"David Livingstone aged ten worked a fourteen-hour day in the cotton mill. When he died at sixty he was buried in Westminster Abbey. Yet some recent biographers have described him as a failure. He was a man of strange contrasts, so intolerant and demanding that many of the Europeans who served under him came to hate him, but he inspired such devotion in the Africans who travelled with him that after his death they insisted in carrying his body across Africa.

A devout Christian who went out to Africa as a missionary, his interest was always in hitherto unknown lands. The first European to cross Africa, he found the Victoria Falls and narrowly escaped death from native spears, poisoned arrows, disease, drowning and being mauled by a lion. His meeting with Stanley is legendary but his greatest achievement was his part in bringing the slave trade to an end."--BOOK JACKET.