On this day in 1823, William Wade, the man who served as the printer for all of the mission work of William Carey, died of cholera  Serampore, India.

As a young man, Wade became the apprentice to a printer, with no intention of ever becoming a missionary.  But as a young man, he accepted Christ and became heavily involved in the Baptist church at Hull, England.  He began traveling and preaching in nearby villages, where people began to refer to him as “a man of promise.”

In 1796, the young Wade met a man named William Carey, who was preparing to set sail to India.  Carey, seeing the skills and ability Wade possessed, told him, “If the Lord bless us, we shall want a person of your business to enable us to print the Scriptures; I hope you will come after us.”  Three years later, Ward sailed to join Carey in India.  Almost as soon as he arrived, he printed the New Testament in Bengalese.  He set up a large printing house in Serampore, where translations of the Bible (Bengáli, Mahratta, Tamil, and twenty-three other languages) , tracts, and other books were printed and distributed all over India and the orient.

In 1819, Ward returned to England due to health complications.  He spent this time traveling to churches, raising money for the mission and the new college they just started in India,  the Serampore College.   He was the first missionary who had ever returned from the East. His warm and animated addresses were well adapted to move popular assemblies. He also visited Holland, and then proceeded to this country, where he spent three months, and raised $10,000 for Serampore College. He was everywhere greeted with the warmest welcome.

He returned to India in 1821, where he picked up the work he left behind.  His influence on the work in India have caused many to refer to him, along with Marshman & Carey, as one of the Serampore trio, the men who helped shine the light of the Gospel throughout India in their day.

Source:

Baptist Biographies – Roger Williams Heritage Archives

William Ward

On this day in 1743, David Brainerd, as he labored among the Native Americans of the American wilderness, wrote the following in his journal in regards to why he faced so many trials and what his reaction was:

This morning when I arose, I found my heart go after God in longing desires of conformity to him, and in secret prayer found myself sweetly quickened and drawn out in praises to God for all he had done to and for me, and for my inward trials and distresses of late.  My heart ascribed glory, glory, glory to the blessed God and bid welcome to all inward distress again, if God saw meet to exercise me with it.  Time appeared but an inch long, and eternity at hand; and I thought I could in patience and cheerfulness bear anything for the cause of God, for I saw that a moment would bring me to a world of peace and blessedness.  My soul by the strength of the Lord, rose far above this lower world, and all the vain amusements and frightful disappointments of it.

David recognized that the trials he faced came from God for a reason.  Therefore, he would praise God in the midst of them!

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On this day in 1797, after a 207-day voyage from London, the three-masted Duff arrives in Tahiti’s Matavai Bay.  Aboard the ship were thirty-seven missionaries and their families with the London Missionary Society.

To establish a mission in Tahiti had, as early as 1787, been the dream of William Carey, the consecrated cobbler, who in 1792 inspired the Baptists to organize the first Foreign Mission Society of modern times. But Carey was led instead to India; and to Henry Nott, the consecrated brick-layer, goes much of the human credit for establishing a mission in Tahiti and throughout the Society Islands.

Nott, along with the eighteen of the other missionaries, went ashore at Tahiti. The Duff continued on several other islands, where the remaining missionaries were distributed.  When the missionaries went ashore at Tahiti, they found that they had been ill-prepared for the work ahead.  Few of them were prepared to live among a people who were “engrossed in strange and dark practices stemming from ignorance and superstition.”  It was amusing to see the young king, Otu, and his queen riding on men’s shoulders. They were always carried about in this fashion, lest their feet should touch the ground or some other object, because whatever they touched became their own. The official report of the “First Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific,” published in London in 1799, conveys much astonishing information, including the following:

The mode of carrying the king and queen is with their legs hanging down before, seated on the shoulders and leaning on the head of their carriers, and very frequently amusing themselves with picking out the vermin which there abound. It is the singular privilege of the queen that, of all women, she alone may eat the vermin, which privilege she never fails to make use of.

The Duff returned to England, where it was immediately outfitted for the needed supplies for the mission stations across the islands.  These supplies where vital for the survival of the missionaries, since they only had the necessities with them before.  But on the way back to the islands, the Duff was taken captive by a French ship (France and England were at war at that time).  For five years, the missionaries on Tahiti waited for the promised supplies.  During that time, several died.  Others quit or went crazy. But others, like Nott, faithfully continued on in the face of hardship and persecution.

Source:

The South Seas Missionary Ships

Henry Nott

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