Chauncy Maples, Bishop of Likoma, Lake Nyasa : a Sketch
of his Life, with Selections from his Letters. By his Sister. (Longmans and Co. 7s. 6d.)—Even those who had but the slightest acquaintance with Bishop Maples (as was the case with the present writer) could not fail to come under the charm of his personality. The present volume explains that charm, or, rather—for charm is a quality never really explicable—shows it to have been the flower of a nature entirely generous and wholesome, intensely human in its depth and range of sympathy, with a bountiful endowment of the grace of humour, and at the same time a thorough- going personal consecration. Chauncy Maples's work, to which he first went out in response to an appeal from Bishop Steere, was almost equally divided, in respect of duration, between two inland stations, Mitsui and Newala, in what is now the German sphere, not far north of the Rovuma River, and the island of Likoma in Lake Nyasa. In the case of the two first-named places, his principal charge was a community of released slaves who had been at Zanzibar under the care of the Universities Mission since their rescue by British bluejackets. The govern- ment, both spiritual and temporal, of these poor creatures, and the converting, as far as might be, of the settlements in which they successively lived into centres for the diffusion of Christianity and civilisation among the Yao and Makna tribes by whom they were surrounded, was Chauncy Maples's business ; and he pro- secuted it with remarkable vigour, devotion, and resource. Unfortunately, Missal was broken up by a raid of the warlike Gwangwara, and the numbers of the freed slaves at Newels were never considerable. At the latter place, however, the colony was more or less under the protection of a friendly chief of very superior character named Matola. Over him Maples established a powerful influence; and when Bishop Smythies, who succeeded Bishop Steers in episcopal charge of the vast region undertaken by the Universities Mission in East Central Africa, wanted a man to develop the new station of Likoma Island in Lake Nyasa, and to take some general supervision of the work in Nyasaland, it was to Maples, the methods and results of whose more limited labours he had watched north of the Rovuma, that in 1886 he entrusted this responsibility, with the title of Archdeacon. So admirably did he fulfil his important trust, and so deep and widespread were the confidence and affection which he inspired among his colleagues of the Mission, and all the natives with whom he came into contact, that when Dr. Hornby, the first Bishop of the separate diocese of Nyasaland, was obliged to resign that post through the breakdown of his health, the Committee of the Mission unanimously accepted his strong re- commendation that Maples should succeed him. After consider- able hesitation the offer of the bishopric was accepted. Chauncy Maples was consecrated at St. Paul's in June, 1895, and went out, after a brief and hard-worked " holiday " in England, to resume, with enhanced authority, the oversight of the workers and the people who loved him. But, as will be well remembered, he never reached Likoma, being drowned almost within sight of it by the swamping of his boat in Lake Nyasa, in a storm through which he had pressed on in order to lose no time in getting to his post. The well-selected letters contained in this volume exhibit a mind full of sublimated natural affection, of religious - common-sense, of varied and cultivated interests, of patience towards almost every form of human weakness except unreality —he could not stand being called a Christian hero—and, above all, of simple straightforward devotion to the work to which he had given his life.
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