David Livingstone leaves Britain for Africa on…
December 1840 CE
Livingstone had hoped to go to China as a missionary, but the First Opium War had broken out in September 1839 and the London Missionary Society had suggested the West Indies instead.
In 1840, while continuing his medical studies in London, Livingstone meetd LMS missionary Robert Moffat, on leave from Kuruman, a missionary outpost in South Africa, north of the Orange River.
He is excited by Moffat's vision of expanding missionary work northwards, and he is also influenced by abolitionist T.F. Buxton's arguments that the African slave trade might be destroyed through the influence of "legitimate trade" and the spread of Christianity.
Livingstone, therefore, focuses his ambitions on Southern Africa.
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