David Livingstone

In 1871, after a long silence from medical missionary and explorer David Livingstone, English reporter Sir Henry Stanley was sent to Africa to see if he still lived. Their meeting in the wilds of Africa began with Stanley’s immortal words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”

Stanley arrived at a time when Livingstone’s dwindling supplies had forced him to cut old newspaper pages to make two 32-page journals. Using ink made from berries, he wrote perpendicular to the original print and recorded the massacre of 400 in the slave market at Nyangwe, a Congolese village. Livingstone, an abolitionist, wrote a about the massacre. (Ironically, he depended on help from the slave traders during his travels.) His publication of the event contributed to the closing of the slave market.

And then, those journals went into storage and the ink faded. No one could read the journals – not until spectral photography allowed today’s researchers to enhance the faded ink and unfold Livingstone’s record of his horror, his quandary about how to respond – and his concern that some of his party may have been involved. It was so much more information than he shared in the 1870s.

Seeing the exhibit about the journal and spectral photography while visiting the David Livingstone Museum in Edinburgh, Scotland, expanded my understanding of this man. Before I visited his birthplace and first home, I pegged David Livingstone as a medical missionary who happened to serve in Africa. I did not know he began working in a factory at 10 or that he was an abolitionist. I was astounded to read that his son, Robert Livingstone, at 17, ran away, joined the Union Army during the Civil War and died as a Confederate prisoner of war.

Located in the former Shuttle Row Tenement, the Livingstone Museum includes the single room apartment where he lived his first 23 years with seven other family members. It barely has enough room for that many people, let alone the double trundle beds and their possessions.

Born March 19, 1813, David Livingstone was the second son of Neil and Agnes Livingstone. They had no running water and only a fireplace for heat and cooking. Kindergarten-aged children worked at the mill, crawling under the machines to re-thread and tie broken threads. Everyone worked long hours, six days a week, yet Livingstone’s community had more than many others. They had wash houses, drying greens and a village store. Also, the owners of his mill hired a teacher for the children. Thus, Livingstone became one of the less than 10 percent of children in that time in Scotland who learned to read.

Full-scale exhibits depict him as one of the 2,000 employees of the cotton mill. Machines clunked day and night. In the pre-electricity era, with the risk of fire from open flames, windows provided most of the light, but had to be kept closed to keep the humidity high so the thread remained pliable. Sounds miserable to me. Yet, Livingstone said his years a child laborer prepared him for life in Africa.

He took books to work with him and left one open on the spinning jenny. Having spent a summer working on a factory line, I identify with his solution. As he passed by the book during the day, he read a sentence or two. “I thus kept up a pretty constant study, undisturbed by the machines,” he later wrote.

Livingstone went to night school and read everything he could. He especially liked books on science and travel.

Promoted from piecer to spinner at age 19, Livingstone began saving money to study at the university. He left the mill at 23. In 1840 he qualified to be a medical missionary. Livingstone said he went to Africa because, “the love of Christ compels me.”

The entrance to the museum features a large map of the river valleys he traveled extensively and mapped in the southern regions of Africa.

In 1844, Livingstone shot a lion which had been raiding a village. It turned and grabbed his arm. A native tried to deflect the lion’s attention from Livingstone and also suffered injury before the lion died. Livingstone’s upper arm was severely mangled. It healed but the bone looked like a third joint. Years later, that bone identified Livingstone’s remains after his death.

Livingstone only returned to England twice in his 30 years as a medical missionary and explorer. In 1856 he returned for 18 months to write his memoirs for publication. He mapped countries now known as Botswana, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
He died in 1873 while kneeling to pray at his cot.

His bones were secretly carried out of Africa and sent to England. Livingstone was honored with a state funeral and burial in the nave of Westminster Abbey. An inscribed stone covers his grave. It reads in part, “…For 30 years his life was spent in an unwearied effort to evangelize the native races, to explore the undiscovered secrets, to abolish the desolating slave trade of Central Africa.”
In 1929, the tenement building of his childhood became the David Livingstone Centre. They still memorialize his impact on the world.

(Joan Hershberger is a staff writer at the News-Times and author of “Twenty Gallons of Milk.” Email her at joanh@everybody.org)


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