MORE HOPEFUL INTELLIGENCE. 365 



" I have the honour," he says, " to inform you that, in pursuance of an 

 intention expressed in my last despatch, concerning the asserted death of Dr. 

 Livingstone, I have personally made inquiries amongst the traders at Kilwa 

 and Kiringi, and have gathered information there which tends to throw dis- 

 credit on the statement of the Johanna men, who allege that they saw their 

 leader dead. 



" The evidence of the Nyassa traders strengthens the suspicion that these 

 men abandoned the traveller when he was about to traverse a Mazitu-haunted 

 district, and, for ought they knew to the contrary, Dr. Livingston may yet be 

 alive." 



The foregoing are the most important of the many communications 

 regarding the reported death of Dr. Livingstone, read to the fellows of the 

 Royal Geographical Society at their meeting on the 25th of March, 1867, and 

 they have been selected for insertion here, because they give the best resume 

 of the tale told by Moosa and the otber Johanna men. 



That Livingstone should fall by the hand of violence in his efforts to 

 penetrate the interior of Africa was no unlikely circumstance, and the story 

 we have rehearsed above was so circumstantial in all its details that it was 

 a matter of no surprise that many should sorrowfully accept it as true. But 

 there were a good many of Dr. Livingstone's friends who declined to believe 

 that the great traveller was yet dead — chief of whom were Sir Roderick 

 Murchison, Messrs. E. D. Young, and Horace Waller. 



After the letters from Mr. Seward and Dr. Kirk had been read, Sir 

 Roderick Murchison said that — 



" He could not, as an old and dear friend of Livingstone, avoid clinging 

 to the hope that he was still alive ; and that he might be at that very moment 

 on that Lake Tanganyika, which he had gone out to explore. If he only 

 succeeded in passing the narrow tract inhabited by the warlike Mazitu, he 

 would be comparatively safe, and so far from the lines of communication that 

 it would be impossible to hear of him for many months, except by the accident 

 of some Arab trader bringing down the intelligence to the coast. It was on 

 this account, and trusting to the last despatch from our Consul, officially 

 reporting what he had heard from Arab traders as to the untruthfulness of the 

 Johanna men, that he thought there might still be some hopes — he would not 

 say very sanguine hopes — that their illustrious friend was not dead. At 

 all events, they ought, before they decided, to have better evidence than that 

 of these men, all belonging to one tribe, and not, like the negro Africans, 

 attached to Livingstone, but only his baggage-bearers, and in the rear, and 

 who were described as a cowardly race. If any of these negroes, several of 

 whom were said to have escaped, had returned and told the story, they might 

 then believe it. And why should they not have returned, if their leader 

 was dead, as well as the Johanna men ? He thought it was their duty to 



