As a ten-year-old, David Livingstone was working 14 hours a day in the cotton mills of Blantyre, just outside Glasgow. But he was to become a legendary African missionary and explorer . . .
He narrowly escaped death by poison arrows, was mauled by a lion and consumed by ants. He witnessed a massacre, and one of his companions was eaten by cannibals. When he died, his faithful African bearers dried his body in the sun and wrapped him in tree bark before carrying him 700 miles back across the continent he had grown to love so much.
Livingstone did much to campaign against the slave trade, and he put a name to much of the remaining uncharted territory of Africa. But did he deserve such adoration? Was he really the great explorer and saviour of souls that the Victorians believed him to be?
