10. Rangoon
Chapter 10
Rangoon
The following morning there was nothing else Adoniram and Ann could do but disembark. Ann was too sick to walk, and an armchair with bamboo poles threaded through the arms was rigged to carry her. Adoniram walked along the deeply rutted road beside her. His wife was pale and scarcely moving. A large sunbonnet flopped down over her face. Adoniram anxiously hoped that now that she was back on solid ground she would soon recover. The hired servants carrying Ann set her down outside the customs house.
Within minutes, a crowd had gathered. Small children, completely naked, and many smoking cigars, giggled as they poked at Ann’s shoes. Several older women, brightly dressed in long tunics, their well-oiled hair knotted back in tight buns, drew closer and closer.
“I bet they’ve never seen a white woman before,” commented the captain of the Georgiana as he emerged from the customs house. “There’s no one more inquisitive than a Burmese woman,” he added.
As if to confirm his words, one of the women dashed forward and pushed Ann’s sunbonnet back out of the way so they could all see her face. A gasp went up from the crowd.
“See what I mean?” said the captain.
Ann smiled at the crowd, who giggled back.
“Go on in,” continued the captain. “I’ve filled out your debarkation papers.”
Adoniram motioned to the chair carriers who lifted Ann up again and carried her into the customs house. “House” was a rather grand name for the structure, which was really nothing more than a bamboo hut with woven grass sides. Through a series of gestures, Adoniram learned that one tenth of everything he had brought with him would be kept as a tax for the king. Both he and Ann were thoroughly searched to make sure they were not smuggling anything into Burma, and the correct papers were then stamped, and the couple was dismissed.
But where would they go? Adoniram knew of only one person in all of Burma, and that was William Carey’s son Felix, who lived somewhere in Rangoon. As it turned out, the Careys’ house was not far from the customs house. Soon Adoniram and Ann found themselves looking up at a stately teak home, quite out of place because of its solid construction. Adoniram pulled a rope attached to a bell, and within a few seconds an old native man appeared. The man was startled to see two white people at the gate, and he immediately swung the gate open and ushered the couple into a courtyard. Soon a tall, slim woman arrived, trailed by three toddlers. She was dark-skinned, but not as dark as the Burmese people. Adoniram guessed she was Felix Carey’s wife, whom he had been told was part Portuguese and part Burmese.
“Mrs. Carey?” he asked.
The woman nodded and lowered her eyes. “Yes. My husband has gone to Ava,” she said in broken English. Then looking at Ann, she gestured, “Come in, come in.”
Over a lunch of tea and rice, Adoniram was able to explain a little about who they were and why they had come to Burma. Mrs. Carey listened attentively and then invited the Judsons to stay with her until Felix returned. With great relief, Adoniram left Ann to rest and returned to the Georgiana to retrieve their belongings and clear them through customs. It took the rest of the day to accomplish this task, but by nightfall everything the Judsons owned was ashore. For better or for worse, they were now in Burma.
Felix Carey arrived home the following day. He explained that he had been in the royal city of Ava vaccinating the young princes and princesses against smallpox. Adoniram was intrigued by this. He had read about this modern idea of vaccination, but it was still very new and quite dangerous according to most people.
“I have studied it,” Felix Carey said authoritatively, “and I am convinced it is the best way to stop this terrible scourge. The king has given me permission to vaccinate the entire province.”
“Very impressive,” replied Adoniram. “The king must trust you greatly.”
Felix shrugged. “Today, perhaps, but tomorrow, who can say? Tomorrow he might decide to have my head. You can never tell in Burma.”
Adoniram nodded. “So I hear,” he said dryly.
Felix Carey continued. “It seems Providence has brought you here. My family and I are about to leave for a visit with my father in Serampore. My only worry in going was leaving this house with no Christian witness in it and not being able to continue work on my Burmese grammar book and Bible translation. But it seems God has it all under control. Your timing is perfect.”
Adoniram gulped. “But,” he spluttered, “how soon are you leaving?”
“Next week,” replied Felix. “But don’t worry, I will leave a housekeeper and a yard boy for you, and I know of a very good Burmese scholar who might be willing to teach you the language.”
“Thank you,” replied Adoniram, trying to digest the turn of events.
Over the next few days Adoniram and Felix Carey spent much time together. There were some customs Adoniram had to learn quickly, because to go against them could be fatal. Felix advised him to be very careful with his feet. “Know where they are pointed at all times,” he warned.
“What do you mean?” asked Adoniram.
“The Burmese are very concerned about feet. Never touch anyone with your foot. Never point at anyone with your foot. Never sit so that the bottom of your feet are showing, and never ever stamp your feet. That’s the most insulting thing you could ever do. You would never be forgiven for doing that.”
Such talk made Adoniram feel very uneasy. He wondered what other mistakes he might make. Everything was so different, he could end up insulting the whole city and never even know it!
Two weeks later Adoniram and Ann were on their own. There was not another English-speaking person in all of Rangoon. The couple had to rely on Felix Carey’s old servants to continue cooking and going about their business without any instructions from them.
Both Adoniram and Ann realized that learning the Burmese language was the most important thing they could do right then, and they began lessons immediately. The old scholar Felix Carey had recommended to teach them was a Hindu man who spoke no English. Lessons, which lasted for twelve hours a day, six days a week, were very frustrating at first. Adoniram and Ann had no way of discussing grammar or the makeup of the Burmese language with their teacher. Instead, they had to learn the language the way a little child would, by pointing at a familiar object and waiting to be told what its name was in Burmese.
Writing the language came a little easier, though. The Burmese alphabet consisted of many shapes made up of circles and arcs. It was not as difficult to write as it looked, and soon both Adoniram and Ann were filling pages with the rounded shapes that made up the language. However, when they came to writing words and sentences, they got a surprise. Written Burmese contained no periods, no commas, no question marks, no other punctuation marks of any kind. It did not even use spaces between the words. Since words all ran together, the reader had to make up his or her own mind where one word ended and another began. Thankfully Felix Carey had left the Judsons with the unfinished Burmese grammar book he was writing, and Adoniram and Ann were able to get some help from it as they studied. Adoniram loved the challenge of figuring the language out. It reminded him of the puzzle books his father had given him as a child.
The days turned into months as Adoniram and Ann struggled on learning Burmese. They were very lonely during this time, as only a handful of Europeans were in Rangoon, and they were either Portuguese or French. The couple longed for the opportunity to begin their missionary work proper, but both of them knew it was impossible without knowing the language.
Finally, in October 1813, three months after arriving in Burma, Adoniram decided it was time to visit Mya-day-men, viceroy of Rangoon, the ruler in charge of the city. He requested an audience with the viceroy and received a summons to the palace. The day of his audience, however, the viceroy seemed very bored and paid little attention to the American man stammering on in broken Burmese. Adoniram went home wondering whether the viceroy had even noticed he was there.
By the following morning, Ann had come up with an idea. She told Adoniram that if he could not make an impression on the viceroy, perhaps she could make one on the vicereine, his head wife. Adoniram was reluctant to allow his wife to attend court. The viceroy and his wife had absolute power, and they often had people who displeased them beheaded. Still, he knew that unless they secured some kind of favor from the authorities they would not get far with their missionary efforts, and so he agreed to let Ann try.
Later that afternoon, Ann went to the viceroy’s house, accompanied by a French woman who was a frequent visitor there. Adoniram waited impatiently for her to return, hoping everything went well.
Finally, Ann burst into the house, her eyes shining. “Thank God!” she exclaimed, untying her bonnet and hanging it up. “Oh Adoniram, I wish you had been there.”
Adoniram grinned at her. His wife was always at her best in a crowd; he had known that since the day he met her back in New England. “Tell me all about it,” he said.
“Well,” started Ann, sinking into a wicker chair, “we arrived early, and the vicereine was taking a nap, so about ten of the viceroy’s other wives entertained us. Actually, I think we entertained them. You should have seen them. They called their children, about twenty of them, and they all examined our clothes. They wanted to try on our bonnets and gloves and see our petticoats and stockings. I was just showing them what I kept in my pocket bag when the vicereine came in. You should have seen her, Adoniram. She is a beautiful woman, and she was wearing a gold embroidered gown and smoking a long, silver pipe.”
Before continuing, Ann took a long sip from the cup of water the cook had brought for her. “When the vicereine walked into the room, all the other wives jumped out of the way and crouched down alongside the walls. The children all disappeared, too. The vicereine then beckoned Madame Duvall and me to sit on a mat with her. She asked so many questions. Sometimes I didn’t know enough Burmese to answer them. I do hope she understood me.”
“What kind of questions did she ask?” inquired Adoniram.
“All sorts. How long do we intend to stay in Rangoon? Where did we come from? And how many wives you brought with you to Burma?!”
Adoniram chuckled at the vicereine’s last question and then asked, “Did you get to see the viceroy?”
Ann nodded. “We had been talking for about half an hour when a servant announced his arrival. I got to my feet and bowed low, and when I looked up, there he was. What a fierce-looking man! He looked as though he had come straight from the battlefield. He was holding a six-foot-long spear and looked like he would order us out at any moment. But when he saw his wife, his demeanor softened, and he had a servant offer us drinks. He did not stay long, but I’m sure he knew I was your wife. When Madame Duvall and I were ready to leave, the vicereine grabbed my hand. She told me I must come back and visit her often and that she would consider me like a sister from now on.”
Adoniram chuckled again. “You certainly make a better diplomat than I do,” he said with admiration. “God willing, we will not need to call on the vicereine for special favors, but in Rangoon anything can happen.”
In January 1814, Adoniram and Ann got to see for themselves just how cruel Burmese justice could be. The house next door was attacked by a band of about twenty robbers armed with swords and knives. The robbers stole everything they could carry and stabbed the owner to death as they left. A week later, seven of the thieves were found, and the viceroy decided to make an example of them. He ordered them to be displayed in the marketplace. Their hands and feet were tied, and their abdomens were cut open so their intestines spilled out. The robbers died a slow and painful death, and their bodies were left in the marketplace for three days for the local people to look at as a reminder of who was in control in Rangoon.
The sight of the three bodies sickened Adoniram and Ann, who worked even harder on their language studies. The need to share the gospel with the Burmese people and tell them about a new way to treat one another was more urgent than ever.
Around the middle of 1814, Felix Carey, his wife, and their three children arrived back in Rangoon. Felix had been offered a permanent post in the Royal government in Ava, and he had accepted the position. However, since this meant he would have to give up his missionary career, Adoniram and Ann would be the only “official” missionaries in Burma.
Adoniram and Ann liked Felix Carey and his family and had looked forward to getting to know them all better, so it was with mixed emotions that they said farewell to the Careys as they boarded a government boat for the journey upriver to Ava. It would have been an even sadder farewell had they known what lay ahead. Felix Carey was the only member of his family to survive the trip. The boat had sailed only a few miles upriver when a storm swept in, whipping up the surface of the river and capsizing the boat. Despite Felix’s desperate attempts to save his family, his wife and three children were all drowned. Felix Carey himself was so traumatized by the event that he did not go on to Ava. Instead, he wandered off aimlessly into the Burmese interior.
Because of the poor communications in Burma, it was two weeks before Adoniram and Ann received word of the tragedy. They were both deeply saddened by the news.
Waiting two weeks before hearing news of the tragedy was nothing, though, compared to the length of time Adoniram and Ann had to wait for mail from the United States to arrive. It was three years and seven months after they sailed from Massachusetts before they got their first letter from America. The letter contained good news. Luther Rice had stayed true to his word. He had traveled up and down the East Coast of the United States stirring up interest in the establishment of a Baptist missionary society. In May 1814, such a society had been founded under the long name of the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States of America for Foreign Missions. Adoniram and Ann Judson had been appointed as the new society’s first missionaries. Luther Rice was also being supported so that he could continue with the task of raising interest in and money for the new society.
Adoniram and Ann could not have been more pleased. Now they could write to William Carey and the English Baptist missionaries in Serampore and tell them they no longer needed their support.
As exciting as word of their new support was the news that another missionary couple, George and Phebe Hough, were on their way to join the Judsons in Burma. George was a printer by trade and was bringing a small printing press with him. This was more than Adoniram and Ann could have hoped for. They would no longer be the only missionaries in Burma.
All this good news, coupled with the fact that Ann was due to have a baby any day, lifted their spirits. On September 11, 1814, Adoniram delivered a healthy baby boy. He and Ann named their son Roger Williams Judson, after Roger Williams, an early missionary to the Indians in New England. Both Ann and Adoniram hoped that their son, like his namesake, would grow up to be a missionary.
Roger Williams Judson was the first white baby to be born in Rangoon, and whenever Ann took him out of the house, a crowd gathered. “Look how white his feet are!” they would exclaim, or, “His eyes are the color of the sky!”
By now the Judsons’ hard work was beginning to pay off. Ann was able to speak fluent Burmese, while Adoniram, who had spent hundreds of hours with his tutor, had a deep understanding of how the language was put together and had nearly finished writing the Burmese grammar book Felix Carey had begun. It looked as though the hard times were behind them. The viceroy accepted their presence, more missionaries were on their way, Adoniram and Ann were healthy, the baby was thriving, and the missionaries were beginning to have meaningful conversations with the local people about the gospel. It seemed nothing could go wrong now.