A Bishop in a Canoe

“But I hold not my life of any account as dear unto myself, so that I may accomplish my course, and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God.”

— Acts 20:24, ASV

A Diocese Without Roads

The new bishop’s diocese had no boundaries anyone could draw and no roads to travel. It stretched along more than three hundred miles of the Niger and into the Delta, among a dozen peoples speaking a dozen languages, and the only way to reach most of it was by water. For many years Crowther had no boat of his own able to make the journey. He went up the river once a year, when a trading steamer or a naval gunboat happened to be going, and came down when it did.

He knew the danger in this. To the people of the Niger, a man who arrived every year on a trading ship or a warship must be connected with the traders or the government. In February 1868 he wrote to Henry Venn about it. As long as he had to travel in such ships, “it will take a very long time to dissuade the natives from the old belief that I am interested in those ships.” He had tried travelling independently in his own small boat, and had been attacked for his pains. “Of two evils I must choose the least for safety’s sake, and must either move in a trading steamer or in a gunboat whenever an opportunity presents itself, whether I be called the proprietor, though I do not own a pennyworth of her, or be called a warrior from being associated with the ship, although I may not fire a blank shot.”

It is a frank letter. Crowther saw clearly that the gospel he preached was being associated with trade and with British power, and he did not like it. He also saw no alternative. It was a dilemma that the missions in Africa never fully escaped.

Bonny

His first new work as bishop was in the Niger Delta, at Bonny, one of the great trading towns of the coast, where European ships loaded palm oil brought down from the interior by African middlemen. In the days of the slave trade Bonny had been one of the busiest slave ports in Africa. Its king, William Pepple, had lived in England for five years in exile, and on his return had written to the Bishop of London asking for a mission. Crowther arrived in 1864 and made an agreement with the king and chiefs.

The land they offered for the mission was a patch of “bad bush” where the bodies of sacrificed people and abandoned twins had been thrown, and where no one would live. Crowther accepted it with a joke that became famous: “Give us the ground, and leave us and juju to settle the remaining palaver.” The king’s son asked for Scripture and prayer before they began to clear it. They found an old copper bell in the town, cast in England in 1824, and one of the chiefs paid to hang it on the mission’s chapel.

The people of Bonny held the monitor lizard, the iguana, sacred. It was the town’s great juju. The lizards wandered the streets and houses, and no one could harm them. On Easter Day 1867 the king and chiefs publicly renounced its worship. Crowther reported that fifty-seven carcasses of the lizards were counted in one market afterwards, and compared the event to Moses grinding the golden calf to powder and making the Israelites drink it (Exodus 32:20). It was a dramatic public change. It did not mean that the people of Bonny had become Christians.

Some did, and in the persecution that came to Bonny in the 1870s they paid for it. Page calls a young man named Joshua Hart, martyred in November 1875, “the protomartyr of Bonny.” His master, a chief, tried to make him eat food offered to the idols. Hart replied: “If he even requires me to carry the world itself on my head, I will try. … But if he requires me to partake of things sacrificed to the gods, I will never do it.” He was thrown into the river, beaten with a paddle, and run through with a pointed pole. Other converts were persecuted, and one was starved to death over six days. At a prayer meeting in 1878 the Bonny Christians prayed for their persecutors: “We beseech Thee not to rain down fire and brimstone … but we pray Thee to rain down Thy love on them, as in the case of Saul.”

Seized

In September 1867, going up the Niger in his own boat with his son Dandeson and an English bricklayer named Moore, Crowther stopped at a village near Idda to visit a chief named Abokko, whom he had known for years. Abokko had quarrelled with his own king, and he believed, like many on the river, that Crowther owned the trading ships and the trading posts. He seized the bishop’s boat, plundered his luggage, and held him and his party prisoner. He demanded three boatloads of goods as ransom. (Ten years later, in a lecture, Crowther himself dated these events to 1868, but his diary and the letters written at the time place them in 1867.)

Crowther kept a diary of his captivity, and it is one of the most revealing documents of his life. He could not make Abokko understand the difference between a mission and a trading company. “A pure missionary object,” he wrote, “unconnected with any selfish object, is beyond the comprehension of such avaricious men as Abokko.” The first night they slept on a mat on the damp ground with nothing to eat. One of Abokko’s slaves, pitying them, offered Crowther his own cloth as a blanket. A boatman gave him his robe as a pillow, and Crowther gave it to Dandeson, and slept himself on a small ridge of earth with his cap under his head. “I need not say sleeplessly,” he wrote, “for my thoughts were full of these unexpected trials. … But the God of mercies will interpose.”

For days the chief gave them almost nothing. The slaves of the household fed them secretly from their own scanty food. “I often told Dandeson,” Crowther wrote, “that these slave boys and tender-feeling females were our ravens which brought us daily food as it was needed.” He was thinking of Elijah in the wilderness, when “the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening” (1 Kings 17:6, ASV). He added that if God gave him the chance, “these small acts of kindness of these poor oppressed slaves shall not pass unrewarded.” The man who had once been a slave was being kept alive by slaves.

On the Sunday he had no Bible. “No Bible, no scraps of any book whatever in hand to read, I felt what it was to be deprived of the means of grace.” He and his son repeated from memory passages of Scripture that fitted their situation. At noon he went to Abokko and told him that it was the day when the people of God throughout the world met to read and pray, and he had no book. The chief, startled, said he never hindered the worship of God, and had his box brought out. Crowther took out his Bible and Prayer Book. A Muslim visitor begged him for some paper, and Crowther, “stripped of everything as I was,” tore a leaf from his notebook and gave it to him. Two days later Abokko sent him some fish that had been offered to his idol. Crowther sent it back, saying that he never ate anything offered to an idol. That day was Dandeson’s birthday.

The ransom demanded rose to a thousand bags of cowries, worth a thousand pounds, and Abokko talked of another thousand for Dandeson. It was proposed that Dandeson should be allowed to leave with a messenger. He refused to leave his father.

Fell

On 28 September a steamer arrived unexpectedly, carrying W. Fell, the British vice-consul at Lokoja, with some of Crowther’s sons and men sent by the Nupe king. Fell tried to negotiate, and then decided that paying such a ransom would only encourage more kidnappings. He urged Crowther and his party to run for the ship’s boat. As they pushed off, Abokko’s men opened fire with muskets and poisoned arrows. Fell was hit in the side by a barbed arrow. He died as the ship came near Lokoja.

Crowther wrote: “It would have been more satisfactory to me, had such been the will of God, had I been shot and my dead body taken to Lokoja instead of his.”

It was not a pious phrase. He meant it. He had not planned an escape by force; others arranged it, and he “yielded.” He had been ready to wait, and to trust God for his release. Another man had died for him. Paul told the elders of Ephesus, in the verse at the head of this chapter: “I hold not my life of any account as dear unto myself, so that I may accomplish my course.” Crowther held his own life cheaply. He found it much harder to accept that someone else had given his.

A Year of Troubles

The kidnapping was one of a series of blows. Not long before, the station at Gbebe had been destroyed in a local war, and a grass fire had burned the mission buildings at Onitsha. At Idda it turned out that the king had been bought off by Abokko and had been promised a share of the ransom, and the station there was abandoned. And in October 1867, at Abeokuta, where Crowther had begun his work twenty years earlier, the Egba, angry at British policy in Lagos, turned on the missionaries and expelled them from the city. Churches were sacked. The converts were scattered.

“Though the last year was closed with a chapter of most painful events in connection with our mission,” Crowther wrote to Venn, “yet I look above to the Hand which has ever overruled similar affairs which had happened in times past to His honour and the advancement of His own cause. May He give us more faith to trust Him.” Of the scattered Christians of Abeokuta he said: “they are all scattered; but though it is night with us now daylight shall come.”