MAPLES, Chauncy

[s. 453] : Second Bishop of Likoma, Born February 17, 1852. Died 1895. Sailed for Zanzibar in March, 1876; and in July, 1877, he left Zanzibar for Masasi, where, for some years, he was to labor. About a year after Maples’ arrival, a new station was founded at Newala, nearer the River Rovuma, where a number of native Christians from Zanzibar were settled; and from these two stations the mi ionary work gradually extended. From Newala, accompanied by a fellow-mi ionary and ten Africa. Masasi men as porters, he took a journey south from the Rovuma River into the unexplored country lying between it and the Mozambique, a tract which was an almost uninterrupted blank on the maps of those days and which he was the first European to penetrate. On the 12th of July they reached the goal of their journey, after a walk of three hundred and sixty miles in three weeks. On the 29th of July they arrived at the port of Lull, and thence they sailed northward by dhow and started northwest from Kisanga for another three weeks’ walk, which brought them to Masasi, after they had accomplished over nine hundred miles of difficult country in sixty-eight days. In the latter part of 1886 Mr. Maples was appointed Archdeacon of Nyasa, and in the Autumn of 1887 he left Likoma to visit the wild Gwangwara bands on the mainland. Among these “thieves, robbers, and murderers,” as he called them, he labored heroically, and never lost faith that “God’s grace is able to turn these savage hordes into the children of He was consecrated Bishop Christ’s Church.” of Likoma in St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1895, and without delay he set out again for Africa, where, nearly twenty years before, he entered upon his mi ionary career. When he reached Fort Johnston, at the junction of Lake Nyasa with the Shire River, he found a little sailing boat belonging to the mi ion, and, not waiting for the German steamer, he decided to go by the boat to Likoma at once, by way of Kota-kota, on the west shore, where he was to leave his fellow-worker, During a violent storm the ve el Mr. Williams. sank, and both Bishop Maples and Mr. Williams were drowned. Bishop Maples had a special facility for acquiring languages, and in the first four years of his sojourn in Africa he mastered Swahili and Yao, and enough Makua to begin the translation of the New Testament. 453