Wrecked at Jebba

“we are pressed on every side, yet not straitened; perplexed, yet not unto despair; pursued, yet not forsaken; smitten down, yet not destroyed”

— 2 Corinthians 4:8-9, ASV

The Dayspring

In 1857 Macgregor Laird signed a new contract with the government, for five years of regular voyages up the Niger. The first ship sent out under it was the Dayspring, commanded by Dr. Baikie, with a naval officer, Lieutenant John Glover, to survey the river. The Church Missionary Society decided that the time had come to plant a permanent mission on the Niger, and that it would be staffed entirely by Africans. Crowther was to lead it.

With him went the Rev. John Christopher Taylor, a young clergyman born in Sierra Leone to Igbo parents who had been sold as slaves, and Simon Jonas, the Igbo interpreter who had stayed at Aboh in 1854. And Crowther did something unusual. He hired, on purpose, a Yoruba Muslim named Kasumo as his teacher of Arabic, so that he could read and discuss the Qur’an with the Muslim rulers of the upper river. It was a mark of the way he meant to work.

They sailed from Fernando Po on 29 June 1857. At Fernando Po the first Igbo primer had just arrived from England, and Crowther started a class to teach it. At Umuoru, on 19 July, he gave the Lord’s Supper on board to twelve Africans and three Europeans. Everywhere in the Delta he noted the villages where African teachers might be placed.

Onitsha

On 26 July they reached Onitsha, the town on the east bank of the Niger that Crowther had marked in 1854 as the best place for an Igbo mission. At first the people armed themselves in fear. Then the king, Obi Akazua, received them, and agreed that a teacher should live among his people.

While they were there, the family of a local notable was preparing a funeral, and a slave woman was to be killed to accompany the dead. Crowther and Simon Jonas protested. The family agreed to sacrifice a bullock instead. The people then offered to sell the woman to the missionaries. “We refused to do,” Crowther wrote, “as we were not slave-traders.” She was sold to someone else, but she was “loosed from her bonds” and lived. The king promised to abolish human sacrifices. It would take much longer than that.

On 31 July Crowther left Taylor and Jonas at Onitsha with a letter of instructions. “Cultivate friendship with all the people as much as possible, so as to gain their goodwill and confidence. … You will have to teach more by conversation when you visit the people … than by direct service.” He told Taylor to learn the language and translate as much as he could. And he added a sentence that shows his realism: “Be not disappointed if you find the people do not act up to their engagement: it is rather a matter of surprise that they do so much. They must be taught the lesson of justice and truth, and that by our own example.” He called the founding of Onitsha “the first important move of the Church Missionary Society in planting a Mission from a native ministry, and an entire native offshoot from the colony of Sierra Leone.”

Gbebe and Bida

Further up, at Gbebe near the Confluence, he chose a site for a second station. He was clear about where it should be: “the Mission station must be in the midst of the people, because we can never expect them to go the distance of a mile to receive religious instruction before they know its real benefits.” When he tried to buy land, a local leader told him it could not be sold, “because the land is God’s,” and the matter dragged on. On 16 August, in the ante-room of a local chief, he gave what he called the first public Christian instruction at Gbebe, reading the third chapter of John in Hausa and giving the chief an Arabic Bible. Three days later a school opened with five boys.

In September he rode with Baikie and Glover to the war camp of the Nupe kingdom, whose rulers, a Fulani dynasty, controlled much of the middle Niger. The king, Sumo Zaki, received them, and so did his half-brother Dasaba, who, Crowther wrote, “rolled on his mat for joy.” In the camp market Crowther counted forty slaves for sale. He passed the body of a slave who had died in the night, neglected, by the road.

The Wreck

On 7 October 1857, near the town of Jebba, far up the Niger, the Dayspring struck rocks in a narrow channel and heeled over. Local canoes came out to help, and everyone was brought ashore. “We were thankful that, in the midst of the hurry and bustle … no life was lost.” But the ship could not be saved. Word was sent overland to the coast asking for another steamer. It would be a year before one came.

Fifty people camped on the riverbank at Jebba: twelve Europeans and thirty-eight Africans. Crowther held morning and evening prayers in his tent of mats, and opened it to the sick. He kept night watches with the others, and when a leopard raided the camp in January he admitted cheerfully, “I am no gunner.” On 25 October, soon after the wreck, he had preached on Paul’s words, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21, ASV). Before the wreck, on board off the ruins of Rabba, he had preached on another verse from Paul: “ye received not the spirit of bondage again unto fear; but ye received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15, ASV). A former slave was telling his hearers that they were not slaves to fear.

The people of Jebba believed that the god of the great rock by the river hated red cloth and had wrecked the ship. Crowther answered that the god’s law bound its own worshippers, not strangers. He told them about the great God “who made of one blood all nations,” and took the hands of Lieutenant Glover and his Nupe interpreter, “three different nations,” to show what he meant.

A Year by the River

He did not waste the year. He began to reduce the Nupe language to writing, working with a Muslim teacher from Jebba named Ibrahima and a young man named Henry George, who had once been a Sunday-school pupil at Abeokuta and had become a soldier in the Nupe army. “They felt very much interested,” Crowther wrote, “in seeing their language being reduced to writing.” He studied the religion of the Nupe, their farming, their trade, their ferries, and the work of their women in the markets, and wrote it all down.

When a Fulani chief let one of his followers rob a Nupe woman in front of him, Crowther “seriously told him that God would plead the cause of the oppressed,” and took the woman to safety in the mission’s boat. When the Nupe official in charge of the district asked him for charms, he “showed him my hands and neck, that I had never used charms, and told him I never should, because there is no help to be had from them.” In the spring of 1858 the official gave him land on the cliff above the ruins of Rabba, and Crowther built five round huts there for six pounds. “Though I was the only Christian in the village, with my servant, yet I was greatly respected.” In July a hostile letter came from the king, ordering him to leave because he was not of the same faith; it turned out to be the work of a mischief-making interpreter, and the king later cleared him. “Thus the Lord has silenced the mouths of my enemies for a time.”

One night in January, sitting up with Kasumo and another Muslim companion, he talked until late about whether Christ had really died on the cross, as Christians believe and the Qur’an denies. “If Christ himself had not died,” he told them, “then we are found false witnesses, because then he had never shed His blood, which is the price of our redemption.”

How to Deal With Muslims

At the end of his journal of these years he wrote a short essay, “How to deal with Mohammedans,” which sums up his method. He had spent some months as the only Christian, apart from his servant, in his village at Rabba, and he had no illusions about how quickly Muslims would change. Already at the Bida camp in 1857 he had written: “A Mohammedan can never be brought round by his religion being quarrelled with, and abusively charged with falsehood and imposition; but by kind treatment he may be led to read and study the Christian’s Bible.” He warned against “undue rashness in quarrelling with, and our untimely exposure of, Mohammedanism,” which could do no good. And he ended with a sentence of great patience: “God, who has permitted the religion of Mohammed to remain so long … can easily remove it when He pleases, without violence or rash proceedings on our part.”

He believed that Islam was wrong about Christ, and he said so, gently and clearly, when he was asked. But he believed that the way to reach Muslims was friendship, the Arabic Bible, and time. It was a view that many missionaries of his age did not share.

Onitsha Without Him

Meanwhile, at Onitsha, Taylor and Jonas were at work. Taylor held his first service “in my fatherland” to hundreds of people in the king’s yard. After hearing a sermon on the third chapter of John, the king said that Jesus, the Son of God, “surpasses him in speaking.” Taylor persuaded one man to free a girl held as a debt-slave. He reconciled four chiefs who had not spoken to each other for seven years. He built the first mission house in the town. In February 1858 he watched helplessly as the annual human sacrifice was carried out, two sick people drowned “one for the land, and one for the river,” and the king fined the mission for interfering. The first man to ask for baptism was admitted as a candidate on condition that he keep to one wife.

In October 1858 a relief steamer at last reached the camp at Jebba and took the party down the river. Crowther found Taylor at Onitsha and was welcomed as “my friend Mr. Crowther.” The people who had first called Taylor “a spirit without toes” wept when he left. A month later Simon Jonas died at Fernando Po. His last words were: “this is the third time I have gone up the Niger … and the last was the best I have spent in my fatherland.”

Crowther went back up the river by canoe, and then overland through the Yoruba country, past Ilorin, where he argued with the Muslim scholars from the Qur’an as well as the Bible, and they wondered at his learning. On the way he fell ill with dysentery and was nursed back to health at Ijaye, and he reached Abeokuta in March 1859. He had been away nearly two years.

Paul, describing his own missionary life, wrote: “we are pressed on every side, yet not straitened; perplexed, yet not unto despair; pursued, yet not forsaken; smitten down, yet not destroyed.” It is as good a summary of the years 1857 to 1859 as any. The ship was lost. The plans were ruined. And by the end of it, there was a mission at Onitsha, another at Gbebe, the beginnings of a Nupe grammar, and a small company of African Christians who had shown that they could plant the church on the Niger without anyone else’s help.