Finding Dr. Livingstone: Technology and tenacity reveal the Victorian-era explorer's diary

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-day spectral-imaging technology and the old-fashioned sleuthing of an Indiana University of Pennsylvania professor.

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, Mr. Wisnicki decided to seek a long-lost 1871 diary that detailed his 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 shores of Lake Tanganyika, where legend says he greeted him with the famous, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

On Wednesday, Mr. Wisnicki and several project team members will discuss how he found Livingstone's 1871 diary, and how his team used high-tech imaging technology to make the manuscript almost entirely legible for the first time since it was written.

"We have succeeded in transcribing and recovering more than 99 percent [of the 1871 Livingstone diary]," Mr. Wisnicki said, adding that Livingstone's fatal illnesses affected his penmanship, made all the worse with smears, wear and tear.

The 1871 diary, written on a mix of paper, including newsprint and book margins cut and sewn together, faded quickly in the harsh heat and rain of Africa. It was returned to England with his body after he died in 1873 in Africa from malaria and dysentery. Only 15 percent of the diary was legible when it reached his English publishers. The only portions they could read were text in margins where there was no newsprint.

Editors in the 19th century revised, edited and even censured unflattering details to bolster Livingstone's legend. What existed before Mr. Wisnicki's project was a third revision of a small portion of diary that had been shuffled about and lost in the Livingstone archive for 30 years.

Mr. Wisnicki decided to find it.

Early on, Mr. Wisnicki searched a Livingstone catalog for the 1871 diary first by consulting an archive catalog that said it was in an archive in London before it was transferred to the National Library of Scotland. Unable to find it at either place, Mr. Wisnicki visited the David Livingstone Centre in the explorer's birthplace near Glasgow, Scotland, where he and a volunteer archivist undertook an exhaustive search that produced several leaves from the diary.

It proved the diary likely existed in the vast archives, and in time, the full 60 pages of one of Livingstone's final diaries had been recovered. The November announcement that the diary had been rediscovered drew worldwide attention.

Next, Mr. Wisnicki faced the challenge of doing something scholars had been unable to do: read the illegible manuscript in its entirety.

He assembled a team of 17 scholars, librarians and imaging scientists to use computerized spectral-imaging technology, which can detect wavelengths of reflections, infrared to ultraviolet, when light is shined on the page. In a simple explanation of a complicated process, scientists flashed different colors of light on ink to cancel out newsprint interference and highlight Livingstone's badly faded handwriting.

One of the experts on the diary project was Roger L. Easton Jr., who also was involved in a project to transcribe the "Archimedes Palimpsest," a parchment text of the 10th-century mathematician/physicist that had been overwritten with religious text. Palimpsest is a manuscript with one text atop another, which was common practice in ancient times when parchment was rare and expensive.

Spectral imaging technology can highlight illegible text and focus light at angles to analyze page topography to reveal folds, wrinkles, tears and damage not apparent to the eye. Such information is important in determining the manuscript's history.

"I see myself as a colleague of the scribe who wrote it and who was the image expert of his day," said Mr. Easton, professor of imaging science at the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology. "We use the best tools to make the images this person created 1,000 or 150 years ago visible for a modern audience."

Besides providing scholars with new information about Livingstone's adventures, reactions and comments about African culture, the project also advertises the potential of spectral imaging to transcribe illegible manuscripts written on paper, parchment, animal skins or other surfaces.

Mr. Easton said the technology will be used to analyze the Declaration of Independence and decipher ancient texts stored and damaged or burned in Dresden during the March 1945 fire-storm bombing at the end of World War II.

The team working under a National Endowment for the Humanities grant also had enough funding to do spectral imaging of portions of the 1870 Livingstone diary also found in the archive.

Historians long had some detail about Livingstone's time central Africa. But the transcribed manuscript provides new information about his experiences with native culture and slave traders during the years he was out of contact. The diary also reveals mistakes he made organizing his expeditions and compromises that the abolitionist was forced to make with slave traders, who provided him a lifeline during his unsuccessful search for the source of the Nile River. Livingstone's 1871 diary also describes the massacre he witnessed of 400 Africans, mostly women, with insights about whether slave trading or community infighting prompted the mass killing.

Mr. Wisnicki's success is drawing praise from Livingstone scholars who have begun a new round of separating Livingstone's life from his legend by using original writings rather than published revisions.

"It seems to me that it is a scientific breakthrough that will inevitably be translated into many uses of value," said Dorothy O. Helly, a professor emeritus of history at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate School.

It will help historians reassess the decisions Livingstone made when facing difficult choices in uncharted territory, she said, with new information about African history, culture and conflicts that remained unknown to Europeans reporting about these observations in the 19th century.

Mr. Wisnicki "is a superb historian because historians ultimately are sleuths," said Ms. Helly, author of "Livingstone's Legacy: Horace Waller and Victorian Mythmaking" that describes the editing and censure of Livingstone's writings. "Great detectives find things not readily available and guess where they might look and come up with conclusions.

"He is doing a fantastic job as a historian."