Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 33.djvu/399

 Livingstone Pioneer on 1 Nov. The river, however, did not rise sufficiently till 19 Jan. 1864, and then the Pioneer carried away her rudder on a sandbank, so that they did not reach Morambala, where he picked up the remaining members of the Universities' Mission, until 2 Feb. On 15 Feb. he reached the mouth of the Zambesi, where he was met by H.M.S. Orestes and Ariel, which towed the Lady Nyassa and the Pioneer through a hurricane to Mozambique. There the expedition came to an end. The Pioneer returned to the Cape with the Rev. Horace Waller and the remainder of the mission, and Livingstone took the Lady Nyassa to Zanzibar to try to sell her. Finding no buyer, he made a plucky voyage across the Indian Ocean to Bombay in the tiny craft with only a European stoker, carpenter, and sailor, and seven native men and two native boys who had never been at sea (one of whom, Chuma, was with him to the end of his life). He sailed from Zanzibar on 30 April and entered Bombay harbour unnoticed on 13 June. He received every kindness from Sir Bartle Frere (the governor), and failing to sell his ship, left her at Bombay pending his possible return, and, borrowing the passage money for himself and one of his men, embarked for England, where he arrived on 23 July 1864.

After a week of fêting in London he visited his aged mother and his children in Scotland. In September he attended the meeting of the British Association at Bath and read a paper on Africa. He then went with his daughter Agnes to stay with his old friend Mr. Webb at Newstead Abbey, and remained there for eight months, writing 'The Zambesi and its Tributaries,' compiled from his own and his brother Charles's journals.

In the beginning of 1865 Sir Roderick Murchison proposed that Livingstone should resume the exploration of Africa, and should proceed up the Rovuma and endeavour to solve the question of the Nile basin. Livingstone desired to devote himself more especially to opening up Nyasaland, either by the Zambesi or Rovuma, but hoped to combine the two objects, and not waiting for the publication of his book, which came out in the autumn, he left London 13 Aug. 1865, and arrived in Bombay on 11 Sept. Here he sold the Lady Nyassa, which had cost, him 6,000l., for 2,300l. He invested the money in shares in an Indian bank which failed a year or two afterwards. He enjoyed a pleasant stay in India till January 1866. Sir Bartle Frere, governor of Bombay, gave him a passage to Zanzibar in the Thule, a government vessel, which he commissioned him to present to the sultan of Zanzibar as a gift from the Bombay government. He naturally received a very friendly reception from the sultan, and was furnished with letters of recommendation to the Arabs of the interior. He had brought with him from India some boys from the Nassick Mission, and thirteen sepoys, as a nucleus for his expedition. At Zanzibar he engaged ten Johanna men and four natives of Nyasaland, and bought camels, buffaloes, mules, and donkeys to experiment on their resistance to the effect of the tsetse fly. He arrived off the Rovuma in H.M.S. Penguin on 22 March, but owing to difficulties of entering, landed in Mikindani Bay on 4 April. The animals were overloaded and maltreated by the sepoys, and bitten by the tsetse fly. Having struck the river, they marched along its north bank as far as the town of Mtarika in the northern part of the Yao country, passing many ghastly scenes of the slave-trade. From Mtarika Livingstone turned to the south-west for the town of Mataka. The behaviour of the sepoys became intolerable, and they were paid off at Mataka, where Livingstone was very hospitably treated by the Yao chief, and whence on 29 July 1866 he started for Nyasa, arriving without difficulty on 8 Aug. He marched round the south end of the lake to the settlement formed by Mponda, an influential Mohammedanised chief. Thence Livingstone continued his journey round the south-western gulf of Lake Nyasa. At Marenga's town the Johanna men, scared by rumours that the country in front was being raided by the Angoni Zulus, deserted him. He obtained canoes from Marenga, and passed round the heel of Lake Nyasa to the town of Kimsusa, who treated him well and escorted him northwards, handing him over to another friendly chief. Livingstone's party now consisted of a few Nassick boys, Susi, a Yao man, and Chuma, a Zambesi man, and crossing the end of the Kirk Mountains at a height of over four thousand feet, they reached the Loangwa river on 16 Dec. 1866.

In the meantime the Johanna men had journeyed back to Zanzibar and concocted a plausible tale that Livingstone had been killed in an encounter with Zulus. In England public opinion was divided as to the credit to be given to the tale, but Mr. Edward Young, the former gunner of the Pioneer, of whose work on the Zambesi Livingstone wrote very favourably, was sent out by the Geographical Society in command of a search expedition, which left England in May 1867, reached the mouth of the Zambesi on 25 July, ascended the Shire in a steel boat they had brought with them, called the Search, which