Page 296 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

CHAPTER VI

AMERICAN MISSIONARIES: FRUSTRATION AND PREPARATION

On February 20, 1830, the American ship "Morrison" from

New York stopped at the Outer Anchorage of Lintin to unload

passengers. Aboard the "Morrison" were two American Protes­

tant missionaries, David Abeel and Elijah Coleman Bridgman.

Abeel reacted like all Americans who had made the long ocean­

passage. That evening he wrote in his journal, "This after­

noon, for the first time in one hundred and twenty-seven days,

we touched our feet upon solid ground, and though a heathen

shore, far from our native land, felt a gratification peculiar

to the wave-tossed prisoner, released from his tedious confine­

ment." Several days later Abeel and Bridgman sailed up to

Canton, reaching the Foreign Factories on the evening of Feb­

ruary 25. They traveled the last ten miles of the river, from

Whampoa to Canton, in the dusk. The dense mass of boats on

the river and the great number of lamps iwhicb/ broke through

the gloom" created an ethereal scene that overwhelmed Abeel.

He described it as "more like magic, than reality, and calcu­

lated to awaken ideas, or call up visions, which seldom visit

1
collected minds in wakeful hours.11 Awed by their first sights

1
David Abeel, Journal of a Residence in China, and the
Neighboring Countries from 1829 to 1833 (New York, 1834), pp. 62,
72-73.