For the completion of the series of explorations of this expedition, upon which the explorer was then still engaged, he left England, August 14th, 1865, accompanied by his daughter as far as Paris. Thence, he proceeded to Bombay, and provided himself with _materiel_ and men for the work before him. From Bombay he proceeded to Zanzibar, and on March 28th, 1866, left that island accompanied by two boys--Chanma and Wakotasie--a number of Sepoys, several men from Johanna Island, and some Suahili from a school at Bombay, and having reached the main land proceeded to the interior by the river Rovuma. As he proceeded he from time to time sent back accounts of his progress and the interesting incidents of his explorations. But late in this year the leader of the Johanna men arrived at Zanzibar with a story that Dr. Livingstone had been murdered on the shores of Lake Nyassa by a band of Mazitus. The tale had such an air of truth that no one doubted it. Moosa’s story being fully credited, the world quite generally gave up Dr. Livingstone as lost. Dr. G. Edward Seward, resident agent of the English government at Zanzibar, condensed Moosa’s information into a dispatch to Lord Stanley, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, of which the following is the principal portion:
“MY LORD--I send you the saddest news. Dr. Livingstone, in his despatch from Ngomano, informed your Lordship that he stood ‘on the threshold of the unexplored.’ Yet, as if that which should betide him had already thrown its shadow he added:--‘It is but to say little of the future.’
“My Lord, if the report of some fugitives from his party be true, this brave and good man has ‘crossed the threshold of the unexplored’--he has confronted the future and will never return. He was slain, so it is alleged, during a sudden and unprovoked encounter with those very Zulus of whom he says in his despatch, that they had laid waste the country round about him and had ‘swept away the food from above and in the ground.’ With an escort reduced to twenty by desertion, death and dismissals, he had traversed, as I believe, that _terra incognita_ between the confluence of the Loende and Rovuma rivers, at Nyomano, and the eastern or northeastern littoral of Lake Nyassa; had crossed the lake at some point as yet unascertained; had reached a station named Kompoonda or Mapoonda, on its western, probably its northwestern, shore, and was pushing west or northwest, into dangerous ground, when between Marenga and Mukliosowe a band of implacable savages stopped the way, a mixed horde of Zulus, or Mafilte and Nyassa folk. The Nyassa folk were armed with bow and arrow, the Zulus with the traditional shield, broad bladed spears, and axes. With Livingstone there were nine or ten muskets; his Johanna men were resting with their loads far in the rear.