David Livingstone

David Livingstone was born in Blantyre, Scotland, and at ten went to work in a cotton mill, studying Latin and science in the evenings. He trained as a doctor and in 1841 went to southern Africa with the London Missionary Society. Restless with mission stations, he began exploring, and between 1853 and 1856 he crossed the continent from Luanda on the Atlantic to Quelimane on the Indian Ocean, the first European known to do so. On the way he saw the great waterfall that the local people called the Smoke That Thunders and named it Victoria Falls. His book Missionary Travels made him famous. He hoped that commerce and Christianity would end the Arab and Portuguese slave trade in East Africa, and his reports of its cruelty helped turn British opinion against it. From 1866 he searched for the source of the Nile. In 1871 the journalist Henry Morton Stanley found him at Ujiji. He died in 1873 in present-day Zambia; his attendants carried his body to the coast, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Faith: Scottish Christian missionary in Africa. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica