Dr John Dickinson (1832–1863): The man behind the bird

The surgeon/naturalists Dr John Kirk, Dr Charles Meller and Dr John Dickinson, associated with the Zambezi Expedition (1857–1864) under the leadership of Dr David Livingstone are, like him, credited with the discovery of new species’ of birds. A raptor, Falco dickinsoni, is named after Dr John Dickinson. Dickinson, born in the north east of England, trained in medicine in Newcastle upon Tyne. He volunteered to join the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa and arrived as part of a second group to join Bishop Frederick Mackenzie, then attempting to build a Mission in Magomero, on the Shire Mountain Plateau in modern Malawi. Livingstone and Mackenzie had sown the seeds of disaster for the first UMCA venture while Dickinson was on his way to Central Africa, and his one meeting with Livingstone was trigger to a chain of events that threatened the whole expedition. Shortly after Dickinson’s arrival in Magomero, Bishop Mackenzie and a fellow traveller, Reverend Henry de Wint Burrup, died. Magomero was abandoned and the remaining missionaries retrenched in Chibisa’s Village on the River Shire. There, where Dickinson did most of his bird collecting, on 17 March 1863, he died of blackwater fever. Livingstone and Kirk were present at the burial. A marble cross at Chikwawa in Malawi is marker to the event that occurred on the day of Dr John Dickinson’s 32nd birthday.