Missionary travel. Travellers in Greece. An Occasional Series 5. Samuel Sheridan Wilson

The woods and forests of Greece abound with wild boars, jackals, hares, wolves, wild cats, lynxes and chamois; whilst the principal feathered tenants of her sylvan groves and mountain glens are finches, nightingales, eagles, owls and falcons. The surface of this lovely land is richly covered and adorned with waving corn, Indian maize, olive-grounds, vineyards, orange groves, and almond, mulberry and other fruit trees. And, as if to give a fine finish to every enclosure, the fields are fenced with laurel, roselaurel, dogrose, aloes and geraniums. The pastures are numerous, and well stocked with flocks of sheep and goats. These are attended by shepherds in arms, boys in rags, or girls in rustic finery; and give additional life and interest to the green hills and sunny vales, over which they are scattered. Over all this vegetation and life, is spread a sky generally fair, and blue and serene; and although occasionally the thunder peal will disperse the affrighted cattle, the nipping frost compel the native to draw the thick capote over his brawny shoulders, and copious showers descend to water the earth; yet the sun smiles during the greater portion of the year.

The author of this bucolic piece, Samuel Sheridan Wilson, made several visits to Greece between 1824 and 1835. Even in his time he must have seemed an unusual man; that is surely even truer nearly two centuries later. Born in Manchester in 1797, he was ordained a minister of the Congregational Church (a dissenting Protestant denomination, which in England now forms part of the United Reformed Church) and from 1819 was posted to Malta by the London Missionary Society, an arm of the Congregational Church, with the task of strengthening the Society’s mission to Greece. On returning to England in 1835, he became pastor of the Congregationalists in Shepton Mallet in Somerset and spent the rest of his life there, dying in 1866. In 1839, he published a memoir of his time in Malta and Greece: A Narrative of the Greek Mission; or Sixteen Years in Malta and Greece, including Tours in the Peloponnesus, the Aegean and the Ionian Isles; with Remarks on the Religious Opinions, Social Habits, Politics, Language etc. [London: John Snow, 1839].[1] It is a remarkable account, not just of Wilson’s missionary activities in Malta and Greece, but also of Greece itself during the revolutionary years.

 

Wilson’s memoir was, in his own words, ‘drawn up for general readers…present[ing] no dry statistics, but incident, narrative and detail’. It is undoubtedly a lively, readable and, in many places, surprising story. The first 180 or so pages deal with Wilson’s arrival in Malta in 1819 and the roughly five years he spent there preparing for the Greek mission. Britain took Malta from the French in 1800 and its possession of the island had been recently confirmed in the treaties that closed the Napoleonic wars. The attachment of the Maltese islands to the British Empire brought Protestantism in all its forms to what was a Catholic people. The opening chapters of the travel memoir show Wilson to have been rabidly anti-Catholic, with a fierce hatred of monastics and Jesuits, and a highly sectarian conviction about the righteousness of the cause of the reformed churches. But for all his efforts at proselytising the Maltese – efforts which caused several skirmishes with the Papal authorities and the local population – Wilson did not lose sight of the fact that he was in Malta to help the Congregationalists’ missionary efforts in Greece and Asia Minor. He worked hard to acquire – from the small Greek population of Valletta – a good working knowledge of demotic Greek and he used this to notable effect. 

 

The final 400 pages of his memoirs are a composite account of his various travels to Greece, together with a summary of the activities in Asia Minor (which he seems himself not to have visited) of the London Missionary Society (LMS), often alongside missionary agents of US Protestant denominations and of the Anglican Church. He visited the Ionian Islands, then under the British Protectorate, in the first half of 1824. As the year closed, he left Malta again for Greece, catching sight of Cape Matapan on 23 December 1824. He spent time on Milos, Spetses, Hydra and Kea, before reaching the mainland at Porto Rafti on the east coast of Attica. From there, he journeyed to Athens and then went onwards to Corinth, Nafplio, Tripoli, Pyrgos, Katakolo and Zakynthos. He was back in Malta in April 1825, after some four months of travels. The memoirs are unclear about the timing of his subsequent visits to independent Greece, but he was clearly in Athens again under the reign of King Otto, probably in 1834/5, shortly before he returned home to England.

 

But why was the LMS launching a religious mission to Greece? The simple reality is that the Congregationalists, unlike the Anglicans and Episcopalians, saw Greece as a fertile ground for proselytism.[2] They knew that the Orthodox Church had not been reformed, as had the churches of NW Europe, and still showed many of the traditional religious stances associated by the reformers with Roman Catholicism, though Wilson consistently viewed Orthodox priests as more friendly to the reformed cause and less pernicious than their Catholic brethren.[3] From 1813 onwards, the LMS sent a succession of its Ministers to Malta, bound for the Ionian Islands. When Wilson arrived on Malta in 1819, the Rev. Isaac Lowndes had recently set sail from there for Corfu, where he would work very closely with the British authorities on educational matters as inspector of schools. On the Ionian Islands, the British authorities, with active support of the missionaries, were looking to establish elementary schools for boys and girls, on the so-called Lancasterian principle, by which the older pupils were taught enough to pass on their learning to the younger pupils. This emphasis on education – particularly on the education of girls – is probably the most remarkable and admirable aspect of the Protestant missions. On mainland and insular Greece and in Asia Minor the LMS worked with comparable US missions and the Anglicans to found elementary schools and spread literacy, irrespective of gender. 

 

         The dissemination of the Greek Bible was central to these efforts. On his travels in Greece, Wilson gave away and sold hundreds of copies of the New Testament in Greek, printed on the Society’s press in Malta; there was huge demand for this among the Greek priesthood and laity. In Asia Minor, these efforts were aided by the interdenominational British and Foreign Bible Society. Back in Malta in the second half of 1825, Wilson took sole charge of the Society’s press. Under his leadership, some sixty titles were printed and issued within a decade. Examples included Wilson’s own Anglo-Greek Primer[4], his Greek translation of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, tracts by Chrysostom, translations of Isaac Watts’s hymns, Psalms in verse, Protestant apologetics and biographies, and so on. It was a Stakhanovite labour of love and Wilson, aided by his Greek friends on Malta, was the Society’s principal translator, working in a variety of genres and registers.

 

Wilson’s account of his travels is not only interesting because of his religious mission. It also shines as a travelogue. Wilson had his eyes open to new places, unknown customs and new experiences. As a Christian missionary, he was not so much interested in the classical world as in the proto-Christian world: the journeys of the apostles and the lives of their first European disciples. Wilson followed the footsteps of St Paul in Athens and Corinth as closely as the poor state of archaeological knowledge then allowed (his confusion of the Pnyx with the Areopagus was total).[5] Though scarcely Byronic in habits or tastes, he had a sometimes romantic sense of the decay of Greece’s antique glories into its contemporary poverty and was impressed by the first signs of recovery under the Bavarian monarchy in the early 1830s. He noticed and recorded carefully the landscapes over which he passed. And he observed the people closely, giving fascinating accounts of their social and domestic lives. He wrote well about marriage customs, Greek hospitality (“On entering, we leave our shoes, generally at the edge of the carpet, lay our right hand on the left breast, bow to the company, say ‘καλ’ ημέρα σας, good day,’ and seat ourselves à la tailor on the divan. The master of the house pronounces some compliment…”)[6], women’s costumes and make-up, the evil eye and other superstitions.

 

Above all, Wilson was excited, as liberal westerners were, by the outbreak of Greek revolutionary fervour in 1821. He was indeed entranced by the prospect of the revival of Greece as a Christian state: 

 

To draw public attention to Greece and to attract the footsteps of the philanthropist towards the land of Basil, the cradle of science, the former scene of apostolic labour, is the object of this volume. She was then filing her chains, and soon she snapt them, to the astonishment of all in Malta. Now was the crisis of Greece. Now the moment of her transit, a transit either to formalism and infidelity, or to light and piety, as Christians in the west might neglect her fate, or direct her course.[7]

 

Travelling to Greece in 1824/5, Wilson had to show considerable courage as he passed through the theatres of war, but he also had the opportunity to meet key figures in the revolution. On Spetses he met Bouboulina. On Hydra, he actually lodged with admiral Miaoulis. In Napflio he met Mavrocordato. In Athens he was received cordially by the Governor (though Wilson wondered if he might be mistaken for a spy) and called on the Bishop. He appears to have met people fearlessly and in full confidence of his rights to be in Greece and to be playing a specific role.

 

        But perhaps most amazingly of all Wilson wrote and published a novel in Greek before he returned to England. His memoirs imply that he wrote it first in English as The Rumeliot Chieftain, but the English manuscript has never been found or published, and the novel exists only in Wilson’s Greek translation, as Το παλληκάριον.[8] It was printed on the LMS press in Malta in 1835 and anonymously published; it is one of the very earliest examples of a Greek novel and is something of a mess (mistakes were clearly made in the translation and printing processes).[9] But as an important curiosity, it was most recently reprinted in 1990 with a scholarly introduction by Dimitrios Polemis.[10] Surely the most eccentric and unexpected legacy of English non-conformist missionary activity.

 

Wilson is undoubtedly a challenging travelling companion. Opinionated and bigoted (while often ignorantly decrying as bigoted the opinions of others), he can appear preposterous (I laughed out loud at his absurd attempts to brow-beat hard-pressed, intellectually and materially impoverished Orthodox clergy and religious into accepting the hair-splitting subtleties of his exposition of substitutionary atonement) and was frequently obtuse about much that is glorious and beautiful in Greek Orthodox tradition; but he undoubtedly liked the Greeks, he worked harder than most of my compatriots then or since to learn and master the language, he was open to Greek experience and Greek customs, and, when all is said and done, he invested sixteen years of his life to spread knowledge among the Greeks of the Gospel in Greek. His memoirs deserve an audience.

 

John Kittmer

Easter 2023

 

NOTES

 

[1] The book has been digitised and is available in print-to-order paperback from the British Library Historical Print Collections.

[2] On the Anglican and Episcopalian decision not to proselytise in Greece, see the chapter by M. Nestlehutt (‘The Development of the Anglican Chaplaincy in Athens’) in L.W. Doolan (ed.), Opening the Doors: A View into the Historic Tradition and Current Life of St Paul’s Church Athens (Athens: St Paul’s Church, 2022), particularly 29. 

[3] See, e.g., Wilson, 204: “We had not been long in the Greek mission, ere we discovered that it had a character all its own. The wants and the supplies, the evils and the antidotes of Greece, differ much from those of heathen nations. It was ours to minister to a mind diseased indeed, but not to any great extent infidel. We had to combat with Christianity paganised, with semi-heathenism baptised with the Christian name; with the errors and vices, the dogmas and sophistries of Platonists, Pharisees, and old Numidian monks, under a visor.”

[4] S.S. Wilson, The Anglo-Greek Primer, or First Step to a Practical Knowledge of the English and Greek Languages. Το Αγγλο-Ελληνικόν αλφαβητάριον, ήτοι πρώτον βήμα προς μιαν εύπρακτον γνώσιν των Αγγλικών και Γραικικών Γλωσσών (Malta: London Missionary Society Press, 1829).

[5] Wilson, A Narrative, 434-6. 

[6] Wilson, op.cit., 296f.

[7] Wilson, op.cit., 86.

[8] Wilson, op.cit., 370.

[9] See R. Beaton, An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature (Oxford: OUP, 1999²), 57.

[10] S.S. Wilson, Το παλληκάριον, edited and introduced by D.I. Polemis (Athens: Idryma Kosta kai Elenis Ourani, 1990).