Missionary Life
Samuel and Maria had five children while overseas. Maria Dyer (born and died at Penang 1829-1831), Samuel Dyer, Jr. (born at Penang 1833-1898), Burella Hunter Dyer (born at Penang, died in Shanghai 1835-1858), Maria Jane Dyer (born at Malacca, died at Zhenjiang 1837-1870), and Ebenezer Dyer (born and died at Singapore 1842-aft. Oct. 1843)
Samuel Dyer and his wife left England on 10 March 1827 and they arrived at Penang, in the Straits of Malacca on 8 August 1827. The Dyers were to have gone on to Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca but a lack of workers lead them to stay in Penang and settle in Chinese sector of town. They both began studying the Min nan Dialect (Hokkien) spoken by the local population.
After gaining some knowledge of the language, Dyer faced the challenge of producing movable metallic types for the thousands of Chinese characters. He started with a systematic analysis of characters and strokes. At first, using wood reliefs to create the clay molds from which type could be cast, he soon moved to steel punches and copper matrixes. Dyer's linguistic abilities, meticulous planning, and painstaking attention to detail resulted in Chinese fonts of high quality. They were later passed on to the American Presbyterian Mission Press in China and played a significant part in its development.
Maria opened school for girls with 23 students, but she was forced to close it later in the year. By 1828 Samuel was preaching in Chinese only 5 months after their arrival. He grew committed to the production of Christian literature in Chinese, printing Bibles, tracts, and books with the moveable, metal-cast type with a controlled vocabulary that he developed.
In 1829 they had their first daughter, named Maria who died about two years later. The same year, in 1831, Samuel visited Malacca, the headquarters of the London Missionary Society’s Chinese ministries.
In 1833 the childless Dyers had a boy named Samuel. About this same time some in the Chinese community requested a school. During this period Samuel was hard at work on a revision of the translation of Matthew’s Gospel in Chinese. The amount of work that still was left to be done prompted him to write to England in the following year, appealing for more workers to be sent out. Robert Morrison died at Guangzhou in 1834.
1835 brought another daughter, Burella Hunter to the Dyer family at Penang. Samuel then took his family to Malacca to join the London Missionary Society China Mission headquarters. The Dyers established 2 schools with the curriculum including: reading, writing, sewing and embroidery. There Samuel worked with Liang Fa (who had been baptized by William Milne in 1819).
Dyer soon recognized the strategic importance of his metal-type printing and proceeded with the revision of the Chinese Bible at Malacca.
Another daughter, Maria Jane Dyer was born in 1837 at Malacca.
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