John welcomed a chance to preach to the Indians so the brothers boarded the Simmonds in October with youthful idealism and missionary zeal, totally unaware of the storms on sea and soul just ahead. The whole Georgia episode proved to be a fiasco. John discovered that the noble American savages were “gluttons, thieves, liars and murderers.” And his white colonists deeply resented his rigid highchurch ways, his refusal to conduct the funeral of a Nonconformist, and his prohibition of the ladies’ fancy dresses and gold jewelry in church.
