David Livingstone (1813-1873). The Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone was ordained in 1840 and a year later reached Botswana in Africa. From there he organised expeditions into the interior discovering Lake Ngami (1849) and the Zambesi River (1851). Livingstone led a great expedition (1853-1856) from Cape Town, South Africa, through west central Africa in which he discovered the Victoria Falls (1855) formed by the Zambesi River. Back in Britain, in 1857, he published his observations in the book Missionary Travels. In 1866 he led an expedition to discover the sources of the Nile, but the river he encountered proved later to be the Congo.