LONDON — The contents of a hard-to-read letter penned by famed 19th century explorer David Livingstone have finally been deciphered, a British university said Friday, nearly 140 years after he wrote of his despair at ever leaving Africa alive.
Researchers say the letter, which required state-of-the-art imaging techniques to decipher, helps round out the picture of a man traditionally cast as an intrepid Victorian hero, revealing the self-doubt that tormented the missionary-explorer in one of his darkest hours.
“I am terribly knocked up, but this is for your own eye only,” Livingstone wrote to close friend Horace Waller. “Doubtful if I live to see you again.”
Livingstone was a national hero when he set off to find the source of the River Nile in 1866. By the time he composed his four-page missive, he was at the lowest point in his professional life, said Debbie Harrison, a researcher at Birkbeck University of London.
He was stuck in the village of Bambarre, in present-day Congo, in February 1871. Livingston was a long way off from his intended goal, most of his expedition party had died or deserted him, and he was suffering from pneumonia, fever and tropical ulcers — a nasty condition that consumes skin and flesh.
He was bedridden for weeks on end and had “gone slightly mad by this point, to be honest,” Harrison said.
Back home, Livingstone’s supporters were going mad with worry. No one had heard from him in years, and search parties set out to discover his fate.
He was eventually located near the eastern shore of massive Lake Tanganyika by journalist Henry Morton Stanley, whose memorable query, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” immortalized their encounter.
His warning to Waller was prescient: He finally succumbed to illness in May 1873 in what is now Zambia.
A team of scientists and academics — including U.S. spectral-imaging specialists — analyzed the fragile paper, drawing out Livingstone’s original text.
The university said the letter projects an image at odds with the fearless hero depicted by Waller, who heavily sanitized Livingstone’s writings before they were published.
