Before becoming a legendary Victorian explorer, David Livingstone escaped the grueling machinery of a Scottish cotton mill through sheer willpower, working 14-hour days as a child "piecer" while propping books on spinning machines to educate himself. Driven by a philosophy that science and religion were complementary, he earned a medical degree and was dispatched to South Africa in 1841. Livingstone’s career as a traditional missionary, however, was marked by professional frustration, as he registered only one recorded convert—Chief Sechele of the Kwena people—whom he promptly excommunicated over marital disputes. Shifting his strategy to the "Three C's" (Christianity, Commerce, and Civilization) in hopes of pricing out the slave trade through legitimate trade routes, he pioneered central African exploration, but his state-sponsored 1858 Zambezi  ...