16

To The East And Other Places

“As pilgrims on earth and friends of the whole world, we can be at home anywhere,” a meeting of the brothers decided in Germany, in 1749. From Labrador igloos to a bark shelter on an island in Canada’s St. Clair River (where Christian Friedrich Dencke lived among the Ojibwas who “let the dogs lick their dishes clean and ate one another’s fleas like sunflower seeds”) to leaf houses without walls in the rain forest, they had already found this true. But vast regions of the world still remained, to them and other Europeans, unknown. Untold numbers of “heathen” still needed to be won as friends, and all the Moravian believes could hear was the Saviour telling them: “Go!”

David Nitschmann and Christian Friedrich Eller had already sailed, by way of the Cape of Good Hope and Zanzibar, to Ceylon, in 1738. At Mogurugampelle (Shady Spot in Which to Rest by the Way) in the centre of the island, they had discovered an open door for the Saviour’s message. But white Protestant preachers serving Dutch traders on the island, drove them away.

Nine years later Friedrich Wilhelm Hocker (a doctor) and Johann Rüffer found their way with an Armenian trader overland from Syria to Baghdad. At Aleppo they joined a camel caravan following the Euphrates River. More and more traders joined until the caravan included two thousand camels. But numbers did not guarantee safety. Kurds fell on them near Shermakhan and robbed them of everything they had—even their clothes. In the confusion, the two brothers from Herrnhut lost each other. Severely wounded and barefooted on the burning sand, Friedrich walked for a day until he arrived, nearly dead with thirst, at a village. Kind people gave him clothes. Others brought him water, bread, and grapes, and in the village Friedrich found Johann again. After another month of travel bandits attacked them again. This time they left Friedrich with his underwear, and Johann with a shirt, but they had to travel nine days with only a little bread and water until they came to Ispahan, in Persia.

For two years the brothers lived in Persia, seeking contact with old Christian churches, and telling the Muslims what they could about Christ. When they left Ispahan bandits attacked them once more and stole everything they had. Johann Rüffer died and Friedrich made his way to Egypt. In Cairo he learned Arabic. The Muslims tolerated him because he knew medicine, but when he set out with a band of traders to Abyssinia their dhow sank off the coast of Mecca and he lost all his supplies.

After a trip back to Europe, Friedrich returned to Egypt with Johann Heinrich Danke, and Hans Antes (son of Heinrich, of the brothers on the Skippack, in Pennsylvania). This time they made their way up the Nile. Fighting between desert tribes kept them from reaching Abysinnia, but young Hans made clocks and Friedrich attended the sick—while demonstrating life in the Saviour’s wounds—until he died.

Before Friedrich Hocker left for Egypt the second time, fourteen single brothers from Herrnhaag, under the leadership of Johann Stahlmann and Adam Völker, made their way around Africa to the rainy Malabar Coast of India. There, at Tranquebar, where rice paddies lie between the ocean and the Western Ghats, they established a small community they named Brüdergarten (Garden of Brothers). One of the young men, Christoph Butler, began to learn Malabar and Portuguese at once. The rest, even though suffering under the heat, set about erecting buildings and planting crops. A year later a group of families arrived under the leadership of Nicolaus Andreas Jäschke. Many died. Six brothers that survived moved onto the island of Nancowry in the Bay of Bengal. In 1771 others moved to Serampore, near Calcutta.

Russia

Thirty-five years after the first brothers from Herrnhut found their way on foot to Archangelsk on the White Sea, Peter Konrad Fries and Johann Erich Westmann (just returned from the West Indies) travelled to St. Petersburg. Russian authorities no longer wanted to capture or imprison them. In fact, their new empress, Catherine II (a German noblewoman by birth), was asking Moravian settlers to come.

In St. Petersburg, Catherine II gave the brothers a document promising them great freedom and exemption from bearing arms. She also granted them a tract of nearly eleven thousand acres, far to the south-east, in the lower Volga region. The brothers saw it as a miracle of grace. Not only would that place them in the midst of the heathen Kalmuk tribes. It would give them a base from which to reach Persia, China, and Mongolia.

Daniel Heinrich Fick and four companions from the single brothers’ choir at Herrnhut travelled overland to Nizhny Novgorod in 1765 and sailed down the Volga to get the place ready. They came prepared to fell trees and build with logs. But to their amazement they left the last forests behind at Saratov and entered treeless steppes. What lumber they needed had to come floating down the Volga. Their land proved salty and largely unfit for growing crops. But with four married couples, a widower, twenty-five single brothers and seventeen single sisters that came from Herrnhut a year later, they built a new community called Sarepta.

The brothers and sisters planted many trees. They built large choir houses, a Gemeinhaus and a Saal, in a protected place along the river. Even though swarms of mosquitos bothered them in the summer and harsh winters buried them in snow, the trading post they set up proved an excellent way of getting to know their neighbours, and they soon felt at home. Kalmuk tribesmen brought horses, beef and furs to trade for goods the brothers shipped in from St. Petersburg. The young men in the community also set up shops where they wove cloth, baked bread, built carriages, dyed wool, tanned leather, and made shoes, clothing, locks, and candles. Joachim Wier, the community doctor, not only cared for patients from far and wide, he discovered a mineral spring near Sarepta. This brought even more patients, many of whom had money and paid well for the hospitality the brothers offered them.

In the midst of all the work necessary to build their new community, the brothers did not neglect what they had come for. Gottfried Grabsch and Georg Gruhl made their into the Caucasus and Muslim lands. Johann Gottfried Schill and Christian Hübner translated large portions of the Scriptures into the Kalmuk language. The priests of these nomad tribesmen, followers of lamaist Buddhism, opposed them. When a group of twenty-three Kalmuks, touched by the mercy of the Lamb, moved to Sarepta the priests notified Russian authorities. Claiming the Moravians could not legally receive converts, they came and took them away. But faithful pilgrims, like Konrad Neiz, did not give up. And in his wandering life among the Kalmuks he made a discovery that would change Sarepta forever.

He discovered mustard.

Using the Kalmuk’s recipe the believers at Sarepta began to cook and sell a delicious mustard spread. Russians all over the country, including the tsar Aleksandr I, tasted it and wanted more. Before long Sarepta’s mustard and vegetable oil factory supplied the whole community with a stable income.

In spite of disastrous fires and revolutions on the steppes (that caused the whole community to flee in 1774), Sarepta came to stand as a witness of the Saviour’s peace. Russians came from far away to visit it. Other German colonists along the Volga and in the Ukraine—Lutherans, Mennonites, and Hutterites—looked to it for spiritual direction and believers from there began the branch communities of Schönbrunn and Gnadenthal (Beautiful Fountain and Valley of Grace) nearby.

Africa

The year after the awakening to the blood in Herrnhut, in 1735, the Moravian refugee Heinrich Huckoff met a mulatto from the Gold Coast (Ghana). Touched with what he heard, he travelled as soon as possible to the slave trading centre of São Jorge da Mina. Four years later the brother Abraham Ehrenfried Richter entered Algeria. But Georg Schmidt, who fled Kunvald in Moravia as a seventeen-year-old, first established a community after the pattern of Herrnhut on that continent.

He did not come unprepared. On a trip to Moravia with Melchior Nitschmann the Austrians had captured him and handled him roughly in prison for six years. But in his affliction—alone—Georg prayed. He found a sure source of strength in Christ and travelled, on his release, to the Netherlands to learn Dutch. From there he sailed to Africa, landing at Cape Town on July 9, 1737.

In the Cape Colony Georg found white Protestant settlers (Dutch Reformed and Huguenots) greatly outnumbered by the Malays, West African blacks, and local tribes they had enslaved. Cattle ranchers and farmers—the Boers—ruled the surrounding veld. Among them, in squalid kraals lived the Bastaards (the offspring of white settlers and their slaves) the San and Khoikhoin people.

Georg found the Khoi villagers shy and humble. But those living close to large numbers of white settlers feared them (for good reason—men in Cape Town bragged how many “wild” Khoi they had shot, along with zebras and antelopes) so Georg decided to go further inland. He caught a ride with some Dutch settlers in a covered cart drawn by twelve oxen. Along dry river beds and over barren hills they made they way against a cold wind until they approached Stellenbosch. There, in a sheltered gorge along the Sonderend River, Georg found a band of Khoi hunters with whom he decided to stay. Bavianskloof (Monkey Ravine), the Dutch called that place.

Georg’s first challenge was speech. Few of the Khoi women or children knew Dutch. Their language (recognised since then as one of the most difficult in the world) consisted of sharp clicks made with the tongue, with the teeth, with sudden gusts of air, and sounds from the throat or nose. Some of the same sounds meant different things on five different tones.

No Dutch people had tried to learn the Khoikhoin language. They called it Hottentotten speech for the way it sounded, and took for granted these slight brown-skinned people were predestined by God to damnation—good for nothing except work, if even that. Georg set out to prove the contrary. He made friends with the Khoi children and taught them to read and write Dutch, while he learned words in their language. He took in an orphan boy and soon had fifty students in classes he held every day. As communication between them improved he told them about the Saviour. He prayed with the people and taught them songs.

The first Khoi villager to repent and receive baptism, Georg named Willem. He was the boy that lived with him. Following this, he baptised forty-six others, and the Saviour’s love shining from Bavianskloof brought results no one would have expected. Thirty-nine Dutch settlers, marvelling at their neighbours new-found peace repented and became followers of the Lamb as well.

Those that did not repent arrested Georg and shipped him back to Europe.

For fifty years no one from the believers’ communities could come to South Africa. The Dutch, staunchly Calvinist, refused to take them there or let them in. Georg Schmidt died. But in 1792, with Dutch politics in upheaval, the brothers Heinrich Marsveld, Daniel Schwinn, and Johann Christian Kühnel managed to find passage to Cape Town again. They hurried out to Bavianskloof, hardly daring to see what they would find.

They found Lena, the last baptised member of the Khoi congregation, still living.

Lena could not walk anymore. Her eyes had grown dim. But after she understood who the brothers were, she had a grandchild fetch her most treasured possession—a Dutch New Testament wrapped in sheepskins inside a leather bag. Georg Schmidt had given it to her when she was young. For fifty years she had guarded it, even though she could not read, and treasured what she remembered about Christ.

The newly arrived brothers from Herrnhut found the seed planted by Georg Schmidt lying dormant, but far from dead. Some Khoi villagers, even though they did not understand it well, had kept on reading from the Bible, generation after generation. Now that the brothers lived with them again they quickly responded to its message and a new community, Genadendaal (Valley of Grace) took shape in South Africa.

Dutch farmers did not like their Khoikhoin workers “wasting time” at meetings in Genadendaal. They feared what would happen if all of them would learn how to read and “think themselves equal to whites.” So many, who had depended on the farmers for their living, lost their jobs. This, with poor hunting and several dry years in a row, soon brought the believers to the edge of starvation. At Genadendaal they planted fruit trees and worked hard to prepare the land for crops. But a dam they built for irrigation broke, and swept their fields, with most of their houses, away. It ripped up the trees they had planted and buried promising gardens with rocks and sand. Johann Friedrich Hoffman, Gottfried Horning, etc.

Hyenas fell continually on the sheep and goats the Khoi believers tried to raise. But when the brothers Adolf Bonatz and Johann Heinrich Schmidt set out with thirty Khoi hunters to eliminate them, they met a greater danger:

Not far from Genadendaal they discovered a hyena and fired at him, but being only slightly wounded it escaped. After searching for it in vain the brothers left. One of the Khoi hunters heard something in the scrub, however, and called them. Johann Heinrich Schmidt hurried back, dismounted, and entered the bushes with several of the hunters close behind. When they had reached the middle of the scrub their dog roused some animal, but tight foliage prevented them from seeing what it was. Those standing outside, when they saw it was a leopard, fled, leaving Johann Heinrich and one of the Khoi brothers alone. Not knowing which way to get out, and afraid of meeting the leopard head on, they backed up slowly with their guns cocked, ready for attack. All of a sudden the animal sprang on the Khoi brother, pulled him down and began to bite his face. Johann Heinrich aimed his gun at the leopard but at such close quarters he could not get a good shot. Then, when the animal saw him, he let go of the Khoikhoin and jumped at him. Johann Heinrich’s gun went flying and he held up his hand to defend himself. The leopard bit him close to the elbow and hung on. With his other hand Johann Heinrich caught it by the throat, and managed to throw it back, pinning it down with his knee. He called for the Khoi hunters who came running. One of them stuck his gun in behind the brother’s arm and fired. He killed the leopard but the Johann Heinrich had eight ugly wounds from his elbow to his wrist, the teeth having sunk in to the bone.

Drought, hunger, and accidents notwithstanding, the community at Genadendaal became established and flourished in the Saviour’s love. The Khoi women, taught by sisters from Herrnhut, learned how to sew and made handcrafted articles for sale. The brothers planted more trees and vegetables and turned to raising grapes. They also built a blacksmith shop, a furniture factory, and a mill. Seekers came from far and wide and in slightly more than twenty years, 256 mud-and-wattle houses, plastered white, with doors and windows, and thatched roofs, stood along the wide, flat street of Genadendaal. Peach and pear trees bordered the street. The believers planted many rose bushes, and their village became home to more than a thousand baptised Khoi believers.

At their regular meetings the believers made room in the Saal for visitors from many places, and their love feasts drew joyful crowds. Once again their lives spoke to the Dutch farmers, one of them who told the Khoi brother Philip who worked for him: “You Hottentots surprise me very much. No matter how wretchedly and drunkenly you live before coming to Genadendaal, once you are there and hear the Word of God you become utterly different. You seem to receive mercy and grace. I was born and raised a Christian. I have a Bible and read it often, yet I find those blessings still escape me.”

Philip answered him, “Even though I cannot read the Scriptures myself, I remember much of what I hear.” Then he related to his boss the parable of the workers in the vineyard, applying it in a fitting way to the situation of the Dutch and Khoikhoin believers. The farmer listened carefully. “You know,” he said when Philip was done, “I never understood that parable before. But now I do!”

This farmer was only one of many Dutch colonists to humble himself before the Lamb and become a supporter of the Khoikhoin congregation.

Antigua

Johann Töltschig, pilgrim to England, found one Yorkshire boy particularly eager to hear what he had to say. Night after night Samuel Isles came to meetings of the believers at the Lammsberg until 1743, when he left his parents’ home, surrendered everything to the Saviour, and went to live among the brothers in the Netherlands and Germany.

From Germany Samuel left for St. Thomas in 1748. French pirates captured the ship he travelled on and took him to Martinique. When he managed to leave that island Dutch pirates overtook him, and the Spanish narrowly missed capturing him again before he slipped into the St. Thomas harbour. Eight years later, newly married, and with his wife Molly expecting their first baby, Samuel landed on Antigua.

Samuel and Molly did not know anyone on the island. They had thirty pounds sterling with them and looked at once for a means of supporting themselves. Behind a rickety wooden house they rented, they planted kale, cabbage, and turnips. They used hollowed out gourds for dishes. Within a year Samuel baptised the first awakened slaves on the island, Joseph and Abraham. Then Molly died. John Bennet, a tailor from England, came, and Samuel married Maria Margarethe Zerb from the brothers’ community at Bethel, in Berks County, Pennsylvania.

The believers on Antigua lived in serious poverty, often stitching clothes by candlelight until late at the night. But with the help of those who brought a few stones every time they came to meeting, they built a Saal just north of St. Johns, at a place they named Spring Gardens. Samuel and Maria Margarethe had a child they named Joseph. But Samuel, already deathly sick when he arrived, died soon afterward. Then she married the brother Paul Schneider. A week later he died too (some tropical fevers hit suddenly) and the brothers married her for the third time to Johann Christian Auerbach. With him she had one daughter that died.

By this time Peter Braun, a brother from southern Germany, Benjamin Brookshaw from England and Johann Meder from Livonia had joined the fourteen believers on Antigua. Benjamin soon died and a hurricane devastated the island. But like John Holmes wrote later:

The catastrophe seemed to have a positive effect on the black people, teaching them the necessity of knowing the Lord who hides from the wind and is a refuge in the time of storm. An awakening broke out among the slaves, spreading like a fire in every direction. Those who came to the meetings at Spring Gardens increased every year so that by 1775 they numbered around two thousand and not a month went by without the baptism of ten or twenty more.¹

Altogether serious in their desire to know the Lamb, some slaves walked as far as ten miles after their day’s work in the fields to attend meetings in Spring Gardens. They did this week after week even though their masters beat them for it and the pilgrims living there soon found themselves answering the door day and night. So many came “their hearts tender to the Saviour’s mercy” that the brothers had little time left over to earn money or eat.

A new community, Grace Hill (Gnadenberg) took shape on Antigua, where the brothers soon baptised two thousand believers. Another four thousand attended meetings, or took part in instruction classes throughout the week. In 1778 hardly any rain fell, and famine struck the island. Some planters fed their cattle rather than their slaves (thinking the slaves could find food on their own) and a time of terrible thievery began. Many of the believers, coming home from work, found all the food and other possessions gone. Four years later the French attacked. One believing slave found himself carried to Guadeloupe, but he took it as the Saviour’s leading and preached the Gospel there.

Little by little, as their slaves persisted in following Christ, the Antigua planters came to believe in their sincerity. One master tried for ten years to entice the believers working on his land to commit fornication. He did everything he could to tempt them. But not one of them, neither old or young, fell into his trap. Neither could other slaves lead them astray.

After nearly everyone on their plantation professed Christ, a young slave named Richard and his friend planned a dance. They planned it on the Lord’s Day and hoped to distract the believing young from going to meeting. But it did not work. No one came to the dance and the boys decided they might as well go to meeting too—if nothing else than to have some fun.

They went to laugh and make trouble. But they stayed to pray. So powerfully did conviction fall on Richard, and so earnestly did he call on the Lamb for mercy that the brothers soon baptised him and he became a leader in the congregation. With unswerving faithfulness he served the Saviour and his Gemein until he turned ninety-nine years old. Then he went home.

All Antigua changed. Where as many as twenty or thirty slaves had commonly been hanged on Monday mornings for weekend fighting or stealing, crime almost disappeared. Murders became unheard of, and the practice of witchcraft died out. The brothers began a school for eighty students. Almost before they knew it, they had seven hundred students eager to learn how to read and write. Because not nearly everyone could come during the day, they began to have classes during the night as well. Both at Spring Gardens and Grace Hill crowds had grown to where communion had to be served on shifts. By 1788 more than six thousand baptised members met there for worship, and the brothers began a third community they named Grace Bay. Membership there grew to rapidly to more than a thousand as well.

During the war with America in 1812 another famine struck Antigua and two hundred from the Spring Gardens community alone, died from hunger. But with their eyes on Christ the enslaved believers did not lose hope. More than anything else, they liked to sing. Those who could read, like the black leader, Jacob Harvey, carried their hymn-books with them and learned hundreds of songs by memory. One day, after a brother from Europe saw Jacob’s hymnal crammed with blades of grass, dried leaves, cane tops, bits of paper, and rags, he said in surprise, “Why Jacob, you will break your book apart.”

“But massa,” Jacob answered apologetically, “Dem me partikler hymns!”

After a Good Friday service at Spring Gardens, another European brother, Joseph Newby, wrote:

From where I sat in my room I had a good view of the roads leading from different plantations. From every direction I could see groups of people come running at various distances, and as it occurs when people eagerly haste after something from which they expect much pleasure, one may see the attitude of the mind in the bent of the body. So it was here. They took every short cut, the young and healthy passing the aged and the lame, and the latter pressing on with all their might, every effort telling of the eagerness of their souls to be present at a place where they might hear the marvellous of Jesus giving himself a sacrifice for sinners.

When I considered that many, if not all, of these people had thrown down their hoes in the middle of the day, left their noon meals, and foregone the little rest of which they stood so much in need for the suppprt of their bodies, under hard labour, I broke out almost involuntarily in this ejaculation: “Oh Lord Jesus! Feed these poor hungry souls with the precious word of thy sufferings and death. Oh enable thy poor unworthy servant to give them their meat in due season!”

Sowing in Tears, Reaping with Joy

The brothers Andreas Rittmansberger and John Wood landed on Barbados on 1765. Andreas promptly turned sick and died. But others came and a circle of believers formed around them until the great storm of 1780 struck the island. Hardly any house stayed standing. Absolute chaos reigned as black and white survivors struggled for survival among the ruins. When the brother John Montgomery and his wife (parents of James, the hymn writer) arrived from England in 1784 they found only fourteen believers surviving.

After six years the Montgomerys left to begin a new congregation on the island of Tobago. Daniel Gottwald and James Birkby began to work among the slaves on St. Christopher and a congregation of more than two thousand baptised believers took shape—this in spite of French invasion and a tidal wave that carried the town of Basseterre into the sea.

Christian Heinrich Rauch, who first lived among the Mohicans at Shekomeko, travelled to Jamaica where he died in 1763. But once again, his efforts bore fruit. Within a year of the arrival of the first brothers in Jamaica eight hundred or more slaves attended their meetings.

Jamaica, like Antigua, was an English Island. Some of the plantation owners were Methodists (or had come under Methodist influence) and allowed the brothers to establish the Carmel community on seven hundred acres at St. Elizabeth, and later on, Emmaus. Mesopotamia and Eden, followed, and one of the pilgrims reported:

The number of our hearers increases all the time. The preaching of the Gospel works powerfully in the hearts of the black people and changes the way they act. Some walk in true fellowship of Spirit with our Saviour and have received the assurance of the forgiveness of their sins. Others mourning because of their sins seek salvation in Jesus. Of the latter class there are about two hundred. Recently, on a Lord’s Day, a black man from an estate about fifteen miles from here [Carmel] brought me a stick marked with seven notches. Every notch he told me stands for ten slaves on that estate that pray to the Lord. About twenty of them attend meetings at a plantation called Peru. They are all unbaptised but want to receive holy baptism. The awakening spreads, and we hope that our Saviour will gather a rich harvest.²

The believers on Jamaica lived in the hope they had in Christ, but far from everything went as they would have liked. “The people of this island have all sunken in ungodliness,” wrote one of the first pilgrims on the island. “Either they serve the god of money, or else the god of their flesh.” French pirates captured Nathanael, son of Peter Braun, coming with his new wife from Pennsylvania, and took them to Sainte-Domingue (Haiti). In 1780 a hurricane flattened the Mesopotamia community and severely damaged the rest. In their first fifty years on the island, forty-seven believers from Europe died of tropical fevers. But their afflictions, compared to those of their black brothers and sisters, were light. One of them described life on the plantations:

Every morning at dawn, a shell is blown to call the slaves to work, and they all have to appear at once to join their gangs. Every gang walks off to the field under the direction of the driver, also a black man, armed with a long whip. The children, from six to twelve years old, under the care of a black woman, also armed with a rod, form another gang and go to clean the pasture or any other work suited to their strength. These black drivers are steeled against all pity and compassion, being generally as brutalised as can be. The gangs go to work all day in the sun, their only covering being a cloth tied around their loins. In digging cane holes they have to keep in line and anyone getting behind feels the driver’s whip. There is no let-up in the work, except at noon when they eat. Late in the evening, after the sun goes down, they come back weak and faint. Not infrequently they also have to keep on working by the light of the moon. Then the overseer who has kept track of how much they worked flogs those men or women with whom he is dissatisfied. They have to lie on the ground and before the whip comes down the third time, they are already covered with blood. . . . Not an evening passes without us hearing the crack of the whip and the screams of the victims. But what can we do? We are as much despised as the slaves. If we write a line to the overseer begging him to have mercy, it sometimes, but not often, helps to save one of the poor creatures. Day after day, the same toil, the same scenes continue.³

Slavery continued on the British West Indian Islands until events in England changed the situation forever. Hannah Moore, an English Christian deeply troubled by what she heard, wrote against slavery. So did William Wilberforce, a Member of Parliament, and others. Many people in England stopped buying sugar produced by slave labour, and revolts in Haiti and the Demerara Colony (at that time the world’s largest cotton producer, and one of Great Britian’s wealthiest overseas possessions) convinced the government to call for change.

In 1833 the British government—against all opposition of the planters—voted to set the slaves free. Five years later, on the stroke of midnight, August 1, 1838, when the act went into effect, three hundred and twelve thousand slaves, only on the island of Jamaica, prepared to celebrate. Thousands of them baptised believers, clothed in white, gathered at their chapels shouting, “If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed,” and praising God.

That same night, hundreds of thousands more in Barbados, Demerara, Berbice, and other British islands celebrated the end of their slavery. But nowhere did the brothers feel more deeply grateful than on the dry island of Antigua, lit up that night with the almost continual flashes of a great thunderstorm. Of the thirty thousand free men and women rejoicing in the rain, almost all belonged to the Saviour’s Gemeine.

Like Samuel Isles, pioneer of the Spring Gardens community said there before his death: “As little as one can accomplish, one likes to do what the Saviour would most have liked to do.”