In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

119 chapter eight Trouble in Suriname Dear Herr Graf, I often think “O, if I only had little wings so that I could fly back [to Marienborn] for only an hour to warmly kiss everyone’s hands and feet and then return to Suriname!” O, the pain I feel because this cannot be. —Maria Barbara Reynier to Count Zinzendorf, Paramaribo, Suriname, Christmas Eve 1740 The Europeans are like so many kings in their courts. The Devil is their Kaiser, they trouble themselves with little, and their hearts are hard as stone. . . . The Jews here are as they are in Germany, and the Negroes have grown accustomed to slavery.1 —Jean-François Reynier to the Marienborn Gemeine, Paramaribo, Suriname, 16 September 1741 These few lines from the Reyniers reflect the different ways this couple experienced their mission in Suriname, or at least the way they wrote about it. Maria Barbara’s letters are filled with expressions of devotion to the Savior, to the Gemeine in Marienborn, and to her colleagues in the Suriname mission, even though they sometimes disappointed her. Jean-François’s letters and reports assess the overall progress of the mission (or lack thereof) and relations with the government and people of Suriname—planters, slaves, Indians, and others. (In this case he assesses the entire colonial project.) Yet both were frustrated and worried, and they had good reason to be. Their attempts to change the colonial system were failing, and as they became wise to its ways, they saw how it was changing them. In spite of what he had told the governor, Reynier had every intention of pursuing a mission among the Africans and Indians in Suriname, as the 120 Part Three verse he had written while at sea indicated. It was also what the Gemeine in Marienborn wanted them to do, as the Herrnhaag cantata had made clear. In Paramaribo, free blacks working in crafts and trades and as seamstresses and slaves aroused his interests for the mission. His deceptive interview with the governor, together with the authorities’ preoccupation with the Moravian spiritual threat to the white colonial population (blanken), gave Reynier the opportunity he sought. Reynier planned to gain spiritual access to the slaves via his medical talents . The barbers (Barbiere) and surgeons (Chirurgen), whom he believed only pretended to be university-trained doctors, were most concerned with controlling who treated the blanken. They shut Reynier out of this market, but treatment of the blacks (Negern) was less controlled. Reynier decided to take advantage of a colonial environment in which the credentials of learned people were difficult to verify. His decision also reflected a sincere view that his family background and informal training in the medical profession qualified him in a substantive way to be a “doctor.” In a place where disease and death ran rampant, what really mattered was not a diploma, but whether Reynier could actually heal people and save lives. In November 1740, the Moravians moved to their plantation, hoping to begin work among the Pocken and the African slaves in the colony. Bömper lent them three slaves to work in their field, while Meisser, Steiner, and Hadwig built their house. Maria Barbara and Catharina Steiner cooked, washed, began a garden, and tended to chickens and a milk cow with two calves. Reynier devoted his time to the three slaves, one of whom he described as a hardworking, God-fearing man. This man had heard about the Moravians’ troubles in town and told Reynier that the authorities should forbid gluttony, swilling, and whoredom in the taverns and leave the Moravians alone. But like in South Carolina, Reynier could make little progress in his missionary work because the slave knew only his African language and creole, which the missionaries called Negrisch or Neger Englisch. Reynier tried to learn the language, now called Sranan, but it was difficult because “it does not contain many words” (weil es nicht viel Wörter in sich hatt), he wrote. At the moment the Indian mission looked even less promising. Few Caribs remained in this part of the colony, and those who did were widely dispersed. But Reynier hoped that they could invite one or two Indians to their plantation to get to know them.2 From Ma Retraite, Reynier noticed that the many diseases devastating the slave population hardly interested the other European medical practitioners, and this presented him with an opportunity. He informed Bömper of his [18.224.63.87] Project MUSE (2024...

Share