In the mid-1800s, Christian missionaries were leaving Europe and America to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ in some of the darkest regions on earth. They brought a message of love, hope and freedom. Many gave their lives fighting inequality and slavery, even when it was widely accepted as a normal practice among the non-Christian nations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Unfortunately, however, there are a few missionaries who, instead of being a light in the darkness, brought a darkness of their own.
In our most recent book, God’s Renegade, the true story of Germany’s first missionary to China, Karl Gutzlaff comes face to face with the legacy of a missionary who beat, raped, and traded slaves. The following is a free look at two dark chapters of Karl Gutzlaff’s experience after he arrived on the mission field.
The following events really happened and was pieced together from various letters, journals, and missionary records.
CHAPTER SIX
The Dark Missionary
The joy of the Lord is my strength, Karl thought, looking out over the massive blue ocean of endless, crashing waves, breathing in the excitement of adventure. He thought of the deadly days at sea that J.T. van der Kemp survived before arriving at the Cape of Good Hope.
Karl was on board the Helena Christina, a solid ship that splashed across the surface of the open waters with relative ease. He sat on the bow of the ship, thinking that if the joy of the Lord never runs out, then the supply of strength is never-ending. What a sadness, he thought, for those who feel there is no more joy to experience, no more adventures to discover, no more amazements to be experienced, no more new sensations to feel, no more thrills to be enjoyed. A life lived without the joy of the Lord is condemned to reside in a prison, bankrupt of astonishments.
Waking up in the morning on the open sea, on the way to a completely different world, brings with it the feeling that the world is brand new, one that human eyes have never seen before. And when the day is done, it will never be seen again. Karl felt the joy of the Lord in relishing each day as a new adventure.
The crew of the ship celebrated the new year, and now they were very close to Batavia, one of the most important trade cities in Asia. The city was also known as Jakarta and had been a buzzing hub for European trad- ers for over two hundred years. Batavia had mainly been under the rule of the Dutch, with the Vereenigde Oost-Idische Compagnie (the Dutch East Indies Company) in control, but in recent years, a British invasion had disrupted things.
On January 6, 1827, the Helena Christina pulled into the port of Batavia. Karl smelled the port long before he could see it. Draining into the harbour from every direction were canals of raw sewage. The waste of tens of thousands of people flowed into the open waters and was eventually diluted by the ocean, but the harbour was a giant cesspool of fermented waste splash- ing back and forth against every ship.
Karl stepped out of his cabin and gazed upon the island for the first time, feeding his eyes with an endless range of volcanic mountains and thickly forested jungles stretching down to the edge of the water. On one side were many small islands that continued outward, dotting the horizon. The city itself was perched upon the high ground.
The Helena Christina anchored alongside about fifty other ships of many sizes and from several different countries, of which many seemed to be Chinese. It was truly an international harbour.
Karl gathered his things and stood outside on the deck, eager to get to shore, which was no easy task. The only access to the city was through the Haven Kanaal (harbour canal), the entrance of which extended between two seawalls through the marshy shoreline to the Batavia Roads where ships could anchor. It was more of a sewer drain than a canal. When Karl finally arrived at the dockside pier, he had to go through the Kleine Boom, which was the customs house for Batavia, to clear his luggage before entering the city. Outside of customs was a slender balding man standing in the middle of the throng looking at him as if he were a familiar friend.
“Karl Gutzlaff?” the slender man asked, stretching his hand forward. “I’m Walter Medhurst,” he said after the handshake. “This is my wife, Betty, and this is our five-year-old son, Walt.” He stood erect and looked back at him, grinning, “Welcome to Batavia!” Karl smiled. He was genuinely glad someone was there to meet him. He had heard the horror stories of Robert Morrison’s first trips to different locations where he did not know a soul.
“Follow us. Our team will load your things in the wagons. We still have a few miles to the mission compound.”
They took the horse and carriages along an avenue with a canal lined with trees called Molenvliet (Mill Way) about five miles inland from the port. The mission compound was in a sector called Weltevreden. Once they arrived, Medhurst showed Karl around the mission compound to get him familiar with everything.
“The mission centre has been in a constant state of construction and expansion,” he said. The chapel had just been built recently and included a vestry, a library, a school room, a printing office, and living quarters. The living quarters had a place for visitors, where Karl would be sleeping. The main quarters were where Medhurst stayed with his wife and son. Betty’s sister lived with them, had studied Chinese, and was teaching in the classroom.
“I didn’t know how I would be received,” Karl said as he walked around with Medhurst, “but you and your family have been extremely warm.”
“Of course! Robert Morrison arrived here just before you and gave a glowing report about you. You must have really impressed him.”
“Dr. Robert Morrison came here?” Karl asked, surprised.
“Well, he actually came to Anjier, which is about sixty-five miles from here. I met him there. I have worked for him for over a decade, but it was actually his assistant, Dr. Milne, whom I worked with. Since Dr. Morrison was so far away working with Chinese in Canton and Macau, I never actu- ally met him until this trip.”
“It is amazing what you have done in such a short time here. I am eager to work with you,” Karl said.
“We haven’t done as much as you think,” Medhurst said, shaking his head. “There are things that have happened here that the world might never know about.”
“The mission field is full of challenges,” Karl said, trying to remain optimistic. “All I know is that I am excited to learn from you. Dr. Robert Morri- son told me so many good things about you.”
“The challenges are understood when they are from the world, but when they are from fellow Christians, that is an entirely different matter.” Medhurst paused, looked at the ground, and said, “Be careful when men build other men up to be larger than life. Be very careful.”
The silence lingered until Medhurst finally broke the tension. “You see that chapel there,” he said, pointing at the building he had just taken Karl on a tour of.
Karl nodded.
“When I first came here, that chapel was nothing more than a bamboo hut. It wasn’t much, but it represented everything to me. It represented simplicity and the pioneer spirit. I was like you, eager to learn and ready to work. My mentor was the great Reverend John Slate. Ah . . . Rev. Slate could preach a powerful message; that’s what everyone told me. Robert Morrison was not known for his great oratory abilities and his assistant, Dr. Milne, was a better teacher than a preacher, but Rev. Slate . . . he was a reverend’s reverend. He could bring the house down with his fiery sermons. That was why the London Missionary Society jumped at the chance when he volunteered to be a missionary and it was why I did everything I could to work with him here in Batavia. My heart was in China, but Rev. Slate was in Batavia, so I came here.”
Karl sat on a bench that had been placed facing the yard. He was tired, but had never been so eager to learn.
“The Rev. Slate came here to Botavia and paved the way for missionaries like me. When I arrived, he was standing there waiting for me, just as I was waiting for you today. His welcome was as warm as any welcome could be. I was so excited to hear him preach the Gospel in that bamboo chapel, but when I heard him preach for the first time, it wasn’t at all what I expected. It was not fiery. It was not anything, really. Do you know what shocked me the most?”
Karl shook his head. “What shocked me the most was that he preached in English. We have a
bamboo chapel here ready to minister among the locals. Batavia has more Chinese than any other city in Asia, and he didn’t even attempt to share the Gospel in Chinese. Instead, he preached in English, and the message was mediocre at best.”
Medhurst rubbed his chin and leaned into Karl. It seemed strange to Karl that the little bit of hair had the ability to form two cowlicks on each side of his head, both of equal length, and hover over the bare spot like the trees that hung over the canal on Molenvliet.
“Something didn’t seem right in my spirit. Betty felt it too, but we didn’t know what it was, until the first night we slept here. As soon as the sun went down and all was dark, we heard the most horrible sounds of screaming and crying. The sounds were the worst cries and pleas for help that you have ever heard. Do you know what they were?”
Karl shook his head again.
“We didn’t know either. The next day we asked the Slates about the sounds and they both got really quiet. Wouldn’t even whisper a word. I began to think maybe it was a spirit from the haunted jungles. I was determined to cast the spirit out, but the next night I heard the sound again, and if it weren’t from my wife, Betty, I would have thought my mind was playing tricks on me. So one day I went and asked the helpers working here in the compound and they were too scared to tell me in English, so they switched to their native tongue. And they told me that the sounds of screams at night were Mrs. Jamima Slate being beaten by the reverend.”
Karl audibly gasped.
“I wish that were the worst of it. I am not one to get involved in a family’s business, but as a Christian man, I had an obligation.”
“What did you do?” Karl asked.
“I doubted my own ears. I couldn’t believe what they were hearing, so I asked them if they had ever actually seen the reverend beat his wife. Not only had they seen it, they experienced it. He beat them on a regular basis too!”
“Why didn’t they go to the police?”
“Because they were slaves.”
“What?” Karl asked in disbelief. “Slaves?”
“Yes. The workers could not go to the police when the reverend beat them because they were not free men and women. The reverend bought them!”
“But slavery is illegal,” Karl blurted out.
“Illegal in England, but not illegal here. When I went to the reverend to confront him about this, he didn’t deny it. He embraced it. He used the Bible to argue for it!”
“And he beat them?”
“He beat everyone. He was an extremely violent man. I watched him get angry at his horse one day in town because it was acting a bit sluggish. The reverend pulled out a thick wooden club and beat the horse over the head so violently that the horse dropped down right there.”
“What did you do?”
“What could I do? I had to confront him, but before anything could be discussed, he packed up and left for Singapore.”
“Singapore?”
“He said he needed some time away. I was the junior missionary here, so I didn’t have many choices. I wanted to write to Dr. Milne and ask for his advice, but he got sick with tuberculosis and was near death at that time. I wanted to write to Dr. Morrison and ask him, but he was travelling to cover for Milne and then returned to England, where you met him.”
“Did the reverend ever return?”
“He did, but not before one of his slave girls told me the ugly truth about what else had happened.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Darkness at the Compound
“The slave girl didn’t dare mention it when the reverend was around,” Medhurst explained, “but she had a dark secret. I don’t know what made her feel she could trust me, but she did.”
“What did she say?”
“She said that he raped the female slaves.”
Karl was speechless. The Medhurst family had been serving in Batavia on their own and their local leader was a violent, wife-beating, slave-trading rapist.
“How did she know that he raped the female slaves?” Karl asked, hoping it could all be a huge misunderstanding.
“She knew because he raped her.” They both sat in silence after the words broke the evening air. The children could be heard distantly playing inside the house. “And she was not with the first batch of slaves who were on the mission compound,” Medhurst continued. “The reverend made money buying and selling slaves. Before he returned from Singapore, he bought two slaves from Penang, and while aboard the ship, he beat them so badly that the captain of the ship had to intervene. The captain was a man by the name”— he looked up into the air, searching the recesses of his mind to remember the name—“Captain Dickey. That was his name. Captain Dickey, keep- ing the anti-slavery laws of England, removed the two young lads from the reverend’s custody and sent them back to Singapore. The reverend had beaten the boys so badly that when a Singaporean missionary by the name of Thomas Beighton received them, he didn’t know if they would walk again. He wrote directly to the Missionary Society, saying, ‘Tears of pity were shed when the poor boy’s back was exposed.’”
“How did you hear about that?” Karl asked.
“The Society told me. Both the captain and the missionary reported the incidents to the Society. The missionary in Singapore, Thomas Beighton, had also witnessed the reverend loading a gun after he beat his wife. It turns out, as indicated by a letter, that the London Missionary Society had already seen signs of his violent nature even before he was sent to the field, but because the reverend was such a sought-after speaker, they over- looked them.”
Karl shook his head. He never thought he would ever hear anything like this on the mission field.
“When he returned, I had no choice but to confront him. I went through all the property contracts and discovered that everything was legally in his name. I didn’t know what would happen to the mission facilities if I forced him out. I didn’t know what the Mission Society would say about him. It would be months after his return before I would get any indication of how they felt, but I couldn’t stand by and do nothing.”
“What did you do?”
“I handed him a resignation letter and a pen and told him to sign the paper and leave.”
“Did he sign it?”
“I didn’t give him a choice! He balked, but he signed the paper, slammed the pen down on the desk, and stormed out of the room and never came back.”
“Then?”
“The reverend went and found the slave girl who had revealed what he had been doing to her. He beat her so badly that her body was maimed. She managed to get to the police, but the police returned her back to him. He then took her to a slave auction and tried to make money off of her, but no one wanted to buy her. Eventually, the reverend found a very crude captain of a Chinese junk who bought her and we never saw her again.”
“Did he return home?”
“No, and he didn’t return to the compound. He had another property here in Batavia he had acquired some time ago. He was there for a few months before he got sick with what we call the Batavia fever. He died a year and a half ago, in September. It was a horrible situation. His wife was left with nothing. She had two children, and she was pregnant. She gave birth here, but the baby died as soon as he was born. It was hard for everyone.”
“When did she leave for England?”
“She never did. The day before her boat was to set sail, she died of the very same fever that her husband did, leaving her two children orphaned. She had a sister in Edinburgh and a brother in the Royal Marines. We contacted them both about the children, but the two are still here with us. We keep a picture of both the reverend and Jamima in their room so that they can remember them.”
**
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