David Livingstone's journey in Central Africa put more on the map of the dark continent than any other explorer's. He was the first European to cross Africa. He traced the Zambesi to its source and discovered one of the wonders of the world--the Victoria Falls.
He was not only an explorer and geographer, but an anthropologist, botanist, ethnologist and a medical missionary. As a poor boy from Glasgow, he taught himself Greek, Latin and mathematics, so in 1840 when he arrived in Cape Town at age 27, it was with an unshakable purpose-- severely tested over the next 30 years.
Elspeth Huxley portrays Livingstone as selfless. His own harsh judgment of himself was that he had failed to make sufficient discoveries or to convert Africans to Christianity in the numbers he had hoped.
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