Luke Washington Bickel was an American mariner and missionary. For eighteen years he was captain of the ship Fukuin Maru, planned and developed under the auspices of the American Baptist Missionary Society.
Background
Luke Bickel was born on September 21, 1866, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. He was of German descent, his father, Philipp, one of the young revolutionists of 1848, having fled to this country, married Katherine, daughter of Rev. Samuel R. Clarke, become a Baptist minister, and served in the Civil War. At the time of Luke's birth, he was publishing German Christian literature in Cincinnati; but when the former was about twelve years old he returned to Germany with his family to carry on publishing work for the Baptists there.
Education
Luke graduated from the Reformed Church Academy, Hamburg, in 1880, and then spent a year at Wandsbeck Gymnasium. Although interested in religious activities, he was passionately fond of the sea, and at eighteen he was apprenticed for a term of four years on an English merchant sailing ship.
Career
By the time Bickel was twenty-eight, he had become a captain, holding, though an American, a British Board of Trade certificate as master mariner. In 1893 he married and established a home in London. Soon, yielding to his wife's persuasions, he gave up the sea, and assumed control of the business of the London Baptist Publishing Society. The American Baptist Missionary Society, having been offered means to build a vessel for work among the Inland Sea islanders, asked him to captain the ship and the work. He consented, took a brief course at Spurgeon's College, and started for Japan, arriving in May 1898.
The Fukuin Maru was built for him and dedicated September 13, 1899. On this vessel and its successor, of the same name, built some fourteen years later, he traveled among the islands, establishing and directing missions for the rest of his life. Selecting a strategic center in each group of islands, he made that a nucleus, arranging that from that center work should be carried on in every village in the group. Weakened by his strenuous life and a siege of typhoid fever, he failed to rally from a minor surgical operation and died at the age of fifty-one. Nevertheless, Bickel's work continued to live.
Achievements
Luck Bickel did a notable work of evangelization and education on the islands of the Inland Sea of Japan. At his death there were sixty-two regular preaching places, fifty-two Sunday schools with 3, 500 pupils, and 400 villages in which services were occasionally held. All denominations regarded his achievement as among the most notable in the missionary annals of the Japanese Empire.
Personality
Bickel was a man of large proportions, great strength and courage, and as capable in mind as in body. His physical ability, nautical knowledge, and unselfish services, won the respect and confidence of the people.
Connections
In 1893 Bickel married Annie Burgess, a native of Norwich, England.
