He was waiting now for the final decision of the directors authorising the advance into the unoccupied district of the north. The decision was long in coming. We must recognise that such a resolution was not an easy one for those who carried all the responsibilities at home. Even their most trusted advisers on the actual field were not agreed. Dr. Philip, the special representative of the Society at the Cape, and a man of great personal power and sagacity, shook his head over Livingstone’s impetuosity and talked about the dangers. “If we wait till there is no danger,” said Livingstone, “we shall never go at all.” It was quite true; but there were big problems of policy to be decided. Many held by the watchword “concentration,” which is always plausible, and often conclusive. Settlements for educational and industrial developments had proved their value. On the other hand Livingstone had unanswerable logic on his side when he argued that the missionaries in the South had too scanty a population and that the call to possess the North was urgent, for the traders and the slavers were pushing out there, and the gospel of humanity was imperatively needed.
There was long delay, but in the meantime Livingstone was making proof of his ministry. His medical knowledge helped to spread his fame. He fought the rainmakers at their own arts with the scientific weapon of irrigation and won his battle. He made friends with the Bechuana Chief, Sechele, one of the most intelligent and interesting of the many great natives who surrendered to the charm of Livingstone. Sechele was deeply impressed by the missionary’s message, but profoundly troubled in spirit. He said, “You startle me—these words make all my bones to shake—I have no more strength in me. But my forefathers were living at the same time yours were, and how is it that they did not send them word about these terrible things sooner. They all passed away into darkness without knowing whither they were going.” When Livingstone tried to explain to him the gradual spread of the Gospel knowledge, the chief refused to believe that the whole earth could be visited. There was a barrier at his very door—the Kalahari desert. Nobody could cross it. Even those who knew the country would perish, and no missionary would have a chance. As for his own people there was no difficulty in converting them, always assuming that Livingstone would go to work in the right way. “Do you imagine these people will ever believe by your merely talking to them? I can make them do nothing except by thrashing them, and if you like I will call my head-men and with our litupa (whips of rhinoceros hide) we will soon make them all believe together.” It must be confessed, however, that Sechele’s state-church principles did not commend themselves to the mind of an ardent voluntaryist like Livingstone. “In our relations with the people,” he writes, “we were simply strangers exercising no authority or control whatever. Our influence depended entirely on persuasion; and having taught them by kind conversation as well as by public instruction, I expected them to do what their own sense of right and wrong dictated.” He then sets on record “five instances in which by our influence on public opinion war was prevented,” and pays a high tribute to the intelligence of the natives who in many respects excel “our own uneducated peasantry.” This attitude of appreciation and respectful sympathy was the secret of Livingstone’s unparalleled influence over the African tribes. It was on a return from a visit to Sechele in June, 1843, that Livingstone heard the good news of the formal sanction of the forward movement. He hailed the decision, as he said, “with inexpressible delight”; and in a fine letter written to Mr. Cecil declared his fixed resolve to give less attention to the art of physical healing and more to spiritual amelioration. He has no ambition to be “a very good doctor but a useless drone of a missionary.” He feels that to carry out this purpose will involve some self-denial, but he will make the sacrifice cheerfully. As for the charge of ambition, “I really am ambitious to preach beyond other men’s lines.... I am only determined to go on and do all I can, while able, for the poor degraded people of the north.”
In less than two months he was ready for the new move. The first journey was two hundred miles to the north-east, to Mabotsa, which he had previously noted as suitable for a station. Here he built a house with his own hands, and settled down for three years’ work among the Bakatlas. During this period two events occurred that were especially notable. The first went far towards ending his career. The facts are well-known from Livingstone’s own graphic but simple description. He had gone with the Bakatlas to hunt some lions which had committed serious depredations in the village. The lions were encircled by the natives but broke through the line and escaped. As Livingstone was returning, however, he saw one of the beasts on a small hill, and fired into him at about thirty yards’ distance. Loading again, he heard a shout, and “looking half-round saw the lion just in the act of springing upon me.” The lion seized him by the shoulder and “growling horribly close to my ear, he shook me as a terrier dog does a rat.” We now see the advantage of a scientific education. Livingstone was able to analyse his own feelings and emotions during the process of being gnawed by a lion. He observed that “the shock produced a stupor, a sort of dreaminess”; there was “no sense of pain, nor feeling of terror.” He compares it to the influence of chloroform; and argues that “this peculiar state is probably produced in all animals killed by the carnivora, and if so is a merciful provision by our benevolent Creator for lessening the pain of death.” In this judgment he anticipated some
LIVINGSTONE ATTACKED BY A LION.
weighty modern conclusions by noted physiologists. So interesting does Livingstone find these observations, that it seems as if he must have been almost disappointed when the lion released him and turned his attention to others less well equipped for scientific investigation. On the whole Livingstone escaped marvellously well, but the bone was crunched into splinters, and there were eleven teeth wounds on the upper part of his arm. The arm indeed was never really well again. It will be remembered that it was by the false joint in this limb that the remains of Livingstone were identified on their arrival in England. It will also be remembered that, as has been so well said, “for thirty years afterwards all his labours and adventures, entailing such exertion and fatigue, were undertaken with a limb so maimed that it was painful for him to raise a fowling-piece, or in fact to place the left arm in any position above the level of the shoulder.”
This was a bad business. But Providence has a way of making up to good men for afflictions of this kind; and Livingstone’s compensation came to him in the following year, when he had something to face that demanded more daring than a mere every-day encounter with lions. He had been a bachelor in Africa for four years, and he had resolved to try his fortune with Mary Moffat, Dr. Moffat’s eldest daughter. The proposal was made “beneath one of the fruit trees” at Kuruman in 1844. He got the answer he desired and deserved, and Mary Moffat took him with all his erratic ways, and became his devoted wife. “She was always the best spoke in the wheel at home,” he writes; “and when I took her with me on two occasions to lake Ngami, and far beyond, she endured more than some who have written large books of travels.” In course of time three sons and a daughter came to “cheer their solitude,” and increase their responsibilities. But from the first they set themselves to fulfil what Livingstone called the ideal missionary life, “the husband a jack-of-all-trades, and the wife a maid-of-all-work.” The catalogue of necessary accomplishments sounds somewhat embarrassing, and one realises that the ordinary college training is in many respects incomplete. Here it is, as Livingstone expresses it—“Building, gardening, cobbling, doctoring, tinkering, carpentering, gun-mending, farriering, waggon-mending, preaching, schooling, lecturing on physics, occupying a chair in divinity, and helping my wife to make soap, candles, and clothes.” It was certainly a busy and catholic career. He was carrying the whole of his world upon his own broad shoulders, and was guide, philosopher, and friend to a vast district. He had his enemies, too, as those who champion the rights of the poor and helpless are sure to have. To the north were to be found settlements of unscrupulous and marauding Boers, who held by all the unenlightened views of the relation of the white races to the black which were only recently extinct in England where the financial interest in slavery died hard in 1833. These Boer marauders lived largely on slave-labour and on pillage; and Livingstone was brought into open conflict with them. On one side they may be said to have barred his advance. The tribes he served and loved lived under the shadow of a Boer invasion. The time was to come when the cloud would burst over Sechele and his unoffending people, when his wives would be slain and his children carried away into slavery; when many of the bravest of his people would be massacred, and Livingstone’s house sacked and gutted in his absence. This complicity of the northern Boers in those outrages on native tribes which history most frequently associates with the Portuguese, earned Livingstone’s stern indignation and detestation; though he never did the Boers of South Africa the injustice of confounding the lawless raiders with the main body of settlers, of whom he wrote “the Boers generally ... are a sober, industrious, and most hospitable body of peasantry.”
He had, however, already begun to have glimpses of what his life-witness was to be. He saw that the curse of Africa lay not only in the eternal conflicts of tribe with tribe. That form of misery was original to the continent and its savage inhabitants. But a new curse had fallen upon the unhappy people by the intrusion of those who united with a higher material civilisation a more developed and refined form of cruelty. The diabolical cunning and callousness that, under the guise of trading, would gain the confidence of a peaceful tribe, only at last to rise up some fatal night, murder the old, enslave the young, burn the huts, and march the chained gang hundreds of miles to the sea, have made the records of African Slavery the most awful reading in human history. Imagination carries the story one step further. We hardly need the genius of a Turner to suggest to us the horror of a slave-ship under the torrid tropical skies, with its dead and dying human freight. When the slave-trade is realised in all its accumulated horrors, it is easy to understand how, to a man of Livingstone’s noble Christian sensibility, the manifest duty of the Church of Christ was to engage in a war-to-the-death struggle against this darkest of all inhumanities.