In 1869, Henry Morton Stanley, a 28-year-old correspondent for the New York Herald, was assigned to travel to central Africa and find the famed British physician and missionary David Livingstone. Livingstone, already the first European to cross the African continent and to sight Victoria Falls (which he named after England’s Queen Victoria), had returned to Africa in 1866 to learn more about the slave trade and the source of the Nile River. He had not been heard from since that time.

Stanley’s search ended in November, 1871, when he found the great explorer, feverish and short of supplies, at Ujiji in present-day Tanzania. Greeting him with the famous words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?,” Stanley nursed Livingstone back to health and grew keenly interested in his work. After several months, Stanley left to further extol Livingstone’s legend.

Livingstone’s exploration was born out of a belief that spreading Christianity and new forms of commerce to the African interior would end the slave trade. As his obsession with this quest increased, his body continued to weaken; Livingstone died malarious and emaciated in 1873, still searching for the source of the Nile. His heart was buried in African soil, and his body in London’s Westminster Abbey.

PostScript: Livingstone exerted an early influence on Western attitudes toward Africa. Following his death, Stanley returned to Africa to continue his friend’s explorations. Stanley became the first European to trace the Congo River to its mouth and, helping to usher in an era of imperialistic exploration, later opened up the Congo region for King Leopold II of Belgium.