University of Virginia Library

2 Corinthians, xi. 26.

Lines in memory of the Rev. William Threlfall, Wesleyan Missionary, who, with two native converts (Jacob Links and Johannes Jagger), set out in June, 1825, to carry the Gospel into Great Namaqua-land, on the western coast of South Africa. The last communication received from him by his brethren was the following brief note, dated “Warm Baths, August 6. 1825. Being rather unkindly handled by this people, in their not finding or not permitting us to have a guide, we returned hither yesterday, after having been to the north four days' journey, and losing one of the oxen. I feel great need of your prayers, and my patience is much tried. These people are very unfeeling and deceitful; but, thank God, we are all in good health, though we doubt of success. Our cattle are so poor that they cannot, I think, bring us home again; but we shall yet try to get further; and then it is not unlikely I shall despatch Johannes to you to send oxen to fetch us away. Do not be uneasy about us; we all feel much comforted in our souls, and the Lord give us patience. We are obliged to beg hard to buy meat. Peace be with you! —William Threlfall.”

No further intelligence arrived concerning the wanderers for seven months, except unauthorised rumours that they had, in some way, perished in the desert. In the sequel it was ascertained, that Mr. Threlfall and his faithful companions had left the Warm Baths above mentioned about the 9th or 10th of August, having obtained a vagabond guide to the Great Fish River. This wretch, meeting with two others as wicked as himself, conducted them to a petty kraal of Bushmen (the outcasts of all the Caffre tribes), and there murdered them in the night after they had lain down to sleep, for the sake of the few trifling articles which they carried with them for the purchase of food by the way. Two of the assassins were long afterwards taken by some of their own wild countrymen, and by them delivered up to the colonial authorities. One of these was the arch-traitor, called Naangaap, who with his own hand hurled the stone which caused the death of the missionary. He was tried at Clanwilliam, and condemned to be shot. On their way to the place appointed for execution, the escort halted at Lily Fountain, where the relatives of his murdered companion Jacob Links resided. These came

out of their dwellings and spoke to the criminal upon his awful situation, of which he seemed little heedful. Martha, Jacob's sister, was especially concerned to awaken him to a sense of his guilt and peril, saying to him, with true Christian meekness and sympathy,—“I am indeed very sorry for you, though you have killed my brother, because you are indifferent about the salvation of your own sinful soul.” On the 30th of September 1827, he was shot, according to his sentence, by six men of his own tribe, at Silver Fountain, on the border of the colony, with the entire concurrence of the chief, who had come from his distant residence to witness the execution.

Mr. Threlfall was a young man who had served on several missionary stations in South Africa, from the year 1822, under great bodily affliction for the most part of the time, but with unquenchable fervency of spirit, and devotion to the work of God among the heathen. His two fellow-labourers and fellow-sufferers, Jacob Links and Johannes Jagger, had voluntarily offered themselves to the same service and sacrifice with him, for the sake of carrying the gospel of the grace of God to their benighted countrymen in the farther regions of Namaqua-land.