Afloat and ashore

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[ABOVE: Herbert Booth (with Beard) on a Salvation Navy Vessel, likely the William Booth, in Lake Ontario next to Cpt John McGillivray and another officer—Courtesy of The Salvation Army Canada and Bermuda Territorial Archives - Photo #S651]

In June 1814 Napoleon had just been exiled to Elba, the French monarchy was restored, and the War of 1812 continued between Great Britain and the United States of America. Meanwhile, at a Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in Rotherhithe in London’s docklands, Zebedee Rodgers, a local shoemaker, reached out to a man he had seen weeping at the chapel prayer service. 

The man, Captain David Simpson, was captain of a small ship called the Friendship engaged in trade along the east coast of England. This encounter led to Rodgers conducting a prayer meeting with the Friendship crew at Simpson’s request on Wednesday, June 22, 1814. This simple meeting spawned a movement known as the Thames Revival and established mission activity and ministry among seafarers that continues today in ports all over the world.

RAISING THE BLUE FLAG

Seafarers in the early nineteenth century were seen as distinct both by themselves and by society at large. At sea sailors were at the whim of their masters whose word was law aboard ship. On land seafarers stayed close to the confines of the “sailor towns” near the docklands, frequenting boarding houses and taverns where they found some welcome, as well as many false friends only too willing to deprive sailors of their earnings. At that time a system known as “crimping” exploited sailors in virtually every port in the world. 

The crimp, often a former seafarer, arranged seafarers for ships and ships for seafarers. The crimp provided lodging houses and advance money (usually at extortionate interest rates, see pp. 36–38), which sailors traded for work on vessels until they could pay off their debts. Needless to say, crimps often took great advantage of vulnerable seafarers; but it is testimony to the marginalization of seafarers that they looked more favorably on crimps than on ship masters and ship owners. 

The first formal outreach of the Christian church to this world began with the Naval and Military Bible Society, founded in 1779 to distribute Bibles on British naval ships. This extended to foreign sailors held on prison ships during the Napoleonic wars. This was but one expression of the evangelical revival that had gained a foothold in British Protestantism in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Another was the burgeoning Wesleyan Methodist movement. In this context an ordinary shoemaker like Zebedee Rodgers could approach Captain Simpson and accept his invitation to hold a prayer service with the Friendship’s crew. 

Within a year of the first prayer meeting aboard the Friendship, crews of different vessels moored along the Thames began to meet together for prayers. By the winter of 1816–1817, prayer meetings on ships were indicated by hanging a lantern from the masthead. In the spring of 1817, as the days grew longer, Rodgers devised the idea of flying a flag to signal instead. The first flag, sewn by his sister, was made with a blue background and featured the word BETHEL in white letters and a red star rising in the east. Later, a white dove and olive branch were added. 

The flag, known as the Bethel flag, became the symbol of the shipboard revival movement, and organizations identified with it. The first of these was the Port of London Society founded in 1818, followed by the Bethel Seamen’s Union in 1819. While these organizations saw themselves as supporting the fledgling shipboard revival, they also led structured land-based ministries among seafarers. The Sailors’ Society, which continues today around the world, can trace its lineage directly back to the Bethel Seamen’s Union and the Port of London Society. 

THE SPEEDY ARK

The Port of London Society soon purchased the HMS Speedy to serve as a floating chapel for seafarers located close to the entrance to the London docks. This was the first of many such vessels located in ports throughout Britain and Ireland and soon the United States. The membership of the Port of London Society included several reasonably prominent businesspeople, including evangelical Anglicans, some from nonestablished churches, some nonconformist clergy, and former Royal Navy officers. 

One notable clergy person was George Charles “Bosun” Smith (1782–1863), a former seafarer and Baptist minister at Penzance in Cornwall. A charismatic preacher filled with boundless energy, Smith was an enthusiastic champion of maritime ministry. The Port of London Society co-opted Smith as a traveling secretary to raise support for the Society’s work and the floating chapel, which he called the Ark. 

From January 1820 Smith helped edit and publish the Sailors’ Magazine under the auspices of the newly established British and Foreign Seamen’s Friend Society and Bethel Union. This magazine and its American counterpart contained stories of general as well as of religious interest and reported news regarding developments in the maritime mission world. Though mainly intended for seafarers, the Sailors’ Magazine also reached the supporters of the Bethel Union. Smith continued to edit the magazine until 1826. Ultimately the Port of London Society and the Bethel Union united in 1833 as the British and Foreign Sailors’ Society. 

Smith by this time had begun to direct his energy and attention into the establishment of a Mariners’ Church in Wellclose Square in London. In 1846 George Tiel Hill, a close associate of George Charles Smith, founded the Seamen’s Christian Friend Society, which still operates in various ports around the world centered on sharing faith through ship visiting, hospitality, and practical help.

The 1820s saw a broadening of maritime mission horizons. Societies were established in Scotland in 1820 and then in other ports in Britain and Ireland over the next few years. Bristol could boast two floating chapels. The movement was also crossing the Atlantic. The New York Marine Bible Society was formed in 1816, and the Port of New York Society for Promoting the Gospel among Seamen was organized in 1818. On June 4, 1820, it opened the first Mariner’s Church in the world. 

Work among seafarers would soon spread to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Charleston, North Carolina; and Boston, Massachusetts. Ward Stafford, like Smith a former mariner, served as an early key figure in the US maritime mission movement. Stafford ensured large portions of the Seamen’s Magazine (the American equivalent of the Sailors’ Magazine) regularly supplemented the Christian Herald. Ultimately all this activity would pave the way for the formation of the American Seamen’s Friend Society in 1828. 

FLOATING CHURCHES

In the late 1820s, the Church of England began to organize denominational outreach to seafarers by establishing the Episcopal Floating Church Society. The Port of Dublin Society, a local Irish Anglican organization, had already opened a floating church in March 1823, and the former HMS Tees followed as the Liverpool Mariner’s Church in 1827, again as a local initiative to provide an Anglican floating church. Although Episcopal floating churches were established around Britain and Ireland, the movement never gained the traction that had been displayed in nonconformist circles. Floating churches of all types would eventually give way to land-based mariners’ churches, also known as Bethels, in many locations—partly due to changes in port infrastructure and docklands as vessels deteriorated. 

Several societies associated with the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States had full gothic-style floating churches. The first, dedicated as the Church of Our Saviour for Seamen on February 20, 1844, was moored in the East River at the foot of Pike Street in New York City. The second, the Floating Church of the Redeemer, was dedicated in January 1849 in Philadelphia. The two associations continue today as the Seamen’s Church Institute of New York and New Jersey and the Seamen’s Church Institute of Philadelphia.

In 1835 John Ashley, on vacation between postings, took an interest in the religious condition of those who lived on the islands in the Bristol Channel between England and Wales. This interest extended to seafarers moored on ships, often waiting for long periods to discharge their cargo in the same channel. Ultimately Ashley purchased a sailing boat, the Eirene, which he used to visit ships at anchor from 1835 to 1850, when finance and ill health forced his retirement. It is estimated that Ashley visited some 14,000 ships and sold 5,000 Bibles in this period and held thousands of services for seafarers onboard their vessels. 

After Ashley’s retirement his Bristol Channel Mission fell into abeyance. The work re-emerged five years later as the Bristol Channel Missions to Seamen with two chaplains, Thomas Cave Childs (1819–1867) and Clement Dawson Strong. Following Ashley, theirs was a chaplain-centered, seagoing, ship-visiting ministry. In 1856 Childs approached a prominent Anglican layman, W. H. K. Kingston (1814–1880), about establishing a national Church of England seafarers’ society. Kingston founded the Missions to Seamen Afloat, At Home and Abroad. This society would become the Mission to Seafarers as it is today: the largest worldwide Christian maritime mission society. It adopted a flying angel logo and flag inspired by the flying angel of Revelation 14:6—bringing the gospel to every nation, tribe, tongue, and people. 

C. E. R. Robinson founded another Anglican mission among seafarers, called the St Andrew’s Waterside Church Mission, in 1864. He belonged to the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England but had been deeply impressed by the ministry of Childs in the more evangelical Bristol Channel Missions to Seamen. However, Robinson saw the need for a more parish-based waterside ministry to seafarers and local seafaring communities. 

Robinson’s vision was somewhat similar to the Apostleship of the Sea in the Roman Catholic Church as it developed in the twentieth century. It was also echoed in Scandinavian seamen’s churches founded in the 1860s and 1870s. The Norwegian Seamen’s Church was established in 1864 followed by the Danish Seamen’s Church in 1867, the Swedish Seamen’s Church in 1869, and the Finnish Seamen’s Church in 1875. The Scandinavian ministries to seafarers saw themselves fundamentally as national churches overseas as well as seafarers’ ministries. 

REVIVING THE MISSION

Meanwhile waves of revival in North America in the mid-nineteenth century began to influence maritime ministry. Stronger emphases on spiritual welfare and the Incarnation, a consequence of these revival movements, also led to a consciousness of physical welfare for seafarers. Sailors’ homes and land-based seamen’s institutes would gradually replace Bethels and mariners’ churches as a result. 

A ministry of advocacy from those involved in maritime ministry for changes in legislation to improve conditions for seafarers came increasingly to the fore on both sides of the Atlantic, advocacy not seen as in any way in conflict with a stridently evangelical religious message. For instance the first chaplain superintendent of the Missions to Seamen in the 1870s, Robert Buckley Boyer, combated the crimping system in Bristol. The founding of the Missions to Deep Sea Fishermen in the first half of the 1880s combined religious and medical missions with social outreach to fishers and their families. In 1887 the Christian medical doctor Wilfred Grenfell began work as a doctor and surgeon with the North Sea fishing fleet before he later left for work in Labrador. 

The Salvation Navy, coming from the Salvation Army’s work among seafarers, also developed around this same time. Though it ceased to exist by the time of the First World War in 1914, the Salvation Navy seems to have had about four seagoing vessels in operation in 1900. 

Roman Catholic initiatives also manifested in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Concern for Catholic seafarers and naval personnel, expressed in the popular Catholic magazine Messenger of the Sacred Heart, set in motion literature and correspondence work, as well as the publication of a prayer book for Catholic seafarers, The Guide to Heaven for Use of Those at Sea. An Apostleship of the Sea was formed out of the Apostleship of Prayer associated with the Messenger of the Sacred Heart magazine in 1894, and some Roman Catholic seafarers’ clubs also made an appearance before the end of the century. 

Just as Christian mission began in Jerusalem, spread in Judea and Samaria, and extended to the ends of the earth in the first century, revival along the Thames in the nineteenth century extended the gospel to seafarers in the British Isles, over to America, and ultimately into ships afloat and ports ashore all over the world. That mission continued by land and by sea, into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, reaching out to people of every nation, tribe, tongue, and people today. CH 

By Paul G. Mooney

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