Month: July 2022

The Chronicle, 1901-1905

From March 1905
Transcription of The Chronicle of the London Missionary Society Central African Mission 1901-1905Download

We take a break from Puerto Rico content (there is a lot more to come, don’t worry) so as to bring you, my loyal reader(s), what will likely be the last segment of my transcriptions of the The Chronicle of the London Missionary Society for a while at least (please see previous segments here: 1876-1880, 1881-1885, 1886-1890, 1891-1895, 1896-1900). However don’t fret! This project is far from over. It is just that, as I alluded to at the end of the last installment, the availability of the Chronicle past 1905 becomes spotty thus making it difficult to put together full transcriptions.

What I would like to do as a next step is put together all 30 years I have transcribed so far (30 years ain’t too shabby, is it?) and extract from it useful information to guide follow-on research. I am specifically thinking at minimum an index, but I would like to compile a timeline of the Central Africa Mission and put together short biographies of all the missionaries, at least as far as their association with Central Africa and the LMS goes. Someday when I A) figure out how to apply for a research grant or something, B) apply for those grants, and C) win one, I would like to go out and find the years of the Chronicle that the internet doesn’t have yet and also of course get my butt over to London to look at all the LMS archives in the flesh. And then I dunno write a book or something? But to write a book I would also want to do a lot more research on the ground in Zambia, and we can already see this is more than a nights and weekends project. But a boy can dream.

But back to these five years, specifically (those are 1901-1905, just to recap). Since it is now tradition, I will say that this edition bucks the trend of downward word counts, coming in at about 54,000 words (the whole project is running to over 300,000, so the proofreading required for the compiled edition will take a hot minute). It also features a whopping 45 pictures, representing very nearly half of the total pictures from Central Africa the Chronicle published over the entire 30 years I have covered.

The Mission is well established at this point, even to the extent that by the end of 1905 Rev. R. Stewart Wright is talking about the work of “our early missionaries, some twenty years ago.” The Mission is, however, still expanding, setting up new bases in “Awemba Country” (Bemba in the modern parlance). Besides their drive to evangelize as much as possible, that effort was driven also by a fear of the Catholics claiming more area (there is a short article, tinged with fear, noting that the White Fathers have the rest of Lake Tanganyika surrounded by well-staffed stations, with some of their African converts being trained in medicine) as well as the not-so-hidden protagonist of this whole story, Mr. Robert Arthington, of Leeds, donating £10,000 for “the extension of mission work to the Awemba tribes” (Although Mr. Arthington died in 1900, he left a final donation to the London Missionary Society that was to only be used for new endeavors and not for the maintenance of the Society’s established endeavors, which due to some court stuff continued to cause the Society some headache throughout this period).

As illustrated by the group photo at the top, the Mission is also benefitting from being it seems less deadly to missionaries than it was in its early years. I am sure this is a byproduct of them figuring some stuff out (like in 1897 the fact that mosquitoes transmit malaria) as well as colonialism making it easier for these British people to travel around and communicate with central Africa. It was safe enough that they are regularly sending out women to the Mission, albeit it as the betrothed to missionaries already in the field (where they hop on down to the magistrate in Abercorn to get hitched) and not as missionaries in their own right. There was still danger of course, but at this point when a missionary in central Africa dies it is shocking instead of routine.

The biggest development I was pleased with at this point is that the Chronicle mentions Africans with increasing regularity. I know it’s a minor thing but hey in a literal sense at least it’s not nothing. I think a big chunk of this is that the missionaries are finally having some success in converting Africans to Christianity, once they had really settled down and had a generation of people grow up around them.

So that’s that, for now. As always, if you are finding this useful or want to swap info on the Central African Mission of the London Missionary Society, hit me up. I would be very excited to hear from you.

Click to access transcription-of-the-chronicle-of-the-london-missionary-society-central-african-mission-1901-1905.pdf

Puerto Rico II: Museos

Reading this week:

  • Between Man and Beast by Monte Reel

Our second day and full first day in Puerto Rico dawned bright and early, except it didn’t because it was delightfully dark in our room and we were on vacation. Our first destination of the day was Casa Blanca, where we arrived shortly after it had opened.

Casa Blanca is one of if not the oldest structure on the island (and is therefore one of the oldest structures still standing in the US) and was originally built as a house for Ponce de León, whose legacy we never quite saw deeply considered on the island. It kept being used for various things over the next few centuries, and eventually we got to visit it. It was a really nice museum! It wasn’t large, but admission was only $5, so not a shabby way to spend some time.

We were still getting used to the immense beauty of Puerto Rico at this point so one of the best features of Casa Blanca was its viewpoint on said beauty, which was excellent. The displays in the house itself were mostly concerned with the construction and physical history of the building, with many many “windows” into the actual brick and masonry that the building is constructed of. These windows list the various approximate dates that these building materials were placed there. One thing I was surprised at here and would continue to be surprised at was just how out in the open everything was, in that they had centuries-old artifacts just chillin’ exposed to the ocean air. My instinct is to put them under glass but I suppose if they survived a few centuries already they would survive a few centuries more.

I really enjoyed the architecture of Casa Blanca with its openness and handy-looking kitchen, but the best part (besides the stray cat curled up beneath a bench) was probably the courtyard. It was this gorgeous tree-lined space with a fountain in the middle providing a cool oasis and all that right in the heart of Old San Juan and it was great. We gotta get one of those for our place.

As the title of this blog post suggests after this museum we continued to go to more museums. The next step was the Museo de las Americas. When going there we were thwarted by several things. The first was our inability to find the front door for a bit. There was some construction and confusing signs in my defense. The next was that we were very confused why there was no one at the entrance, which we eventually figured out was because the museum was still closed. So we had a lovely brunch at a place on the ground floor and when the museum opened we dove in.

The Museo de las Americas covers a lot of topics, from the African influences on the island to contemporary art movements. When we went they had a section on a contemporary art group, “Agua, Sol y Sereno.” That group puts on a variety of performances, involving sometimes these large masks and other caricatures, many of which were on display at the museum. One performance they would put on was a commentary on the food situation in Puerto Rico, where despite the lushness of the island much of the food was imported. I was just thinking to myself that I would have liked to see that one when we discovered that they were putting on a performance at the museum in like, 15 minutes. So we got to see that! It was very good, and I think we got the gist of it largely thanks to the museum displays. However afterwards there was a discussion portion which we could not understand (it was in Spanish, you see) but were too embarrassed to leave because there was no easy way out. It was my super amazing girlfriend that was brave enough to rescue us and get out of there. Still, quite an experience!

My one other comment on the Museo de las Americas is that they and in fact many of the museums we went to were very good about contextualizing what they were putting on display. I mentioned their African exhibit and what they are doing there is going back to African traditions that were imported by enslaved persons in order to show the roots of different aspects of Puerto Rican culture. It was very good and it was far from the last place that really worked to show the sources of traditions and other cultural aspects and how Puerto Rico has transformed them to produce the culture of today. It was really great!

Puerto Rico I: Arrival in San Juan

Reading this week:

  • The House on the Lagoon by Rosario Ferré

Almost but not quite a year into our jobs, my super amazing girlfriend and I decided to take a vacation. We took that vacation to Puerto Rico and it was a blast. We had decided to go to Puerto Rico because we wanted to go somewhere exotic and foreign, but going someplace actually foreign was too much of a logistical hurdle. So, in the long tradition of exoticizing anyone with a different accent, we settled on Puerto Rico.

I am extremely harsh on us in that paragraph and this comes from guilt from seeing references to TikTok videos saying that people should stop visiting Puerto Rico. I have a lot of different thoughts on that topic and a deep interest in the United States’ territories, having lived in Guam for two years. In that vein I was very interested in visiting Puerto Rico to get a better glimpse into how the United States is treating the place and what the situation really is on the ground. Without pontificating too much based on a one week vacation, in the end I was surprised at how different Puerto Rico was. I had expected it to be a lot like Guam (which the US also took over in the Spanish-American War) but it felt much different than I expected. But first of course we had to get there.

Traveling to Puerto Rico went perfectly smoothly, and we arrived at right about lunchtime and immediately caught a ride into Old San Juan where we were going to spend a few days. Burdened with our luggage and needing to kill some time before we could check into our room, we stumbled around until we found a magnificent lunch place that I regretted not being able to rediscover the rest of our time there. While in grad school, only a whopping one year ago, I took two years of Spanish classes which were almost entirely wasted on me. I relate that to say that I didn’t know what it was that I was ordering off the menu, much to the surprise of my super amazing girlfriend, but like all the food we had in Puerto Rico it was delicious and filling. We had a couple of beers to kill some more time and basked in the literal warmth of Puerto Rico and the metaphorical warmth of being in a new and exciting place where we were bound to have memorable adventures.

When enough time had passed we head into the heart of Old San Juan to check into our room and then turned around again to see what we could see. This was great. Old San Juan is not a large place and takes like 15 minutes to walk from end to end. On this first walk we admired the park filled with pigeons, various old chapels/churches/cathedrals, and did some touristy photos in and amongst the colorful streets. The most gorgeous part was when we hit the north side of town and got our first look at El Morro, and the massive field in front where people were flying kites in the late evening. As we walked around a cargo ship drove right by El Morro and into the harbor, which of course I was gaga for.

Heading southward, we were then delighted to find all the street cats. We eventually made our way down to the Parque de Los Gatos, though man that park is an absolutely minefield for cat poop. Despite that the views of the harbor were beautiful and we took a bunch of selfies, as one does. We then headed down through the San Juan gate and strolled along the waterfront, taking many more selfies along the way. We proceeded to a pre-dinner Sangria at a tapas place before settling into a bar to get some grouper and fried plantains for dinner. On a short post-dinner walk (to aid in the digestion of course) we poked around even more of Old San Juan, and I admired people’s windows where there was no glass but only wooden bars, making an intimate connection between the street and their living room. Then it was back to our room to chill for the night and prepare for a big day two.

Goddard Space Flight Center

My super amazing girlfriend is, as I like to mention here, super amazing. One facet of her super amazingness is that when you read this (admittedly you are likely her, hi hon!) she will be working for NASA!!!! This is super cool, and is a reflection and not a cause of her super coolness. But seeing as when I am writing this she is not yet working for NASA, we decided to see if we couldn’t learn a thing or two about the coolest space agency and so we went to Goddard Space Flight Center to check it out!

The visitor’s center for Goddard is small but mighty, much like the rockets they have on display in the backyard. I had been to Goddard once before, when I was but a wee little lad in the Boy Scouts but didn’t remember much of it. Admission is free and when you go in it is almost entirely in one large room full of space stuff:

In addition to the one large room there is a “solarium” which is playing videos of the sun’s surface, and another movie theater which is playing videos that are about space and stuff. I assume they are somewhere in Goddard’s surprisingly impressive YouTube channel.

The special treat the day we visited is that they were doing rocket launches. Unfortunately the Delta rocket they have in the backyard stayed put (it could use a coat of paint), but what they launched were a bunch of model rockets. This was the first time they had done it since the pandemic, but it turns out the first Sunday of every month you can bring your model rocket and they’ll launch it off for you which is an extremely fun way to do model rocketry and have a nice day at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Only a few of the rockets wound up in the trees. Here is a gif of the first launch for your pleasure:

I have failed to find a way to fit this in narratively but I wanted to say that my clearest memory of my childhood visit to Goddard was the story told by the guy (one of the fellow Scouts’ dad) who brought us there. He worked at Goddard (hence the visit) and he was telling us that some of his fellow satellite designers were trying to figure out how to design a fluid ring, which is a uh ring of um fluid that somehow helps satellites stay stable when they’re up there is space. They used to be used all the time on satellites but NASA had gone away from them in favor of more advanced technology or something (look I was a little kid and I don’t work at NASA unlike my super amazing girlfriend the details are sketchy). But they were going back to them due to budget cuts or something, but everyone had forgotten how to design them. But this dude (the dad) mentioned to them that one of the satellites hanging in the visitor’s center had one, so they marched on down there to check it out and it saved the day or something like that. Anyways this is a good excuse to always keep old junk around.

Of all the objects at the visitor’s center I think the one I was most fascinated with was the above piece of equipment, which fitted over a component of the Hubble Space Telescope they needed to repair or replace and was used to capture screws. I dunno, just like, kinda neat, and also it is a perfect piece of NASA engineering, for better or for worse. Also excellent colors! Some really great craftsmanship went into that piece and all to capture screws. I was impressed.

Besides that the other thing I think I learned the most about was probably the James Webb telescope. They spent a few decades building it right there at Goddard and so they were fairly proud of it. I hadn’t actually quite realized what it looked like until I saw a scale model, nor realized how far away from Earth and the moon it was really orbiting. They also had full-sized mirror mockups and the dang thing is just extremely impressive and I am excited to see the images it produces. I think by the time this is published those photos will have been published which will be cool.

And then finally our trip concluded with a visit to the gift shop, where they had a surprising amount of cat-themed souvenirs and a bunch of other cool NASA stuff. I noted the other day to my super amazing girlfriend that just given the relative volume of Space with everything that is Not Space, most museums should in fact be Space Museums and this visit solidified that sentiment for both of us. Going to Goddard doesn’t really take very long but it is an excellent visitor’s center and it was a hoot checking out space stuff with my super amazing girlfriend. I am very excited to see all the cool stuff my super amazing girlfriend learns actually working for them. Gonna be a blast!

Naval Academy

Reading this week:

  • Sketches from the Dark Continent by Willis R. Hotchkiss

The very next day after our exciting adventure in Baltimore visiting Fort McHenry and the Walters Art Museum my super amazing girlfriend and I doubled down on our Maryland weekend and went to Annapolis! We did several very fun things, include getting ice cream and checking out my favorite used bookstore. Although my super amazing girlfriend and I had visited Annapolis together before, and done these very things, there was a difference this time around: we could visit the Naval Academy!

Last time we went to Annapolis the Naval Academy was closed to visitors because of course there was a pandemic on. Some things have changed (and some haven’t), but the restriction on the Academy was no longer true and we could visit at will. My super amazing girlfriend was extremely interested in visiting the Academy, because in much the same way that Captain America was made in a lab, I was made in Santee Basin. So she wanted to see the place at the Naval Academy did not disappoint.

We started at the Visitors Center because they had bathrooms. While there I was delighted to discover the one of my absolute favorite parts of the Academy was housed there, namely 3-0 Jack Dalton. 3-0 Jack Dalton is the stuffed goat in the photo at the top. He was the only Naval Academy mascot not named Bill, and the reason I like him is because he is a century-old stuffed goat that the Academy clearly doesn’t quite know what to do with. I have been going to the Naval Academy since I was but a wee lad, and I think I remember that goat near the ice rink, back when there was an ice rink in Dahlgren instead of across the river. The last I saw him he was in the Midshipmen Activities Center, and now he is stuck awkwardly in a hallway in the Visitor Center, greeting the legions of kids who want to be Midshipmen someday and haven’t quite realized what they’re signing up for yet. This blog post will not feature any cannons, though my one complaint about the Naval Academy decorating scheme is that it is full of cannons they clearly feel they can’t get rid of anymore because now they are Historic instead of just Old. In the same way, I assume at some point you can’t just put your century-old stuffed goat on ebay.

I am going out of timeline order here, but this seems like a good time to say that another place I was especially excited to show my super amazing girlfriend is the other preserved old dead thing at the Naval Academy, ie the Crypt of John Paul Jones. I still think it is Very Strange that the Naval Academy has a crypt. I mean, I like it, I’m a big John Paul Jones fan, me and my super amazing girlfriend rode around on one of his boats just the other weekend (the Providence), and so to be absolutely clear I am entirely for having a crypt. But like I also went to Yale, the whole school is very consciously Oxford cosplay, and yet I don’t think they have a crypt. Any real ones anyways. They want to claim Skull and Bones but do they actually have any skulls, or for that matter any bones? Anyone at all preserved in booze? I think not. Anyways the crypt was nice, I think my super amazing girlfriend was impressed, I can’t believe it exists.

But to back up a bit. After a peak around the Visitors Center I took my super amazing girlfriend on an absolutely terrible tour of the Naval Academy. It probably wasn’t so bad but I was interested in all the places I used to wander around and not necessarily like, the picturesque places the normal tours take you on. This was probably a good decision though because she was blown away by how gorgeous the view is off of Farragut (I should link to a map at this point). I wanted to drag her off to the sailing center so we could check out the boats. I talk about sailing all the time so I wanted to show her the boats I used to sail, and I was over the moon that my favorite boat was there! My favorite boat is the one I am pictured with above, the NA-23 Defiance. This is my favorite boat because I sailed this boat to Bermuda one time and I enjoyed that trip! Our crew was the first to really actually sail that boat, it was brand new when we got her. She is still looking absolutely gorgeous. This is what you can do when you have a budget.

After this I dragged her past all the academic buildings. At each academic building I pointed to it and was like “I used to go to classes in there.” I even pointed to the little Chemistry Majors Study Room at Michelson where I probably spent most of my time. Then it was off to the Naval Academy Museum so we could stare at all sorts of artifacts. By this time we were kinda pooped actually so it was a bit of a whirlwind tour. I was mostly looking for pictures of myself, because I am so important and all, but alas while there was some Class of 2011-specific stuff there was no me. Oh well. I did make sure that we went upstairs to the real centerpiece of the museum, which were all the old model ships they have. Look at this impressive piece! 400 years old!

From there to round out our Naval Academy experience we went and visited the Chapel. The Chapel is the big centerpiece of the Naval Academy layout which is weird. I spent a lot of time in that place as a kid because that is where my family went to church and I hated it. An absolutely massive waste of time every weekend. But it is a fairly impressive building. Looking around I did appreciate all the stained glass windows. They are of course extremely heavy on the oceans/seas/boats theme, and I admire the dedication. The pews where my family typically sat were up on the right, in front of the below window:

Instead of Jesus or whatever boring stuff other people put into their church windows, this is Admiral Farragut lashed to the rigging in the Battle of Mobile Bay, presumably around the time he apocryphally yelled “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” which, you know, hells yeah. So the chapel has that going for it at any rate.

From there we head out and off the Naval Academy to do the one thing my super amazing girlfriend has always wanted to do in Maryland: absolutely devour some crabs. So we went to the place you gotta go, Cantler’s. Having cleverly waited until the lunch rush was over, we only had to wait for an hour. The crabs were served up almost right away, and after only a few warm up swings my super amazing girlfriend was happily hammering away at some absolutely delectable and second-to-none Maryland blue crab. Truly a fitting lunch for such a wonderful day in Annapolis.