John Evans: East India Chaplain
Margaret Martyn profiles a seventeenth century missionary in Bengal and Madras who privately traded with ‘interlopers’.
The East India Company which, by its Elizabethan charter in 1600, was essentially a trading company, would have been surprised to hear itself called a missionary society. Yet in 1657/8 the Court of Committees - the Directors - sitting in Leadenhall Street, decided to appoint a chaplain for all their Indian factories and expressed their concern for ‘the spreading of the Gospell in India’.
They wrote - February 13th, 1657/8 - to the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge that they wanted ‘an orthodox and godly minister... as may instruct and teach the people that shall be committed to his charge, in building them up in the knowledge of God and faith in Jesus Christ’. They asked the universities to recommend for this purpose ‘some such person whom you shall approve and declare to be a fitt instrument, both willing and able to undergo and manage the great and good work’.
‘For his encouragement’, the Directors continued, the man appointed would have ‘an allowance of £100 per annum certain with accommodation of Dyet, and there is no question but his other benefits will be very considerable’.
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