David Livingstone

David Livingstone (1813–1873) was a Scottish missionary and explorer of Africa. A former Blantyre mill boy who studied medicine in Glasgow, he went to southern Africa for the London Missionary Society in 1841. He crossed the Kalahari to Lake Ngami, reached the Zambezi, saw and named the Victoria Falls in 1855 and became the first European to cross the continent from coast to coast, the journey told in Missionary Travels. Later expeditions explored the Zambezi and Lake Nyasa and sought the sources of the Nile; Henry Morton Stanley found him at Ujiji in 1871. He died in what is now Zambia and is buried in Westminster Abbey.