When I was a young Scottish lass attending school in Glasgow, many of my textbooks were full of stories about the adventures of David Livingstone, celebrated Scottish explorer and missionary. Stories of African jungles, savages and man-eating lions fired the embers of my young and fertile imagination.
Born in 1813, David Livingstone grew up in the town of Blantyre on the bonnie banks of the River Clyde. He lived in a one room ‘single end’ which was part of an 18th-century mill worker’s tenement house on Shuttle Row. It was here that David spent his childhood with his parents, brothers and sisters. The restored building once housed 24 families and today at the David Livingstone Center, the cramped abode looks much as it would have done in the industrial 19th century.
David was taught to read and write in a school which is now the middle room of the Shuttle Row Museum. At the age of 10 he began to work as a "piecer" in the cotton mills. He worked 14 hours a day with half an hour for breakfast, and one hour for lunch. Each evening he attended the company’s school for two hours. Scientific words and books of travels were his special delight. "In reading, everything that I could lay my hands on was devoured except novels," he wrote later.
By 11 years of age, he was studying Latin and spending any spare money on books. In the mill, he usually had a book propped up on the machine. A local farmer who sometimes employed him complained that he was "aye lyin’ on his belly readin’ a book."
Later in life David claimed that by reading amid the roar of the textile machinery, he learned to abstract his mind from surrounding disturbances and to read or write with perfect comfort amidst the play of children or near the dancing and songs of savages.
At 21, David expressed an interest in a medical career, but his father was opposed unless it was applied to a Christian purpose. David, however, persevered and later went on to study theology and medicine. Eventually he and his wife, Mary, traveled to Africa to set up a mission where he faced many dangers. On one occasion, he was mauled by a lion; his arm bone was badly crushed and did not heal properly. Much later it was to be from this badly damaged bone that the Royal College of Surgeons identified Livingstone’s body. On another occasion, his canoe was attacked by a hippopotamus and almost capsized.
Today in the David Livingstone Center his life unfolds with fascinating exhibits telling of the story of his explorations in Africa and his key role in helping to abolish the slave trade. He was the first to discover many parts of Africa never before seen by Europeans. After working as a missionary in Botswana, he led a series of epic journeys, discovering Lake Ngami (1849), the Zambezi River (1851), the Victoria Falls (1855) and Lake Malawi (1859). Personal letters tell tales of the tsetse flies and malaria-carrying mosquitoes which sickened his children and many members of his party.
In 1866, he set out to find the source of the River Nile in the heart of Africa and virtually disappeared from sight. His long absence became an international concern, so the New York Herald sent explorer Henry M. Stanley to find him in 1869. Eventually in 1871, Stanley found Livingstone, who was in dire straits in a small town on Lake Tanganyika. When they met, Stanley greeted the missionary with the famous line, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume."
Five days after Stanley left him, David wrote in his diary: My Jesus, my King, my Life, my All, I again dedicate my whole life to Thee.
Eventually David Livingstone succumbed to the many diseases which ravaged his body. One night at four in the morning, the young African boy who lay at his door called in alarm for Susi, a servant. By the candlelight they saw him, not in bed, but kneeling by the bed with his head buried in his hands upon the pillow. He had died in the act of prayer. His loyal African friends salted his body, wrapped it in bark cloth, and carried it 1,500 miles to the coast so that it could be shipped to Britain. On 18th April 1874, David Livingstone was buried with full honors in Westminster Abbey, London.
