OVER the past three weeks I have tried to tell the story of two great Scottish explorers of Africa in James Bruce and Mungo Park. Now I turn to the greatest of them all, David Livingstone.

Born in Blantyre on this date 206 years ago, Livingstone rose from humble origins to become one of the great figures of the Victorian era, a hero of the British people whose story took on almost mythical proportions. By the end of his life, such was the adulation for this remarkable Scotsman that he was granted the honour of being buried in Westminster Abbey.

David Livingstone was the second of seven children of Neil Livingstone and his wife Agnes, née Hunter. They first worked in the cotton mills of Blantyre, but Neil later becamea tea salesman.

Neil was of Hebridean origin and proud of it, as Livingstone himself recalled: “Our great-grandfather fell at the battle of Culloden, fighting for the old line of kings; and our grandfather was a small farmer in Ulva, where my father was born.” Agnes Livingstone, by contrast, was descended from lowland Covenanters.

The family lived in a one room flat in a tenement built to house millworkers. Their room is now part of the David Livingstone Centre in Blantyre.

At the age of just ten and after a rudimentary education, Livingstone was sent to work in the mills, but even working 12 hours a day six days per week, he was able to educate himself sufficiently so that he could read the works of philosophy, theology and science that were to inspire him. His strong Christian faith was inherited from his father in particular. Neil Livingstone was a Sunday school teacher who left the Church of Scotland to join a local Congregational Church, with David joining him.

An appeal for missionaries to work in China seems to have inspired Livingstone to consider a life preaching the Gospel to the Chinese. Livingstone would become the very epitome of a muscular Christian and from the outset he saw the preaching of his faith as something that needed to be accompanied by practical assistance to the people listening to the word of Christ. He later wrote: “In the glow of love which Christianity inspires, I soon resolved to devote my life to the alleviation of human misery.”

In 1836 he had saved sufficient money to be able to work part time and attend Anderson’s College (now Strathclyde University) in Glasgow, where he studied medicine, theology and Greek, having already learned sufficient Latin to enable him to study medicine. He graduated from Anderson’s and almost immediately moved to London where he joined the London Missionary Society (LMS) and became both a minister and a doctor with the Society, though it took him two attempts to qualify for the position of missionary.

It was still Livingstone’s intention to be a missionary in China, but the Opium Wars broke out and he was eventually diverted to Africa. Already a fierce critic of the slave trade, Livingstone was convinced that Christianising those parts of Africa where the trade still operated was the key to defeating slavery.

Arriving in South Africa in 1841, he gained experience as a missionary with the Scottish missions leader Robert Moffat and made the first of his trips further north into Bechaunaland (now Botswana) so that by mid-1842 he had gone farther into the interior of Africa and its vast Kalahari desert than any European before him. In 1844 he suffered the experience that was to change his life.

Lions had been terrorising the village of Mabotsa and Livingstone became convinced that if he could kill a lion, the villagers would be receptive to his preaching.

One lion in particular proved troublesome to the village and Livingstone tracked it down and shot it through the long grass. The lion was severely wounded but still able to fight, heading for Livingstone.

In his best-selling book: Missionary Travels and Researches in Southern Africa, Livingstone recounted what happened next: “I saw the lion just in the act of springing upon me. I was upon a little height; he caught my shoulder as he sprang, and we both came to the ground below together.

“Growling horribly close to my ear, he shook me as a terrier dog does a rat. The shock produced a stupor similar to that which seems to be felt by a mouse after the first shake of the cat.

“It caused a sort of dreaminess, in which there was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror, though quite conscious of all that was happening. It was like what patients partially under the influence of chloroform describe, who see all the operation, but feel not the knife.

“This singular condition was not the result of any mental process. The shake annihilated fear, and allowed no sense of horror in looking round at the beast. This peculiar state is probably produced in all animals killed by the carnivora; and if so, is a merciful provision by our benevolent Creator for lessening the pain of death…Besides crunching the bone into splinters, he left eleven teeth wounds on the upper part of my arm.”

Livingstone survived, though his broken arm, which he set himself, was never the same again.

The National: A bronze statue at Blantyre's David Livingstone Memorial Centre showing Dr Livingstone being attacked by a lionA bronze statue at Blantyre's David Livingstone Memorial Centre showing Dr Livingstone being attacked by a lion

THE incident appears to have inspired Livingstone to redouble his missionary and exploring efforts. On January 2, 1845, he married Mary Moffat, Robert’s daughter, and it’s fair to say that he was never going to be a stay-at-home husband. Instead, Mary accompanied him on many of his journeys until her health eventually declined and she and their four children went back to Scotland.

Livingstone was determined to go northwards and learn the language and customs of the people who lived on the edge of the Kalahari prior to an attempt to cross it.

He made friends with Chief Sechele of the Bakena, or Bakwains, tribe who converted to Christianity. Pointing to the Kalahari desert, Sechele told Livinsgtone: “You never can cross that country to the tribes beyond; it is utterly impossible even for us black men, except in certain seasons, when more than the usual supply of rain falls, and an extraordinary growth of watermelons follows. Even we who know the country would certainly perish without them.”

Years later, Sechele himself assisted Livingstone in crossing that desert which, as the doctor recalled “had previously proved an insurmountable barrier to so many adventurers.”

Further and further into the heart of Africa went Livingstone, usually travelling light and occasionally with companions such as William Oswell or in expeditions such as the one in 1849 in which he and Oswell discovered Lake Ngami, the first Europeans to see it. Livingstone received the Gold Medal and a financial reward from the Royal Geographical Society for this feat and also named his son William Oswell Livingstone after his friend and fellow explorer.

He mounted a further expedition with Oswell in the spring of 1851. Livingstone wrote: “Oswell and I then proceeded one hundred and thirty miles to the northeast, to Sesheke; and in the end of June, 1851, we were rewarded by the discovery of the Zambesi, in the centre of the continent. This was a most important point, for that river was not previously known to exist there at all. The Portuguese maps all represent it as rising far to the east of where we now were; and if ever anything like a chain of trading stations had existed across the country between the latitudes 12 Deg. and 18 Deg. south, this magnificent portion of the river must have been known before. We saw it at the end of the dry season, at the time when the river is about at its lowest, and yet there was a breadth of from three hundred to six hundred yards of deep flowing water.”

By now Livingstone’s adventures were being recounted in the press both in Britain and the USA, while the European powers could only watch as the Scot made history with his discoveries of wonders that no white man had ever seen.

Livingstone sent Mary and his children back to Scotland before setting out on the journey he hoped would end slavery by opening up a trail to the west coast of Africa.

In 1852, he had a sad encounter with Boers who destroyed his home at Kolobeng. With typical doggedness, Livingstone duly set about organising the expedition which would make him world famous.

He set out from Linyanti on November 11, 1853, stating: “I shall open up a path into the interior, or perish.” Travelling with just native porters, Livingstone reached Luanda on the west coast of Africa on May 31, 1854.

He caught fevers and suffered from the extreme heat, but pressed on and managed to return to Linyanti before carrying on his journey along the Zambezi River, mapping it as he travelled.

On November 16, 1855 he could see clouds of what he thought was smoke until he reached the vast waterfall that he duly named Victoria Falls.

He wrote: “No one can imagine the beauty of the view from any thing witnessed in England. It had never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight. The only want felt is that of mountains in the background.”

As he went, he recorded his impressions of the people he encountered. In January 1856, he wrote: “Each village we passed furnished us with a couple of men to take us on to the next.

“They were useful in showing us the parts least covered with jungle. When we came near a village, we saw men, women, and children employed in weeding their gardens, they being great agriculturists.

“Most of the men are muscular, and have large plowman hands. Their color is the same admixture, from very dark to light olive, that we saw in Londa. Though all have thick lips and flat noses, only the more degraded of the population possess the ugly negro physiognomy.”

Such a viewpoint seems racist to us now, but back then it was the way which people viewed the black population. He also showed a sense of humour now and again such as this passage on African and Scottish justice.

“The Barotse, for instance, pour the medicine down the throat of a cock or of a dog, and judge of the innocence or guilt of the person accused according to the vomiting or purging of the animal.

“I happened to mention to my own men the water-test for witches formerly in use in Scotland: the supposed witch, being bound hand and foot, was thrown into a pond; if she floated, she was considered guilty, taken out, and burned; but if she sank and was drowned, she was pronounced innocent.

“The wisdom of my ancestors excited as much wonder in their minds as their custom did in mine.”

Eventually he reached the coast at Quelimane, the first European to cross Africa from coast to coast.

Here he met a Royal Navy ship, HMS Frolic: “I received so hearty an English welcome from Captain Peyton and all on board that I felt myself at once at home in every thing except my own mother tongue.

“With the exception of a short interval in Angola, I had been three and a half years without speaking English, and this, with thirteen years of previous partial disuse of my native tongue, made me feel sadly at a loss on board the Frolic.”

Livingstone headed for home.

Next week we will see how he became the subject of legend.