Jemima’s Story – Part Two
See Joy Bausum – following in Jemima’s Footsteps for part one. Jemima’s journey East was dependent on such pioneers as Eliza Thornton and Emma Combe:
One morning in November 1839 a young woman from Switzerland, Emma Combe, got up early to enjoy her first view of Java from the deck of the sailing ship on which she had travelled from England. She wrote:
“An ampitheatre of lofty mountains, between when we could distinguish woody valleys – the bamboo cottage, peeping out of shady bowers, surmounted by lofty cocoa-nut trees, were reflected in a glassy sea, and gilded by the first rays of the morning sun. That was a feast indeed for us who for months together had seen nothing but sky and water, or stolen a glance of some distant mountain that seemed to come within the horizon, only to tantalise and disappear.”
She and a travelling companion had a very bumpy journey by palanquin and then horse-drawn carriage from the port to Jakarta, the cosmopolitan city which had developed during 200 years of Dutch rule. There at last she met Eliza Thornton who had been the first woman recruited by the Society for Promoting Female Education in the East (SPFEE ). When Miss Thornton requested the SPFEE to send someone to help her it first sent a Dutch woman (Miss Hulk) in 1837, and then Miss Combe.
By February 1840 Miss Combe had opened her own school with ten Malay girls, based in Miss Thornton’s pleasant and cool house. Miss Thornton was, by then, superintending a school for Eurasian girls. The fees from that school would have helped to cover their living costs and so fulfilled one of the aims of the SPFEE – that their agents should be as self sufficient as possible. The Society did send parcels of handmade children’s clothing and fancy goods which could be sold to raise funds for the less well supported schools.
Despite many problems Miss Combe so loved the work that even after she married the American missionary, the Rev Frederick B Thomson, in December 1840 she continued to superintend a girls’ school in Jakarta.
The Dutch colonial government, however, was determined that the American missionaries would not remain there as it was worried that they would antagonise the Muslims and so hinder its commercial interests. The Dutch also thought the Americans were interested in developing trade in that region. The colonial government had, therefore, insisted that the Americans who had been sent by the Board of Foreign Missions of the Reformed Church and the Prudential Committee of the American Board should, after a year’s residency in Jakarta, move to southern Kalimantan (Borneo). Mr Thomson stayed in Jakarta longer because his wife died there leaving him with two young children. His period of stay was extended when he married Miss Combe – but finally in February 1842 the Dutch insisted that the family had to leave.
They moved to a compound deep in the forest to live and work among the Dyak tribe which didn’t even have a written language. And yet Emma wrote to the SPFEE requesting someone to help with teaching girls. The Geneva Auxiliary Committee gave £50 towards the cost of sending someone to join her. And the young woman chosen by the SPFEE was Jemima Poppy.
Sources: as in part one. And also: Mission to Borneo – The Historical Society of the Reformed Church in Americ Occasional Papers No 1, by Gerald de Jong, 1987.