CHAPTER XXXII 
Livingstone’s Missionary Travels 
L ITTLE 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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