PROTESTANT CEMETERY IN MACAO
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cemetery. Membership of the Board is open to the Consular Authorities in Macao of certain European Protestant nations, plus Protestant residents in Macao. In 1924 the Rev. John Galloway, a Canadian missionary, was appointed a Trustee; he still lives in Macao and it is to him that we are indebted for much of our information concerning the later history of these two cemeteries in Macao, the Old and the New. When the East India Company ceased operating in China in 1834, its property in Macao reverted to His Majesty's Government in England. But in 1870, it was thought wiser that the two cemetery properties in Macao should come under the ownership of one body, and the Old Cemetery property was transferred to the New Cemetery Trustees, under whose control it rests to this day.
Entrance to the Old Cemetery. The door in the wall already mentioned gives entrance to the property which is on three levels; the highest or first level is a courtyard in which a simple chapel stands; the burial plots are on the two lower levels which we refer to as the Upper and Lower Terraces. A wide cement path leads down from the Chapel level to the Lower Terrace and a break in the left-hand wall on the way down gives access to the Upper Terrace. In the chapel are two wall memorials of interest; one is to a British merchant named Margesson who originally came from Surrey, and who was drowned on 17 June 1869 when the ship in which he was travelling struck a rock just a mile or two off the coast of Japan; the disaster occurred on a clear evening and in a perfectly calm sea, but the ship sank almost immediately with a big loss of life.
The other chapel memorial is to James B. Endicott who died of typhoid in 1870 after living for 35 years in Hong Kong, Macao, and Canton. He is actually buried in the Colonial Cemetery in Happy Valley, Hong Kong, but he has two daughters, an uncle, and many friends in the churchyard in Macao. Endicott was born in Danvers, Massachusetts, U.S.A. in 1814, and is a direct lineal descendant of John Endicott who sailed from the harbour of Weymouth, England, in 1628 in the ship Abigail on an adventurous voyage to the New World where he became the founder and first governor of the State of Massachusetts. James B. Endicott introduces us to the important American section of the foreigners who lived in Macao more than one hundred years ago, over fifty of whom rest in this cemetery.