Jeannette Expedition New York early in 1874; the newspaperman was impressed by De Long, and assured him that his Arctic ambitions would have the enthusiastic support of the "Herald". In the meantime De Long had applied to the Navy Department for an Arctic command, a request that he was informed would "receive due attention". James Gordon Bennett Jr., had succeeded his father as proprietor of the "New York Herald" in 1866. He had won renown in 1872, when his reporter Henry Morton Stanley, sent by Bennett to Africa in search of the British missionary-explorer David Livingstone, cabled that Livingstone had been found.
John Kirk (explorer) William Carnegie Kirk was author of "A British Garden Flora". The engineer, Alexander Carnegie Kirk, was John Kirk's elder brother. From 1858 to 1864 Kirk accompanied the explorer Dr David Livingstone on the Second Zambezi Expedition as a botanist and experienced his work to end the East African slave trade. He found Livingstone an inept leader and in 1862 wrote "I can come to no other conclusion than that Dr. Livingstone is out of his mind and a most unsafe leader"". In 1866 Livingstone’s began his next and final expedition, to find the source of the Nile, from Zanzibar. From