Posted: 02 Aug 2015 11:21 AM PDT
One eccentric missionary was George Jones Adams of Maine who attempted to establish an "American Colony" in Jaffa. He failed miserably, even appealing to American government officials and the Governor of Maine for assistance. Two contemporary writers described Adams and his colony. One was an extraordinary writer and actress from Jerusalem named Lydia Mamreoff von Finkelstein Mountford (1855-1917) whose clippings we discovered in a New Zealand archives. The other writer was an American humorist named Mark Twain. He met some of the colony's survivors on his return from his "Innocents Abroad" voyage in 1867 and described their travails. According to von Finkelstein -
In the year 1866 a large American colony came out, and settled in Jaffa. It was called the American Adams colony. The colonists held their estate under great disadvantages. Mr Adams, either through design or in ignorance of the laws, possessed no title deeds; neither were the colonists, who purchased lots, provided with the necessary documents — all holding the property under bills of sale and purchase, whose legality and validity could have been questioned at any moment. Consequently interested parties took advantage of their position, and the best and the largest portion of the land they had paid for was lost, and all the trees out of a fruit plantation cut down, rooted up, and carried away because they whose duty it was to protect the colonists against such legalised frauds, either from interested motives or through gross negligence, omitted to secure for the purchasers the title deeds, which documents also were only rendered legal under certain conditions.
According to Mark Twain -- ...But I am forgetting the Jaffa Colonists. At Jaffa we had taken on board some forty members of a very celebrated community. They were male and female; babies, young boys and young girls; young married people, and some who had passed a shade beyond the prime of life. I refer to the "Adams Jaffa Colony." Others had deserted before. We left in Jaffa Mr. Adams, his wife, and fifteen unfortunates who not only had no money but did not know where to turn or whither to go. Such was the statement made to us. Our forty were miserable enough in the first place, and they lay about the decks seasick all the voyage, which about completed their misery, I take it. However, one or two young men remained upright, and by constant persecution we wormed out of them some little information. They gave it reluctantly and in a very fragmentary condition, for, having been shamefully humbugged by their prophet, they felt humiliated and unhappy. In such circumstances people do not like to talk....Innocents Abroad, Chapter 57. |
Monday, August 3, 2015
The "American Colony" in the Holy Land in 1866, "Shamefully Humbugged by their Prophet"
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