Samuel Dyer - Final Days

Final Days

Dyer was able to finally reach China on 7 August 1843 at Hongkong. At the LMS general conference he was appointed as Conference Secretary. The Dyers were appointed to go to Fuzhou, Fujian to open missionary work there.

Samuel visited Guangzhou where he had a severe attack of fever and was cared for by Peter Parker, M.D.. He was taken to Macau and died in there on 21 October 1843 before being able to live in China itself at his newly assigned designation of Fuzhou. This was the same outbreak that took the life of Robert Morrison's son, John Robert Morrison at Guangzhou. Dyer was buried next to the graves of Robert and Mary Morrison at the Old Protestant Cemetery in Macau.

Dyer had once written:

“

If I thought anything would prevent my dying for China, the thought would crush me.

”

Maria Dyer died only three years later at Penang, leaving 3 orphaned children in the care of her second husband, Johann Georg Bausum. Fellow missionary to Penang, Evan Davies, wrote a memoir of Samuel Dyer and a volume of Samuel's letters to his children in 1846. The Chinese Repository recorded his obituary and mentioned that,

His attainments in speaking the Fukien dialect were of the first order, and he had already published a small Vocabulary and a translation of Thom's Esop's Fables in the colloquial, and had commenced another larger vocabulary. Besides preaching among the people, Mr. Dyer had also devoted much of his time to the cutting of punches for a font of Chinese types, in which he had attained to a great degree of perfection. One large and one small font are now partly done...

The type that came to be known as Dyer's Penang font became the standard in Chinese printing until the 1850s when it was replaced by William Gamble's font in 1859.

All three of the Dyers' surviving children became involved in work to spread the Gospel in China, fulfilling their father's prayers. The Dyers' daughters, returned to China as teenagers and worked with Mary Ann Aldersey at her school for Chinese girls in Ningbo, Zhejiang. Maria Jane Dyer eventually married James Hudson Taylor, who went on to found the China Inland Mission. She had a strong influence in the beginnings of that agency. Burella Dyer had married a year earlier to John Shaw Burdon, but had died in Shanghai very soon after they were married. Samuel Dyer, Junior succeeded Alexander Wylie with the British and Foreign Bible Society as their agent in China in the 1870s.