author

Johann Gottfried Haensel

Best known for a vivid firsthand account of the Nicobar Islands, this Moravian missionary wrote from long experience in the field. His surviving book blends travel writing, observation, and the religious aims of an early nineteenth-century mission.

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Letters on the Nicobar islands, their natural productions, and the manners, customs, and superstitions of the natives with an account of an attempt made by the Church of the United Brethren, to convert them to Christianity

Letters on the Nicobar islands, their natural productions, and the manners, customs, and superstitions of the natives with an account of an attempt made by the Church of the United Brethren, to convert them to Christianity

by Johann Gottfried Haensel

About the author

Johann Gottfried Haensel is chiefly remembered for Letters on the Nicobar Islands, published in 1812 and edited by Christian Ignatius Latrobe. The book presents his descriptions of the islands' natural world, local customs, and the Moravian mission's efforts there, making it part travel narrative, part missionary record.

Sources connected with the 1812 edition describe him as a Moravian missionary and identify him as the only surviving missionary of that Nicobar venture. In the book's prefatory material, Latrobe says he met Haensel in St. Thomas in the West Indies and notes that Haensel had earlier spent seven years on Nancowry in the Nicobars.

Because reliable biographical information about him is scarce online, much of what can be said with confidence comes from this single work and its publication history. That gives Haensel a small but distinctive place in print history: his writing preserves one missionary's close, firsthand view of the Nicobar Islands at a time when very few European accounts existed.