CALCUTTA: PAST AND PRESENT
few years of his life passed peacefully. He died in 1799, at the great age of eighty-eight, and was laid to rest in the family vault he had prepared in the Mission Burial Ground, in Park Street. While Kiernander was the first Protestant missionary to Bengal, his successor, the Rev. A. T. Clarke, was the first Protestant missionary of English nationality in Bengal, his arrival, in 1789, preceding by four years that of the Baptist missionary, Dr. Carey, for whom the honour is sometimes claimed.
One of the earliest duties Mr. Kiernander took up on his arrival in Calcutta was the charge of the Charity School, which he continued to conduct without payment for nearly twenty years, when advancing age and failing sight obliged him to resign. This Charity School, which in 1800 was amalgamated with the Calcutta Free School, was founded, as far back as 1727, by public subscription for the purpose of "educating poor European children in the Protestant religion." Mr. Richard Bourchier, a member of the Calcutta Council and Master Attendant, afterwards Governor of Bombay, took a leading part in founding the school; and when, shortly after, a Mayor's Court was established in Calcutta, this gentleman built a Court House for its accommodation, which he made over to the Government on
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