La moral y los valores vistos por los niños y adolescentes

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two Went Indian missionaries and thirty-nine settlers.

The Scottish missionaries, who were great rivals of the Baptists in Jamaioa, similarly turned their attention to, West Africa. In -July, 1841* the Presbytery meeting at

Oosohen spent two days in prayer and deliberation on the subject. They heard the lev. Hope Kasterton Waddell read extracts from Burton’s African Slave grade and its Remedy and they emerged with resolutions declaring the time ripe for missions to Africa. They called on their congregations at horns to undertake an African mission, and eight of the ministers present, including Hope Waddell, volunteered to join it. They drew up plans "to evangelise Africa through the means of the converted negroes of the west Indies"

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operating in agricultural and industrial colonise. in reply, they were Informed by the Board of the Scottish Missionary Society that their proposal was :

"premature, displaying more seal than judgment, not accordant with the state of dependence in which our Jamaica Church stood, both for means

and missionaries; (it was) highly presumptious after the failure of vastly greater efforts by others than we could possibly put forth* (a j reference in partlovtf.ar to the Niger Expedition).

1. J. MoKerrowt History of the Foreign Missions of the Secession and frnlied Presbyter Ian Church, pp. jfcP-fT Hugh Goldie* Calabar and its Mission. (Edinburgh 1901), p.73; Hope M» Waddells' Twenty-nineYears in the West Indies and Central Africa U8o7). p p.

2. Donald W. MoParlan* Calabar 1846-1946. p.7.

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•he missionaries were undented, however. In 1842, two of them, Her. George Blyth and Rev. Peter Anderson, on leave In Scotland, canvassed the idea of a West African

■lesion in various churches. Further, they asked Dr.

pergusson, a Liverpool merchant who had been a surgeon in west Africa, to put the® in touch with supercargoes trading on the coast. From such consultations, the aisslonaries decided that Calabar was the most eligible spot for a pioneering mission. They sent a letter through Capt. Turner, a supercargo well-known in Calabar, who had been a local preacher in a Methodist church in Liverpool, to sound the views of the rulers of Calabar. Turner replied in January 1843 *

"At a consultation of the chiefs held this morning in the king's house", wrote Capt. Turner from Calabar, "it was settled that to sell the tract of ground required was out of the question.

The land, however, will be at your service, to make such establishments as you may see proper.

It will be guaranteed to its oocuplers on those terms for ever. A lttw will he passed for its protection, and the colonists may dwell in peaoe and safety, none daring to make them afraid.

There seems no doubt of your obtaining land sufficient for plantations for a number of families." 1

1, Goldie, op.oit., p.75. Also Hutchinson's despatoh no 71 June 24th 1856 enclosing copies of Capt. Turner to the missionaries 4th January 1843 and 19th January 1843! and Beeoroft to the same Mar. 18th 1844.

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They also consulted Beeoroft, an Englishman long resident on the coast, Governor of the Spanish oolony of Fernando Po end the most Influential European in the whole Bl$at of Hiafra, who reported In March 1844 that the chiefs of Calabar were favourable to the proposal of the missionaries Thereupon the Presbytery of Jamaica decided to embark on

the Calabar mission on their own. They obtained two years*

leave of absenoe for Hope Waddell and naked him to lead an exploratory mission to Calabar. He was accompanied by

Samuel Edgerley, an English printer, together with his wife, Andrew Chisholm, a mollato carpenter, and Edward Miller, a negro teaoher. Hope Waddell arrived in England together funds for the mission, prepared if need be, to form a

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separate missionary society to organise it. The ttoited Secession Churoh which on its union with the Relief Church in 1847 became the United Presbyterian Church, however, decided to adopt the new mission. But it did so with an important modification of the original plan* Hope Waddell had to give up his idea of agricultural settlements as part of the missionary scheme.

This is not surprising, though the exact reason for dropping the scheme is not clear. Opposition might have

1, Waddell’s original appeal for the formation of a Society to take up the new mission was published in Friend of Africa. Journal of the African Civilisation Society, III 15-16 (1846).

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been expected from West Indian planters to a scheme for the exportation of labour from the West Indies at a time when they rere seeking extra hands from the Bast Indies and Sierra Leone, The Presbyterians were also to discover that their dependence on the Liverpool traders inevitably influenced their policy, and the Liverpool traders could not have been expected to favour a scheme for importing into Calabar people who might become their trade rivals, The scheme was also bound to be so cumbersome as to be beyond the resources of the mission. Besides, as we observed earlier, though *the Plough* was the slogan, it was generally to commerce not to agriculture that the

missionaries turned. Dr. Pergusson and others would also probably have pointed out that it was technical skill not agricultural knowledge that the Calabar rulers particularly wanted. On reaching Calabar In April 1846, Hope Waddell , saw that particularly in the Delta, trade, not agriculture,

was the civilising force, and that the chiefs were not a

"land-owning aristocracy* but middle class traders. After visiting their houses, many of them imported from England, surveying the household furniture in them, some of which he bought for his own house, attending their weekly dinner parties, and, above all, watching them conduct their trade, 1, See below Chapter III.

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h* saw that they would not hare placed much value on a

body of West Indian negro farmers as agents of civilisation.

He saw King Byo»s son keep accounts, ‘writing and copying Into an account book the memoranda of buslnesa which his father had made on slateB, ... neatly entered and all In English". And he commented that this, In addition to other observations, convinced him that the teachers for d e b a r

"must be really competent men", for neither the school master he brought along, nor the carpenter,^was "equal to this young man in writing and arithmetic". Artisans from the West Indies would however have been welcome if they had been forthcoming. Waddell himself later took to recruiting the teachers, carpenters and sawyers whom he needed for the mission and for the chiefs, from Sierra Leone, when he oould not get them from the West Indies. The truth would appear to be that although individual West Indian missionaries continued till this century to be important in many West

Afrioan missions, hopes of a large-soale emigration of nostalgic exiles from the Hew World, entertained in the

ecstasy of the moment of emancipation, were completely false.

Various attempts by different people, friendly and unfriendly to the negro have consistently borne this out.