Mary Slessor's Decision to Go to Calabar

I was sorting hymnals in the vestry when the letter arrived from the Mission Board. Mary stood by the door, the envelope still in her hand, the afternoon light catching the red in her hair. She did not smile at once. She asked if I would walk with her to the river wall so she could read it aloud without the others crowding in.

The words were plain. They had accepted her for Calabar. She folded the paper carefully, as though it might tear, and said only that she must tell her mother before the evening service. I watched her shoulders settle under the weight of it, the same way they settled when a loom beam jammed and she knew the fix would take all night.

Three days later she packed for Edinburgh. The training course would last three months. She left most of her good dresses behind and took only two changes of plain cotton. Before the train pulled out she pressed a small parcel into my hands for her mother and sisters, the weekly amount she had been sending from her weaver’s wages. She said the Board would pay her now, but the money must still reach Dundee.

I kept the household informed while she was away. Her letters came every fortnight. One described the lectures on tropical fevers and another the drills in simple medicine. She wrote that her hands, already quick from the loom, found the dispensary work familiar. She did not mention loneliness. When the three months ended she returned to Dundee thinner, her skirts shortened by two inches, and announced she would cut her hair before sailing.

The Wishart congregation met after the Sunday service to present the gold watch. The minister spoke of the years she had taught the infants’ class and visited the sick. Mary stood with her hands folded, eyes on the floorboards. When they placed the watch in her palm she thanked them once and said the time it kept would be spent where it was most needed. She did not promise to return.

On the fourth of August I travelled with her party to Liverpool. The docks smelled of tar and fish. The SS Ethiopia lay at the quay, her hull streaked with soot. Mary’s trunk was small enough for one man to carry. She wore the shortened skirt and a plain blouse, her hair already cropped close beneath a cotton bonnet. At the gangway she turned and gave me the watch to hold for a moment, as though testing its weight one last time. Then she took it back, climbed the plank, and did not look over the rail again.

The voyage lasted five weeks. I received two letters posted from the ship. In the first she described the heat that settled on the decks after the Bay of Biscay and the way the other passengers still dressed for church on Sundays. In the second she wrote that she had begun to study the Efik phrases the captain’s steward knew. She asked me to tell the infants’ class she would send them drawings of the birds she saw.

Duke Town appeared on a morning of heavy rain. The mission house stood above the mud huts, its corrugated roof glinting. Missionaries who had been there since the forties came down to the landing stage. Mary stepped ashore carrying her own bag. Within a week she was teaching in the schoolroom and measuring quinine in the dispensary. She ate the local yam porridge because it cost less than tinned meat from home, and the difference went straight back to Dundee.

Her first letters from Calabar described the children who came barefoot and stayed to learn the alphabet. She noted the sound of the language in her own mouth and how quickly the women in the market began to answer her. She stopped wearing the heavy bonnets the other women kept and went about with a cloth tied over her head. The red hair and the Dundonian vowels still marked her out, yet the people began to call her by an Efik name within the month.

I kept every letter. When the next party sailed from Liverpool the following year I sent a bundle of cloth and needles with them, marked for Mary Slessor. She wrote back that the needles had been useful in the dispensary for removing splinters. She had already begun walking the smaller paths beyond Duke Town, sometimes alone, sometimes with one of the older Christian men as guide.

The gold watch remained on her person. In later letters she mentioned winding it each morning before the sun rose. The time it marked was now the time of the village drums and the tide on the Cross River. She never asked for replacements or repairs. She simply noted the date of each letter and the work done that week.

Years after, when visitors from Scotland reached her station farther upriver, they brought back word that the watch still kept accurate time. She used it to measure the intervals between fever bouts in the children and the hours she could safely travel before dark. The congregation that had given it never saw her again, yet the object continued to divide her days exactly as she had promised it would.

In the spring of 1888 a letter from the Calabar mission secretary, the Reverend Alexander Ross, reached the Wishart manse with the date 15 March marked at the top. Mary had left Duke Town on the Cross River steamer and landed at the Okoyong beach three days earlier with two Christian carriers and a box of quinine. She settled first at Ekenge in a mud-walled house roofed with palm thatch that measured twelve feet by fourteen. Chief Edem, whose compound stood two hundred yards away, sent yams and plantains each morning. By June she had opened a school for twenty-seven children and recorded in her own hand that seventeen of them could already spell the Efik words for “house” and “water.” The gold watch stayed on a string around her neck during the day and rested on a wooden stool beside her mat at night.

Two years later, in October 1890, she wrote from the same clearing that twins had been born in the next village. The mother had been driven into the bush according to custom. Mary walked the five miles alone, reached the woman before nightfall, and carried both infants back wrapped in her own cloth. She named the surviving girl Mary and the boy William Anderson after the Glasgow secretary who had first recommended her. The Board minute book for 1891 records that she drew an extra allowance of eight pounds for their keep. By 1895 she had taken in five more children whose names appear in her letters as Janie, Alice, Maggie, Okon, and Etim. Each child received a portion of the monthly stipend the mission paid her, listed as thirty-five shillings.

In December 1892 the British consul, Major Claude MacDonald, appointed her vice-consul for the Okoyong district. The formal commission, dated 2 December, gave her authority to hear cases and impose fines up to five pounds. She held court under a cottonwood tree, the watch open on the table before her. One recorded judgment from 3 February 1893 fined a man two goats for destroying a neighbour’s yam mounds. The same year she built a timber chapel at Ekenge that seated one hundred and twenty people on benches made from packing cases. The dedication service took place on 11 June 1893, and the text she chose for the sermon was written out in her letter as “I will make a way in the wilderness.”

By 1902 the station had moved four miles closer to the river at Use. She supervised the cutting of a road wide enough for a handcart and laid the foundations of a brick house whose walls reached eight feet before the rains stopped work. The mission ledger shows she ordered two hundred and forty sheets of corrugated iron, shipped from Liverpool on the SS Bonny and landed at Creek Town on 14 July 1904. The house was finished in 1905. She kept the same watch, now on a leather strap, and noted in a letter dated 9 January 1908 that it had lost only two minutes since the previous Christmas.

Her health reports appear in the annual medical returns sent to Edinburgh. In 1910 she suffered twelve attacks of malaria and recorded the exact hours between the first chill and the sweating stage. A visitor, Dr. John Hitchcock of the Church of Scotland Mission, examined her on 4 March 1914 and wrote that her pulse remained regular at seventy-two beats per minute. She continued to travel, once covering twenty-three miles in a single day to reach a village where a chief had requested arbitration. The last letter she posted herself is dated 2 January 1915 and addressed to her sister in Dundee. It ends with the sentence “The watch keeps good time still.”

She died at Use on 13 January 1915 at half past nine in the morning. The mission nurse, Miss Martha Peacock, noted the time from the same gold watch that was later sent to Edinburgh. The body was carried by canoe to Duke Town and buried on 15 January beside the graves of earlier missionaries in the cemetery above the river. The stone records only her name, the year of arrival, and the year of death. In 1953 the Eastern Nigerian government erected a bronze statue of her at the Calabar waterfront. The plaque gives the dates 1848–1915 and the single word “Missionary.” A second statue stands in the courtyard of the Wishart Church in Dundee, cast in 1961 from the same measurements. The original watch is preserved in the Dundee Museum under accession number 1963-47; its case still bears the inscription presented by the congregation on the fourth of August 1876.

The Reverend William Wilkie wrote from Duke Town on 20 March 1915 that the Okoyong people had carried palm fronds to the grave and placed them along the path from the landing stage. He recorded that Chief Edem’s son, now called Daniel, read the burial service in Efik from the same primer Mary had printed in 1894. The mission ledger for that quarter lists the cost of the headstone at four pounds eight shillings, paid from the special fund opened in Edinburgh after her death. Wilkie added that the gold watch had been packed in cotton wool and forwarded by the next steamer, arriving at the Board offices on 11 May.

Janie Slessor, the girl Mary had named after her own mother, remained at Use and opened a second classroom in 1917. The Eastern Nigeria Education Report for 1918 shows thirty-four pupils enrolled under her name, with attendance marked daily at eight in the morning by the same watch now kept in the mission safe. Janie wrote to the Wishart congregation on 4 September 1919 that she had planted two mango trees beside the brick house and that the older children still wound the watch each Sunday before the service. She drew an extra allowance of twelve shillings a month for lamp oil used in the evening literacy class.

In 1923 the Church of Scotland Mission transferred the Use station to the newly formed United Free Church, and the annual report lists the property as four acres with the original eight-foot brick walls still standing. The handcart road Mary had cut reached the river by 1929, and the district officer’s map of that year marks the route as “Slessor’s Path.” A visitor from Dundee, Thomas Caird, noted in his journal on 12 February 1931 that the cottonwood tree under which she had held court remained, its trunk now measuring eleven feet around at chest height.

The Eastern Nigerian government placed a second plaque at the Use site in 1956, recording the exact coordinates six miles north of Creek Town and the number of children she had taken in, listed as nine. After independence the Calabar Museum acquired the original school bench made from packing cases; its label gives the date of construction as June 1893 and the maker as Okon, one of the boys named in her 1895 letters. The bronze statue at the waterfront was cleaned and re-dedicated on 13 January 1965, the fiftieth anniversary of her death, with the governor reading the same text she had chosen for the Ekenge chapel dedication.

In 1978 the Dundee Museum received a further donation from the Slessor family in Aberdeen: the leather strap she had used after 1905, together with a note dated 9 January 1908 in her hand stating the daily loss of two minutes. Accession records show the watch was opened for inspection on 3 March 1984; the movement number 14782 matched the Liverpool supplier’s invoice preserved in the Board archives. A descendant of Chief Edem, now living in Calabar, visited the museum in 1994 and signed the visitors’ book with the Efik name the people had given her within the first month of arrival.

The Mary Slessor Foundation, registered in Calabar in 2002, maintains the Use clearing and records that the brick house walls still stand at eight feet despite three major rains. Its annual report for 2015 lists the number of visitors as 2,847, each given a printed copy of the 11 June 1893 dedication text. The foundation’s current director, Mrs. Grace Edem, is the great-granddaughter of the chief who sent yams each morning in 1888; she keeps a photocopy of the 2 December 1892 consular commission framed in the office beside the river.

On 13 January 2015 a small group from the Wishart congregation placed a wreath at the Dundee statue. One member, the great-niece of the woman who had sorted hymnals in 1876, carried a photograph taken at the graveside in 1915 showing the mission nurse Martha Peacock holding the watch. The image, printed on postcard stock by a Calabar studio, measures four inches by six and bears the handwritten date 15 January 1915 on the reverse. It remains in the museum’s archive under the same accession number as the watch itself.

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