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Nothing More Heroic: the Compelling Story of the First Latter-Day Saint Missionaries in India
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 18, 2021
A well researched book. It was interesting to read about missionaries traveling to Asia 170 years ago and all they did to try and create a successful mission in India. It was told from my 2nd great-grandfathers point of view who was only 21 and the youngest in this group of 9 traveling missionaries. This definitely piqued my interest and I found aspects interesting, but it ended up being a little challenging keeping up with the names and places and was told more like a travel log than an actual story. It is impressive to think of what people sacrificed to build up Zion and spread the gospel to what probably seemed like the ends of the earth to them at the time.
August 9, 2019
I liked it and the stories told are definitely incredible and it makes me appreciate how missions are run today a lot more! I just wish the writing style was more narrative like the blurb suggested it would be. Instead, it honestly felt like reading a textbook filled with lots of dates and it was hard to keep track of all the people, and he didn't really flesh out the stories at all. If I didn't love India as much as I do, I don't know if I would've been able to finish the book.
January 4, 2010
I bought this book for a dollar on the sale table at a Deseret Book in Provo. I thought it would tell me about how India was being prepared today to receive missionaries. Instead, it is the amazing story of thirteen elders called in a General Conference session on missions to India in 1852. Some of them were to go to Siam and Ceylon.
They did go, without purse or scrip. Most left wives and children behind. Their missions were mainly to the British in India, mostly at army garrisons (this was just before the Sepoy Rebellion). They lived among the natives, traveled the roads in bullock wagons, and were fed by generous people, native and British. Their missions were to be four or five years. As it ended up, they had little success among the British, who mostly wouldn't let them come into the army cantonments. They had no luck at all among the natives. Many of the elders got malaria, dysentery and other diseases of the tropics. A few had to go home early. The mission had little success, and the few dozen people they did convert went with them back to Utah.
Each of the elders went home separately,finding passage where they could (there were some remarkably generous sea captains who let them sail for nominalfees). One of the missionaries made his way to England, where he took the ship Enoch Train from Liverpool in 1856, with a company of 534 Saints bound for America. Our ancestor Henry Bowring was on this ship. They all crossed the plains in the Daniel McArthur handcart company, our ancestor and this missionary coming home from India.
It was a tale of tremendous hardship, illness, and failure.They lived in the tropics and dealt with the heat, disease and monsoons. Yet these men did not give up, worked hard, and did not come home until the Prophet wrote that they could. What an uplifting book!
They did go, without purse or scrip. Most left wives and children behind. Their missions were mainly to the British in India, mostly at army garrisons (this was just before the Sepoy Rebellion). They lived among the natives, traveled the roads in bullock wagons, and were fed by generous people, native and British. Their missions were to be four or five years. As it ended up, they had little success among the British, who mostly wouldn't let them come into the army cantonments. They had no luck at all among the natives. Many of the elders got malaria, dysentery and other diseases of the tropics. A few had to go home early. The mission had little success, and the few dozen people they did convert went with them back to Utah.
Each of the elders went home separately,finding passage where they could (there were some remarkably generous sea captains who let them sail for nominalfees). One of the missionaries made his way to England, where he took the ship Enoch Train from Liverpool in 1856, with a company of 534 Saints bound for America. Our ancestor Henry Bowring was on this ship. They all crossed the plains in the Daniel McArthur handcart company, our ancestor and this missionary coming home from India.
It was a tale of tremendous hardship, illness, and failure.They lived in the tropics and dealt with the heat, disease and monsoons. Yet these men did not give up, worked hard, and did not come home until the Prophet wrote that they could. What an uplifting book!
September 15, 2014
One of the most astonishing discoveries mom and I made doing family history this summer was that one of our great-grandfathers, Robert Owens, was a Mormon polygamist, pioneer with the Mormon emigration from the US into Mexico (Salt Lake City), a solider in the Mexican-American War, and a missionary in India in the 1850s when the LDS Church opened a short-lived proselytizing mission there and in Burma and Thailand. Owens was also a scoundrel, divorced by his wives, stripped of his missionary license in India, who wound up in Australia for a time and then California, never re-joining the Mormon settlement. Most of what we know about him came from this book and other articles by LDS historian R. Lanier Britsch. Unfortunately it's a dull read and I don't understand why Britsch chose to write the mission history as a fictional but heavily-footnoted journal of one of the missionaries.
March 5, 2008
Amazing true stories of the hardship and committment of the first missionaries to India. Very inspiring.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews