March 19

David Livingstone was born on the 19th in 1813 in Scotland. As an adult, he would become a doctor and a missionary who spent the bulk of his life in central Africa. Everyone must be familiar with his famous encounter with Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who was Welsh and who had been sent to Africa by the New York Herald to find Livingstone, which he did in 1871. When Livingstone finally got around to dying on the 1st of May in 1871, two of his friends, Chuma and Susi, would carry his body for over 1000 miles to a port so that Livingstone’s body could be returned to England for proper burial in Westminster Abbey. One question that immediately occurred to be when I learned of this was “What condition was the body in after being carried for that distance across Africa in May?” The weather had to have been really hot.

Livingstone’s wife, Mary, would die when she contracted malaria trying to reunite with him in Africa. Mary was the daughter of Robert Moffat who was, like Stanley, a missionary in Africa.

Stanley would enlist at first in the Confederacy’s army during the American civil war. He was taken prisoner by the Union and would then switch sides. Once in the Union army, he would desert and enlist in the Union’s navy, from which he would also desert.