Gone to China: Risk and Reward in the Travel Diaries of Martha Foster Crawford

Martha Foster Crawford thought that she would literally die.

Hagiographical stories of missionary wives who had succumbed in the foreign field, one at the age of only nineteen, circulated broadly in her evangelical world. These deaths seemed to confirm the widespread belief, in part fostered by missionary women themselves, that tropical and subtropical climates were deadly to female constitutions. When Crawford herself, following a bout of ill health and spiritual crisis in the autumn of 1849, rededicated her life to missionary service, she thought she knew what it meant: an early grave, far from home. She pressed forward nonetheless, and over the course of slightly more than a year, broke off an engagement to her cousin, had an application sent on her behalf to the Southern Baptist Board of Foreign Missions, and, after a three-week courtship, married a fellow applicant for missionary service, both of them thereby surmounting the Board’s reluctance to employ unwed women or men. Less than a year later, she and her new husband set sail from New York Harbor en route to China.^[1]

I came across Crawford’s diaries in the summer of 2014, when I was in Washington, DC, on break from my job teaching history and English at China Agricultural University’s International College Beijing. Unlike Crawford, I had gone to China not out of missionary fervor (as an agnostic, that would have been odd) but from a need to refocus my career after a grueling contract had finished on not entirely favorable terms, and also to see a bit more of the world.

I spent much of those sweltering weeks in DC in the Library of Congress, digitally scanning secondary works in the glorious main reading room and gathering primary sources in the bowels of the Manuscript Division. I did not intend to pursue a project on China, but when I stumbled upon the finding aid for Crawford’s diaries, how could I resist? These diaries, available in microfilm via the Southern Women and their Families series and digitally through Duke University, are a goldmine of information about courtship, women’s education, religion, ocean travel, missionary life, and yes, China, as experienced by a woman with evangelical preconceptions but also a keen, almost anthropological eye for detail.

The differences between my China experiences and Crawford’s began with our modes of travel. While my “voyage” comprised a sixteen-hour flight on a 747, hers lasted from November 1851 through February 1852. Its early difficulties both confirmed Crawford’s expectation that the mission field would be replete with danger, and reaffirmed her confidence in her own salvation. Seasickness set in almost as soon as her ship had lost sight of land. “About five I took my last view of the land of my birth … the home of the dear ones I have left forever,” she wrote, adding, “Before dark we began to grow sick.”^[2] Just as she thought she and her companions had recovered, the weather turned, and “the increased rolling of the vessel again sent us to vomiting & to bed.”^[3] Their shipboard friends cheered them with fresh fruit and lemonade, but as the weather worsened visiting ceased and she began to fear that the ship would capsize, despite the captain’s assurance that it could not. An attempt to get out of bed resulted in a bruised chin and a skinned elbow. The ship rolled. “[T]he waves swept her quarter deck—the top of the main mast had to be sawn off to save it—and we drifted with reefed sails” through the night. “Articles that had not been secured, were broken loose [and] rolled about in wild confusion—broken lamps, bottles & glasses, with boxes, bags-clothes &c.” It was a struggle even to stay in bed, and Crawford began to think she might die: “A grave in the depths of the ocean presented itself. I knew not at what moment i [sic] might be called to meet my judge.” She claimed that this prospect did not alarm her much, as she “knew the God of the wind & waves,” although she and her husband both prayed hard for “the souls of the poor sailors.”^[4]

After this inauspicious beginning, the voyage improved. The heat of the tropics was a challenge, as were ongoing digestive problems–“inactive bowels” followed by, alarmingly, “the other extreme” –but there were also natural wonders such as flying fish: “From a large wave a dozen or more will sometimes spring off and fly fifty or a hundred yds.”^[5] They saw “the breath of whales at a distance”^[6] and “gaily sporting” porpoises.^[7] Sailors also caught a “booby,” and Crawford had the opportunity to inspect the bird’s four-foot wingspan, “glossy brown” plumage, “long, sharp, pointed beak,” and “fierce eyes” before it was released.^[8]

The indigenous cultures and religions of the Moluccan islands also drew her interest. This region had first encountered Europe in the early 1500s via the voyages of Antonio de Abreu and Ferdinand Magellan. A rich source of spices, the islands quickly became contested ground, struggled over by imperial Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, and Arab interests. Today, the peoples of the region comprise an estimated 131 linguistic groups and practice traditional animist faiths in tandem with Islam and various strains of Christianity. Between Bouro (now Buru) and Ceram (now Seram), the ship’s crew spied an object floating in the water. Neither a boat nor a buoy, the captain defined it as “Meeting house” or “something so near akin to it, I don’t know what else to call it,” explaining that it was an object of veneration, built by the island people, of logs lashed together and set afloat in an act of worship to “the ocean it being the most magnificent object around them.”^[9]

To presume that Crawford’s endeavors and those of other missionaries were necessarily a “reflex of imperialism” is to oversimplify a complicated history.^[10] Nonetheless, she and her companions approached China via sea lanes that had been charted by the agents of empire. From the Moluccas, her ship sailed on, into the Strait of Dampier, named for an English privateer and naturalist, and through Raja Ampat, an archipelago west of Papua New Guinea. Officially part of the Dutch East Indies, these islands were entangled in global commerce, and local people themselves seem to have greeted the ship as a business opportunity. Near dusk on an evening in February, two people in a small craft approached the ship, offering to “bargoose,” or trade. Crawford described them in terms of lack–in particular, of Victorian clothing and Victorian modesty–noting that “if they had any covering we could not see it.” Perhaps it was only a coincidence that in exchange for fish, shells, and pumpkins, the passengers and crew offered the pair what they seemed to require–calico fabric and a mirror.^[11]

As grueling as they were, the months she spent on the open ocean exposed her to the wonders of the natural world, to the fearsome power of the wind and waves, and to the ways of foreign peoples. They further allowed her to begin to establish her distinctive observational style, in which clear-eyed and largely value-neutral details are followed by devout reflection. As they sailed past New Guinea, for example, four men approached Crawford’s ship. Like the naked couple, they were eager for “bargoose.” She described their scanty clothing (no more than “what could be afforded by a yard of cloth”), their complexions and hair, their dyed-black teeth, and the expert construction of their outrigger canoes: “made from the trunks of trees—nicely hewn & dug out—with sharp extremities. Over these, which were about fourteen ft. long, was a frame made of a few bamboo rods, to prevent, I suppose, their capsizing. On one side was a sail made of palm leaves, rolled up.”^[12] Crawford’s later diary entries, as she settled in to her new life in Shanghai, reveal a trenchant awareness that her Chinese acquaintances were every bit as fascinated by her unfamiliar foreign ways– among them hooped skirts and unbound feet– as she was of theirs. Here, though, although she was clearly impressed by the islanders’ ingenuity, the gaze only went one way. She further described their trade goods and innovative use of bamboo for quivers and canteens, and then finished with an exclamation of pious condescension: “Poor heathens! They have never heard of the dying love of Jesus. When shall the whole world bow in humble adoration at his feet.”^[13]

I remained in China only two years, departing for Europe in 2015, ahead of predicted authoritarian crackdowns under the Xi regime, to teach history and government courses to the U.S. military community there and in the Middle East. Crawford’s diaries went with me in digital form, and I presented research on her girlhood and on her early experiences in Shanghai at conferences in Warsaw and Coventry. In 2019 I returned to the States, where my career has assumed, in some respects, a more conventional shape. As for Crawford, she risked death for a life in the mission field, but her direst predictions did not come to pass. After a missionary career of more than fifty years, she passed away early in the 20th century, at the age of approximately eighty. She left behind a corpus of private writings little known outside the evangelical world but of great value for the scholar of gender, travel, education, the long Civil War, and trans-Pacific encounters, as well as of religion and missionary life. Her voice still sings from the archive.

1. Anne Y. Brinton, “‘One of the Large-Throated Frogs’: Martha Foster and the Politics of Resistance and Accommodation in the Antebellum South,” Teksty Drugie, vol. 14, no. 1, Special Issue: Convention and Revolution (2020), 71-77, available online at http://tekstydrugie.pl/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/teksty-drugie-tom-1.2020R-2.pdf. See also Georgina H. Endfield and David J. Nash, “‘Happy is the Bride the Rain Falls on’: Climate, Health, and ‘The Woman Question’ in Nineteenth-Century Missionary Documentation,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, vol. 30, no. 3 (Sep. 2005), as well as Wayne Flint and Gerald W. Berkley, Taking Christianity to China: Alabama Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom, 1850-1950 (University of Alabama Press, 1997). ↑
2. Undated diary entry between 14 Nov. 1851 and 3 Dec. 1851, Diary 1850-1853 and 1878, Martha Foster Crawford diaries, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University., https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/crawfordmarthafoster, accessed 11 Jul. 2024, hereafter MFC Diaries. ↑
3. Undated diary entry between 14 Nov. 1851 and 3 Dec. 1851, MFC Diaries. ↑
4. Undated diary entry between 14 Nov. 1851 and 3 Dec. 1851, MFC Diaries. ↑
5. Undated diary entry between 14 Nov. 1851 and 3 Dec. 1851, Diary entry 7 Dec. 1851, MFC Diaries. ↑
6. Diary entry 25 Dec. 1851, MFC Diaries. ↑
7. Diary entry 26 Dec. 1851, MFC Diaries. ↑
8. Diary entry 11 Feb. 1852, MFC Diaries. ↑
9. Diary entry 9 Feb. 1852, MFC Diaries. ↑
10. Norman Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1. ↑
11. Diary entry 11 Feb. 1852, MFC Diaries. ↑
12. Diary entry 12 Feb. 1852, MFC Diaries. ↑
13. Diary entry 12 Feb. 1852, MFC Diaries. ↑

Featured image caption: Courtesy Pixabay.

Tom (Anne) Brinton

Tom (Anne) Brinton is an associate professor of history at Northwest Florida State College.

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