Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Dr. Livingstone's Lost Diary, I Presume?


Awesome.

From a piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer...

A field diary partially written with berry juice on old newsprint, paper scraps, and book margins in the last years of the life of British explorer David Livingstone is legible for the first time in 141 years with the help of modern spectral-imaging technology and the old-fashioned sleuthing of a professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Adrian S. Wisnicki, an assistant professor of 19th-century British literature, studies the works of Victorian-era explorers and novelists, including Livingstone, Richard Burton, and Joseph Conrad, based on their travels to Africa and across the British Empire.

Recognizing a big void in Livingstone's history, Wisnicki decided to seek a long-lost 1871 diary that detailed the explorer's whereabouts and experiences during his arduous and final travels in central Africa, when he was out of contact with the Western world for two years. New York Herald newsman Henry M. Stanley finally tracked him down in early November 1871, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, where legend says he greeted him with the famous, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

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