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DAVID LIVINGSTONE
[Illustration: DAVID LIVINGSTONE.]
DAVID LIVINGSTONE
BY
C. SILVESTER HORNE, M.P.
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1916
[Illustration]
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO
DALLAS . SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
_All rights reserved_
PREFACE
On March 19th, 1913, a hundred years will have passed since David
Livingstone was born. It is only forty years since his body was carried
by faithful hands from the centre of Africa to the coast that he might
be buried among his peers in Westminster Abbey. In those forty years
great and astounding changes have been witnessed in the Continent which
is associated with his fame. The campaign he fought against the
slave-system that desolated the vast district drained by the Zambesi had
to be renewed to free the population on the banks of the Congo. Southern
Africa has been reconstructed and consolidated. The Upper and the Lower
Nile have witnessed many strange vicissitudes of history. Other names
have become great in men’s mouths. Some have been associated with vast
political enterprises; while some, with a disinterestedness as noble as
Livingstone’s, have been at once the pioneers and the martyrs of a
Christian civilisation. But nothing that has happened since has
diminished by a single laurel the wreath he won, and will wear for
ever. With every decade his fame greatens; and whatever our views on
African problems may be, we may all agree that her white population may
well pray for a double portion of his spirit. At first it seemed
unnecessary to re-write his life. The task has been so well fulfilled by
many sympathetic biographers. For anyone who has the patience and the
leisure it is to be found recorded in the fascinating pages of his
journals. But it is so great a possession that there seemed to be room
for yet another attempt to present it to those in our busy century who
ask for short measure and a clear, simple narrative of facts. This is
what the present biography aspires to be. The author has aimed not so
much at telling the story as at allowing the story to tell itself. It
may be added that, in the belief of the writer, Livingstone is greatest,
not as a scientist, nor an explorer, but as a man and a missionary.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I 1
CHAPTER II 22
CHAPTER III 54
CHAPTER IV 66
CHAPTER V 85
CHAPTER VI 106
CHAPTER VII 138
CHAPTER VIII 165
CHAPTER IX 179
CHAPTER X 191
CHAPTER XI--CHARACTERISTICS 229
INDEX 245
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
DAVID LIVINGSTONE _Frontispiece_
THE CLYDE AND RUINS OF THE OLD MILL AT
BLANTYRE 13
WHERE LIVINGSTONE LIVED AT ONGAR 13
LIVINGSTONE ATTACKED BY A LION 32
PREACHING ON THE JOURNEY UP-COUNTRY 77
THE TRAGEDY OF CENTRAL AFRICA 161
“I READ THE BIBLE THROUGH FOUR TIMES WHILST
I WAS IN MANYUEMA” 169
THE MANYUEMA AMBUSCADE 175
STANLEY FINDS LIVINGSTONE 181
ON THE LAST MARCH 211
CARRYING THE BODY TO THE SEA 223
MAP OF LIVINGSTONE’S JOURNEYS IN AFRICA _At end_
DR. LIVINGSTONE
CHAPTER I
The year 1813 in which my story opens was a momentous one in the history
of Europe. The titanic struggle with Napoleon was nearing its crisis.
Victor at Lutzen and Bautzen, he had been defeated at Leipzig, on one of
the bloodiest battlefields in modern warfare. Away in the Pyrenees,
Wellington was grappling with Soult, and step by step driving him back
on to French soil. Among those who were fighting in the ranks of the
British army were at least two men bearing the name of Livingstone. It
is doubtful whether they even heard, amid the excitement and peril of
the time, that away in peaceful far Blantyre, and in their brother
Neil’s home, a lad had been born, and christened by the good, sound
scriptural name of David. Yet it may come to be believed some day that
the birth of David Livingstone was of more vital influence upon the
destiny of the world even than the battle in which Napoleon’s star set
in blood two years later. For to open up a continent, and lead the way
in the Christianisation of its countless millions was one of the “more
renowned” victories of peace--a more difficult and notable achievement
than to overthrow one form of military domination in Europe.
The family of Livingstones or Livingstons--for David Livingstone himself
spelt his name for many years without the final “e”--came from the
Island of Ulva off the coast of Argyllshire. Not much of interest is
known about them except that one of them died at Culloden fighting for
the Stuarts; so that the “fighting blood” in their veins had its way
with them before David’s more immediate kinsmen crossed the seas to the
Peninsula. The most distinguished member of the family inherited the
Highlander’s daring and love of exploits combined with the most pacific
spirit, and left behind him an unstained record as an explorer who never
lifted his hand to do hurt to anyone through all the perils of his
adventurous career. Towards the close of the eighteenth century his
grandfather had crossed from Ulva and settled in Blantyre, a village on
the Clyde that had certainly no romantic attraction. He was employed in
a cotton factory there. Most of his sons went off to the wars; but one
of them, Neil, settled in Blantyre as a dealer in tea. He had been
previously apprenticed to David Hunter, a tailor; and, as many a good
apprentice has done before him, married his master’s daughter. Neil
Livingstone and his brave wife had a hard fight of it to make a living
out of a small tea business, and to educate and rear their children. Two
of the children died in infancy; but three sons and two daughters grew
up in that humble home. David was the second son. He was born on March
19th, 1813.
The small struggling tradesman has had little justice done to him either
by the novelist or by common repute. He is usually represented as a man
who cannot afford to keep a soul, and whose interests are limited to
sordid and petty transactions across a counter, not always nor often of
a scrupulous and honourable character. The reputation is very
ill-deserved. The small shop has proved itself as good a training ground
as any other for scholars, and saints and heroes; and, but for the fact
that our prejudices die hard, we should recognise that it is so. Neil
Livingstone and his wife may have lived a narrow life, serving
faithfully their customers and dividing their interests between their
family, their business, and the little Independent Chapel of which Neil
Livingstone was a Deacon. But they found their sphere large enough for
the practice of the fundamental Christian virtues, as well as for the
noblest of all interests--the interest in the progress of the Kingdom of
God throughout the world. There was one family tradition of which David
Livingstone was immensely proud. A saying had come down to them
attributed to an ancestor that in all the family history there was no
record of any dishonest man. When Deacon Neil Livingstone and his wife
had passed away, the epitaph on their grave recorded the gratitude of
their children for “poor and honest parents.” In this simple and public
fashion they expressed their thanks for the honesty of one who, when he
sold a pound of tea, gave neither short weight, nor an adulterated
article. They also gave thanks for the poverty of their parents,
recognising in poverty one of those hard but kind necessities that make
for industry and courage and patience; and that the children of the poor
oftener leave the world their debtor for serviceable activities than the
children of the well-to-do, who have less spur to their ambitions. It
was eminently characteristic of David Livingstone that he should thus
avow his thanks for the honesty and poverty of his father and mother.
There are those still living who recall the manly pride with which he
was wont to refer to “my own order, the honest poor.”
The mother of David Livingstone was a woman of great charm and force of
character--“a delicate little woman, with a wonderful flow of good
spirits.” In her, rare devoutness and sterling common sense were
combined. She was the careful and thrifty housewife, who had to make
every sixpence go as far as possible; but she was remembered for her
unfailing cheerfulness and serenity, and there was always something to
be saved out of the meagre income when the work of the Church of Christ
needed extra support. She came of Covenanting stock, and her father,
David Hunter, the tailor, received his first religious impressions at an
open-air service, held while the snow was falling fast, and used to tell
that so absorbed was he in the realisation of the truth of the Gospel,
that, though before the end of the sermon the snow was ankle-deep, he
had no sensation of cold. He lived to be eighty-seven, was a close and
prolific reader, bore severe reverses of fortune with unflinching
courage, and earned the high respect of the countryside.
It is impossible to exaggerate what David Livingstone owed to the stock
from which he sprang and the bracing influences of his early
environment. There were two drawbacks to his home education. It seems
that the Deacon had put two classes of book on his private index
expurgatorius, as being dangerous--novels, and books of science. So far
as novels are concerned the harm done was probably slight; for no one is
well-read in the Bible and the Pilgrim’s Progress without receiving a
liberal education, and the cultivation of the imagination; while
history, biography, books of travel, and missionary records amply served
the same purpose. But the proscription of books of science was an
evidence of the old evil creed that there is essential antagonism
between science and religion. This assumption came near to doing David
permanent injury. His religious difficulties did not disappear until in
his own words “having lighted on those admirable works of Dr. Thomas
Dick, ‘The Philosophy of Religion,’ and ‘The Philosophy of a Future
State’ it was gratifying to find that he had enforced my own conviction
that religion and science were friendly to one another.” Few people in
the nineteenth century were destined to do more towards the practical
reconciliation of science and religion than David Livingstone.
It is interesting to find that even in his very young days he had a mind
and will of his own, and that not even the love and respect he felt for
his father could shake his own conviction of truth. The last time his
father “applied the rod” was when David refused to read “Wilberforce’s
Practical Christianity.” The boy thought the matter over in his canny
Scotch way, and concluded that, on the whole, the rod was the less
severe form of punishment. So he took the rod, and refused a religious
book for which he had no use. Looking back upon his own religious
development in after years, he used to confess that at this stage he was
“colour-blind.” When he was led to see that God and Nature are “not at
strife,” and that God does not say one thing to the theologian and its
contrary to the scientist, he accepted in his own simple and sincere way
the Christian Gospel, and drew from it the same splendid faith in the
universality of the Kingdom of God that inspired the souls of the first
apostles. To David Livingstone, to become a Christian was to become in
spirit and desire a missionary. It is only necessary to add that the
faith which he accepted with the full consent of heart and mind as a lad
in Blantyre was the faith in which he died.
The days of David Livingstone’s boyhood were great days for missions.
The churches were everywhere awakening to their opportunity and
responsibility. A new “Acts of the Apostles” was being written. Letters
from remote parts of the world, where the ancient battle between Christ
and heathenism was being fought out anew, were eagerly read and deeply
pondered. The romance and heroism of the majestic campaign captured and
kindled both young and old. The year of Livingstone’s birth was a year
of singular triumph in the South Seas. It was the year when his great
countryman Robert Morrison completed his translation of the New
Testament into Chinese. When he was some six or seven years old, another
famous Scotch missionary, Robert Moffat, was settling on the Kuruman;
and Mrs. Moffat bore in her arms a baby girl destined to become David
Livingstone’s wife. The life of Henry Martyn was a supreme call to
consecration; while the story of the heroes and heroines of the Moravian
missions was almost as familiar in that humble Scottish home as the
history of the Apostle Paul.
A specially powerful influence in moving Livingstone to his
life-decision was the appeal of Charles Gutzlaff for medical
missionaries for China.
Livingstone was a born naturalist; and despite his father’s
old-fashioned prejudices, he made himself a scientist at a very early
age, searching old quarries for the shells in the carboniferous
limestone, “scouring Clyde-side for simples,” and arranging the flora of
the district in botanical order. These expeditions were often very
prolonged, and involved the endurance of fatigue and hunger; but the lad
could not be discouraged. Unconsciously he was bracing himself
physically for the toils and tasks of after years. There is a fine story
about the revenge he took upon his native African escort, on one
occasion, who had been misguided enough to talk disrespectfully about
his slim figure and shortness of stature. Thereupon, Livingstone took
them along for two or three days at the top of their speed till they
cried out for mercy! He had not scoured Clyde-side for simples for
nothing. His fearlessness is well illustrated in his daring and reckless
exploit of climbing the ruins of Bothwell Castle, so that he might carve
his name higher than any other boy had carved his. There, too, was the
childlike ambition, which remained with him to the end, to do something
which nobody else could surpass. “No one,” he wrote at the very end of
his life, on his last expedition, “will cut me out after this
exploration is accomplished.” Then he adds finely, “and may the good
Lord of all help me to show myself one of his stout-hearted servants, an
honour to my children, and perhaps to my country and race.” The story of
Livingstone is told there: it is the story of one of the good Lord’s
stout-hearted servants.
All the drudgery and hardship of his lot went to make him the man he
was. The days of his boyhood were “the good old days”--the days when
children of ten years old were sent to work in the factories; and David
went with the rest. No eight hours’ day his! No humane legislature
thought it wise and well to forbid or curtail child labour. From six
o’clock in the morning till eight o’clock at night he worked as a
piecer; and all the world knows how he used to place the book he was
studying on a portion of the spinning-jenny, and snatch a sentence or
two as he passed at his work. He tells us he thus kept “a pretty
constant study, undisturbed by the roar of machinery,” and that this
habit
[Illustration: THE CLYDE AND RUINS OF THE OLD MILL AT BLANTYRE.]
[Illustration: WHERE LIVINGSTONE LIVED AT ONGAR.]
of concentration stood him in good stead in after years when he wanted
to read and write even “amidst the dancing and song of savages.” As if
this were not enough, after a fourteen hours’ day in the factory he
would go off to a night-school provided by the employers; and then home
to work at his Latin till “mother put out the candle.” It is well for
ten-year-old humanity when it has a mother to put out the candle, or
Mother Nature might have put out another candle, and where would Africa
have been then? Nine years of such severe and determined work as this
brought him to University age; and as Glasgow University was hard by,
and as he was promoted to be a spinner by this time and able to earn
enough in the summer to keep him during the other six months, he entered
as a student for Greek and medicine, and seems to have successfully
schemed to attend some Divinity lectures even in the summer months. The
Scotch Universities are the paradise of poor and struggling students who
have more brains and character than bawbees: but the education was not
free in those days. The money for fees had to be pinched and scraped;
but it was found somehow, and in the early winter of 1836, David and his
father walked to the city from Blantyre and trudged the streets of
Glasgow all day, with the snow upon the ground, till at last they found
a room in “Rotten Row” that could be had for two shillings a week.
Lodged thus as cheaply as could be managed, he applied himself with all
his unfailing diligence and zest to learn Greek and medicine, as well as
to such theological studies as could be undertaken under the leadership
of the Rev. Dr. Wardlaw--one of Glasgow’s most famous divines--who
trained men for the Congregational ministry, and for whom Livingstone
had a great admiration.
During his second session at Glasgow (1837-8) David Livingstone came to
the most fateful decision of his life. He decided to offer himself to
one of the Missionary Societies for foreign service. He chose the London
Missionary Society because of his sympathy with the catholicity of its
basis. It existed “to send neither Episcopacy, nor Presbyterianism, nor
Independency to the heathen, but the Gospel of Christ.” “This,” said
Livingstone “exactly agreed with my ideas.” He was a member of a
Congregational church, and the London Missionary Society has always been
in the main supported by these churches. But the Society was founded by
Evangelical churchmen and prominent Presbyterians, as well as by
Congregationalists, and nothing appealed more to Livingstone than this
union of Christian people in the service of an un-Christian world.
In due course the acceptance of his offer arrived, and in the early
autumn of 1838 he travelled to London, where he was to appear before the
Mission Board at 57 Aldersgate Street. One can imagine that, apart
altogether from the momentous character of his visit, and the anxiety he
must have felt as to his acceptance by the Directors, this first visit
to London must have been a most impressive one to the young Scotsman.
He heard many distinguished preachers, and visited the famous sites of
London. Among other places, he went with a companion to Westminster
Abbey. It is a thrilling thought, as Mr. Thomas Hughes reminds us, that
he was never known to enter that Abbey again until his remains were
borne thither amid the lamentations of the whole civilised world, and
all the honours that the living can ever pay to the dead.
The examination by the Directors was satisfactory; and according to the
custom of the time Livingstone was committed for a short period of
probation to the tutorship of the Rev. Richard Cecil, the minister of
the little town of Chipping Ongar in Essex. There he was expected to
give proof of his preaching ministry, with what result is generally
known. He was sent one Sunday evening to preach in the village of
Stanford Rivers, where the tradition of Livingstone’s first effort at
preaching is still cherished. The raw, somewhat heavy-looking Scotch
youth, to whom public speech was always a difficulty, gave out his text
“very deliberately.” That was all the congregation got. The sermon
composed on the text had fled, owing to the nervous embarrassment
produced by a handful of people in a village chapel. “Friends,” said the
youth, “I have forgotten all I had to say”--“and hurrying out of the
pulpit he left the chapel.” I have no doubt that “hurrying” is the right
word. Never was failure more absolute. It is hardly to be wondered at
that the Rev. Richard Cecil reported to the Directors his fears that
Livingstone had mistaken his vocation. It was a risk to send someone to
preach to the heathen who might possibly forget what he had come to say
when he arrived. Moreover, criticism was made of his extreme slowness
and hesitancy in prayer. Yet the man who was nearly rejected by the
Society on this account, died on his knees in the heart of Africa, while
all the world was awed by the thought that David Livingstone passed away
in the act of prayer. As it was his probation was extended, and at the
end of another two months he was finally accepted, and went up to
London to continue his medical studies in the London Hospitals. One of
the most striking things ever written about him was by the celebrated
Dr. Isaac Taylor, of Ongar. “Now after nearly forty years,” he writes,
“I remember his step, the characteristic forward tread, firm, simple,
resolute, neither fast nor slow, no hurry and no dawdle, but which
evidently meant--getting there!” In November, 1840, he was able to
return to Glasgow, and qualify as a Licentiate of the Faculty of
Physicians and Surgeons; and a few days later he said goodbye to the old
folks at home, one of whom--his father--he was never to see on earth
again. On November 20th he was ordained at Albion Chapel, London, and
three weeks later he sailed on the “George” to Algoa Bay in South
Africa. One chapter in his memorable life was now definitely closed.
Among the memories in it there are few if any that he cherished more
than that of his old Sunday School teacher, David Hogg, who sent for him
as he lay dying and said, “Now lad, make religion the every-day business
of your life, and not a thing of fits and starts, for if you do,
temptation and other things will get the better of you.” It is hardly
too much to say that the old man’s death-bed counsel became the
watchword of his life.