On 6 January 1871, Welsh-American newspaper reporter and explorer Henry Morton Stanley (born John Rowlands) reached Zanzibar, funded with American money to search for a missing Dr. David Livingston. With a well-equipped caravan he forced his way through the country disturbed by fighting and stricken by sickness to Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, Dr. David Livingstone’s last known port of call. There he found the old Scottish explorer and Christian missionary, ill and short of supplies, and greeted him with the now famous words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”.
Although the phrase was not recorded in either man's journal, it seems more likely Stanley later wrote the text and embellished their meeting for the The Herald newspaper. Additionally, the exact date of their meeting is unclear, as both men recorded different dates in their journals; according to Stanley, they met on 10 November 1871, while Livingstone’s journal suggests that the event occurred sometime between 25 and 28 October 1871.
After meeting, together, they explored Lake Victoria. Dr. David Livingston sequentially died in 1873. Besides his discovery of Livingstone, he is mainly known for his search for the sources of the Nile and Congo rivers, the work he undertook as an agent of King Leopold II of the Belgians which enabled the occupation of the Congo Basin region, and his command of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. He was knighted in 1897, and served in Parliament as a Liberal Unionist member for Lambeth North from 1895 to 1900.
Despite these accomplishments Stanley is mired in controversy. Although he personally had high regard for many of the native African people who accompanied him on his expeditions, the exaggerated accounts of corporal punishment and brutality in his books fostered a public reputation as a hard-driving, cruel leader.
Stanley died in London, UK in 1904
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