At some point, the newspaper pages were misplaced. But in 2009, Adrian Wisnicki, a professor of British literature at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, learned of their existence from a catalogue of Livingstone documents. He set out on a quest to find them — and then to decipher their almost illegible script, with the help of a technology team that has collaborated with such institutions as the Library of Congress to examine documents from Thomas Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence to an original Beethoven score.
The result is the latest example of using science to fill in historical gaps. On Tuesday, 140 years after his fateful meeting with H.M. Stanley, Livingstone’s words are being released for the first time, prompting a reevaluation of a man seen in the Victorian era as a nearly flawless Christian hero. Livingstone, it turns out, was capable of succumbing to baser human emotions such as vengeance and self-doubt.
“This material shows much more clearly the internal conflicts and concerns and frustration and emotional reactions that Livingstone had,” says Dorothy Helly, an emerita historian at the City University of New York, who wrote a book on the historical censorship of Livingstone’s diaries. It “shows in great detail the way in with Livingstone was a real man, warts and all.”
Stuck in an African village
The critical period was the summer of 1871. Livingstone had been stuck for months at a Central African village called Nyangwe, in what is now Congo. Foot ulcers and other health problems plagued him. Uncooperative locals and Arab slave and ivory traders had stymied his attempts to go farther west on his obsessive search for the source of the Nile, a key component in his plan to map the waterways of the region and then open it to commerce and Christianity.
To make matters worse, he was out of paper and almost out of ink. Livingstone regularly kept pocket diaries and then copied them later into a larger master journal. In this case, he improvised. He made ink from seeds that the locals used for clothing dye, and he used it to write on the London Standard. A map, a book of sermons, and other odds and ends wouldn’t escape his need for diary paper, either.
Despite his frustrations, Livingstone loved to attend village market days. But on July 15, 1871, he watched in horror as Arab traders and their servants opened fire on the locals, mostly women, in the market. They burned nearby villages and attacked those who tried to escape into the river.
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