Finding David Livingstone.
Stephen King, Bathing Machines, Crystal Palace & On This Day.
BOC#049
4 MINUTE MUNCH
‘Livingstone, I presume?’ — The Story Behind the Origin of the Phrase.
Physician, prospector, missionary and explorer David Livingstone is renowned for his exploration of Africa, but perhaps more so for his famed disappearance while in search of the Nile’s source in 1866. His time in Africa saw him make the ‘first’ crossing of the Kalahari Desert, ‘discover’ Victoria Falls, and open the continent to the Church and Western commerce.
Beginning in the early 1840s, Livingstone preached the gospel, denounced slavery, and became the first white man to cross Africa from coast to coast. But while pre-occupied searching for the source of the Nile, seeking slave-traders and discovering the undiscovered, Livingstone went missing, and was presumed dead.
In 1869 a journalist by the name of Henry Morton Stanley would find himself summoned to Paris on ‘important business.’ Upon meeting publisher James Gordon Bennett at the Grand Hotel, Stanley’s mission quickly became apparent; “FIND LIVINGSTONE, ” he was told — or so Stanley tells us in his first book, How I Found Livingstone.
Who Was Stanley?
As a six-year-old, Stanley was an inmate at the Welsh St.Asaph Union Workhouse, a place he’d leave in pursuit of relatives when he was fifteen. At seventeen, while staying with an uncle in Liverpool, Stanley worked as a butchers delivery boy, and in 1859, while delivering meat to an American merchant ship at the nearby docks, was invited to join the crew on a voyage that would eventually dock at New Orleans where he would jump ship.
Stanley would join the Confederate Army and fight with the Arkansas Volunteers at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee in 1862, but soon found himself in a crowded typhus-ridden POW camp outside of Chicago. The only way out, it seemed, was to join the Union Army, which he did. Having later received a medical discharge, he joined the Union Navy in 1854 where he became a ship’s clerk aboard the Minnesota before deserting in 1865.
His next career path saw him serve as a war reporter covering the Indian Wars of 1867. New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr hired Stanley to cover British exploits against the Emperor of Abyssinia, and while on his way to war, Stanley bribed the chief telegraph operator, ensuring his reports were first out. By 27, he was named permanent foreign correspondent for The New York Herald.
As the Scramble for Africa took center-stage, so did the advent of the African explorer. Richard Francis Burton and John Speke were two notable African explorers discussed previously (BOC#029 link below), but most pertinent to this story, was the aforementioned David Livingstone.
Upon being instructed to “find Livingstone,” Stanley set off for Africa where he planned on exploring Tanzania’s Rufiji River. In 1871. Joined by a dog named Omar, armed guards, an interpreter, cooks and an American flag carrying guide, Stanley marched in search of Livingstone. Following an eight month trek amidst swamps, crocodiles and deadly diseases, he finally found Livingstone and uttered the famous words that have since become a staple of English catchphrases: “Livingstone, I presume?” — or so the legend goes.
According to Stanley, he and Livingstone became friends and travelled together for several months. Upon their parting, Livingstone remained in Africa where he would soon die. This gave Stanley a blank canvas upon which to paint his narrative. Tales of chiefs, sultans and servants would fill the pages of his writing, making him the “progenitor of all the subsequent professional travel writers.”
When the Royal Geographical Society belatedly sent an expedition to find Livingstone, they were appalled to cross paths with a returning Stanley who was smugly boarding a ship having achieved something comparable to Hannibal’s and Napoleon’s crossing the Alps — he’d found Livingstone.
Read More on African Exploration:
ON THIS DAY: 8th DECEMBER
The President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, declared war on Japan on this day in 1941; a day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
In 1854 Pope Pius IX declared that the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, was preserved from all sin, a doctrine that is now binding on all Roman Catholics.
The former member of the rock band The Beatles, John Lennon, was fatally shot by Mark David Chapman on this day in 1980 in New York City. Chapman, who had asked for Lennon’s autograph earlier that day, dispatched five shots as the former Beatle walked into his apartment.
The Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty was signed on this day in 1987. The agreement between the U.S (Reagan) and the U.S.S.R (Gorbachev) would see the dismantlement and abandonment of thousands of mid-range ballistic missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km.
BOOK QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“The world turns, that’s all. You can hold on and turn with it, or stand up to protest and be spun right off.”
― Stephen King, The Green Mile
HISTORIC PHOTO OF THE WEEK
Two women stood in front of a bathing-machine, once used to protect female modesty while at the beach. Invented in 1753 by Benjamin Beale in Margate, England, bathing-machines were wooden carts about 6 feet high and 8 feet wide with a peaked roof and a door or (canvas cover) on either side. They were invented to hide the user until they were submerged and therefore covered by the water. Swimming costumes were not yet common at the time (18th-20th Century).
DID YOU KNOW?
South London’s Crystal Palace was built for ‘The Great Exhibition’ of 1851 in Hyde Park, London. It featured artifacts and inventions like printing machines, a 50kg lump of gold, folding pianos, rare diamonds and jewels. In 1852 the palace, designed by Joseph Paxton, was dismantled and moved to Sydenham where it was expanded to become the largest building in the world. At about 7pm on the 30th November 1936, the structure caught fire; a disaster of which could be seen for miles. The legacy of Crystal Palace lives on in the form of a football club and a park.
Thanks Omar! I've heard the quote over and over, but never bothered to look up the story behind it. Fascinating stuff!