Thomas Coke tried and failed. The Nova Scotian colonists
in 1792 had already brought amongst them Wesleyans, Baptists, and Lady
Huntingdon's connexion. This school, which differs from other Methodists
only in Church government, still has a chapel at Sa Leone. Thus each sect
claims 1792 as the era of its commencement in the colony. In 1811 Mr.
Warren, the first ordained Wesleyan missionary, reached Freetown and died
on July 23, 1812. He was followed by Mrs. Davies, the prima donna of the
corps: she 'gathered up her feet,' as the native saying is, on December
15, 1815. Since that time the place has never lacked an unbroken
succession of European missionary deaths.
The Church Missionary Society, founded in 1799, sent out, five years
afterwards, its first representatives, MM. Renner and Hartwig, Germans
supported by English funds. In 1816 they devoted themselves steadily to
converting the 'recaptives,' and many of them, together with their wives,
fell bravely at their posts. In twenty years thirty-seven out of seventy
died or were invalided. The names of Wylander and W. A. B. Johnson are
deservedly remembered. Nearly half a million sterling was spent at Sa
Leone, where the stone church of Kissy Road was built in 1839, and that of
Pademba Road in 1849.
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