discovery of water at periodical intervals. The “caravan”
was a considerable one. Eighty cattle and twenty horses were not deemed
too many for the waggons and for riding; these had to be watered, and
the twenty men besides. Progress was necessarily slow. None could face
the burning heat of the mid-day hours. They had to move forward in the
mornings and the evenings. The waggon-wheels sank deep into the soft,
hot sand; and the poor oxen dragging them laboriously forward were, at a
critical time, nearly four days without water, “and their masters
scarcely better off.” Aided, however, by the experience and keen
instinct of the natives, they found wells in unsuspected places, and
eventually made the banks of the Zouga River. After that, progress was
easy. Leaving the waggons and oxen, they took to canoes, or wended their
way along the riverbanks, until, on the morning of August 1st, they
found themselves gazing on the waters of Lake Ngami, the first white
people to see it so far as they knew.
It had been one of the principal arguments with Livingstone for the
journey that he would meet the famous chief Sebituane, who had saved the
life of Sechele in his infancy, and who was renowned as a warrior and as
a powerful and intelligent ruler. It meant another two hundred miles of
travel to the north, and the jealousies of the chiefs, and their real or
assumed fears for Livingstone’s safety, prevented the realisation of his
hopes on this journey. There was nothing for it but to go back to
Kolobeng, where the drought persisted as absolute as ever.
Livingstone’s congregation and Mrs. Livingstone’s school had disappeared
in search of better watered lands. It was clear that for Livingstone
there was here “no abiding city.” He resolved to transport his wife and
three children to the north. He made more of an eastward circuit this
time, and Sechele accompanied them to the fords of the Zouga. Mrs.
Livingstone was the first white lady to see Lake Ngami; but the purposed
visit to Sebituane had again to be deferred.
Livingstone’s aid was invoked for a fever-stricken party of Englishmen
who were hunting ivory. One was already dead, but the others recovered
under his treatment. His own children, however, sickened; and the party
precipitately retired to “the pure air of the desert,” and so home to
Kolobeng where another child was born to them, only to be carried away
by an epidemic. “Hers is the first grave in all that country,” writes
the bereaved father, “marked as the resting-place of one of whom it is
believed and confessed that she shall live again.”
After a visit to Kuruman to rest and recruit, they were ready in April,
1851, for a third attempt to reach Sebituane. Mr. Oswell, the most
valuable of comrades, was again with them. The journey was successful,
but it came dangerously near to being disastrous to the whole family.
This crisis occurred on the far side of the Zouga river, as they were
travelling northward across absolute desert. The Bushman guide lost his
way, and the supply of water in the waggons had been wasted by one of
the servants. Livingstone tells the incident in a single paragraph, but
the agony of it must nearly have killed him and his wife. “The next
morning, the less there was of water the more thirsty the little rogues
became. The idea of their perishing before our eyes was terrible. It
would almost have been a relief to me to have been reproached with being
the entire cause of the catastrophe, but not one syllable of upbraiding
was uttered by their mother, though the tearful eye told the agony
within. In the afternoon of the fifth day, to our inexpressible relief,
some of the men returned with a supply of that fluid of which we had
never before felt the true value.” At last the often-postponed pleasure
of meeting and greeting Sebituane was fulfilled, and the famous chief
more than justified all expectations. He met the party on the Chobe
river and conducted them with great ceremony and hospitality to his
home. The way seemed to be opening for a new and auspicious missionary
settlement, when in a few days Sebituane sickened and died. It was one
of the greatest blows which Livingstone ever experienced. Its tragic
suddenness almost stunned him. Looking back upon it now, it is easy to
believe that it was not God’s will that Livingstone should spend his
life in the work of a missionary settlement, but should be driven out
along the lonely, adventurous path where his destiny lay.
But at the moment he only felt severely the crushing of his hopes and
frustration of his plans. Sebituane’s daughter, who succeeded to the
chieftainship, was full of kindly promises; but difficulties multiplied
in the way of a settlement, which further exploration of the district
did not diminish. Penetrating a hundred and thirty miles to the north,
Oswell and Livingstone came upon the broad channel of a noble river,
called by the natives the Seshéke. It was the Zambesi, and some three
hundred yards wide even there, more than a thousand miles from the
mouth. Clearly the swamps round the great river afforded no healthy land
for settling. There must be more exploration done, and meantime his wife
and children must be cared for. They were hundreds of miles from any
white settlement. Even so, Livingstone might still have debated his
destiny. But revelations came to him that the slaver was even now
establishing his accursed hold on this district. Sebituane’s people, the
Makololo, finest and loyallest of tribesmen, had begun to sell
children, plundered from their native villages, for guns and calicoes.
“It is broken-heartedness,” he wrote much later, “of which the slaves
die. Even children, who showed wonderful endurance in keeping up with
the chained gangs, would sometimes hear the sound of dancing and the
merry tinkle of drums in passing near a village; then the memory of home
and happy days proved too much for them, they cried and sobbed, the
broken heart came on, and they rapidly sank.” This was the awful
revelation that came to Livingstone in the land of the Makololo. Little
more than a year before, such an idea as the barter of human beings for
guns had never been known among this tribe. “Had we been here sooner the
slave traffic would never have existed,” argued Livingstone. He began to
have a vision of Christian settlements standing sentinel over the lives
and happiness of the natives of the interior. If the slaver could make
his way from the coast to the centre, so could the missionary. It was
the one effective counterstroke in the battle for human liberty. But it
meant separation from wife and bairns. He must return and do this work
alone. He could risk no one’s life but his own. His decision was taken.
He devotes only a single paragraph to the long and arduous journey to
Cape Town. It was a matter of fifteen hundred miles, and part of it was
through territory where a so-called Caffre War was being waged, which
excited Livingstone’s scorn for the waste of blood and treasure. He was
an object of suspicion at the Cape. The State authorities suspected his
humanitarian sympathies, and the Church officials his theological
orthodoxy. He was in debt, and had anticipated his small salary for more
than a year in advance. But he had written to the Directors of the
London Missionary Society in the most resolute terms. “Consider the
multitudes that in the Providence of God have been brought to light in
the country of Sebituane; the probability that in our efforts to
evangelise we shall put a stop to the slave trade in a large region, and
by means of the highway into the north which we have discovered bring
unknown nations into the sympathies of the Christian World.... Nothing
but a strong conviction that the step will lead to the Glory of Christ
would make me orphanise my children.... Should you not feel yourselves
justified in incurring the expense of their support in England, I shall
feel called upon to renounce the hope of carrying the Gospel into that
country.... But stay, I am not sure: so powerfully convinced am I that
it is the will of our Lord that I should go, I will go, no matter who
opposes; but from you I expect nothing but encouragement.” A happy
comment on this letter is found in Livingstone’s “Missionary Travels,”
in the paragraph recording the farewell to his wife and children.
“Having placed my family on board a homeward-bound ship, and promised to
rejoin them in two years, we parted for, as it subsequently proved,
nearly five years. The Directors of the London Missionary Society
signified their cordial approval of my project by leaving the matter
entirely to my own discretion, and I have much pleasure in acknowledging
my obligations to the gentlemen composing that body for always acting in
an enlightened spirit, and with as much liberality as their constitution
would allow.”
Livingstone started back for the interior on the 8th of June, 1852. He
was now in his fortieth year.