One of the 19^th century’s most intrigu­ing fig­ures, the Scot­tish explor­er David Liv­ing­stone may be best known for words uttered by a reporter when the two men met on the shores of Lake Tan­ganyi­ka: “Dr. Liv­ing­stone, I pre­sume?”

David Liv­ing­stone dis­ap­peared in Africa for six years before meet­ing the famous­ly quot­ed Hen­ry Mor­ton Stan­ley. He was a hero in Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land for his rags-to-rich­es sto­ry of an impov­er­ished boy who went on to become a sci­en­tif­ic inves­ti­ga­tor and anti-slav­ery cru­sad­er. Liv­ing­stone became impas­sioned about the poten­tial of Chris­tian­i­ty to erad­i­cate the slave trade in Africa and took his mis­sion­ary work into the African inte­ri­or.

An avid chron­i­cler of his adven­tures, Liv­ing­stone left behind a num­ber of jour­nals, but one of his most vivid accounts—of a mas­sacre hit wit­nessed in 1871—has been inac­ces­si­ble until now. Liv­ing­stone’s 1871 Field Diary cap­tures a five-month peri­od when the explor­er was strand­ed in a vil­lage in the Con­go. He had run out of paper and ink to main­tain his usu­al jour­nal, so he impro­vised by writ­ing over an old copy of The Stan­dard news­pa­per using ink made from the seeds of a local berry.

In col­lab­o­ra­tion with British and Amer­i­can archivists, the UCLA Dig­i­tal Library Pro­gram used spec­tral imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy to dig­i­tize the del­i­cate mate­r­i­al. Over­all the site offers an inter­est­ing pre­sen­ta­tion of Livingstone’s work, though the diary pages them­selves aren’t too leg­i­ble. Crit­i­cal notes are abun­dant and intrigu­ing, and diary pages appear side-by-side with tran­scrip­tions. View­ers can zoom in to study Livingstone’s spi­dery script writ­ten per­pen­dic­u­lar to the news­pa­per copy. The spec­tral imag­ing process itself is worth a look. With­out this tech­nique, the diaries appear as noth­ing more than ghost­ly scrib­bles.

Pre­vi­ous to keep­ing this field diary, Liv­ing­stone embarked on a mis­sion to find the source of the Nile Riv­er, which he misiden­ti­fied. But his the­o­ries about cen­tral African water sys­tems are fas­ci­nat­ing. Liv­ing­stone was the first Euro­pean to see Mosi-oa-Tun­ya, “the smoke that thun­ders,” water­fall, which he renamed Vic­to­ria Falls after his monarch. His diaries pro­vide a peek into a time when explo­ration was dan­ger­ous, dif­fi­cult and even dead­ly. Liv­ing­stone died of Malar­ia in present-day Zam­bia, where his heart is buried under a tree. The rest of his remains were interred at West­min­ster Abbey.

Kate Rix is an Oak­land based free­lance writer. See more of her work at .