Letter to William Jowett Narrating His Capture
Crowther’s own account, written at Fourah Bay in Sierra Leone, of the raid on his town in 1821, his sale as a slave, his rescue by British warships in 1822 and his baptism in 1825.
Samuel Ajayi Crowther wrote this letter to the secretary of the Church Missionary Society when he was a teacher at Fourah Bay. It tells how his town was taken, how he was parted from his mother and sisters and sold from hand to hand until he reached Portuguese traders on the coast, how the ship was captured, and how he came to faith under the Society’s missionaries in Sierra Leone.
It was written sixteen years after the raid, in English, by a Christian convert addressing his patrons, and it interprets the events as providence. The Society printed it in 1842 with the journal he kept on the Niger expedition of 1841.
Cited in
- 29 June 1864, firm date