Beschreibung:

Two letters. Comprising: 4 pp. Written aboard the Ship Saluda as Canfield was returning from a visit to Monrovia. 3pp.+stampless address leaf. Written at his "station" at Settra Kroo. To Walter Lowrie, Presbyterian Board of Missions, New York. The young Presbyterian Minister Oren K. Canfield had just graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary when he sailed for Liberia with his wife in August 1839 to establish a new missionary outpost. Here he describes the arrival of another white missionary and his wife, who had ill-advisedly slept ashore at their first port of call “after a long and tedious voyage”, being immediately “attacked with the fever”. Despite these perils, Canfield was cheered by the “promptness with which the servants of the Lord have come”, “the ample provisions made for our comfort and the prosecution of the mission…”, the “many messages of love and affection” he had received from America. He goes on to describe his progress in setting up a new mission. He had employed 10 carpenter and a mason (at a wage of two dollars a month) to build a school house. He was assisted by Peter Harris Jr., an “African prince” who had come to America in the 1830s, graduating from a Pennsylvania college before returning home to assist Canfield at the school. The natives had received Canfield with “great kindness”, his only opponents being the captains of trading vessels (probably engaged in the slave trade) who had tried hard “to keep me away but all their enmity has amounted to nothing. They told the people that we should spoil the trade and make them poor, some few believed it for a while but as soon as I came and talked with them their fears were all gone. There is not a man of any influence that is not on my side…” He was living in “a very comfortable native house built for me… You would hardly believe that they could with the bamboo build so good a house.” He describes his health as “very good” - but he spoke too soon. Five months later, he died of “bilious remittent fever”,