Lammermuir Party

The Lammermuir Party was a British group of Protestant missionaries who travelled to China in 1866 aboard the tea clipper Lammermuir, accompanied by James Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission. Mission historians have indicated that this event was a turning point in the history of missionary work in China in the 19th century. This was the largest party of Protestant missionaries to date to arrive at one time on Chinese shores. It was also noteworthy that none of the members of the mission were ordained ministers, and only two had any previous overseas experience. In addition to this, there were among them nine unmarried women traveling to a place where single European women were rare for many reasons.

On the morning of 26 May 1866, the 34 sailors, 18 missionaries and four children boarded the Lammermuir, which lay tied up at London's East India Docks. Lammermuir was a two-year-old clipper ship with three masts and square-rigged sails. Her frame was built of iron, and by the standards of the day, she was a first-class sailing vessel. A voyage halfway around the world would only take four months; a fast trip compared to the six-month duration of some of the older ships of the previous decade.

Henry Grattan Guinness wrote a hymn in honor of their departure that echoed Hudson Taylor’s 1865 book China's Spiritual Need and Claims:

Over the dark blue sea, over the trackless flood,

A little band is gone in the service of their God;
The lonely waste of waters they traverse to proclaim
In the distant land of Sinim, Immanuel’s saving Name.
They have heard from the far-off East the voice of their brothers’ blood:
A million a month in China are dying without God.

The Lammermuir was nearly wrecked by two typhoons before limping into the Shanghai harbour in late September.

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