A Photographic Rarity

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Jacob Wainwright is thought to have been about fourteen years old when he was hired to accompany Dr David Livingstone as he explored East Africa. Jacob had been sold to slavery as a child, but was liberated by a British anti-slavery ship and subsequently sent to an asylum for freed slaves in Nashik, India.

 ^{David Livingstone's coffin attended by Jacob Wainwright (£600-900)}

Having contracted dysentery, Livingstone died at Ilala in the centre of Africa in May 1873 after which Wainwright and two other Africans, Abdullah Susi and James Chuma, resolved to bring his body the 1,000 miles (1,600 km) to the British consulate at Bagamoyo in Zanzibar. Before the journey, Livingstone's heart was buried under a mpundu tree and his embalmed body placed in a cylinder of bark which was wrapped in sailcloth. Before the party left, Wainwright carved the following inscription on the tree:

'Dr. Livingstone
May 4, 1873
Yazuza, Miniasere
Vchopere'

 ^{David Livingstone's coffin attended by Jacob Wainwright, together with a carte de visite of David Livingstone (c.1865) (£600-900)}

The Church Missionary Society paid for Wainwright to accompany Livingstone's body back to England and he faithfully guarded the coffin on its journey. The explorer had been away from England for so long that a formal identification of his remains was required; this was made by the badly set arm which had been broken when Livingstone was crushed by a Lion.  The funeral took place at Westminster Abbey, on 18 April 1874, with Wainwright the only African among the eight pallbearers; he threw a palm branch into the grave, which is located in the centre of the Nave and a choir boy recalls that Henry Morton Stanley had to restrain Wainwright from throwing himself into the grave.

^{David Livingstone's coffin attended by Jacob Wainwright, together with a carte de visite of David Livingstone (c.1865) (£600-900)}

Subsequent to Livingstone's death, Wainwright remained in England at Kessingland, Suffolk, and also spent time travelling across the country addressing meetings of the Church Missionary Society.  He returned to Africa in the mid 1970s where he died in German East Africa (modern Tanzania) in April 1892.

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