Kidnapping a spinster and her chaperone

THE MISS STONE AFFAIR: AMERICA’S FIRST HOSTAGE CRISIS

By Teresa Carpenter

Simon & Schuster, $24, 238 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY LYN NOFZIGER

For 2,000 years bringing salvation to the unsaved has been hard, often thankless and sometimes dangerous work for Christian missionaries. They’ve been kidnapped, arrested, tortured, killed, mocked, derided for their faith and for attempting to spread it throughout the world.

The apostle Paul experienced it from both sides. As a Jewish zealot named Saul he was responsible or the deaths and imprisonment of numerous persons whose only crime was to embrace Christianity. As a missionary sent by Christ to bring the Gospel to the gentiles he was mocked, beaten, imprisoned and eventually executed.

But things had improved down through the ages, at least in that part of Europe and Asia Minor where Paul had traveled.

And so it was that the new missionary lady from Boston, Miss Ellen Maria Stone, was in no immediate danger when she arrive in Bulgaria in 1878. American Protestant missionaries during that period were common in the part of Europe known as the Balkans that lay just across the Dardanelles from Constantinople. They were there not only to convert the Muslims of the area but also the Orthodox Christians whom they looked on as only a little better than the Muslims.

Miss Stone was to spend 13 years in that part of Europe before anyone got around to kidnapping her.

“The Miss Stone Affair” by Teresa Carpenter is the story of her kidnapping, the travails she and her fellow kidnappee, Katerina Tsilka, underwent for the nearly six months of their captivity, and the attempts that were made to obtain their release.

Miss Stone was kidnapped on Sept. 1, 1901 and by the time official Washington received word of her abduction it was Sept. 5, the same day a nut named Leon Franz Czolgosz shot President McKinley twice. For understandable reasons the kidnapping of MIss Stone took second billing to the assassination attempt and McKinley’s subsequent fight for life. He died on Sept. 14 and Vice President Theodore Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency and to the question of what to do about Miss Stone’s kidnapping.

Though the lady was eventually freed and for a while was somewhat of a celebrity her fame faded, due as much as anything to another kidnapping. More than two and a half years later a man named Ion Perdicarus, thought at the time to be an American citizen, was kidnapped in Morocco by Berber tribesmen led by one Ahmed al-Aziz Mohammed al Raisuli. His kidnapping gave rise to Roosevelt’s famous threat, “Perdicarus alive or Raisuli dead” and the release of Perdicarus, who, it turned out, had renounced his American citizenship during the Civil War.

Thanks to Roosevelt’s threat, actually issued by Secretary of State John Hay, Perdicarus lives in American folklore while, until resurrected by Teresa Carpenter the kidnapping of Miss Stone has been all but forgotten.

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