Missionaries Before Airplanes

H

ow did Adventist missionaries travel before the invention of the airplane? A lot of the time, they traveled by ship.

Adventist missionary Stephen N. Haskell once had to rush to catch his boat to Australia. That ship, the Thermopylae, had reached Cape Town, South Africa, on September 16, 1896, at 4:00 PM, a day earlier than he expected.

“As I was in one of the suburbs, it left me only an hour after receiving the telegram,” he reported to the readers of the November 17, 1896, issue of the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, “to finish packing, secure a cab, and drive four miles to the dock” for the ship’s departure less than five hours after it arrived, at 8:40 PM.

Part of the Aberdeen White State Line, the Thermopylae traveled monthly between London, England; Cape Town, South Africa; and Melbourne, Australia, and carried passengers and freight (mostly Australian wool). The second ship bearing this name (the first being one of the most magnificent clipper ships ever built), the steamer Thermopylae was launched in 1891 and eventually shipwrecked in 1899, three years after Haskell’s voyage.

Haskell reported to the Review: “The voyage was not a pleasant one for the passengers. It was very cold and boisterous,” and to give his readers an idea of the crossing, he quoted extensively from the captain’s report of the voyage, which was also printed in the Melbourne newspapers upon their arrival.

The temperature dropped rapidly, snow fell heavily, sometimes mixed with hail, and the seas were high with occasional gale-force winds. The ship went far enough south that icebergs were spotted; the report details one iceberg that was “over half a mile long, and six hundred and forty feet high.”

The captain logged more than 100 icebergs in “a space one thousand miles long by twenty miles wide” and speculated there were more unseen in the dark, heavy snow. Haskell commented, “These large islands of ice, moving amid the foaming billows, and at times covered by the white spray, are truly to be numbered with the wonders of the deep.” They saw their last iceberg on September 26.

Haskell also spoke highly of the Thermopylae’s captain, Alexander Simpson, a well-known man of his profession, calling him “a social Scotchman,” and Haskell observed that Simpson “made daily visits to his bedridden passengers, speaking encouraging words to them.”

Despite the rough weather, Haskell stated that the other passengers and the crew “went far toward making the voyage a pleasant one, and we enjoyed much of the blessing of God.”

The Thermopylae arrived in Melbourne on October 6, 1896, and Haskell was met by people he knew, which made him glad, as it would probably make all of us after such a journey!