What did Stanley really say to Livingstone?

History relates that it was on November 10, 1871, that Henry Morton Stanley walked up to Dr Livingstone in the market place of Ujiji, and uttered the immortal line, "Dr Livingstone, I presume". But was that what he actually said? Nowadays there seems to be some doubt.

Livingstone had set out five years earlier to try and find the source of the Nile, but his long absence and total lack of news had convinced most people that he had perished somewhere in the interior. Stanley's expedition to track him down was financed by the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph, the former throwing vast sums of money into the cause.

There was wild excitement when news started to trickle in that the ailing explorer had been found alive  - or just alive anyway. Livingstone had been marooned by sickness and lack of funds, deserted by his servants and his supplies plundered, and he was delighted to have been found, as he wrote in this grateful letter to the Editor of the Herald:

He was, as he explained, in a very bad way, "a mere ruckle of bones" by the time Stanley turned up.

The Times was full of praise for Stanley:

Was this the grammatical correction of a pedantic sub-editor - or would that have read, "to whom I am speaking"? It's not exactly very catchy.

Since Stanley apparently tore up the pages of his diary for the momentous day, there's no way of knowing the truth. The greeting seems to have shrunk in the telling, as it rapidly became a famous catchphrase. Stanley himself was using the snappier version by the time he got back to London, as this speech to a rapturous audience at St James's Hall records.

From the cheers that greeted the phrase, it seems clear that Stanley, a natural showman, knew a good line when he saw one.