Introduction

Edward Coode Hore, a sailor with ten years’ experience in the merchant navy, was one of two artisans appointed in 1877 to the pioneering expedition of the London Missionary Society to Central Africa. Perhaps the major factor behind the flurry of missionary fervour in Great Britain, which so affected Central Africa in the 1870s, was David Livingstone’s death at Lake Bangweulu and public burial in Westminister Abbey and the publication in 1874 of his last, dramatic journals. When Livingstone had requested help in 1857, few had followed him back into the interior of east Africa, but his death sparked Scottish and English missionary societies to abandon their previous hesitation, alter their priorities, and plunge enthusiastically into Central Africa. Two observations by members of the mission in late 1890 and early 1891 indicate the dimensions of the failure of the mission as a proselytising influence in its first dozen years.