“Pray for Me!”

“And I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then I said, Here am I; send me.”

— Isaiah 6:8, ASV

A Mission Born in Jamaica

The mission to which Mary Slessor gave her life did not begin in Scotland. It began in Jamaica, among people who had been slaves.

Many of the enslaved Africans brought to the Caribbean had been shipped from the Bight of Biafra, and a great number of them passed through Calabar. When slavery ended in the British colonies in the 1830s, the freed people of Jamaica had not forgotten the land their parents had come from. Many had become Christians through Scottish and other missionaries, and they began to ask whether the gospel that had come to them in their captivity might be taken back to Africa. The Scottish missionaries in Jamaica took up the idea, and a small number of them offered to go.

A link with Calabar came through a ship’s surgeon named Ferguson, who had once been wrecked on a slaving ship near the coast and had been kindly treated by the people there. Later, as a Christian living in Liverpool, he used the captains of trading vessels to ask whether the rulers of Calabar would receive missionaries. An invitation came back in 1843, from the king and chiefs of the Efik towns, offering land and a welcome. In 1846 the Rev. Hope Masterton Waddell, an Irish-born minister who had served in Jamaica, led a small party to Calabar. It included men and women from Jamaica of African descent. The mission they founded in Duke Town and Creek Town was taken over the next year by the new United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and it was this Church that Mary’s mother followed so eagerly in the pages of the Missionary Record.

It is worth remembering that beginning. Later histories of the mission often made it sound as if Scotland brought light to a dark land on its own initiative. In fact the mission was first imagined by freed African Jamaicans, invited by African rulers, and carried out with the help of both. Mary Slessor inherited that story, and in her own way she carried it on.

The Death of a Brother

Mary’s mother once heard the Rev. William Anderson, a veteran of the Calabar mission, speak in Dundee about the needs of Old Calabar, and she was so moved that she longed to give her son John to the work. John was a gentle boy, much loved by Mary. But his health failed. He was advised to seek a warmer climate, and he emigrated to New Zealand, where he died soon after landing. His mother, Livingstone says, felt the loss of her hope for him even more than his death.

For Mary, John’s death was a bitter grief, and it turned her thoughts towards the mission field. Could she take her brother’s place? She told no one. For some time the thought floated in her mind, unspoken, until it slowly became a purpose. She sometimes considered the Church’s mission in South Africa, but her heart always came back to Calabar.

She knew what people said about the place. West Africa was called the white man’s grave. Fever killed Europeans there with frightening speed, and the graveyards of the coastal missions were full of young men and women who had not lasted a year. One of her fellow students later remembered her answer when people asked her why she wanted to go. Calabar, she said, was the post of danger, and therefore the post of honour. Few would volunteer for it, and so she wanted to go, because the Master needed someone there.

1874

Early in 1874 the news reached Britain that David Livingstone had died in the heart of Africa. His body was carried to the coast by his African companions and brought home to be buried in Westminster Abbey. The whole country was moved, and a wave of missionary enthusiasm followed. For Mary Slessor it was the moment to act.

She thought through her situation carefully. Her sisters were now working and could contribute to the home. If she became a missionary, she believed she could still send money back to support her mother. She did not realise how much that decision would cost her in the years to come, but she made it with her eyes open. She would go to Africa, and she would go on helping her family. For the rest of her mother’s life she did both.

When she finally spoke to her mother, Mrs. Slessor gave a glad consent. Some of her church friends were lukewarm. James Logie and J. H. Smith encouraged her. Logie, who soon joined the Church’s Foreign Mission Committee, promised to look after her affairs while she was away. To save money for the change, she took on two sixty-inch looms at the factory, hard work for anyone.

In May 1875 she offered herself to the Foreign Mission Board of the United Presbyterian Church. Her heart was set on Calabar, but she was so anxious to be accepted that she said she would go anywhere. Women had been part of the Calabar mission since its early years, and the Board had found them, in its own rather chilly phrase, “economical and effective.” More were needed. She was accepted as a teacher for Calabar and told to go on with her studies in Dundee. In December the Board decided to bring her to Edinburgh for three months of special preparation.

On the night before she left Dundee, in March 1876, a friend found her standing at the mouth of the close where she lived, in tears. “Good-bye,” she said. And then, with passion, “Pray for me!”

Edinburgh

She arrived in Edinburgh lonely and shy, and found her way first to Darling’s Temperance Hotel, where a small service of worship was held every evening. She lodged with a city missionary, Robert Martin, and became friends with his daughter Mary, and through her with another young woman, Mary Doig. She went to live with the Doig family, who treated her as one of their own. A married daughter, Mrs. M’Crindle, became a friend for life. In later years it was to Mrs. M’Crindle’s house that the tired missionary came first when she returned on furlough.

She attended the Normal School, where teachers were trained, though she was never formally enrolled and her name does not appear in its registers. She was never, in the modern sense, a trained teacher. What she had was a working woman’s intelligence, a wide if irregular reading, and a gift for people.

In the evenings she worked in the city missions with her two friends. At one of them, in the High Street, she gave her first address to a meeting of women. A friend remembered it long afterwards. It was on the question Pilate asked the crowd: “What then shall I do unto Jesus who is called Christ?” (Matthew 27:22, ASV). Christ, she told the women, was standing before them as surely as he had stood before Pilate. “Dear women,” she said, “you must do something with Him: you must reject Him or you must accept Him. What are you going to do?” She said nothing about hell-fire. She put the question to their reason and left it with them.

Her two friends came under her influence. Both offered themselves to the Church for missionary work and were accepted for China. The three Marys, as people called them, spoke at meetings together before they sailed for their different fields. In July the Committee declared itself satisfied with her preparation. Her salary was fixed at sixty pounds a year.

Here Am I

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from Isaiah’s vision in the temple. He saw the Lord high and lifted up, and heard the seraphim crying, “Holy, holy, holy.” His first response was not courage but dread: “Woe is me! for I am undone.” Only after his lips had been touched with a coal from the altar did he hear the question, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And then he answered, “Here am I; send me.”

That is the right order. The call to go does not begin with a person’s gifts or courage, but with God’s holiness and mercy. Mary Slessor was not a heroine when she offered herself for Calabar. She was a factory worker of twenty-six, poorly educated, frightened of public speaking, carrying the weight of a family she could not abandon. What she had was a sense that God had loved her, and that she owed him everything. Jesus told his disciples, “The harvest indeed is plenteous, but the laborers are few. Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he send forth laborers into his harvest” (Matthew 9:37-38, ASV). She had prayed that prayer in Dundee. Now she was the answer to it.

Scores of Casks

She sailed from Liverpool on 5 August 1876 on the steamer Ethiopia. Two friends from Dundee went with her to the docks. As they stood on the quay they watched cargo being loaded into the ship, and much of it was casks of spirits for the West African trade.

“Scores of casks!” she said ruefully. “And only one missionary!”

It was a joke, but it was also a judgement, and it named something she would fight for the rest of her life. The same ships that carried missionaries to Africa carried gin and rum by the ton, and much of it came from Christian countries. The daughter of Robert Slessor knew what drink did to a home. She was about to discover what it did to a whole people.