Mr Sayres Despairs

View from Golden Island, 2011. The Yangtze maintains to this day a majestic beauty.
It was into this remote wilderness and ancient culture that the Missionaries sought to bring
their Christian value set.  

One member of the mission, William Sayres meanwhile purported to be in despair and resorted to a statistical analysis to back up his diagnosis of the mismanagement of  the Protestant Episcopal Mission, settling on a one-to-one comparison with the achievements of the Mission with their Presbyterian rivals:

These are the figures last year:

Presbyterian Mission--
Missionaries 55, Native Preachers 16, Native Assistants 134, Communicants 3,302, Stations 10, Scholars 2,092, Expense of Mission $98,240.

Protestant Episcopal Mission--
Missionaries 13, Native Preachers . . . , Native Assistants . . ., Communicants 400 [Annual Report 1884 says 326.], Stations 2, Scholars Expense of Mission $44,000.

From the above you will notice the Presbyterian Mission have over four times more missionaries in the field than we have; five times the number of stations and the communicants exceeds by more than eight fold. Why is this? We were on the field three years in advance of the Presbyterians. What a showing ours is after nearly forty-nine years of labour and expense. 

All these complaints however were to no avail, and it was reported finally on October 29th 1884, that William Jones Boone had been consecrated in Shanghai with Herbert Sowerby in attendance. Boone was to die of tuberculosis just seven years later in 1891, by which point the mission of Herbert Sowerby and Ann Fanny Wombwell was entering its last chapter. Which, as it happened, was just as well for them.