Uncle George's Remarkable Adventures

George Pope was a minister and missionary, who must have had an impressive facility with language. On the four-month voyage in 1839 to South India from Britain, he learned to speak the Tamil language. During the 40 years he spent in India, he founded schools, taught and translated many Tamil texts, setting the ground work for future studies of the language and culture. He is held in high esteem by the Canadian Tamil Congress, which had a bust of him placed in Bedeque, P.E.I., his birthplace. In Chennai, formerly Madras, a statue of him stands by the beach, while schools carry his name almost 150 years after he left India.