The Lost Diary of Dr. Livingstone

2014 • 52 minutes

About this movie

From PBS - "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" To celebrate the 200th anniversary of David Livingstone's birth in March 1813, The Lost Diary of Dr. Livingstone, follows a pioneering American team's ground-breaking attempts to decipher the legendary explorer's last field diary. By digging out these forgotten diary pages, they began an incredible journey inside the mind of this extraordinary 19th-century adventurer. Was Livingstone the hero he's made out to be? The original pages of his last field diary contain a secret, hidden until now. Scrawled over an old copy of The Standard newspaper in an 'ink' made of berry juice, the words are faded and illegible. No one has been able to read these words since Livingstone's death 140 years ago. Now, state-of-the-art multi-spectral imaging technology can help us see the invisible. And the pages reveal Livingstone witnessed a shocking massacre in an African slave-trading village. Is it possible that Livingstone, a crusader for the abolition of slavery, worked with slaves?