The New Tribesmen

It must have been something like the hustle & bustle around Noah's Ark when the rains came. This Ark was a bulky, 175-ft. converted Navy patrol boat in the Oakland (Calif.) estuary. Last week she was abuzz with last-minute flurry. Women hung their clothes out to dry on a line running from mast to smokestack, crewmen tested ropes and slapped on final licks of paint, children swarmed everywhere, while men struggled to set up a wire screen at the ship's sides to keep them from falling overboard.

The Tribesman was getting ready to sail this week. Her strange and valiant cargo: 63 men & women missionaries, with 20 children, bound for South America, to bring the Gospel to the wildest savages they could find.

The Protestant, nondenominational, fundamentalist New Tribes Mission makes a specialty of aborigines, hardships and dogged courage. Two of its planes have crashed in mission work within a year of each other: a DC-3 in June 1950, killing 13 missionaries, a converted C-47 last November, killing several children and the mission's energetic founder-director, 40-year-old Paul W. Fleming.

Paul Fleming started New Tribes Mission in 1942. He set up camps for toughening and training his missionaries. There are now three camps in operation; a fourth will open this fall.

The New Tribesmen strategy is to head for a small village, pick up the dialect and try to make friends with the natives, then push on into the hinterland where white men have never been. They are steeled to the fact that conversions will be few & far between, even to the possibility of being received with war hatchets or poisoned arrows. Five missionaries were killed in Bolivia by Indians in 1943. But in spite of hardship and hazard, New Tribes attracts plenty of candidates for its work. There are 190 of them overseas--mostly in South America--living on about $100 a month per man & wife team and planning to spend the rest of their lives where they are now.

On her maiden voyage, the Tribesman's first port of call will be Belem, Brazil. After carrying another group of South American-bound missionaries from Miami, she will return to the West Coast for a voyage to Japan. "I wish I could go, too," said New Tribes Director John Ruskin Garber last week. "This is our simple way of doing the Lord's work. Our philosophy is: if you have something good, you want to share it."

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