Stanley Meets Livingstone at Ujiji

A Missing Explorer

David Livingstone, a Scottish missionary and explorer, had traveled in Africa for more than two decades. In 1866 he set out from the East African coast to search for the sources of the Nile. For years he sent few messages, and in Britain and America some people feared that he had died. In 1869 James Gordon Bennett Jr., the owner of the New York Herald, sent Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh-born correspondent who lived in the United States, to find him.

The Journey to Ujiji

Stanley left Zanzibar in March 1871 with a caravan of porters and traveled inland for about eight months. He crossed regions of present-day Tanzania, and many of his men fell ill or deserted. He reached Ujiji, a trading town on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, in the autumn of 1871. Livingstone had arrived there not long before, in poor health and short of supplies, after finding that goods sent to him had been sold or stolen.

The Meeting

Stanley's account says that he approached Livingstone, who was standing among Arab traders and local people, took off his hat and said, with the sentence 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume?' The phrase is known from Stanley's account. His book How I Found Livingstone, published in 1872, gives the date as November 10, 1871. His first dispatch to the Herald gave November 3, and Livingstone's diary points to late October. Livingstone Online, a research project based at the University of Maryland, has published an analysis of the dates that points to late October.

Afterwards

Stanley and Livingstone explored the northern end of Lake Tanganyika by canoe together in the following weeks and found that the Ruzizi River flowed into the lake. They parted in March 1872 at Tabora. Stanley pressed Livingstone to return to Britain, but Livingstone refused and continued his search for the sources of the Nile. He died on May 1, 1873, at Chitambo, in what is now Zambia. His African assistants Chuma and Susi and others carried his body to the coast, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey on April 18, 1874. Stanley later explored the Congo River from 1874 to 1877.

The Written Record

Stanley's dispatches appeared in the New York Herald and in the London press in 1872, and his book How I Found Livingstone was published the same year. Livingstone's journals and letters from his last years were collected after his death and published in 1874 as The Last Journals of David Livingstone, edited by Horace Waller. Livingstone Online, based at the University of Maryland, has made the manuscripts and field diaries available to read on the internet.