CHAPTER XXXII 



Livingstone's Missionary Travels 



LITTLE did Livingstone think that when he left Kolobeng to 

 seek a more suitable settlement for himself and his friends the 

 Bakwains, he was really entering on a career of travel and 

 exploration which was to place his name on the highest pinnacle of 

 fame and only end with his death. 



Yet such was the case, and therefore it cannot but be appropriate 

 to consider here, as briefly as possible, the twofold position of Living- 

 stone as a missionary and an explorer. 



It is evident enough that, when he left his wife and three children 

 at Kolobeng, his sole purpose was to seek the country of Sebituane, 

 and ascertain if the regions of the "great lake" of which he had so 

 often heard were healthful and suitable to missionary enterprise. In 

 his efforts to preach the Gospel to the various tribes he encountered 

 he found it after a while impossible to take his family with him, and 

 reluctantly he consented to their departure to England. At once set 

 free from all family responsibility, he entered into those wider labors 

 which ultimately led him across the continent of Africa. This was no 

 mere effort of geographical enterprise, but undertaken in a purely 

 humanitarian spirit. He had by that time discovered the growing 

 enormity of the slave trade, which prospered wherever the Arabs, 

 coast tribes, and Portuguese had access ; and to stamp this out became 

 one of the ruling passions of his life. With a statesmanlike apprecia- 

 tion of the case, he saw that if he could foster legitimate trade that in 

 human flesh would probably subside. If the tribes of the interior had 

 nothing to exchange for those cottons and guns, bright tinsel orna- 

 ments, beads and wire, which were displayed so temptingly before 

 their eyes, and which they naturally coveted, but the men, women, and 

 children they had captured in their tribal wars, or, failing these, even 

 their own kith and kin, then, as Livingstone saw plainly, their uncon- 



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