Livingstone's 1871 Field Diary

A Multispectral Critical Edition
Introduction
The publication of Livingstone’s 1871 Field Diary: A Multispectral Critical Edition reveals for the first time the original record of a remarkable and traumatic period in the life of David Livingstone, the celebrated British abolitionist, missionary, and explorer of Africa. The date of publication coincides almost exactly with the date Livingstone completed this diary in Central Africa 140 years ago. The original, previously unpublished text of the diary has remained inaccessible until now, due to the fragility of the paper and the near-illegible script. The David Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project has restored the full text of the diary by using cutting-edge spectral imaging and processing technology, and now makes the diary available through this electronic edition.
Figures 1 and 2. Livingstone, The 1871 Field Diary, 297b/157-138
in color (top) and spectral ratio (bottom) versions. A portion
of the printed newspaper title The Standard is visible at left.
In 1871, David Livingstone spent five months stranded in a small village in the Congo called Nyangwe. He had run out of writing paper and had nearly run out of ink, so he improvised the materials for his diary by writing over an old copy of The Standard newspaper with ink made from the seeds of a local berry. On 15 July 1871, while still in Nyangwe, Livingstone witnessed a massacre of the local African population by Arab slave traders from Zanzibar. Some 400 or 500 Africans, the majority of them women, died in a single day – a scale of murder and death unprecedented in Livingstone’s experience.
The massacre horrified Livingstone, leaving him too shattered to continue his mission to find the source of the Nile. He traveled 240 miles from Nyangwe – violently ill most of the way – back to Ujiji, an Arab settlement on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika. Here, Henry Morton Stanley, a reporter sent by the New York Herald to locate Livingstone (who had been "missing" for several years and presumed dead) found the Scottish explorer and greeted him with the iconic words, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"
Figure 3. "Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?" Illustration from
Stanley 1872,2:opposite 412.
The rest is history. The meeting, one of the most famous encounters in the nineteenth century, and Stanley’s published accounts of Livingstone’s crusade against slavery secured Livingstone a prominent and enduring place in the public imagination. The meeting also launched Stanley’s own career, cementing his reputation as a dauntless explorer and, ultimately, leading him to found the Congo Free State on behalf of Leopold II, the King of Belgium.
Yet despite its significance, Livingstone’s 1871 Field Diary – which chronicles both the months in Livingstone’s life leading up to the famous meeting and the Nyangwe massacre as it unfolds moment by moment before Livingstone’s eyes – has remained inaccessible to scholars and the public alike. The newspaper over which Livingstone wrote has deteriorated, and Livingstone’s improvised red ink has faded to the point of invisibility. From the time that the diary was returned to England after Livingstone’s death in Africa in 1873 to the present, it has not been possible to read and study Livingstone’s original words.
Figure 4. The Massacre of the Manyuema Women at Nyangwe. Illustration from Livingstone 1874,2:opposite 133.
Today, the David Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project – a unique, eighteen-month, transatlantic collaboration between scholars, scientists and educational and archival institutions – has completed its work on the diary. The complete original text is now made available worldwide as a free resource on the internet. The diary, as those who read it will soon discover, offers an astonishing glimpse into Livingstone’s conflicted thoughts and actions during the most crucial period in his life. Instead of the saintly hero of Victorian mythology, the individual who emerges from the pages of the diary is passionate, vulnerable, and deeply torn about the violent events developing around him.
Together with the text of the diary, the project team is delighted to make available an exciting and rich array of complementary materials:
  • a Livingstone spectral image archive that digitally preserves all the pages of Livingstone’s 1870 and 1871 Field Diaries as high-resolution spectral images with full metadata, and so that allows direct access to all the primary Livingstone data on which this critical edition is based;
  • a webpage that allows comparison between the original 1871 Field Diary, the highly revised 1872 Journal created by Livingstone, and the further revised 1874 book posthumously produced by Livingstone’s friend, Horace Waller;
  • critical, textual, and historical essays and notes; and
  • a detailed project history and archive that chronicles the fascinating journey of Livingstone’s words from the "rediscovery" of the faded diary in 2009 to its publication today as the first significant nineteenth-century British literary manuscript to be enhanced with spectral imaging and processing. The project archive contains over 60 downloadable documents and files produced in the course of the project that collectively provide an intimate and comprehensive look into the production of this critical edition.
The result – for the first time – is full access to a major Scottish national treasure and the addition of an important primary resource to the study of African history and the history of the British Empire.

Adrian S. Wisnicki

Project Director
The David Livingstone
Spectral Imaging Project

1 November 2011
Edinburgh, Scotland
Site Guide