Seeking the source of the Nile
01/1866 AD arrived
Livingstone returns to Africa, obsessed with finding the source of the Nile founded on the belief that if he could solve that age-old mystery, his fame would give him the influence to end the East African Arab–Swahili slave trade.
"The Nile sources", he told a friend, "are valuable only as a means of opening my mouth with power among men. It is this power [with] which I hope to remedy an immense evil."
Richard Francis Burton, John Hanning Speke, and Samuel Baker had identified either Lake Albert or Lake Victoria as the source (which was partially correct, as the Nile "bubbles from the ground high in the mountains of Burundi halfway between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria"), but there was still serious debate on the matter.
Livingstone believed that the source was farther south and assembled a team to find it consisting of freed slaves, Comoros Islanders, twelve Sepoys, and two servants from his previous expedition, Chuma and Susi.
Livingstone was wrong about the Nile, but he identified numerous geographical features for Western science, such as
- Lake Ngami
- Lake Malawi
- Lake Bangweulu
- Victoria Fall
He filled in details of Lake Tanganyika, Lake Mweru, and the course of many rivers, especially the upper Zambezi, and his observations enabled large regions to be mapped which previously had been blank.
Subjects Who or What arrived?
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David Livingstone Scottish physician, Cong...
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