6. Privateers
Chapter 6
Privateers
Adoniram could hardly wait to go back to Bradford again. He used any excuse he could think of to visit the Hasseltine home. And after each visit he was more convinced than ever that he had found the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.
After a month of visiting, he knew it was time to write a formal letter to Ann (who was also called Nancy by many of her friends), telling her he had serious intentions towards her. He wrote asking if she was willing to “formally commence an acquaintanceship,” which was the proper way to ask a young woman to consider marriage. It was also proper for a young woman not to answer such a letter too quickly, because to do so would make her look overly eager. So Ann made Adoniram wait an agonizing week before she replied. And in her letter she gave no answer to his request; she just said her parents would have to consent to the relationship before she would even consider the idea.
Adoniram knew he had another letter to write, and it would be the hardest piece of writing he had ever attempted. He wondered how he was going to tell Ann’s parents that he would like to marry their beautiful, talented daughter and drag her off to the Far East, where they would probably both die. He tried wording the letter one way and then another. The candle burned low, and his eyes ached with strain before he finally settled on the wording for such an important letter. It read:
I have now to ask, whether you can consent to part with your daughter early next spring, to see her no more in this world; whether you can consent to her departure, and her subjection to the hardships and sufferings of a missionary life; whether you can consent to her exposure to the dangers of the ocean; to the fatal influence of the southern climate of [Burma]; to every kind of want and distress; to degradation, insult, persecution, and perhaps a violent death. Can you consent to all this, for the sake of Him who left His heavenly home, and died for her and for you; for the sake of perishing, immortal souls; for the sake of Zion, and the glory of God?
As he sealed it, Adoniram knew he had written a bleak letter. He thought of his own parents. How would they react if someone wrote to them asking for Abigail’s hand in marriage and included in the letter a list of hardships she could expect to endure? Still, as blunt as the letter was, he knew it had to be that way. If Ann Hasseltine was to become his wife, she would face many hardships, and he did not want her family to let her go begrudgingly or without thinking of the cost to themselves.
A week later, Adoniram received a reply. Deacon Hasseltine wrote to tell him that although he and his wife were not in favor of their youngest daughter going on such a perilous journey, especially since they may well never see her again, neither of them would forbid her from going. The decision as to whether she became Mrs. Judson was hers alone to make. Whatever she decided, her parents would stand by her decision.
Adoniram continued to pay visits to the Hasseltine home. The more he learned about Ann, the less likely he thought it was that she would give up everything for him. The Hasseltine home was the center of social activity for miles around, so much so that Deacon Hasseltine had built an entire wing onto his house to be used as a dance hall by the young people of the district.
Ann had been the first person in her family to become a Christian. She was fifteen at the time, and her parents and brother and sisters quickly followed her example. Despite the family’s conversion, the lively social events continued at their home, with Ann at the center of them all. Adoniram groaned when he discovered how many young men in the district had their eyes on Ann. Many of them came from rich homes and could give her the kind of life she had grown up with. What were a dangerous sea voyage and unknown hardships in Burma compared to that?
On September 24, 1810, Adoniram Judson graduated from Andover Theological Seminary, though he continued to live in his dormitory room after graduation. Most of the other students were off to be junior or assistant pastors in churches around New England, but Adoniram had nowhere else to go. He was waiting for the American Board, as the Congregational church’s new mission organization was called, to tell him what he should do next. He could have waited back home in Plymouth, but there was the matter of Ann. Over the next several weeks, the two of them rode together around the New England countryside, taking in all the beauty of early fall as the leaves began to change color. As they rode, they discussed their views on the Bible, on families, and on missions. Finally, in mid-October, Ann announced she had made up her mind. She would marry Adoniram and go wherever God led them. Adoniram could hardly contain his excitement.
The couple decided they would get married just before they left America, but no one could say for sure when that would be. The American Board had formed a subcommittee called the Prudential Committee, whose job it was to work out how to financially support the missionaries it sent out. This proved a difficult task, and in the end it was decided that the American Board would just have to humble itself before the London Missionary Society and ask if they would provide the money needed to help send and support the missionaries. Of course, this was a blow to almost everyone concerned. Memories of the American Revolutionary War were still fresh in the minds of most people. The last thing any American wanted to do was ask the British for help. Still, they could see no way around the situation, and so on Christmas Day 1810, the would-be missionaries, Samuel Newell, Samuel Nott, Gordon Hall, and Adoniram Judson met with the American Board.
All four young men were formally accepted as missionaries, and Adoniram was chosen to go to London to put their request before the London Missionary Society. Passage was booked to London for him aboard the Packet, a three-masted schooner scheduled to sail from Boston on New Year’s Day 1811.
Bad weather delayed the Packet’s departure, and the ship finally sailed out of Boston Harbor on January 11. Once out of sight of land, Adoniram spent most of his time reading. There was little else to do on the small ship, and there were only two other passengers, both of whom spoke only Spanish. Normally the ship would have carried about twenty passengers, but war was raging between England and France, and it was rumored that the United States might soon go to war against both countries. Only desperate or determined passengers risked sailing across the Atlantic at this time, and Adoniram was soon to find out just how much of a risk it was.
On the fifteenth morning of the voyage, Adoniram awoke to find the crew of the Packet in a panic. As he climbed the stairs to the foredeck, he saw what the problem was. A French ship was skimming across the water towards them, its white sails billowing in the breeze.
“A privateer,” yelled the captain, as he stared through his telescope. “She’s armed to the gunwales. Let’s try to outrun her.”
Immediately the deck turned into a frenzy of activity as the sailors hoisted the sails and tightened the halyard while the captain tried to maneuver the Packet to take maximum advantage of the wind. Despite the crew’s best efforts, the French ship continued to gain on them. They would soon be overrun.
Adoniram had read about the French privateers back in Boston. They were French ships whose crew had been given a license by the French government to plunder any enemy ships. In return for their license, the privateers turned over half the booty they stole to France. The practice of privateering meant that private ships could act as a country’s navy, destroying and pillaging foreign ships at will.
Adoniram had no idea what the privateers would do with him once they boarded the Packet, but he knew this would be his last chance to retrieve anything from his cabin. He raced down the deck and descended the stairs two at a time. Reaching his cabin, he yanked the door open and stood for a moment looking around. What should he take with him? His eyes fell on his desk. He thought he should take his Bibles, all three of them—one in English, one in Hebrew, and one in Latin. He quickly scooped them up and shoved them into a cloth bag. Then he remembered the letter Ann had written to him just before he left Boston. He fumbled around in his trunk until he found it.
Thump! Thump! Someone was whacking on his door. Adoniram swiveled around to see two French sailors glaring at him. He could smell stale alcohol on their breath as they strode towards him.
Adoniram was surprised at how fast the French privateers had overrun the Packet. He had been below deck for only about three minutes, and in that time they had taken complete control of the ship. And since they controlled the ship it was pointless to resist, so Adoniram allowed the privateers to push him out the door and up the stairs onto the deck.
“Over there, you English dogs,” yelled one of the privateers in heavily accented English.
Adoniram was herded with the rest of the crew to the starboard side of the ship, where they were counted into groups of ten. The men were then forced to climb down a rope over the side of the Packet and into waiting longboats that ferried them to the L’Invincible Napoleon, the French privateer ship.
As Adoniram pitched with the motion of the longboat, he wondered what would happen next. Would he ever make it to London, or back to Boston, or would he be dumped at sea and left to drown? He felt for the letter from Ann inside his jacket pocket. With his hand on the letter, he comforted himself with the thought that at least if he was killed he would have died trying to become a missionary.
The privateers had no plan to kill Adoniram or the crew of the Packet. Instead, the men were thrown into the overcrowded, dark and dank hold of the French ship. They had no food, water, or chamber pots. A dull shaft of sunlight filtering through the dusty air of the hold was the only light the men had.
About three hours after the men had been brought aboard, Adoniram felt the L’Invincible Napoleon begin to move forward. They were under sail again. Adoniram wondered where they were headed. At the same time, the captain of the Packet finally took a roll call. Everyone was accounted for except the two Spanish passengers.
“I saw them being taken to a cabin,” volunteered one crew member.
“That figures,” grunted the captain. “The French have no war with the Spanish. They’ll probably be treated like royalty, or at least a lot better than we will be.”
It didn’t take long before Adoniram knew exactly what the captain meant. The rest of the day was a kind of living hell for him. A storm blew up, and stuck below water level with no fresh air, many of the sailors became violently ill. Adoniram was ill, too. Soon the hold was filled with the stench of vomit. Adoniram had lived a sparse life at Andover, but there had always been plenty of fresh well water to wash with, and he had taken great pains to keep himself and his clothes neat and clean. Now he could hardly stand the smell, and with nowhere for the sailors to relieve themselves, he braced himself for things to get a lot worse.
Days slipped by in the hold. The only high point was the visit by a French doctor, who held a perfumed handkerchief over his nose and mouth throughout the visit. Adoniram wanted desperately to tell the doctor that he was not one of the crew, that he was on his way to be a missionary, but he had no way to get through to him. Adoniram spoke no French, and the doctor spoke no English.
At first Adoniram could not believe what had happened to him. He questioned God as to why He had let it happen. After all, wasn’t it important that he speak to the London Missionary Society as soon as possible? But as time went by, Adoniram began to accept the situation he was in. He decided that it was probably good preparation for missionary life, and he prayed for grace to ignore the stench around him. Soon he felt his old optimism returning, and he decided to put his time to good use. He found a spot just to the right of some boxes, where there was barely enough sunlight to read by, and set about reading his three Bibles. To keep his mind sharp he would read a chapter in Latin and then translate it into Hebrew. Then he would read the next chapter in Hebrew and translate it into Latin.
Adoniram was busy doing this one morning when the doctor climbed down the ladder into the hold. He watched as the doctor’s eyes squinted to see what he was reading. The doctor picked up the two Bibles and tucked them under his arm. Adoniram wanted to protest, but he knew it was pointless. Any complaint was met with a whack from the stock of a musket. Instead, Adoniram sat and prayed that the doctor would return his precious Bibles. A few minutes later he did.
“So you speak Latin, my friend?” the doctor asked Adoniram in perfect Latin.
Adoniram’s mouth fell open. In all his attempts to communicate with the doctor he had not thought of speaking Latin to him!
The two men had a long conversation, and Adoniram was able to explain that he was a pastor on his way to secure funds to become a missionary.
“I wish I had known sooner!” exclaimed the doctor when Adoniram was finished. “I will make arrangements for you to have your own cabin immediately.”
Within an hour, Adoniram was hauled out of the hold and given water for a bath and his own cabin aboard the L’Invincible Napoleon. He ate dinner that night with the captain and the two Spanish passengers from the Packet, and although he could not understand what they were saying, he appreciated the good food and drink.
From then on he spent as much time up on deck as he could, enjoying the fresh air and the sun on his back. He understood from a crewman who spoke a little English that they were bound for Bayonne on the southwest coast of France.
One day, as he scanned the horizon, Adoniram’s heart beat wildly. Perhaps he was not bound for France after all. What he saw was a large, well-armed brig flying the Union Jack. The brig spotted the L’Invincible Napoleon and gave chase. Adoniram watched as the French sailors scrambled to get their ship under more sail. The L’Invincible Napoleon was a smaller, more nimble ship that handled well in the water, and within an hour the British warship had fallen from sight. Adoniram’s hopes of rescue were gone with it.
Adoniram did not spot any more British ships during the voyage, and eventually the L’Invincible Napoleon dropped anchor off Le Passage, Spain, where the two Spanish passengers were put ashore. Adoniram, however, had to stay aboard. As the ship sailed on to Bayonne, he marveled at the Pyrenees Mountains looming majestically above the horizon to the east. Soon the L’Invincible Napoleon was maneuvering its way into Bayonne Harbor.
Once the ship was tied up, the crew of the Packet were led out of the hold. By now they were filthy, and their eyes squinted against the bright sunlight. Adoniram wondered what would happen to him, since he wasn’t a member of the crew. A gentle prod in the back with a bayonet gave him his answer.
“Over there, with the others,” growled a sailor in French.
Adoniram had picked up a few words of the language by now, and he knew exactly what was expected of him. He joined the crew of the Packet as they were tied together with long ropes and marched down the gangplank and into the street below. He grimaced as he stood between the cook and one of the helmsmen from the Packet. The rancid odor of the men’s unwashed bodies made him gag.
“Faster, faster,” yelled the sailor with the bayonet. Adoniram felt the tug of the rope in front of him, and he walked forward into the surging crowd, which parted for them. The people jeered and spat on the English prisoners. Adoniram knew he had to do something, but what? He was in a strange country, roped to two other men and being marched off to prison. Recalling every bit of French he had learned aboard the L’Invincible Napoleon, he began to shout to the passers-by, telling them, or so he thought, that he was an American citizen and should be freed at once.
Adoniram’s words had an unusual effect on the crowd, who went wild when they heard them, slapping their sides and laughing until the tears rolled down their cheeks. After several minutes of this, Adoniram began to think he was using the wrong words and that he was doing more harm than good. So he decided to switch to English. “This is an outrage,” he yelled in his booming voice. “I am a citizen of a country that is not at war with you. How dare you capture me on the high seas and bring me here against my will. I demand to see a judge at once.”
One of the guards leading the prisoners raised his pistol and threatened to beat Adoniram with it, but Adoniram kept on yelling. More than anything, Adoniram knew that if he ended up in prison with the British sailors, it could be years before he saw sunlight and freedom again. Ann was waiting to marry him when he got back to Boston, and the American Board was counting on him to secure the money needed for the first American missionaries to be sent out. But most of all, the people of Burma needed to hear the gospel. Adoniram could not allow himself to go to prison. He raised his voice and shouted some more.