How I found Livingstone : $b Travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. LivingstoneStanley, Henry M. (Henry Morton)
History
How I found Livingstone : $b Travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. Livingstone
Stanley, Henry M. (Henry Morton)
Africa, Central -- Description and travel; Livingstone, David, 1813-1873
In Livingstone I have seen many amiable traits. His gentleness never
forsakes him; his hopefulness never deserts him. No harassing anxieties,
distraction of mind, long separation from home and kindred, can make him
complain. He thinks "all will come out right at last;" he has such faith
in the goodness of Providence. The sport of adverse circumstances, the
plaything of the miserable beings sent to him from Zanzibar--he has been
baffled and worried, even almost to the grave, yet he will not desert
the charge imposed upon him by his friend, Sir Roderick Murchison. To
the stern dictates of duty, alone, has he sacrificed his home and ease,
the pleasures, refinements, and luxuries of civilized life. His is the
Spartan heroism, the inflexibility of the Roman, the enduring resolution
of the Anglo-Saxon--never to relinquish his work, though his heart
yearns for home; never to surrender his obligations until he can write
Finis to his work.
But you may take any point in Dr. Livingstone's character, and analyse
it carefully, and I would challenge any man to find a fault in it. He is
sensitive, I know; but so is any man of a high mind and generous nature.
He is sensitive on the point of being doubted or being criticised. An
extreme love of truth is one of his strongest characteristics, which
proves him to be a man of strictest principles, and conscientious
scruples; being such, he is naturally sensitive, and shrinks from any
attacks on the integrity of his observations, and the accuracy of his
reports. He is conscious of having laboured in the course of geography
and science with zeal and industry, to have been painstaking, and as
exact as circumstances would allow. Ordinary critics seldom take into
consideration circumstances, but, utterly regardless of the labor
expended in obtaining the least amount of geographical information in a
new land, environed by inconceivable dangers and difficulties, such
as Central Africa presents, they seem to take delight in rending to
tatters, and reducing to nil, the fruits of long years of labor, by
sharply-pointed shafts of ridicule and sneers.
Livingstone no doubt may be mistaken in some of his conclusions about
certain points in the geography of Central Africa, but he is not so
dogmatic and positive a man as to refuse conviction. He certainly
demands, when arguments in contra are used in opposition to him, higher
authority than abstract theory. His whole life is a testimony against
its unreliability, and his entire labor of years were in vain if theory
can be taken in evidence against personal observation and patient
investigation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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