The Pleiad

“Jehovah will keep thee from all evil; He will keep thy soul. Jehovah will keep thy going out and thy coming in From this time forth and for evermore.”

— Psalm 121:7-8, ASV

The Pleiad

For thirteen years after the disaster of 1841, no great expedition went up the Niger. Then, in 1853, a Liverpool shipbuilder and merchant named Macgregor Laird, who had himself been up the river in the 1830s and believed passionately in its future, made a contract with the government. He would build a small steamer, the Pleiad, to explore the great eastern branch of the Niger, the Benue, which the explorers called the Tshadda, and to look for news of the German explorer Heinrich Barth, who was somewhere in the interior. Laird offered Crowther a free passage.

Crowther joined the expedition at Fernando Po in June 1854. Before he joined it, at Lagos, he learned that the British consul, John Beecroft, who was to have led it, had died. He wrote simply that he “resigned everything to God’s good and unerring providence.” He visited Beecroft’s grave and preached in his house on Paul’s words about the earthly tent that is dissolved and the building from God that is eternal. Command of the expedition passed to the ship’s doctor, a young Scot named William Balfour Baikie.

They crossed the bar into the Niger on 12 July. From the beginning, Crowther noticed signs of change since 1841. There were English shirts on the riverbanks, bought with palm oil, not with people. He suggested to Baikie and the ship’s officers that the green firewood they were burning, stacked in the bunkers, might be breeding the “miasma” that caused fever, and they agreed to tow it in canoes instead. It was the wrong theory; malaria is carried by mosquitoes, which no one then knew. Historians have usually credited the expedition’s health instead to Baikie’s regular doses of quinine. Crowther’s journal does not mention quinine. But whatever the reason, something was different this time.

Aboh and Idda

At Aboh, the old king Obi Ossai, who had signed the treaty in 1841 and asked for teachers, was dead, and his sons were quarrelling over the succession. Crowther talked with the eldest, Tshukuma, about the gospel. It was the middle of the day, and the sun was blazing. Would anyone, he asked, light lamps in broad daylight like this to help the sun to shine? The sacrifices the people offered to their gods were like lamps lit at noon. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ, once offered, alone could take away the sin of the world. Before he left, he arranged for Simon Jonas, an Igbo interpreter from Sierra Leone who had been on the 1841 expedition, to stay at Aboh and teach.

At Idda he had to go through a long and tedious ordeal before he was allowed to see the Attah, the same king Captain Trotter had treated with in 1841, who agreed again that his people might “learn the white man’s book.” Crowther used homely stories in his talks with rulers, about a boil that needs a salve, or a friend carrying a heavy load. He learned to wait. “The native chiefs always take more time to think and arrange their plans and settle their affairs than we are aware of,” he wrote on one occasion; and on another, “A prudent man will not consider an hour or two wasted, … rather than risk the painful result of misunderstandings which may never be remedied.”

At the Confluence, where the model farm had been, the site was overgrown. Old people on the hill asked him whether they had come back to rebuild it. He preached on board that Sunday on Paul’s words to Timothy, “God gave us not a spirit of fearfulness,” and admitted in his journal that he preached “in much weakness.”

Up the Benue

Then the Pleiad turned east, up the Benue, far beyond the point where the one earlier expedition had turned back. Crowther found towns destroyed by Fulani raiders and heard stories of treachery and slaughter. He saw Tiv people at their markets, armed and suspicious, and went ashore among them. “What is generally related of the natives of Africa as to their hostility to Europeans is not strictly correct,” he wrote. “If feelings of confidence and friendship are left to arise gradually … we shall soon come to a mutual understanding.” At one town a chief offered to sell a boy to the interpreter. At another, a Muslim scholar named Imoru asked him to pray for his wives, who had no children. Crowther read him the psalm that says children are a heritage from the Lord, and showed him his bare arms and neck to prove that Christians wore no charms: “we resign all our affairs to the hand of God.”

On 22 September he walked twelve miles through mud to Hamaruwa, the town of a Fulani ruler named Mohamma. It was a long way from the Yoruba country, among a Muslim people who had been raiding their neighbours for slaves. Crowther asked the ruler’s permission to teach the non-Muslim people of his territory, and Mohamma smiled and gave it. Crowther took out a pencil and wrote in front of him, and the king was astonished. Four days later, out of fuel, the Pleiad turned back.

Brethren

On the way down, at Agberi below Aboh, he sat with a headman named Agbekun and pointed to himself, to Simon Jonas, and to Dr. Baikie. “Look at me, a Yoruba by birth; Simon Jonas, an Ibo; and Dr. Baikie, an Englishman; though of different nations, we live together as brethren.” It was a picture of what he believed the gospel could do among the nations of the Niger, who had been at war with one another for generations.

At Aboh, one of the quarrelling princes, Aje, freed two prisoners at his request. Agbekun, just back from consulting the famous oracle at Aro, had asked how to pray to the Great God, and Crowther told him “to do so, just as a little child would ask his father.” Earlier, on the way up the Benue, when the Krumen were set to cut wood on a Sunday, he had written in his journal: “It is a reproach to us, who profess to observe the Lord’s-day, and teach others to sanctify it, thus to violate it ourselves.”

On the 101st day in the river, he wrote: “It is a hundred and one days to-day since we entered the river, and no death has taken place.” He did not take the credit. “Not unto us, but unto God, we give praise.” He was echoing the psalm: “Not unto us, O Jehovah, not unto us, But unto thy name give glory, For thy lovingkindness, and for thy truth’s sake” (Psalm 115:1, ASV). That Sunday he preached on the stone that Samuel set up, called Ebenezer, “Hitherto hath Jehovah helped us.”

They reached the sea on 4 November 1854, “just sixteen weeks, this very day,” Crowther noted, after they had entered the river. Crowther wrote to Henry Venn that they had returned “without any death, either among the Europeans, twelve in number, or among the fifty-four Africans.” In 1841, forty-two Europeans had died. In 1854, none.

The Lesson

Baikie wrote to Crowther afterwards: “It is nothing more than a simple fact, that no slight portion of the success we met with in our intercourse with the tribes is due to you.” Crowther wrote to Venn with his own conclusions. He had marked Onitsha and Asaba as the two most promising places for a mission to the Igbo. Aboh, he wrote, “can only be occupied by native teachers. I cannot recommend it for the residence of European Missionaries.” And he wrote: “I believe the time is fully come when Christianity must be introduced on the banks of the Niger.” He knew the men he would have to send were not perfect. “As pioneers,” he told Venn, “we must not look for instruments of the keenest edge.”

The psalm at the head of this chapter is one of the Songs of Ascents, sung by pilgrims going up to Jerusalem. “Jehovah will keep thy going out and thy coming in.” It is a traveller’s psalm, a prayer for the road. Crowther spent most of his life on the road, and on the river, and he trusted that promise. It did not mean that he would never suffer; he would be wrecked, kidnapped, and bereaved. It meant that his going out and his coming in were in God’s hands. In 1854, on the Pleiad, he had seen it proved in the plainest way. Every man who went up the river came back.