User:Jay D. Easy/sandbox/Johann August Miertsching

Johann August Miertsching (Jan Awgust Měrćink; 21 August 1817 – 30 March 1875) was a Sorbian missionary with the Moravian Church and interpreter of Inuktitut who took part in Sir Robert McClure's 1850–1854 Arctic search expedition to look for traces of Sir John Franklin's ill-fated Northwest Passage expedition.

Early life
Johann August Miertsching was born on 21 August 1817, to working class parents. He was sent to the Moravian community at Kleinwelka, Saxony, at a young age, where he was apprenticed to a shoemaker and joined the Moravian Church.

Moravian mission to Labrador
The Moravians were among the first Protestant denominations to send out missionaries to spread the Christian message among unreached peoples, among which were the nomadic Inuit. Having first set up missions in Greenland early in the 18th century, they slowly fanned out to North America and set up missions among its natives.

Also fitting this description was Labrador, and the Moravians first came to its shores to set up mission stations in the 1770s. Miertsching was chosen to minister to Labrador's migratory Inuit and was deployed there in 1844. He founded and spent the next five years at Okak mission station on the northern Labrador coast, where he learned the local variant of Inuktitut—Inuttitut—and gained experience in Arctic travel.