A potter and a carpenter walk to the Caribbean.
On 21 August 1732 Leonhard Dober and David Nitschmann left Herrnhut for St Thomas to preach to enslaved Africans, with about thirty thalers between them. Within thirty years Moravians had gone to Greenland, Suriname, the Cape, Labrador and the Delaware and Cherokee — the first sustained Protestant mission programme anywhere.
Dober and Nitschmann left Herrnhut on foot on 21 August 1732 for St Thomas in the Danish West Indies, having been told that they would probably have to sell themselves into slavery to reach the enslaved people they intended to preach to — a story the church tells often and which is not quite what happened, since they worked as free artisans. What followed was extraordinary in scale for a village of a few hundred: Greenland in 1733, Suriname in 1735, the Cape Colony in 1737, Labrador from 1752, and missions among the Lenape and Cherokee. Moravian missionaries went as tradespeople who supported themselves, which distinguished them from later mission societies. The record is not clean. Moravians in the Danish and British Caribbean and at Salem in North Carolina owned enslaved people; the Bethabara and Salem congregations held slaves into the nineteenth century, and in 1856 the Salem congregation moved its Black members into a separate congregation at St Philips. The Southern Province formally apologised and the archives have published the records.
The same ground, other faiths
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