The Niger, 1841

“But ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you: and ye shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judæa and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.”

— Acts 1:8, ASV

A Great Expedition

In 1841 the British government sent an expedition up the Niger River. It was the idea of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, who had led the campaign to abolish slavery in the British colonies. Buxton believed that the slave trade could not be ended by the Navy alone. It had to be undermined at its source, by making treaties with the rulers of the interior, by introducing honest trade to replace the trade in people, and by bringing the gospel. Three iron steamers were built for the purpose, the Albert, the Wilberforce, and the Soudan, under the command of Captain H. D. Trotter of the Royal Navy. They carried treaty commissioners, scientists, a company of settlers to start a model farm, and, at the request of the Church Missionary Society, two missionaries.

One was a German clergyman, the Rev. J. F. Schön, who had worked in Sierra Leone for ten years and was a gifted linguist. The other was “Mr. Samuel Crowther,” a catechist and schoolmaster of Fourah Bay. Afterwards the society would invite him to England with a view to his ordination “for Missionary labours in his own country, should the Bishop of London deem him qualified.” He was in his early thirties. He had a wife who was expecting another child, and four children. He had lived in Sierra Leone for nineteen years, which he called “the happiest part of my life, because there I was brought acquainted with the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.”

He went aboard the Soudan on 1 July 1841, after taking “affectionate leave of my wife, children, and friends.” His prayer as he went was characteristic: “May the Lord, who has been my guide from my youth up until now, keep them and me, and make me neither barren nor unfruitful in His service!”

On Board

His journal of the voyage, published the next year with Schön’s, is the first long piece of writing we have from him, and it shows a man at ease in any company. The captain of the Soudan, Bird Allen, was a devout man who held services and an officers’ Bible class, and invited Crowther to join it. He lent Crowther his cabin to write in. Crowther made a first attempt to teach the Kru sailors their alphabet, led evening prayers when asked, “I hope with all lowliness and self-abasement before God,” and worked with the Yoruba interpreter on a vocabulary of his mother tongue.

At Cape Coast, on the Gold Coast, he spent a day at the house of the Wesleyan missionary Thomas Birch Freeman, himself the son of an African father, and visited a government school of 170 boys taught by an African master. He also copied, for a Dr. Marshall, the memorial of the Rev. Philip Quaque, a native of Cape Coast who had been ordained in the Church of England in 1765 and had served his people for fifty years. Crowther copied it without comment, but it was proof that an African could be a clergyman of the Church of England. Crowther would follow him.

He listened to a sermon preached through an interpreter, and came away convinced of something he would say for the rest of his life: “The plan of studying the language of the people, and translating the Scriptures into it, ought to be immediately adopted by every Missionary sent into the heathen world.”

Up the River

They crossed the bar at the mouth of the Niger on 13 August. “Hitherto hath the Lord helped us!” Crowther wrote, using Samuel’s words when he set up a stone of remembrance after a victory: “Hitherto hath Jehovah helped us” (1 Samuel 7:12, ASV). He would use the phrase again and again.

The steamers pushed slowly up through the mangrove swamps of the Delta and into the broad river beyond. At Aboh, the king, Obi Ossai, signed a treaty against the slave trade and asked for teachers. At Idda, the capital of the Igala people, there were long negotiations with the Attah, the king, who thought it beneath his dignity to step into a canoe. The day before they reached Idda, at the village of Doko Abbokkoh, Crowther had acted as interpreter in Hausa for the first time. At the confluence of the Niger and the Benue, the expedition bought land for its model farm at the foot of a hill, and left a company of settlers there under a superintendent, Mr. Carr, with the schoolmaster Thomas King to teach them.

At Gori, Crowther watched three slaves, two women and a man, freed after a trial before the Attah’s son. They were given new clothes, and their old clothes were thrown into the river. At Egga, further up, he went ashore and found himself among Yoruba people for the first time since he had been taken from his home twenty years before. They gave him news of the wars: Old Oyo deserted, the new capital moved south, the new towns of Ibadan and Abeokuta rising. He argued with Yoruba Muslims who said that God had sanctioned the slave trade, and then let the argument drop; “I waived all disputes whether God sanctioned the slave-trade or not,” he wrote, and simply told them that the God who had brought him so far could do greater things. He asked Yoruba traders whether it was better to trade in goods, “or to trade in slaves, when the buyer and seller rejoice, and the purchased, our fellow-creatures, enshackled, sit mournfully.”

When he told the people of Egga how the liberated Africans lived in Sierra Leone, many of them said, he wrote, “that they could judge of their happy state merely by my appearance.” He was, without meaning to be, the expedition’s best argument.

The Fever

Then the fever came. It had already begun at the Confluence. Within weeks almost every European on the expedition was ill. The Soudan was sent back down the river as a hospital ship, and Crowther moved to the Albert, which pushed on a little further under Trotter before he too fell ill and the ship turned back. The officers were all sick. The mate worked the ship, and Dr. Stanger took a turn in the engine room. Two men, delirious, jumped overboard; one was saved by a Black sailor, and the other drowned. At the Confluence the three Europeans in charge of the model farm were all ill. Crowther sat up with Captain Bird Allen until midnight.

They reached the island of Fernando Po in the Gulf of Guinea on 17 October. On 25 October Bird Allen died. “Captain Trotter, with tears, closed the eyes of his departed friend.” Others followed. Of about 150 Europeans on the expedition, Macgregor Laird later wrote, 42 died within about two months. The model farm was abandoned the next year. By any measure, the expedition was a disaster, and the society itself called it an “admitted failure.”

But the Africans on the expedition had mostly stayed well. Crowther’s biographer says that he escaped the fever altogether, though his own journal records a bout of ague on the way out. Whatever the reason, and no one at the time really understood malaria, the lesson seemed obvious. At Fernando Po, while the survivors recovered, Crowther gathered a class of people who wanted to be baptised. By mid-November it had grown from seven to thirty-six. And he wrote a letter to the society in London.

Her Own Children

The letter, written on 2 November 1841, is the first statement of the idea that would govern his life. “I do not limit the power of the Lord of the Vineyard,” he wrote, and he did not want to seem to say that European missionaries were not needed. “Still, I am reluctantly led to adopt the opinion, that Africa can chiefly be benefitted by her own Children.”

He did not write it proudly. In the same letter he said: “I always feel that myself and my Brethren of the Natives are not sufficiently qualified for so great a work.” He added that “human learning will be of very little avail, if the heart is not inspired by the Holy Spirit from above.” He was not claiming that Africans were better missionaries than Europeans. He was saying that Africans could live where Europeans died, could speak the languages that Europeans had to learn, and could go where Europeans could not. The question was whether they would be trained, trusted, and sent.

Schön, writing his own report, drew the same conclusion and put a name to it. Might not Samuel Crowther, he asked, “a Native of the same country, and held in high estimation by his brethren, be sent thither, after he shall have received Ordination?” By “thither” Schön meant the Yoruba country, by way of Badagry.

The verse at the head of this chapter records the last words of Jesus before his ascension. The apostles were to be his witnesses in Jerusalem, and Judea, and Samaria, and to the uttermost part of the earth. The order is worth noticing. The witness was to begin at home and spread outward, carried by people in their own land before it was carried to others. The disaster of 1841 persuaded the Church Missionary Society, in a way that no argument had, that the uttermost parts of Africa would be reached chiefly by Africans. Samuel Crowther would be the first of them.