The Awakening Coast: An Anthology of Moravian Writings from Mosquitia and Eastern Nicaragua, 1849-1899

3. Establishing a Mission at Rama Key

3 Establishing a Mission at Rama Key Hermann G. Schneider and J. P. Jürgensen, Rama Key: Erlebnisse daselbst des Missionars der Brüdergemeine J. P. Jürgensen [Rama Key: Experiences of J. P. Jürgensen, Missionary of the Brotherly Society in Said Location], 2nd ed. (Niesky: Verlag der Missions-Schule der Brüdergemeine, 1891 [1885]). This seven-chapter memoir was written in German by the Dane Jean Paul Jürgensen and edited by Moravian historian and professional writer Hermann Schneider for publication in 1885. It was reprinted in 1891, and this is the version we have elected to translate into English. Jürgensen was born in 1818 in Germany to Danish parents. He was trained as a glassblower before coming to Mosquitia with his wife as a missionary in 1853. He was the founder of the Magdala station in 1855 and arrived shortly before a cholera epidemic struck the community. One retrospective church history put it that “Panic seized upon the Indians, and they rushed to [Jürgensen] for advice and medicine: they were gladly provided with both . . . [and the effect was great,] the attendance at every religious service was overflowing, and some hearts were ‘almost persuaded’ to accept the invitation to come to the Saviour, the Good Physician.”1 Although rarely elaborated in the present memoir, Jürgensen also distributed medicines to the people of Rama Key to the same effect. Given his inability to learn the Miskito language, attributed to his relatively advanced age in 1855 (thirty-seven), the church decided he should found a station among the Rama Indians on Rama Key, a small Cay or island at the southern end of Bluefields Lagoon. Though the Rama spoke their own language, as Jürgensen explains, many understood English and so he never learned Rama.2 This is why Jürgensen Establishing a Mission at Rama Key | 51 spent twenty-one years at Rama Key (1857–78), as most missionaries rotated every five years or so. Church historian J. E. Hutton interviewed Jürgensen in Denmark for his own book. The elder Jürgensen recalled his days at Rama Key “with tears in his eyes” and attributed his success there to three strategies : changing the nature of trade, changing the laws of the island, and setting up the rudiments of an educational system. Since the first two strategies are not evident as such in our memoir, it is worth taking a closer look at what Jürgensen did. To change the nature of trade, Jürgensen opened a shop on the island—as most missionaries did—and supplied people with goods in exchange for fish and bush meat, “and further, having discovered oil on the island, he taught the natives how to extract it, [sell] it at Greytown, and paid them the value in goods.”3 The missionaries considered Indian payment in kind rather than cash essential because, without money, the Indians could not buy liquor. Stopping men from traveling to Bluefields to sell their meat and products also prevented them from visiting rum taverns, as Jürgensen calls them. This helped, as Jürgensen explained elsewhere, “to tame” the Rama, a word the Rama themselves use to express their own conversion.4 Although Rama Key was in the Mosquito Reserve, Jürgensen got the permission of the Miskito king George Augustus Frederic to make “the island independent,” and, according to Hutton, having won the goodwill of the people, Jürgensen “made such laws as he saw fit.”5 These dictatorial powers allowed Jürgensen to insist that sukias, or medicine men, not be allowed to practice. He also decreed that no liquor be made or sold on the island, that no boat put out to sea on Sunday, that no one leave the island without his permission, and that no one visit the island “without satisfactory reason.” In short, backed by the government of the Mosquito territory and then the Mosquito Reserve, Jürgensen came to assume absolute power on the island. At least in the beginning , people likely understood his Christian rule-making within this secular-political light. In contrast to these two radical and important strategies—absent from the memoir—Jürgensen does highlight the role of education that he and Mrs. Jürgensen promoted through their day-school activities.6 52 | Establishing a Mission at Rama Key Although Jürgensen probably drew on his twenty-one years of living at Rama...