IN 1845, Livingstone married Mary Moffat, but he was reluctant to expose her or their four children to the dangers of an explorer’s life: he had narrowly escaped being killed by a lion only the year before.

Sadly, his anxiety was justified: Mary died of malaria on a visit to Africa in 1862.

In the meantime, however, Livingstone had crossed the entire continent, and on November 16th 1855 he became the first European to see the Victoria Falls, writing in his bestselling travelogue that “Scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight”.

Two years after Mary’s death, he crossed the Indian Ocean to Bombay in a tiny river-boat, just to avoid having to sell it to Portuguese slavers.

On his return, he began searching for the source of the Nile south of Lake Tanganyika, but his health was failing. On 1st May, 1873, his companions found him dead in his room in Hala in northern Rhodesia. He had been praying.