Presented by Rev. J. Ketley
Providence New Chapel House, Georgetown, Demerara, 21 March 1849
Detail of Aligator and Boa Constrictor, with various sea shells in front.
Published in the Juvenile Missionary Magazine, 1 May 1860, p. 102
Image supplied by the Bodleian Library (Per. 133 f.186, v.17(1860)), Scanned in February 2012. CC-BY-NC 4.0
Joseph Ketley hesitated before writing to the Directors of the London Missionary Society. He had arrived in Demerara as a missionary in 1828, but his official connection with the Society ended a decade later in somewhat acrimonious circumstances. Still, enough time had probably now passed to build some bridges, and what better way than by offering a gift.
Ketley began his letter by describing a recent visit to the ‘Animal and Bird preserver of this city’, where he had been:
much taken with a beautiful perfect specimen of an Alligator as in the Agonies of Death under the pressure of a large Camoanic Snake (Boa Constrictor) – the Serpent having coiled itself around the body of an Alligator from neck to tail; thus rendering it at first powerless, and then lifeless.1
He immediately thought of the London Missionary Society’s Museum, hoping it still had room for the specimen — it came in a box that was 3ft 9in long, 2ft wide and 1ft 10in high. If the Directors agreed, ‘the Deacons of the Church will be united in the presentation and deposit, in token of our attachment to the Society’.2
For Ketley, as a Congregationalist, each Church formed a self-governing sovereign entity, ministered by a pastor who was accountable to the congregation, assisted by deacons, but was ultimately responsible to God. The governing principles of Independent Churches built on New Testament descriptions of the earliest Christian Churches, were formed in the cauldron of the European Reformation, and played a decisive role in the English Civil Wars of the 1640s.
When combined with the increasingly global operations of an officially non-denominational missionary society, modelled on a joint-stock company and overseen by a Board of Directors, these principles faced some challenges. Nevertheless, the London Missionary Society continued to restate a ‘Fundamental Principle’ that had been adopted in May 1796 each year in its Annual Report:
that its design is not to send Presbyterianism, Independency, Episcopacy, or any other form of Church order and government, (about which there may be difference of opinions among serious persons), but the glorious Gospel of the blessed God, to the heathen; and that it shall be left (as it ought to be left) to the minds of the persons whom God may call into the fellowship of his Son from among them, to assume for themselves such form of Church government as to them shall appear most agreeable to the Word of God.3
Presumably designed to keep the largest possible number of the people happy, this formulation left open the question of when the question of church government would be determined, and by whom. When did a Mission became a Church in its own right? How could one tell it was ready to operate independently? How closely did an infant Church need to adhere to its parent Society?
Such questions came sharply into focus in the decade that slavery was abolished across the British Empire, which also saw the London Missionary Society’s achieve the venerable age of fifty. Its jubilee was celebrated in 1845, a term which came from the Old Testament book of Leviticus, where God commanded Moses in Mount Sinai that after ‘seven times seven years’, slaves and prisoners should be set free, debts forgiven, and land returned to its original holders. 4
While missionary work on the African continent offered one way to continue the enthusiasms of Britain’s Anti-Slavery movement (Chapter 17), her Caribbean colonies also became a focus for missionary attention as they prepared for the end of slavery, a latter-day ‘day of atonement’.
Ketley would have been aware of the Natural History specimens displayed at the Missionary Museum since it opened in 1815, including its towering giraffe (Chapter 2). I can’t help feeling, however, that this particular example of taxidermy made him think of the London Missionary Society for other reasons too. Was he not, at some level, reminded of his own long struggle with the Directors to establish Providence New Chapel as an Independent church?
Can we regard the young Alligator as like his congregation, struggling to break free from the snake-like coils of the London Missionary Society? Like the protectiveness of an overbearing parent, did its embrace feel like something which needed to be escaped for a truly independent future to commence?
The Jubilee of the Israelites
Published to accompany an article on ‘The Year of Jubilee in Judaea’ in the Juvenile Missionary Magazine, September 1844, p.1.
Engraving, based on a painting by Poussin.
Following John Smith’s death in prison following the Demerara uprising of 1823 (Chapter 5), there had an attempt to exclude missionaries from the colony and seize their Chapels for the established Church of England. Ultimately however, the Governor was recalled to London and Joseph Ketley arrived as a twenty-six year old missionary recruit in December 1828, sent to continue the Society’s work at Providence Chapel in George Town.5
Ketley’s first decade would see a further rebellion in Jamaica in 1831, sometimes called the Baptist war because of the central role played by Black Jamaican Baptists such as Samuel Sharpe. Its brutal suppression and the outrage which followed in Britain directly fed into the passing of Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act in 1833.
Anticipation of the implementation of the Slavery Abolition Act, on 1 August 1834, seems to have created the sense that further missionary efforts would be needed during the period of apprenticeship that would follow for the enslaved. The January 1834 issue of the Missionary Chronicle began with a report from Demerara and Bernice, declaring:
the safe and satisfactory transition of the negroes from a state of bondage to one of freedom, must be an object of desire to every lover of his country, and every friend of human kind… But, in whatever light we may regard the past, it is impossible to look forward to the future without much anxiety. Nothing has diminished the evils and alleviated the pressure of slavery so much as the teaching, example, and influence of the Christian missionary; and nothing has operated so effectually to prepare the negroes for the great deliverance which now awaits them.6
Readers were told that around 800,000 British subjects would soon become free, creating an unrepeatable opportunity to ‘extend the benefits of education and religious instruction throughout the colonies’. According to the printed excerpts from missionary letters, there was a considerable desire for education among the enslaved, who sometimes even arranged their own reading classes without any missionary oversight or assistance.
The Sunday School at Joseph Ketley’s Providence Chapel in George Town was regularly attended by 250 children and 430 adults, while the day school taught 150 children with a further 220 adults attending in the evening.7 According to accounts sent to London by Ketley, his congregation had raised the equivalent of £529 sterling during the previous year.8
The seven page article ended by declaring that the Directors were ‘anxious to meet the strong claims of the population of the colonies’ and were in the process of sending additional missionaries to Berbice and Demerara, in the hope that:
the colonies may be spotted with the dwellings or villages of a contented, cheerful, sober, industrious, and Christian peasantry, forming an important and useful class among a free, intelligent, and happy people, blessed with all the privileges and enjoyments of religion here, and prepared to realise all the hopes it inspires in reference to immortality.9
The following month, February 1834, saw the cover of the Missionary Chronicle feature an ‘Appeal on Behalf of the West Indies’. This declared ‘The moral and religious instruction of the negroes in the West Indies is one of the most important duties now demanding the attention of the Christian public’:
It is evidently the duty of those who have so long held the negro in a state as unnatural as it is unchristian to inform him, discreetly but fully, of the obligations which his new civil relations involve, and the duties which the station in society on which he is about to enter will impose; and to accomplish this, the instruction he receives must be decidedly Christian.10
There was clearly anxiety about the large numbers of formerly enslaved people about to become ‘free subjects of the British crown’, but the article asserted that the nation was responsible for the ‘moral and spiritual wrong, the cruelty to the soul, which slavery has inflicted’. It suggested some compensation might be offered through the ‘communication of the gospel’.
While the nation had granted civil liberty, it fell to the ‘religious portion of the community’ to ‘give the mind emancipation, and to set the spirit free’. The Directors announced in capital letters their intention to send:
FOURTEEN ORDAINED MISSIONARIES TO THE BRITISH COLONIES11
As well as sending further missionaries to Berbice and Demerara, a new mission would be established in Jamaica, home to around half of those anticipating emancipation and an established mission field of the British Baptist Missionary Society since 1814.12
The Directors appealed for ‘discreet, experienced, and truly devoted men’ to help ‘the Lord in this important work’, asking supporters for special donations for the West India missions to enable what would likely be ‘a very considerable increase to the permanent annual expenditure of the Society’. They quoted John Wray, the first missionary sent to Demerara (Chapter 5), in a letter sent from Berbice in late November 1833:
Surely Britain, having accomplished the abolition of slavery, at least having fixed a period when it shall for ever cease, will furnish the means of instruction to these poor people, that they may be delivered from the slavery of sin and Satan, and brought into the glorious livery of the children of God. Will the British Parliament vote £20,000,000 for their temporal, and will not the Missionary Society contribute a few thousands for their spiritual freedom?13
By May 1835, around £6,400 had been raised in a special fund for ‘West India Missions’.14 The most immediate needs of the newly emancipated, however, were imagined as spiritual and educational.
It would be easy to be cynical, suggesting that mission education was a ruse to prepare skilled workers in ‘villages of a contented, cheerful, sober, industrious, and Christian peasantry’ for the emerging capitalist economy. Indeed, Missions were supported by many planters following emancipation, fore preciely these reasons, Nevertheless, education seems to have been enthusiastically embraced alongside Christianity by many who had previously been enslaved, although possibly not always on exactly the terms imagined by those writing these articles in London.
Education carried an emancipatory appeal for people previously prevented from learning to read or write by planters, so they wouldn’t find out about political events in other parts of the world. Nonconformist Christianity had demonstrated itself to be an important tool in the resistance against planters interests, associated with the Demerara rebellion of 1823, the Jamaica rebellion of 1831, as well as through playing a significant role in promoting the cause of abolition within Britain itself.
In January 1836, the Directors announced in the Missionary Chronicle that the British Parliament had made the sum of £20,000 available ‘in aid of voluntary contributions towards the erection of School-Houses in the colonies and settlements in which slavery had been abolished’.15 The scheme was modelled on a scheme established two years earlier for ‘the erection of schools for the education of the children of the poorer classes in Great Britain’, established following the Great Reform Act of 1833.16 By May 1836, the LMS had been awarded £3000 from this grant.17
Writing from Demerara in early June 1836, however, Joseph Ketley, expressed his concern about the conditions of the Government grant, which involved a requirement for regular Government inspections of mission schools. He told William Ellis, the Foreign Secretary, that he could not ‘help regarding it as another snare of the Devil by which to hinder the progress of the true emancipation of the souls of the negro man from his own vassalage’.18
The expansion of missionaries which followed led, at around the same time, to the Western Committee of the Board of Directors instructing the Demerara missionaries to form themselves into a District Committee.19 Joseph Ketley resented this imposition of metropolitan power, feeling it contradicted the ‘fundamental principle’ of the Missionary Society in relation to Church governance.20
Ketley asserting that Providence Chapel had established itself as a self-sustaining Independent congregation, having raised nearly £1100 the previous year. This allowed it to cover the expenses of the Chapel, to support two missionary stations among the indigenous people of Demerara along the Essequibo River, as well as to send funds that supported the work of the LMS elsewhere in the world.
His congregation, he suggested, acknowledged ‘no right of interference with it in any particular’, but the new Committee Regulations would allow them no voice in relation to their affairs, since it was composed entirely of British Missionaries.21 Ketley refused to join the Committee, and when it tried to interfere with operations at one of his Church’s inland missions, under the care of Marcus Peters, wrote to London in January 1837.22
Soon after, the Directors delayed sending Ketley’s nephew, who wanted to join him in Demerara as a school teacher, making it clear something was seriously amiss.23 After waiting over eleven months for a response, Ketley received a letter from London in May 1837 (dated 1 March), asking him to direct his communications through the new Committee, with whom his relationship had by then irreparably broken down.24
Ketley felt he had remained true to the instructions issued to him in 1828, and asked the British abolitionist and Congregationalist Minister John Scoble, visiting Demerara to examine the apprenticeship system instituted following emancipation in 1834, to make his case to the Directors in London.25 Scoble was accompanied to London by Mr Carter, a senior Deacon of Providence Chapel.26
William Ellis and the Directors met with Carter in March 1838, who was ‘of the opinion that no measures which the Directors could adopt would secure the co-operation of Mr Ketley with the Committee’ in Demerara, partly because ‘the alienation of feeling between Mr Ketley and the brethren had existed prior to the formation of the Committee’.27
Carter told the Committee that the Congregation ‘wished to purchase the land on which the Chapel was built, also many of the buildings as belonged to the Society, at an appraised valuation’. The Committee proposed that Ketley appoint an appraiser and the District Committee another, concluding that:
The case of Christ would be best promote by their not being united with the Demerara District Committee.28
In noting that it was no longer listed alongside the Society’s stations in the Annual Report of 1838, the Directors described Ketley:
As a faithful, efficient, and devoted Missionary Christ, and their unfeigned gratitude for the truly encouraging measure of success which, under the blessing of the Most High, has attended his labours in the important post to which the Great Head of the Church has called him. Towards Mr Ketley personally, and the people of his charge, the Director desire to cherish cordial and fraternal affection, and while continuing to feel the most lively interest in their welfare, will be happy to receive their aid and co-operation in carrying forward the work in which the Society is engaged.29
In a letter considered at a meeting of the West Indies Committee on 25 May 1838, Ketley declared that neither he nor his people wanted to separate from the Society, but onto to ‘secure the privileges & immunities of Children who no longer need to be under Tutors & Governors’.30
At a meeting at Providence Chapel on 27 July 1838, less than a week before the apprenticeship system ended, in part due to Scoble’s report, the Church agreed a number of resolutions in response to a letter sent by William Ellis on 14 April.31 The Directors had declared that the end of the Church’s relationship with the London Missionary Society, like most divorces, would entail a financial settlement.
Education in the West Indies
Engraving, printed on the cover of the Missionary Magazine and Chronicle for September 1838
Union Chapel, Fort Island
One of the two mission stations on the Essequebo River established and supported by the congregation of New Providence Chapel.
It was established in 1819 among the indigenous people of South America by Marcus Peter, descrived as ‘a pious man of colour.
Image published in Missionary Sketches, No. LXX. July 1835. (SOAS)
Mission Chapel, Castricome (later called Caria Caria)
One of the two mission stations on the Essequebo River established and supported by the congregation of New Providence Chapel.
It was established in 1832 on a piece of land on the west bank of the Essequebo at Cariacaria creek, granted for the mission by H.J.T. Faber Esq. The chapel, called “The Pray House” was completed in January 1833.
Image published in Missionary Sketches, No. LXX. July 1835. (SOAS)
After the first minister of Providence Chapel, Davies, had died, the Directors had paid his wife £1000 to transfer ownership of the chapel and the ground on which it stood. The chapel had been rebuilt in around 1830 at a cost of £3000, of which £400 had been supplied by the Directors. The Directors evidently expected to be recompensed for these, as well as other expenses. The Church declared, however, that:
considering all the circumstances of this Station, any claim & demands made by the Directors on any part of which, ought to be regarded as unjust in Principle & oppressive in enforcement.32
Sending an initial payment shortly after emancipation day on 1 August 1838, Ketley noted that no fewer than 2,400 people had attended services at Providence Chapel, at which tears flowed down many cheeks. According to Ketley ‘The people universally feel that God has done it and not Man’, and when Ketley asked one man how he felt, was told ‘It feel as if the Great Massa be passing by, when he blow away all the bad, and blow all the good upon us’.33
In October 1838, Ketley sent £400, raised from the congregation to repay the money lent for the new chapel in 1834, while refusing to pay to purchase the land on which the chapel stood. Ketley explained that the Church remained in debt, but that this was now ‘among our own people who will be patient till we can pay them.’34 He noted that ‘my people have felt exceedingly hurt & surprised that the Directors… should have spoken about having a claim on the Grant of £100 made in 1832’ for the infant school, the only grant made since Ketley arrived in 1828:
We do not know how to construe the Directors demands & claims after they have acknowledged our having fulfilled their highest expectations & express so much pleasure & delight… It seems to us as though the more a people strive to disburden the Society, the more determinately the Society burdens them.35
In July 1839, Ketley arrived in London and requested a meeting with the Directors ‘to negotiate with you for the final adjustment of the differences which have unhappily arisen between us and you’.36 By October, it had been agreed that the Chapel property would be placed in Trust. It was the first time in LMS history a Church had left the fold, which made both Ketley and the Directors conscious of the precedent they were establishing.37 When it was proposed that all the Trustees be resident in England, the congregation in Georgetown communicated ‘surprise and regret’ to Ketley, still in England. They pointed out the complications likely to result from such an arrangement, and resented the implication that no suitable trustees could be found in a Church which had proved itself capable of sustaining itself.38 A resolution at the Annual Meeting of the London Missionary Society in May 1840 approved the recommendation of the Directors to convey the property which had:
hitherto been legally held by Mr Ketley, in the name of the London Missionary Society, to trustees for the use and benefit of said church, subject to such trusts as may be necessary for securing the continuance of the faithful preaching of the Gospel of Christ, and the administration of Divine ordinances.39
Ketley remained in England where he attended the Anti-Slavery convention at Exeter Hall in June 1840. He was depicted beside John Scoble, near the front of a famous painting showing Thomas Clarkson, one of the funders of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787, addressing the event.
Ultimately, it was agreed that at least half the trustees should come from the congregation. Six were appointed at a meeting of the Church in December 1840, after Ketley’s return from England. Six others were appointed by the Society in London.40
In April 1841, Ketley wrote again to London, complaining that the church seemed to have been ‘completely discarded by the Society’ and ‘cast off as unworthy’.41 They had not been sent any news of the Society’s work or copies of Missionary publications. For Ketley and his congregation, freedom for their Church paralleled the freedom granted to those who had been enslaved, which made their argument with the Directors about the nature and principle of liberty.
The Missionary Society had asserted a new form or control over mission congregations through District Committees, paralleling the system of apprenticeship by which freedom from slavery was delayed and ultimately constrained. This new form of governance placed greater control in the hands of British missionaries, undermining principles of Congregational independence.
Ketley and his congregation wanted to convert their dependent relationship with the London Missionary Society, expressed as like that between a parent and child, into one of equality and adulthood. Writing on behalf of his congregation, Ketley addressed the Directors as ‘Dear and Honoured Brethren’, using the language of Christian brotherhood to assert the right to be recognised as ‘brethren’ in return.42
Ketley was concerned that barriers were being placed in ‘the way of people ever acting for themselves’. He felt the new committee arrangements could also be taken advantage of by missionaries with ’a despotic mind’, suggesting that ‘should the Missionary himself prefer his ease to his obligations – or should be think it better to keep the people in what he may think their place – their case is hopeless’.43
On 7 January 1842, Ketley wrote to Arthur Tidman and J.J. Freeman, newly appointed Foreign Secretaries following the resignation of William Ellis on health grounds in 1841. While he welcomed their declarations of goodwill, and assurances that the failure to send Missionary publications had been an oversight, he complained about plans for “Smith’s Chapel” in Georgetown.44 According to the Society’s Annual Report for 1842, this was intended to become the basis of a seminary that would train up ‘an efficient native agency for the service of the West India Mission’.45
The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840
Oil on canvas painted by Benjamin Robert Haydon
The Missionary's Welcome
Image showing Ebenzer Davies and his wife at a plantation chapel in Berbice in 1840. They were sent to New Amsterdam replace John Wray, who died in 1837.
The Image was first published in the Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle for August 1840.
Published in Missionary Sketches, No. XCI. April 1841. (SOAS)
At around the same time, however, the position of church leaders in the Caribbean became the focus for a very public moral panic among British evangelicals. The earliest Baptist preachers in Jamaica had been African Americans, arriving on the island following American Independence in 1783. The English missionaries who arrived after 1813 at their invitation frequently only had relatively limited influence over their sometimes very large congregations.46
Representatives of other missionary societies on the island may well have resented the relative success and material comfort of Baptist Missionaries, but also recognised that Jamaican Baptists sometimes approached Christianity rather differently to many European churches. Congregations were generally organised into ‘classes’, each led by a ‘daddy’.47 These leaders often seem to have sometimes resented the oversight and instruction of White Baptist missionaries.48
Concerns, expressed privately over around a decade, spilled over into a pamphlet war in England from 1841 onwards. William Knibb, a prominent Baptist Missionary in Jamaica, was evidently extremely irritated by his critics from the Scottish Missionary Society, writing in a private letter in April 1841 that:
If the time spent by some missionaries in back-biting, and slandering, and in the anonymous scribbling against us in newspapers, were devoted even to the temporal welfare of the people, it would at least be equally consistent with the principles of religion.49
When three LMS missionaries in Jamaica, John Vine, William Slatyer and W.G. Barrett added their voices to the criticisms, Knibb became even more vociferous:
I could not, I did not, for a long time believe it; but now I would much rather receive into my house the vilest slave-owner Jamaica ever produced, than some of the agents of the London Missionary Society. I feel no enmity to them, but such mean snake-like crawling conduct inspires my unqualified disgust. Under anonymous signatures, and through the vilest papers, they have attacked us.50
In January 1842, a meeting of Baptists from across Jamaica sent William Knibb to England to represent their interests. Under Knibb’s guidance, they also decided Jamaican Churches should take responsibility for their own support from 1 August 1842, partly in response to charges of extravagance in the furnishing of mission houses and chapels.51
William Knibb, with a Jamaican landscape
Colour image produced by George Baxter in 1847, after Knibb died in 1845.
As a missionary portrait, it complements those of Moffat and Williams, also produced by Baxter (Chapter 17)
The controversy even found its way into the usually staid Evangelical Magazine in March 1842, when a letter was printed that responded to a document published by the Baptist Missionary Society to refute some of the charges against it. The letter summarised the main charges as:
- abuse of office by class leaders, described as tyrannical and often illiterate
- adoption of a ‘ticket system’ for attending communion, for which payment was received – the tickets sometimes becoming an object of superstitious veneration
- too rash and indiscriminate admission of people to church membership, without knowledge of the real character of those baptised
The letter in question suggested Knibb, as well as other Baptist missionaries, genuinely believed in the sincerity of the congregations under their care, but suggested that for ‘a number of independent and creditable witnesses’ to have raised these concerns, there must have been some genuine issues at play.52
What certainly seems to have been the case was that Jamaican Christians were in the process of developing forms of religious practice which blended Christianity with African ways of understanding and approaching the world. Hope Waddell from the Scottish Missionary Society suggested that ‘The grand doctrine of these people was the Spirit’s teaching. It gave life. The written word was a dead letter’. The spirit was sought in dreams and visions, and preparation for baptism sometimes involved spending time in the wilderness waiting for signs.53
Hugh Brown, an LMS schoolmaster stated that it was commonly believed that full body baptism not only washed away sin, but provided knowledge, making White missionaries unnecessary “because dem know all him can tell them”.54 John Clark of the Baptist Mission at Brown’s Town in Jamaica’s North, seems to have been proud that his congregation established its own prayer meetings with independently chosen leaders.55
Heathen practices at funerals
Published in the Baptist Missionary James Mursell Phillippo’s (1843) Jamaica: Its Past and Present State, opposite p.372.
An extremely revealing visual source on contemporary Baptist practices comes in the form of a colour print, produced in 1842 by George Baxter showing the baptism of 135 people in the sea near Brown’s Town in 1842. While two White British missionaries perform the sacrament in the water while a third preaches from a raised pulpit on the beach, the image is filled by people of African descent, some on horses, others in boats, wearing an array of variously coloured clothing.
Beginning near Montego Bay in late 1841, there seems to have been a revival of practices of purification, featuring the curing of illness alongside the removal of evil influences. This was possibly influenced by recent arrivals of large numbers of Africans, liberated from captured slaving vessels.56 The combination of drumming, dancing and spirit possession which occurred parallels practices from across sub-Saharan Africa, associated with what have been called ‘cults of affliction’.57 In Jamaica these practices were called Myal, and were understood to oppose the negative influences of Obeah or sorcery.
Hope Waddell, a prominent Scottish Missionary Society critic of the Baptists, described a ‘wild outbreak of Myalism in 1842’ as ‘one of the most startling events in the history of the Jamaica missions, and showed how deeply rooted the old heathenism of their race still was among the negroes’.58 He encountered a group of Christians who claimed to have been sent by God to purify the world. They formed a ring of people, inside of which a group of women:
performed a mystic dance, sailing round and round, and wheeling in the centre with outspread arms, and wild looks and gestures. Others hummed and shuttled a low monotonous tune, to which the performers kept time, as did the people around also, by hands and feet and swaying of bodies.59
When Waddell entered the circle he was at first ignored, and then invited to sing a hymn. Disturbed by the dancing this inspired, he prayed instead. The group soon returned to singing and dancing. He then addressed the man who seemed to be overseeing the ceremony in impatient terms:
“If you don’t keep these mad women quiet, we cannot go on with the worship of God” Thereupon a strange hubbub arose. “They are not mad.” “They have the spirit.” “You must be mad yourself and had best go away.” “Let the women go on; we don’t want you.” “Who brought you here?” “What do you want with us?”60
Standing on a chair, Waddell attempted to preach to the crowd, but this only provoked them. Waddell directed his followers to disrupt their attempts to ‘make ring”, at which point:
The women thus baffled became frantic, and dashed themselves from side to side, driving over some of their own class, and tearing themselves with rage.61
Such accounts alarmed the evangelical supporters of mission in Britain. In late 1842, Rev. J.J. Freeman, one of the London Missionary Society’s Foreign Secretaries, was sent to the West Indies on a tour of inspection by the Directors, arriving back in Britain on 20 April 1843.62 Addressing the Society’s Annual meeting on 11 May, Freeman told the assembled supporters of the Society that he had travelled first to British Guiana and then to Jamaica, where he encountered:
congregations of men so lately in bondage… and so manifestly affording the earnest of the future prosperity of those countries as the industrious, sober-minded and increasingly intelligent and religious peasantry of those portions of the British Empire.63
Freeman described congregations that were ‘well clad, well behaved, eager to listen, to understand, to believe and to be saved’. He was impressed by the large amounts given to Church and missionary causes, estimating that a total greater than £250,000 had been raised across the different denominations in Jamaica and British Guiana since emancipation in 1834.
He felt he had seen ‘a large amount of real, but not of highly enlightened piety’, manifested by a strong desire to ‘have their own minister, their own chapel, and to be identified with a religious party, and do something to sustain it by personal effort and sacrifice’, a condition he felt was a ‘transition state’.64
Freeman also described visiting Smith Chapel in George Town. Although he noted plans for a Seminary in George Town, it is possibly significant that these did not develop in subsequent years. Freeman also described visiting ‘my old friend Mr. Ketley, formerly this Society’s faithful and laborious agent there’:
Few Missionaries have been more honoured in doing good: and there are few stations, in my opinion, of greater usefulness in Great Britain, or any part of the world.65
During his visit, the congregation at New Providence Chapel even made a donation of £50 to assist ‘the persecuted native Christians from Madagascar’ (Chapter 19), where Freeman had previously served as a missionary.66
Freeman’s report anticipated that the Mission Churches of the West Indies would, like New Providence Chapel and the Baptist congregations in Jamaica, be ‘in a position to support themselves ere long, without pressing on the funds of the Parent Society’.67 With an expansion into China underway (Chapter 16), and annual expenditure having been at least £7,000 higher than income during the previous three years, such savings were keenly sought.
Month later, the missionary ship Camden (Chapter 15) returned to London after five years in the Pacific and a major appeal was soon launched for a larger ship (Chapter 23). However, it was only in 1845, the London Missionary Society’s Jubilee, that Income once again exceeded Expenditure.
In the end, it was not until 1867 that the London Missionary Society eventually made the decision to withdraw its support for missionary operations in the Caribbean, a gradual process that was not completed until 1884.68 At least part of the reason for this was a decline in the wages paid to the free people of the West Indies, a consequence of the arrival of large numbers of indentured labourers from India.
The first shipload arrived to work on the sugar plantations of John Gladstone in British Guiana just as apprenticeship ended in 1838. Pressure from humanitarians, Scoble among them, prevented further arrivals between 1839 and 1845. As a consequence, the cost of producing sugar more than quadrupled for most plantations in British Guiana, while the volume produced decreased significantly.69
The prosperity of Caribbean congregations such as New Providence Chapel immediately after emancipation was closely linked to the high wages available, but this also proved to be a temporary ‘transition state’. By 1848, the impact of reducing wages was already considerable and W.G. Barrett reported to the Annual Missionary Meeting in London that there were in Demerara:
hundreds, nay, thousands of people, who would be willing to work if they could get employment; but even if they did, they could not get paid for it.70
By June 1850, the influence of ‘deep and universal poverty on the resources of the Mission Churches’ in the West Indies was noted in the Missionary Magazine:
“During the last year,” writes Mr. Pettigrew, of Berbice, “we have often been asked for bread by those who, only a short time ago, have large sums of money to the cause of God.”71
Celebrations of the First of August in Jamaica
The image depicts a celebration held at Chapelton to commemorate the third anniversary of the end of Apprenticeship, at which:
About two hundred respectable, serious, and well-dressed negroes sat down, happily greeting each other on this joyous event. The greatest order and decorum prevailed…
Published in the Missionary Magazine and Chronicle for December 1841.
Smith Chapel and Mission-Premises, George Town, Demerara
The image was printed to accompany an article that reported the opening of the chapel on 21 August 1844, twenty-one years to the day since Smith had been arresed following the Demerara uprising (Chapter x).
Published in the Missionary Magazine and Chronicle for December 1844.
"The Negro's Offering"
Depicting a church meeting at New Amsterdam, Berbice, in 1841 when pledges were made towards a new chapel. Fitzgerald Matthew, who had a wooden leg, insisted on handing over his contribution of around £3 immediately, since:
God’s work must be done, and I may be dead.
Published in Missionary Sketches for January 1842.
On 14 December 1849, Joseph Ketley marked his birthday by writing to the Directors of the London Missionary Society about their gift:
This day completes the 47th year of my earthly pilgrimage, and the 21st of my public service in the Guiana field of Missions72.
Comparing the 1849 to 1828 when he arrived in Demerara, Ketley noted:
Then as a Messenger of the Church, I was dependant on your help. Now as the independent pastor of a truly independent people, I am privileged to minister to your’s. In this capacity it is my privilege this day to address yo you these lines, in cheerful response to yours accepting the offer of the specimens of Natural History for your Missionary Museum.73
Following his arrival in October, Ketley had visited Arthur Tidman, the Society’s Foreign Secretary, to tell him he would send the specimen ‘after being filled up’.74 It had been taken, he noted, not far from our Missionary stations up the Demerara River. It was accompanied by a further gift of more that fifty pounds ‘in furtherance of the Society’s Mission in Heathen lands’, intended primarily to support the extension of LMS Missions in mainland China (Chapter 16).75
Ketley then set the record straight, using his letter to record his version of the events which led to the independence of his congregation. He hoped these gifts, and their acceptance by the Directors, marked ‘the renewal of fraternal intercourse’ which had long been interrupted.76
An image of the Missionary Museum, published in April 1853, shows a glass case containing the alligator wrapped in the coils of a boa constructor near its centre, immediately in front of the Giraffe and behind the case containing the model house from South Africa (Chapter 17).77
By 1860, this had been moved to a display case dedicated to Natural History. Surrounded by shells, corals and animal horns, it was positioned below an even bigger stuffed snake, originally from Bengal, wrapped around a tree trunk.78 While the larger serpent possibly evokes the temptation of Eve by Satan in the Garden of Eden, we can read the alligator and boa constrictor, locked in their seemingly eternal embrace, according to an alternative symbolic frame.
To me at least, it captures something of the struggles of the congregation and pastor of the New Providence Chapel in Demerara to achieve their independence from the London Missionary Society. But this struggle also mirrors a wider contemporary struggle, as those emancipated from slavery sought a future for themselves and their descendants as free subjects of the British Empire.
The mission premises at Kuruman
Published in the Juvenile Missionary Magazine, 1 May 1860, p. 102
Image supplied by the Bodleian Library (Per. 133 f.186, v.17(1860)), Scanned in February 2012. CC-BY-NC 4.0
Comments
This is an experiment in writing – intended to stretch the idea of the academic monograph.
I am keen to recognise and incorporate the input and expertise of others into the writing process, so I would welcome any comments or feedback.
Notes
1 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana/Incoming/Box 7 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 21 March 1849, Demerara
2 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana/Incoming/Box 7 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 21 March 1849, Demerara
3 Eg. 1849.The Report of the Directors to the Fifty-Fifth General Meeting of the Missionary Society, usually called the London Missionary Society on Thursday, May 10th, 1849, p. ix: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/AA00001298/00036/9x
4 King James Version, Leviticus 25:8-10 states: 8 And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years.
9 Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubile to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land.
10 And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family. See: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2025&version=KJV
5 Lovett, R. 1899. The History of the London Missionary Society 1795-1895. London, Oxford University Press. Volume 2, p. 360.
6 1834. ‘South America: Demerara and Berbice’, Missionary Chronicle for January, 1834’, pp.29-30: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_scoAAAAYAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA29#v=onepage&q&f=false
7 1834.The Report of the Directors to the Fortieth General Meeting of the Missionary Society, usually called the London Missionary Society on Thursday, May 15th, 1834, p. 104: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/AA00001298/00021/120x
8 1834. ‘South America: Demerara and Berbice’, Missionary Chronicle for January, 1834’, p. 35: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_scoAAAAYAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA35#v=onepage&q&f=false
9 1834. ‘South America: Demerara and Berbice’, Missionary Chronicle for January, 1834’, pp. 34-35: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_scoAAAAYAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA36#v=onepage&q&f=false
10 1834. ‘Appeal on Behalf of the West Indies’, Missionary Chronicle for February, 1834.’ p. 73: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_scoAAAAYAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA74#v=onepage&q&f=false
11 1834. ‘Appeal on Behalf of the West Indies’, Missionary Chronicle for February, 1834.’ p. 74: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_scoAAAAYAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA74#v=onepage&q&f=false
12 Hall, C. 2002. Civilising subjects : metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830-1867. Oxford, Polity.
13 1834. ‘Appeal on Behalf of the West Indies’, Missionary Chronicle for February, 1834.’ p. 77: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_scoAAAAYAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA77#v=onepage&q&f=false
14 1835.The Report of the Directors to the Forty-First General Meeting of the Missionary Society, usually called the London Missionary Society on Thursday, May 12th, 1834, p. lxi (204): https://digital.soas.ac.uk/AA00001298/00022/205x
15 1836. ‘To the Members of the London Missionary Society’, Missionary Chronicle for January, 1836.’ p.31: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8NBGAQAAMAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=evangelical%20magazine%20and%20missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA31#v=onepage&q&f=false
16 1834. ‘Parliamentary Grant for Education’, Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle for January, 1834.’ pp. 21-22: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_scoAAAAYAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA21#v=onepage&q&f=false
17 1835.The Report of the Directors to the Forty-Second General Meeting of the Missionary Society, usually called the London Missionary Society on Thursday, May 12th, 1836, p. Xliii (189): https://digital.soas.ac.uk/AA00001298/00023/189
18 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 5 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 03 June 1836, George Town: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/CW00001700
19 Lovett, R. 1899. The History of the London Missionary Society 1795-1895. London, Oxford University Press. Volume 2, pp. 365-366.
20 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 5 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 20 June 1836, George Town: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/CW00001706
21 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 5 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 20 June 1836, George Town: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/CW00001706
22 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 5 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 09 January 1836, George Town: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/CW00001729
23 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 5 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 13 March 1836, George Town: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/CW00001738
24 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 5 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 27 May 1837, George Town: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/l/CW00001743
25 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 5 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 27 May 1837, George Town: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/l/CW00001743
26 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 5 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 09 June 1837, George Town: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/CW00001747
27 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/West Indies Committee Minutes/Wednesday 21 March 1838, p.25
28 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/West Indies Committee Minutes/Wednesday 21 March 1838, pp.27-28.
29 1838.The Report of the Directors to the Forty-Fourth General Meeting of the Missionary Society, usually called the London Missionary Society on Thursday, May 10th, 1836, p. Xliii (189):
30 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/West Indies Committee Minutes/May 25 1838, pp.27-28.
31 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 5 – Resolutions of the church at Providence Chapel, George Town, Demerara, June 1837, George Town, 27 July 1838: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/CW00001788/00002/1x
32 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 5 – Resolutions of the church at Providence Chapel, George Town, Demerara, June 1837, George Town, 27 July 1838: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/CW00001788/00002/2x
33 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 5 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 14 August 1838, George Town: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/CW00001785
34 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 5 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 5 October 1838, George Town: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/CW00001790
35 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 5 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 5 October 1838, George Town: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/CW00001790
36 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/Home/Incoming Correspondence/Box 7 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 26 July 1839, No. 9 City Terrace, Old St Road
37 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 6 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 23 October 1839, London: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/CW00001813
38 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 6 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, February 1840, London: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/CW00001822/00001/1x
39 1840. ‘Forty-Sixth General Annual Meeting’, Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle for June, 1840.’ p. 309: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yNBGAQAAMAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=evangelical%20magazine%20and%20missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA309#v=onepage&q&f=false
40 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 6 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 3 December 1840, George Town: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/CW00001844
41 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 6 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, April 1841, George Town: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/CW00001850/00001/2x
42 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 6 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, April 1841, George Town: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/CW00001850/00001/2x
43 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 6 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, April 1841, George Town: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/CW00001850/00001/2x
44 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/British Guiana. Demerara/Incoming Correspondence/Box 6 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 7 January 1842, Georgetown: https://digital.soas.ac.uk/CW00001864/00001/1x
45 1842.The Report of the Directors to the Forty-Second General Meeting of the Missionary Society, usually called the London Missionary Society on Thursday, May 12th, 1836, p. 89 (104): https://digital.soas.ac.uk/AA00001298/00029/104x
46 Hall, C. 2002. Civilising subjects : metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830-1867. Oxford, Polity, p. 150.
47 Stewart, R.J. 1992. Religion and Society in Post-Emancipation Jamaica. Knoxville, the University of Tennessee Press, p. 126, citing Barrett, W.G. 1842. Baptist Mission in Jamaica: an exposition of the system pursued by the Baptist Missionaries in Jamaica, by Missionaries and Catechists of the London Missionary Society in that Island. London, John Snow, p. 8.
48 Stewart, R.J. 1992. Religion and Society in Post-Emancipation Jamaica. Knoxville, the University of Tennessee Press, p. 134.
49 Hinton, J.H. 1847. Memoir of William Knibb, Missionary in Jamaica. London, Houlston and Stoneman, pp. 398: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=G6YeB76DaEUC&vq=402&pg=PA398#v=onepage&q&f=false
50 Hinton, J.H. 1847. Memoir of William Knibb, Missionary in Jamaica. London, Houlston and Stoneman, pp. 402: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=G6YeB76DaEUC&vq=402&pg=PA402#v=onepage&q&f=false
51 Hinton, J.H. 1847. Memoir of William Knibb, Missionary in Jamaica. London, Houlston and Stoneman, pp. 403-404: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=G6YeB76DaEUC&vq=402&pg=PA403#v=onepage&q&f=false
52 Vindex. 1842. ‘Baptist Missionary Churches in Jamaica’. Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle for March, 1842, pp. 112-116: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=4EawDuiTdtsC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=missionary%20magazine%201841&pg=PA112#v=onepage&q&f=false
53 Stewart, R.J. 1992. Religion and Society in Post-Emancipation Jamaica. Knoxville, the University of Tennessee Press, p. 133, citing Waddell, H.M. 1863. Twenty-nine years in the West Indies and Central Africa: A Review of Missionary Work and Adventure, 1829-1858. London, John Snow, pp. 26-27.
54 Stewart, R.J. 1992. Religion and Society in Post-Emancipation Jamaica. Knoxville, the University of Tennessee Press, p. 134, citing SOAS Special Collections: LMS/Jamaica/Incoming/1/4/C – Brown to Ellis, Mandeville, 3 October 1836.
55 Stewart, R.J. 1992. Religion and Society in Post-Emancipation Jamaica. Knoxville, the University of Tennessee Press, p. 125, citing Ryall, D.A. 1959. The organisation of missionary societies, the recruitment of the missionaries in Britain and the role of the missionaries in the diffusion of British Culture in Jamaica during the period 1834-1865. PhD. Didd, University of London, p. 156/
56 Stewart, R.J. 1992. Religion and Society in Post-Emancipation Jamaica. Knoxville, the University of Tennessee Press, pp. 139-145.
57 Janzen, J.M. 1992. Ngoma: Discourses of Healing in Central and Southern Africa. Berkeley, University of California Press.
58 Waddell, H.M. 1863. Twenty-nine years in the West Indies and Central Africa: A Review of Missionary Work and Adventure, 1829-1858. London, John Snow, p. 187.
59 Waddell, H.M. 1863. Twenty-nine years in the West Indies and Central Africa: A Review of Missionary Work and Adventure, 1829-1858. London, John Snow, p. 189.
60 Waddell, H.M. 1863. Twenty-nine years in the West Indies and Central Africa: A Review of Missionary Work and Adventure, 1829-1858. London, John Snow, p. 190.
61 Waddell, H.M. 1863. Twenty-nine years in the West Indies and Central Africa: A Review of Missionary Work and Adventure, 1829-1858. London, John Snow, p. 190.
62 1843. ‘Arrival of Rev. J.J. Freeman from the West Indies’. Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle for May, 1843, p. 263: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BeM6AQAAMAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=evangelical%20magazine%20and%20missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA263#v=onepage&q&f=false
63 1843. ‘The Annual Public Meeting’. Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle for June, 1843, p. 312: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BeM6AQAAMAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=evangelical%20magazine%20and%20missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA312#v=onepage&q&f=false
64 1843. ‘The Annual Public Meeting’. Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle for June, 1843, pp. 313-314: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BeM6AQAAMAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=evangelical%20magazine%20and%20missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA313#v=onepage&q&f=false
65 1843. ‘The Annual Public Meeting’. Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle for June, 1843, p. 314: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BeM6AQAAMAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=evangelical%20magazine%20and%20missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA314#v=onepage&q&f=false
66 1843. ‘The Annual Public Meeting’. Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle for June, 1843, p. 314: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BeM6AQAAMAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=evangelical%20magazine%20and%20missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA314#v=onepage&q&f=false
67 1843. ‘The Annual Public Meeting’. Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle for June, 1843, p. 315: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BeM6AQAAMAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=evangelical%20magazine%20and%20missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA315#v=onepage&q&f=false
68 Lovett, R. 1899. The History of the London Missionary Society 1795-1895. London, Oxford University Press. Volume 2, pp. 388-396.
69 Mahoney, M. 2020. A ‘new system of slavery’? The British West Indies and the origins of Indian indenture’. The National Archives Blog: https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a-new-system-of-slavery-the-british-west-indies-and-the-origins-of-indian-indenture/
70 1848. ‘Adjourned Meeting’. Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle for June, 1848, p. 336: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xsFTMOpbi6gC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=evangelical%20magazine%20and%20missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA336#v=onepage&q&f=false
71 1850, ‘West Indies’. Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle for June, 1850. Pp. 326-327: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iHs2NJpfSVkC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=evangelical%20magazine%20and%20missionary%20chronicle&pg=PA326#v=onepage&q&f=false
72 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/Home/Incoming Correspondence/1845-1849/Box 9 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 14 December 1849, London.
73 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/Home/Incoming Correspondence/1845-1849/Box 9 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 14 December 1849, London.
74 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/Home/Incoming Correspondence/1845-1849/Box 9 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 14 December 1849, London.
75 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/Home/Incoming Correspondence/1845-1849/Box 9 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 14 December 1849, London.
76 SOAS Special Collections: CWM/LMS/Home/Incoming Correspondence/1845-1849/Box 9 – Letter from Joseph Ketley, 14 December 1849, London.
77 1853. ‘Museum of the London Missionary Society’, The Lady’s Newspaper, 329, 16 April 1853, p.237.
78 1860. ‘The Missionary Museum. No. IV’. The Juvenile Missionary Magazine, May 1 1860, p. 103: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=V2AEAAAAQAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=juvenile%20missionary%20magazine&pg=PA103#v=onepage&q&f=false