Rev. Henry M. Ladd and Dr. E. E. Snow, who were about to proceed up the Nile for locating the Arthington Mission, were brought before the Committee and instructed as follows:
The Executive Committee of the American Missionary Association, which has commissioned you to explore the basin of the Upper Nile in Africa, with reference to the locating and the working of the Arthington Mission, would give you these few words of God-speed and of instruction.
We furnish you a letter from the U.S. Secretary of State, which in response to a request from this office, assures you that upon arriving at Cairo, you will find the U.S. Consul General stationed there, Mr. Simon Wolf, instructed to facilitate the labors of your expedition and to protect your rights as American citizens in such ways as are consistent with his duties and with due regard to local laws. With his assistance and your English endorsement you will seek from the Khedive of Egypt the essential protection of his authority.
It is our impression that near the mouth of the Sobat, where the Nile comes in from its great western bend, within the Arthington district, and perhaps upon the very spot where Sir Samuel Baker had his camp, you will locate the headquarters of the mission, whose stations in time will be extended into the country beyond; but we leave this matter of location to your discretion. In determining it you will consider the navigability of the river, the elevation and healthfulness of the site, and the friendliness and condition of the people. You will negotiate with the heads of the people, among whom you locate, for the use of land needed by the mission. You will investigate the feasibility of our owning and running a small steamer between Berber and Sobat.
Upon all these matters you will report as frequently as possible to this office. A journal, kept and furnished us, such as that reported by Sup’t Ladd, in regard to the visit to the Mendi Mission, will be greatly helpful.
Returning, Dr. Snow will stop in England to superintend the construction of a steamer for the Nile service, provided your reports shall warrant the Committee in ordering such an expenditure, and Sup’t Ladd will come back to this country to report in person and to secure colored missionaries to go back with you in the early autumn of 1882.
If the way shall not appear closed up, the plan for the second expedition will be that, with your recruits, you take along your steamer as freight to Berber, where you will put it together and launch it to carry your party and materials for building and for subsistence to the chosen site, upon which you will set up the house of the mission.
While the Superintendent, like the Apostle Paul, will have his “beloved physician” to travel with him as associate missionary, in our prayerful solicitude for your health and safety, we wish to enjoin upon you the utmost diligence in seeking to preserve yourselves from sickness, and in keeping yourselves in that enervating climate from overstrain in travel and work.
We bless God that he has given you a heart to assume this great undertaking in the name of His dear Son. We commend you now to the Divine care, and shall ever pray that you may be preserved in health and in life, and prospered in your mission, until you shall see that heathen people coming to the standard of the Cross which you shall have set up in equatorial Africa.