How the Scots Invented the Modern World (57 page)

The first person to challenge this accepted view was the shipbuilder’s son MacGregor Laird. He believed the steam-powered boats his family firm was starting to build could be used to explore West Africa’s great Niger River, from its mouth at the Bight of Benin up the channel and deep into the interior. Europeans, he believed, could then trade directly for raw materials with the natives, bring them manufactured goods in exchange—and spread the word of Christianity to Africa’s heathen masses. Steam, he wrote to Lord Grey, “will convert a most uncertain and precarious trade into a regular and steady one, diminish the risk of life, and free a large portion of capital at present engaged in it.” In 1832 Laird set up his company for commercial development of the Niger and took two steamboats to Africa. The venture failed. Of forty-eight Europeans who started out on his first voyage up the Niger, only nine returned. Laird himself nearly died, and returned to England in January 1834 in a feeble state—indeed, his health never recovered. But he persevered in pushing for steam power as the key to unlocking the dark secrets of Africa, and expanding the British Empire. The voyage of the
Nemesis
to China six years later was the result.

In the end, however, it was not the desire for empire or profits that finally opened up Africa, but another powerful force in the Scottish cultural repertoire—religion. A single man did it, not in order to enrich himself or to plant the Union Jack on another distant shore, but for the Africans themselves, to bring them education, medicine, freedom from the threat of slavery—in other words, “civilization” in enlightened Scottish terms—as well as Christianity. His name was David Livingstone, and in many ways his life epitomizes much of what made Scots so respected and influential around the world.

He was born in Blantyre in 1818, eight miles from Glasgow, to a family of mill workers. His grandfather Neil, a crofter on the tiny island of Ulva in the Inner Hebrides, had been driven from the family farm during the Clearances, and had found work in Blantyre’s cotton mill. The son learned to read and write and became a clerk in the same factory, and then made a precarious living as a traveling tea salesman. David Livingstone grew up in a one-room tenement house on Shuttle Row, as it was called. Since the family needed every penny it could scrape together, David started work himself in the factory at age ten, climbing under the huge steam-driven looms to repair broken threads. According to an early biographer, a Blantyre neighbor remembered the Livingstone boys, David and Charles, coming from work. “If they was walkin’ along the road and cam’ tae a puddle, Charlie wud walk roon, but Dauvid—he’d stamp right through.”

After fourteen hours of hard labor in the factory, David Livingstone attended night classes to get the education he craved. He spent his first paycheck on a Latin grammar. By the time he was fourteen he had learned Latin and Greek, and mastered stacks of theological literature. His father was a Calvinist Congregationalist who distributed religious tracts as he sold tea, so it is not surprising that religion was a powerful force in the son’s life. But it had also become a resurgent force in Scotland.

For fifty years after the Moderates had defeated the Evangelical party for control of the Scottish Kirk in 1757, Scottish culture had secularized itself and become “enlightened” on matters of religion. Dugald Stewart, Henry Brougham, James Mill, even Sir Walter Scott, all treated most of the history of organized Christianity, particularly in Scotland, as one of superstition and intolerance. Then, with the new century, Protestant evangelism experienced a powerful rebound. Part of it was a reaction against the atheism of the French Revolution. Part of it, too, was the rebellion against an established Church of Scotland that had become so refined and aloof from everyday life that it offered nothing to people who needed a strong emotional outlet. Just as American Presbyterians had caught religious fire from Scottish Evangelicals in the eighteenth century, setting off the Great Revival, so Scottish and English Calvinists now turned to American revivalism for a new kind of “religion of the people.”

The country went through an unabashed phase of being “born again.” Protestant sects such as the Congregationalists, Baptists, and Methodists found eager converts among Scotland’s rural and urban workers. Shops, taverns, even most city services, strictly observed the Sabbath—a custom that persisted until very recently. Church leaders such as Thomas Chalmers became civic leaders in the fight against poverty and slum conditions. Eventually the revivalist tide swept over the Kirk itself. In 1843 nearly 450 ministers resigned their offices and joined with Chalmers in forming the new “Free Protesting Church of Scotland,” or the Free Kirk, an evangelical alternative to Scotland’s government-subsidized church.

However, this resolute, churchgoing, Sabbath-keeping, psalm-singing Scotland stayed in line with this modernizing predecessor. No one wanted to turn back the clock or reverse the accomplishments of the past hundred years. Instead, the new evangelism sought to provide a steadily improving inner spiritual life, to match the progress of society and “civilization.” As the young David Livingstone discovered when he read the works of the Scottish astronomer and theologian Thomas Dick, science and religion were parallel paths to revealing God’s truth. In other words, the thirst for knowledge of the world and the desire to be one with Jesus Christ were not at odds with each other. The God of nature and the God of Revelation were one. “In the glow of love which Christianity inspires,” Livingstone remembered years later, “I resolved to devote my life to the alleviation of misery”—both as a missionary and as a doctor.

Livingstone took up studies in chemistry and theology at Anderson College at the University of Glasgow. At twenty-three he was older than most of the students, but he was as keen and alert as the best—who were very, very good. One of his classmates in Thomas Graham’s chemistry class was William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, who would become the most influential chemist of the nineteenth century. Another was Lloyd (later Lord) Playfair, grandson of the brilliant mathematician.

In 1838 he had his medical degree, and he hoped to go to China to open a mission there. However, the outbreak of “that abominable Opium War” forced him change his plans. Then he met Englishman Robert Moffat, who gave a lecture in Glasgow on the mission he had just opened in southern Africa. As Moffat told his audience of the vastness of the African continent and its unexplored beauty, of rising in the morning to see “the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary had been before,” the image stuck in Livingstone’s mind. Here was a chance not only to do the Lord’s work but to embark on a great adventure, an opportunity to journey to places where no white man, not even Moffat, had gone before.

David Livingstone set sail from Liverpool on December 8, 1840, hardly dreaming he would not see home again for sixteen years. He grew restless on the three-month trip, and decided to learn the art of navigation from the ship’s captain, which would come in handy when he began his treks across Africa, and later sailed his own boat across the Indian Ocean. After reaching the British colony of Cape Town, Livingstone set off for Moffat’s station at Kuruman, six hundred miles north, on the edge of the great Kalahari Desert. It turned out to be a bitter disappointment. Moffat had found fewer than forty converts, and although he and his daughter Mary tried to create an oasis of civilization and security in their tiny mission, they drew no takers. So Livingstone decided to take a different tack. Instead of waiting for the natives to come to him, he would go to them, wherever they happened to be— even if that meant penetrating hundreds of miles into trackless jungle and mountains.

He set off on his first journey to the African interior in October 1841, traveling nearly five hundred miles northeast through a series of remote villages, where he learned what he could about African life and language.
⁴²
The risks Livingstone was willing to run for the sake of his mission were staggering. Quite apart from the physical dangers of traveling across wild and often hostile country—at one point Livingstone was attacked by a lion and severely mauled, which cost him the use of his right arm—there was also the hidden menace of diseases and fever. He caught malaria early on, and its recurrent bouts never left him. But he managed to limit its effects, and to protect other members of his party from its ravages, by taking doses of a new drug developed by French chemists, called quinine, which he usually dissolved in a glass of sherry. Livingstone was the first person to use quinine in Africa. Although he was never entirely convinced it was completely effective in preventing malaria—he preferred a home remedy he developed of quinine, calomel, rhubarb, and resin of julep—it changed the odds in Europeans’ favor for the first time. Like James Lind’s discovery of citrus against scurvy, quinine opened a pathway for long-distance travel in the tropics, in this case overland—and in doing so it would save the lives of hundreds of thousands, both black and white.

For all the risks he ran, Livingstone enjoyed the strenuous effort his itinerant mission involved. “The mere animal pleasure of traveling in a wild unexplored country is very great,” he wrote. “Great exercise imparts elasticity to the muscles, fresh and healthy blood circulates through the brain, the mind works well, the eye is clear, the step is firm.” He also discovered he got on well with Africans—better, in fact, than he did with white Europeans, who sometimes found him too abrupt and unafraid to say what was on his mind. There was also the thrill of finding one new vista and discovery after another.

The first was Lake Ngami, which unexpectedly greeted him when he arrived at the upper reaches of the Kalahari. The most famous, however, was Victoria Falls—“so lovely,” he wrote, “it must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight”—and the Zambezi River, one of the great rivers of the world, which flows from northwestern Zambia across the heart of Africa to the Indian Ocean. As he gazed for the first time over its broad expanse, more than five hundred yards across in places, with foothills and mountains rising up in the distance, Livingstone said it awakened memories of “the long-lost scenes of the Firths of Clyde and Forth, which came back so vividly, I might have cried.”

That trip in 1853–56 took him across Africa from ocean to ocean, as the first European to do so. It revealed that the interior of Africa was not desert or barren savannah, as some had guessed, but a world of lush vegetation and millions of human beings. Livingstone decided that rivers such as the Zambezi were the key to opening Africa up to the rest of the world. He believed they constituted a great “water highway” that could bring goods, services, and the Gospel to even the most remote parts, and trigger the continent’s economic and social advance—much as Telford’s roads and canals had opened up the Highlands. Later, he hoped the Zambezi could be declared an open waterway for the use of all nations, but the Portuguese, who occupied crucial parts of its headwaters in Angola, refused to permit it.

The one service he could bring to Africa’s heartland himself was his medical practice. Livingstone became truly the first “doctor without borders,” traveling thirty or forty miles out of his way to visit whatever village or people needed his assistance. Livingstone brought the sharp analysis and technical knowledge of Scottish medicine to some of the remotest places in the world. His efforts won him the respect of local tribesmen and their leaders—and, as he expected, a steady stream of conversions to Christianity.

As Livingstone saw it, there were two great barriers to Africa’s eventual road to Christianity, commerce, and “civilization.” One was white racial prejudice. Like most Scots, Livingstone was largely immune to racial theories of white supremacy (belief in white
cultural
supremacy itself was another matter). In one colonial setting after another, Scots proved themselves far better able to get along with people of another culture and color than their English counterparts. In addition, the whole weight of Scottish Enlightenment tradition was on the side of belief in a universal human nature, which all human beings shared, but which was shaped according to environment and a society’s developmental stage—“nurture,” in other words, rather than “nature.”

Livingstone despised the sort of race prejudice and brutality he found in the Cape Colony. He had become fast friends with missionary John Philip, another Scot, who fought for the rights of aboriginal peoples in South Africa. Livingstone clashed repeatedly with the local Boers, especially when he supported a local native revolt against their rule. “Every nation on earth worthy of freedom,” he wrote, “is ready to shed its blood in its defence. We sympathize with the Caffres [sic]; we side with the weak against the strong.” Rebellion, he said, was prima facie evidence of bad government to begin with. His forthright stance so infuriated the South Africans that they practically herded him out of the country.

He spoke even more forthrightly on race when he published
The
Zambesi and Its Tributaries,
and included a sharp riposte to race theorists who believed Livingstone’s travels showed that the black Africans were savages and incapable of understanding the values of civilization. “We must smile at the heaps of nonsense which have been written about the negro intellect. . . . I do not believe in any incapacity of the African in either mind or heart.” Black Africans merely exhibited the kind of cultural backwardness one would expect from anyone cut off from mainstream civilization, Livingstone said. “A couple of centuries back the ancestors of common people in England were as unenlightened as the Africans are now.” And how unenlightened was a matter of opinion. “Africans are not by any means unreasonable,” he wrote. “I think unreasonableness is more a hereditary disease in Europe.”

When Livingstone returned to England in 1856, he discovered he was famous. His lectures on his exploits and adventures drew huge crowds and gained an audience with Queen Victoria. So did his impassioned attacks on the African slave trade.