Dr Googlestone, I Presume (for PG)

As every Scotsman knows to his chagrin, we English puffs have a propensity to absorb, as “British”, the great and the good from Scotland. The list of people adopted in this way, having made their mark in the last century alone, is very substantial and extends far beyond such noteworthy names as John Logie Baird, Alexander Graham Bell, John Boyd Dunlop (yes, tyres), Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (Tony, if you like) and, of course, the “British” winner of the sprint Gold at the Moscow Olympics in 1980, Allan Wells.

Mr Blair and Mr Wells, despite each having done stuff the normal “Briton’” could only dream of doing, can’t claim the historical importance of the others in my tiny sample list. Look a little further back in time and you can find still more heavyweights of history who are “Britons”…. erm, that is to say, “Scots”. What would the World look like if James Watt hadn’t perfected steam engine technology in the 18^th Century? It doesn’t even bear thinking about and he achieved much else besides. Moving on, the advances made in the technology of bridges and canals, behind which lay the expertise of Thomas Telford, are deemed as British as any of our historical achievements could be but, yes, you’ve guessed it. Another Scotsman. There are many, many more and their feats deserve to be pinned upon the country of their birth and then, but at a secondary level, upon Britain!

As a Briton, I’m hugely proud of their ingenuity but, as an Englishman, I won’t participate in the fraud. Vive l’Ecosse and all her progressive sons and daughters!

Ok. Now that we’ve made a small scratch in the area of giving praise where it’s due, let’s get to the point of this chunk of waffle. A point inferred in its title. Having hinted at how different today’s World would have been without what they did, let’s just picture, for fun, their World with the benefit of what “we” can now do.

Yet another Scotsman, frequently deemed, by history, to have been as British as pie and peas with a Union Flag stuck into it, is David Livingstone. My personal opinions of the man are tarnished by the fact that, above all else, he was a religious missionary who sought to replace one genre of mumbo-jumbo with another (not my idea of progress – more of a sideways step in my book) but his courage and his dreams of civilisation cannot be greatly doubted. How many of us would, today, be prepared to risk our lives in the way that he and his colleagues and aides risked theirs in the pursuit of, (after the mumbo-jumbo), knowledge and discovery?

My own opinion is that it’s very unlikely that much that was “discovered” by Livingstone had been unknown to man before his arrival but I absolutely contend that, in that age as in any, it takes educated minds to register a discovery, to realise its value, to set it beside other similar discoveries elsewhere for the furtherance of human knowledge in general and to estimate its effect upon all that follows. To “see its place”, one might say.

Amongst the things catalogued and ordered for the first time, as a result of Livingstone’s endeavours, were Mosi-oa-Tunya, which he re-named "Victoria Falls" in honour of his Queen (are you sure he was Scottish? ;o) ). I can’t help thinking that “finding” something as big and as noisy as Victoria Falls is something which a European was bound to do at some stage but that doesn’t mean that I sneer at his efforts or his courage. I absolutely don’t.

About 3 years later, he set out to resolve an argument between two other notable explorers, (both of whom were actually English!) These two bods had found a large pond. In fact, it was a very large pond. As was the custom of the day, they took its local names of (disputably) Ukerewe or Nalubaale and they changed the odd letter (or even syllable) and the name of the pond was slightly adjusted into “Lake Victoria”. The argument, of course, was not about the name chosen for the pond. That was pretty much a unanimous choice. No. It was far more about the importance of the pond in the scheme of things as one of the 2 who had charted it made the (at the time) very bold claim that they had discovered the holy grail of river issues. The source of the Nile itself.

Livingstone set out to arbitrate on this claim (and its well-founded rebuttal on the part of the second of the two English explorers – the claim broke the most fundamental of scientific principles – it was not backed up by any proof and was, therefore, just a supposition). Livingstone seemingly believed that this lake might just be the source so many had been looking for or he wouldn’t have bothered.

Unfortunately, Livingstone must have been using a map he’d bought from a man in a pub in Islington as he made far too many left turns and, embarrassingly, managed to miss the lake, all 26,000 square miles of it, completely! Ironically, he didn’t miss absolutely everything on his trip. He did manage to bump into an American, who’d been sent on a mischief mission by a US newspaper. The American (although actually Welsh) was Sir Henry Morton Stanley. It was on this meeting that the celebrated “Dr Livingstone, I presume” line was allegedly uttered. Presumably, after that meeting, Livingstone carried on making left turns, based on the information of his pub map and he never quite got where he wanted to go. Stanley, on the other hand, found the pond, (the 26,000 square mile pond), did a lap around it, realised that it poured out water to the North and, thus, confirmed (this time with proof) that the source of the Nile had, indeed, been established.

I probably seem like I’ve aligned myself very much against Livingstone in my matchbox summary of these exploits. Not a bit of it. I’m a huge fan of his, just as I’m a fan of Stanley and the others for their extreme endeavour, courage, vision and stamina.

I can’t help thinking, however, that, as much as James Watt had his impact on the World going forward, the fact that these 5 photos catalogue the 2 minutes it took me to find Lake Victoria (thanks to Google Earth – if you haven’t tried it, DO!) suggests that our ancestral brothers and sisters would have fainted in admiration of what we later achieved.

…………… except, of course, that, without them, we may never have harnessed electricity and its communicational powers at all……. Foresight? Hindsight? …….. Intelligence.

Just out of interest, “ancestral” is an anagram of Lancaster, where my dear Mama came into this intriguing World of ours.