David Livingstone was born on 19 March 1813 in Blantyre, Scotland, and worked twelve-hour days in a cotton mill from age ten while studying Latin at night. He qualified as a physician in 1840, was ordained by the London Missionary Society, and reached Kuruman (in modern South Africa) in March 1841.
Between 1841 and 1856 he made three great transcontinental journeys, becoming in November 1855 the first European to see the Mosi-oa-Tunya (which he renamed Victoria Falls) on the Zambezi. His 1857 Missionary Travels and Researches sold 70,000 copies in its first months and made him a Victorian celebrity.
His second expedition (1858–64) up the Zambezi was a failure — the Cabora Bassa rapids blocked navigation, his wife Mary died at Shupanga in 1862, and the mission at Magomero collapsed. But his 1865–1873 search for the source of the Nile placed him at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, where the journalist Henry Morton Stanley found him on 10 November 1871 with the greeting "Dr Livingstone, I presume?"
Livingstone died on 1 May 1873 at Chief Chitambo's village in modern Zambia, kneeling in prayer beside his cot. His African companions Susi and Chuma buried his heart under a mvula tree and carried his sun-dried body 1,500 miles to the coast for return to Westminster Abbey. His posthumous journals, describing the Yao and Arab slave caravans in unflinching detail, gave the anti-slavery movement its final polemic; the Sultan of Zanzibar closed the East African slave market in June 1873.