19 March: Boreham on David Livingstone

Unveiling a Continent
It was on March 19, 1813, that David Livingstone was born at Blantyre on the Clyde; and it was on the first of May that he was found, dead on his knees, in his rude grass hut at Old Chitambo's village, near Ilala, in East Africa. Livingstone cuts a Homeric figure in our civilisation. It is just as well that most men are content to settle down to the task nearest them, working out their modest destinies without bothering about the distant and the unexplored. But it is also well that each age contains a few adventurous spirits who feel themselves taunted and challenged and dared by the great unknown. They are restless and ill at ease as long as there is a sea uncharted, a mountain unclimbed, a desert uncrossed.

From the moment of his landing on African soil, Livingstone was haunted, sleeping and waking, by visions and voices that came to him from out of the undiscovered. He tried hard, and he tried often, to settle down to the life of an ordinary mission station. It was impossible. The lure of the wilds mesmerised him. He built three houses and left each of them as soon as it was built. The stories that the natives told of vast inland seas, and of wild, tumultuous waters, tantalised him beyond endurance. The instincts of the hydrographer surged within him. He saw three great rivers—the Nile, the Congo, and the Zambesi emptying themselves into three separate oceans: and he convinced himself that the man who could solve the riddle of their sources would open up a new continent to the commerce of mankind. Few things in history are more affecting than the hold that this ambition secured upon his heart. Even at the last, worn to a shadow, suffering in every limb, and with his feet too ulcerated to put them to the ground, the mysterious fountains of Herodotus teased his fancy and lured him on. And, with death stamped upon his face, he implored his faithful blacks to carry him as swiftly as possible in his tireless search for the elusive streams.

Exploration, Emancipation, Evangelisation
Although he himself regarded his life work as unfinished, and, even in his last delirium, was murmuring wistfully about the unseen waters, yet his record of pathfinding is so astonishing that he takes his place as quite easily the greatest of all explorers. The list of his monumental discoveries covers many pages. When, in 1841, he landed in Africa, the map of that immense continent was a blank from Kuruman to Timbuctoo. When, in 1873, he passed away, that map had been entirely reconstructed. Moreover, his observations were made with such scrupulous exactitude, and his records entered with such microscopic accuracy, that subsequent travellers have been able to find their way from coast to coast with no other assistance than the data that he left.

In spite of all this, however, Livingstone repudiated the suggestion that he was primarily an explorer. He was, first and last, a Christian missionary. He had set his heart upon a redeemed and regenerated Africa, and he never for a moment lost sight of the supreme end towards which all his scientific and exploratory efforts were bent. Whenever he turned his face afresh towards the bogs of the watershed, it was in the fond hope that, by opening up the country, he might blaze a path for the gospel and ameliorate the conditions of the slave. His descriptions of African slavery stirred the anger of the world. The swoop of the pitiless traders on the unsuspecting villages; the blaze of burning huts; the wholesale slaughter and revolting cruelties; and, at last, the long caravan of chained natives driven beneath the lash to the distant coast; all this stirred the imagination of Europe and excited immediate action. "All that I can add in my solitude," he wrote—and the words have since been inscribed upon his honoured tomb at Westminster Abbey—"all that I can add is: May heaven's richest blessing descend on everyone, American, English, or Turk who will help to heal this open sore of the world!"

A Drama Of The African Jungle
Chitambo's village, the scene of the last moving drama, is one of the loneliest outposts among Africa's boundless solitudes. We have, in fancy, seen the litter on which the explorer's native attendants carried his fevered and emaciated form into the circular hut, shaped like an immense old-fashioned beehive, in which he was destined to close his illustrious career. We all seem to have gazed upon the cold and stiffened form of the man who, dying the loneliest death in history, was nevertheless impelled by the radiant and palpitating sense of a Presence to struggle, in his last agony, to his knees. We all seem to have stood reverentially beside the tree on which the natives, with uncanny insight, carved the inscription that would enable any white man who desired to do so to identify the spot. Nothing has more impressed the world with the intelligence of the African than the fact that those natives sensed the historic importance of Livingstone; marked the scene of his death in such a way that no fire could deface it; and refusing to bury the body in the wilds, carried it many hundreds of miles to the coast and then accompanied it on its long voyage to Westminster.

Africa has been transformed as a result of Livingstone's exploits; yet, after allowance has been made for the romantic character of his adventures, and the scientific value of his explorations, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that it is not on these grounds that millions of men cherish his memory as one of humanity's most golden traditions. David Livingstone presented to the world the impressive spectacle of a man of the most distinguished gifts, who was prepared to endure any hardship, suffer any loss, or die any death, that he might emancipate and uplift earth's most degraded races. And when the world finds its prosaic annals enriched by a thrilling story of such practical idealism, it does not willingly allow the name of its hero to sink into forgetfulness or obscurity.

F W Boreham

Image: David Livingstone