Nathaniel Ward

Nathaniel Ward (b. 1798) accompanied the BMS missionaries Charles Evans and Richard Burton who had been asked by Sir Thomas Raffles, then governor of Sumatra, to open a station at Fort Marlborough to begin work on a translation of the Java New Testament. Nathaniel, from Derby, was William Ward’s nephew. They arrived in Sumatra with his printing press in April 1819. The younger Ward worked along with Gottlob Brückner in Sumatra for many years before the BMS closed its mission there. Ward remained behind on his own, sustaining himself through agriculture while continuing to work on a translation of the Bible. Andrew Fuller visited Derby in 1812, mainly for the purpose of meeting the then fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, at that time apprenticed to a Mr. Smith, carpenter and joiner.  Fuller describes the meeting in a letter to William Ward at Serampore on 15 July 1812:  “The boy has a fine open countenance, and apparently heatlthy constitution. He bears a great resemblance to what I can conceive my dear brother Ward to have been at his age.” See F. A. Cox, History of the Baptist Missionary Society, from 1792 to 1842, 2 vols. (London: T. Ward, and G. and J. Dyer, 1842), 1:354; “Calendar of Letters,” Baptist Quarterly 7 (1934-1935), 45.