David Livingstone

David Livingstone, who lived from 1813 to 1873, was a Scottish doctor, a Congregationalist missionary with the London Missionary Society, and an explorer of central Africa who achieved iconic status in Victorian Britain as, in the words of his biographers, a Protestant missionary martyr, a working class rags-to-riches figure, and a scientific investigator. Much of his later exploration was driven by his pursuit of the sources of the Nile, a quest he believed would grant him the influence needed to combat the East African slave trade, and he explained to a friend that the Nile's sources were valuable to him chiefly as a means of opening his mouth with power among men. His central African journeys represented, for European observers of the period, the high point of European geographical discovery in the region, and his eventual disappearance from contact, his death in Africa, and the wave of public glorification that followed his death in 1873 and his 1874 funeral helped spark a major expansion of Christian missionary activity across central Africa during the period of European colonial expansion known as the Scramble for Africa.