i 9 4 DAVID LIVINGSTONE. [chap. ix. 



on his learning that Captain Maelure, Lieutenant Wood- 

 ruffe, and five men of H. M. S. " Dart," had been drowned 

 off the bar in coming to Quilimane to pick him up, and 

 how he felt as if he would rather have died for them. 1 



News from across the Atlantic likewise informed him 

 that his nephew and namesake, David Livingston, a fine 

 lad eleven years of age, had been drowned in Canada. 

 All the deeper was his gratitude for the goodness and 

 mercy that had followed him and preserved him, as he 

 says in his private Journal, from " many dangers not 

 recorded in this book." 



The retrospect in his Missionary Travels of the manner 

 in which his life had been ordered up to this point, is so 

 striking that our narrative would be deficient if it did 

 not contain it : — 



"If the reader remembers the way in which I was led, while 

 teaching the Bakwains, to commence exploration, he will, I think, 

 recognise the hand of Providence. Anterior to that, when Mr. 

 Moffat began to give the Bible — the Magna Charta of all the rights 

 and privileges of modern civilisation — to the Bechuanas, Sebituane 

 went north, and spread the language into which he was translating 

 the sacred oracles, in a new region larger than France. Sebituane, at 

 the same time, rooted out hordes of bloody savages, among whom no 

 white man could have gone without leaving his skull to ornament 

 some village. He opened up the way for me — let us hope also for the 

 Bible. Then, again, while I was labouring at Kolobeng, seeing only 

 a small arc of the cycle of Providence, I could not understand it, and 

 felt inclined to ascribe our successive and prolonged droughts to the 

 wicked one. But when forced by these, and the Boers, to become 

 explorer, and open a new country in the north rather than set my 

 face southward, where missionaries are not needed, the gracious Spirit 

 of God influenced the minds of the heathen to regard me with favour, 

 the Divine hand is again perceived. Then I turned away westwards, 

 rather than in the opposite direction, chiefly from observing that some 

 native Portuguese, though influenced by the hope of a reward from 

 their Government to cross the continent, had been obliged to return 

 from the east without accomplishing their object. Had I gone at 



1 Among Livingstone's papers we have found draft letter to the Admiralty, 

 earnestly commending to their Lordships' favourable consideration a petition from 

 the widow of one of the men. He had never seen her, he said, but he had been 

 the unconscious cause of her husband's death, and all the joy he felt in crossing 

 the continent was embittered when the news of the sad catastrophe reached him. 



