David Livingstone

David Livingstone worked a Scottish cotton mill from age ten with a Latin grammar propped on the spinning jenny, and arrived in Africa in 1841 as a missionary doctor. Convinced that the interior would never hear the gospel while the slave trade bled it, he spent thirty years walking it open — crossing the continent coast to coast, mapping the Zambezi and Victoria Falls, and writing dispatches that made the East African slave caravans a scandal Britain could not ignore.

He made few converts himself and knew it; he called himself a forerunner, opening the road. Found by Stanley in 1871 after years out of contact, he refused to come home. His men found him dead kneeling at his bedside in 1873, carried his body a thousand miles to the coast — and buried his heart in Africa first.