Rangoon (1813)

C H A P T E R I I I

Rangoon

[ I813 ]

T was an exhausted trio of missionaries who climbed wearily

aboard La Belle Cre’ole as she lay at anchor at Saugur. For several days, while the ship made up her crew, hoiSted sail, and struck out across the Bay of Bengal for the Indian Ocean, they did little but I'CSt. Nancy confessed to such “an uncommon degree of slothfulness and inactivity” that she even “enjoyed religion but little.”

Eventually they roused themselves, but if they had hoped to hold religious services aboard, as on the Caravan, they were soon disappointed. Nobody but themselves was in the least interested in religion. The passengers even profaned the Sabbath by playing cards and chess on deck and amusing themselves with “trifling conversation”—-—behavior the missionaries found “very trying,” but New England Sunday laws did not obtain aboard and there was nothing they could do to prevent it. In fact, Nancy was a little taken aback to realize that although the passengers’ manner was respectful, they probably privately considered the missionaries “superstitious, unsocial creatures.” She was more used to passing that judgment on others than to having it applied to herself. But she consoled herself with the thought that to be a missionary it was necessary to “take those methods which make us appear contemptible in the eyes of the men of this world.”

Under the circumStances the three kept to themselves a good deal, occupying their time by studying French, which they expected to need in Isle of France, as they called Mauritius. They held private worship in their own quarters every evening and twice on Sundays.

The Créole made rather a slow voyage of it. There were light winds, in which the ship could but barely drift, then contrary winds and occasional rough weather. Adoniram, alternately optimistic and depressed, must have wondered in his gloomier moods whether their mission would ever begin. Were they doomed to sail the Seven Seas forever, in the character of evangelistic Flying Dutchmen, fated always to be sailing toward the place of their mission but never permitted to reach it? These gloomy thoughts of Adoniram’s were of a piece with those of Nancy’s, when she gave way to a peculiar form of self-criticism: “I find my nature shrinks from the idea of being shipwrecked and sunk amid the waves. This shows me how unlike I am to those holy martyrs, who rejoiced to meet death, even in the most horrid forms.” Most of the time, however, they were in high spirits, rejoicing in their youth and good health, in the mission they had chosen, and in their love for each other. Both, by the nature of their creed, were given to feeling that they were unworthy to serve God. If they had possessed all the virtues of all the saints, they would still have felt guilt on this score. But they felt no guilt and made no apologies for their passion. To Adoniram, earthly love, bodily love, was almost a part of love for God. Its delights and satisfactions, were, so to speak, a foretaste of the ineffable delights of heaven, which no mortal on earth could even imagine except in some such manner. And Nancy was sure Adoniram was, “in every respect, the most calculated to make me happy and useful, of all the persons I have ever seen.”

Eventually the voyage came to an end, when the Cre’ole sailed into the harbor of Port Louis, Isle of France, late on Saturday, January 17, 1813. They had been at sea seven weeks, and away from Salem eleven months.

It was good to see land again. Even better, to both Adoniram and Rice, but eSpecially to Nancy, was the prospect of meeting the Newells once more. Nothing, she felt, not even a change of denomination, could separate her from Harriet. And there was the baby. It——boy or girl? she wondered—must be about two months old by now. She longed to see the infant, pure New England in blood, born in this remote island set in the middle of an ocean so far from the home of its ancestors.

But the ship had scarcely dropped anchor when a boat from shore came alongside with stunning news.

Harriet was dead. The baby was dead.

This was all they could learn from the men in the boat. Questions brought no particulars, merely the statement that both were dead.

Dismayed, shocked, they talked late in the cabin that night, fruitlessly conjecturing much. Nancy, after her firSt tears, began to feel an anger against Providence itself that she had never experienced before. “0 death,” she wrote bitterly, “thou destroyer of domestick felicity, could nor this wide world afford victims sufficient to satisfy thy cravings, without entering the family of a solitary few, whose comfort and happiness depended much on the society of each Other?” But as she reflected she grew more resigned: “But thou hast only executed the commission of a higher power. Thou hast come, clOthed in thy usual garb, thou waSt sent by a kind Father, to release his child from toil and pain. Be still, and know that God has done it.”

The next morning, Sunday, Newell came on board the Cre’ole, disconsolate, brokenhearted. He was too distraught on that visit to give more than a few fragmentary hints of how Harriet died. Later, little by little, they learned the whole story.

Harriet, having worn herself out with that multitude of lastminute tasks even before boarding the Gillespie in Calcutta, had taken to bed with a fever about the time the ship sailed. She was up in a week, but a few weeks later she was attacked “with severe pains in the stomach and bowels, the disease of the country.”

All this time the Gillespie was being driven about the Bay of Bengal by contrary winds, making little progress toward its destination. Along the Coromandel Coast it sprang a leak which became so bad that the captain had to put in for repairs at the small town of Coringa, south of Vizagapatam.

Harriet was taken ashore there. By the time the Gillespie set out again—a matter of some two weeks—she had apparently made a full recovery. But the delay meant that they were still at sea, more than two months after leaving Calcutta, when, on the eighth of October—two days before her nineteenth birthday—she gave birth to a baby girl— “on the cabin floor with no Other attendant but my dear Mr. Newell.”

The Newells’ joy in their new daughter was to be pitifully short. A day or so later both mother and child were exposed to a violent storm which drenched and chilled everyone aboard. Harriet and the baby caught cold; the baby’s cold turned into pneumonia, and five days after birth she died in her mother’s arms.

Grief, exhaustion, exposure and sickness quickly did their work on Harriet. She lost strength rapidly. Soon both she and Newell recognized the symptoms of tuberculosis. Remembering her father’s waSting and death, knowing that several other relatives had died of the same disease, she was convinced from the beginning that she must die. Newell was more optimistic and insisted that she would recover once they were on land again; but she told him to give up any such hope and help her prepare herself for death.

Early in November the Gillespie dropped anchor at Port Louis and Harriet was taken ashore to a small house Newell had rented. He found two physicians to care for her, but they could do nothing. Little by little she wasted away. By the middle of November, even Newell gave up hope. On the thirtieth, about four in the afternoon, her eyesight failed, and in an hour or so, she died. The next day Newell buried her in the shade of an evergreen tree in a secluded corner of the Port Louis cemetery.

These were the bare facts of Harriet’s sickness and death. In them Newell found one consolation — the firm expectation he had shared with her that the two would be reunited in heaven. From the beginning, except for a few days following the baby’s death, Harriet had never doubted that she was on the way to a better world than the one she was leaving. She looked forward to it, all but gloried in the prospect, and expressed no fears and no regrets except that of being parted temporarily from her husband.

For more than a week after the arrival of the Cre'ole at Port Louis, the missionaries did little. Bereavement and the lonely weeks on the island had sapped Newell’s initiative. Adoniram, Rice and Nancy, too, momentarily lost heart. They did what they could to console Newell, but they needed consoling themselves.

The grim, unromantic reality of the task they had undertaken was beginning to reveal itself. At Andover and in Salem they had talked about difficulties and dangers and probable martyrdom, but their departure had been, in a certain sense, almost festive, surrounded as it had been by the atmosphere of drama which always envelops the firSt volunteers at the start of a long war, before the big battles and the long casualty lists. Now had occurred the first skirmishes and the first casualties. It had not turned out the way they had expected. It was hard to see the glory in such deaths as) Harriet’s and her baby’s.

Here they were, four of them, a full year after leaving Salem, on an island where none of them had ever intended to go. They were three Baptists and one Congregationalist, who had begun as four Congregationalists. They had given up hope of going to their original destination, Burma. The East India Company seemed intent on hounding them out of any other possible place.

And always, and always again, their thoughts reverted to Harriet, the youngest of them all. The accident of contrary winds, a leaky ship, drenching in a storm at sea, a cold, pneumonia, tuberculosis — where was the purpose of Providence in this mean, unfair, sneaky, even vindictive, attack on a young mother and her newborn baby?

Was the purpose to chasten them, or to fortify them for the trials ahead? If so, the method was a strange one. More of this, and there might not even be a mission. Newell was a broken man, the heart gone out of him. Rice was ill from another of the recurrent attacks of liver trouble which he had first experienced in Calcutta. Nancy knew herself to be pregnant. Thinking of what had happened to Harriet she wrote gloomily, “I am left behind, still to endure the trials of a missionary life. 0 that this severe dispensation may be sanctified to my soul and that I may be prepared to follow my dear departed siSter.” Only Adoniram continued in his usual good health, but even he, those first days in Port Louis, felt uncertain what to do.

Gradually, however, they roused themselves and began to investigate the prospects for a mission. Governor Farquhar turned out to be friendly, casually remarking that he had received orders from Bengal to “have an eye on those American missionaries,” but so far as he was concerned they were free to go anywhere on the island.

The trouble with Isle of France, however, was not the governor but the faCt that there was really nowhere to work except in the Port Louis army barracks and hospital; there the missionaries preached to the soldiers and patients, but that was not their idea of a mission. Most of the pOpulation consiSted of slaves, and the slaveowners would not permit religious inStruction. That such instruction was needed there was no queStion—-——and probably even more needed among the owners, whose inhumanity was sometimes almost incredible, than it was among the slaves.

To this need an episode Nancy described to her sisters bore ample testimony:

Last night I heard a considerable noise in the yard in which we live, connected with another family. We went to the door and saw a female slave with her hands tied behind her, and her mistress beating her with a club, in a most dreadful manner. My blood ran cold within me, and I could quietly see it no longer. I went up to the mistress and in broken French, asked her to stop, and what her servant had done.

When Nancy learned that the slave had recently tried to run ofl’, she talked to the woman appeasingly “till her anger appeared to be abated, and she concluded her punishment with flinging the club she had in her hands at the poor creature’s head, which made the blood run down on her garment.”

... The slave continued with her hands tied behind her all night. They were untied this morning, and she spent the day in labour, which made me conclude she would be punished no more.

But this evening I saw a large chain brought into the yard, with a ring at one end, just large enough to go around her neck. On this ring were fixed two pieces of iron about an inch wide and four inches long, which would come on each side of her face to prevent her eating. The chain was as large and heavy as an ox chain, and reached from her neck to the ground. The ring was fastened with a lock and key. The poor creature stood trembling while they were preparing to put the chain on her. The mistress’ rage again rekindled at seeing her, and she began beating her again, as the night before. I went to her again, and begged that she would stop. She did, but so full of anger that she could hardly speak. When she had become a little calm, I asked her if she could not forgive her servant. I told her that her servant was very bad, but that she would be very good to forgive her. She made me to understand that she would forgive her, because I had asked her: but she would not have her servant to think it was out of any favour to her. She told her slave that she forgave her, because I requested it. The slave came, knelt and kissed my feet, and said, ‘Mercy, madam ——mercy madam,’ meaning, Thank you madam. I could scarcely forbear weeping at her gratitude... How happy are the inhabitants of New England, who witness no such scenes of cruelty, and where every servant has his freedom as well as his master.

But the slaveowners, and the slave population of Isle of France, were unreachable. The other possibility considered, Madagascar, was also out of the question, for another—and more practical—reason: there, the natives were accustomed to imprisoning or killing all visitors. The missionaries would have to choose some other place; but even to get to one they would have first to go back to India.

Newell now decided to try to rejoin his fellow Congregationalists. Adoniram had brought him letters from Nott and Hall, but it was not clear whether they had meant to settle in Ceylon or go on to Bombay. Newell decided to try Ceylon first, and on February 24, 1813, five weeks after the arrival of the Créole, he said good-by to Adoniram, Nancy and Rice, and sailed on a Portuguese brig, the Generoso Almeida, which was expected to touch at Point de Galle, Ceylon, on its way to Bombay.

Meanwhile Rice’s liver trouble was growing worse. Soon it became apparent that he would have to find a better climate or he could expect to follow Harriet shortly. Why should he not, decided Adoniram and Rice, kill two birds with one stone by going to America to promote a Baptist missionary movement while being treated for the liver complaint? The news that there were American Baptist missionaries in the east must have reached the United States by now.

No sooner said than done. On account of the war, no ships were sailing directly for the United States; but in March one touched at Port Louis which was bound for San Salvador. From there it would be an easy journey to any United States port. Rice promptly took passage, and sailed about the middle of March.

Rice’s departure left Adoniram and Nancy “entirely alone—no one remaining friend in this part of the world,” as she remarked to her journal.

In a way, this was exactly what Adoniram wanted. He had always liked to do things on his own. At Andover he had come to his missionary decision alone. The Others had joined him, not he them. He could work with groups on occasion, and enjoyed the company of others, but there was an intense individualism in him—--a liking for the lonely way, the pioneer’s trail-blazing, perhaps stemming from his father’s insistence on his personal destiny — that made him prefer solitary effort. It was this, in part, which may have led him to become a Baptist in spite of any possible obligations of honor to his Congregationalist supporters, regardless of whether his decision would harm the welfare of the group of which he was one.

Now, with Rice gone, Adoniram could go with Nancy where and as he pleased, with no one to consider but the two of them.

Nancy, perhaps, had different feelings. She was keenly aware of her need for help and companionship when the time should come for her to bear her child. She had already undergone two or three short sieges of illness in Port Louis. But if she lacked Adoniram’s disregard for others, she had something of his spirit of independence. And she had him. She had accepted the unalterable facts, and now joined with him in considering a destination.

They finally settled on Penang, in the Straits of Malacca. But no ship ever sailed there from Port Louis! They first would have to go to Madras—taking their chances again with the East India Company — and try there to discover a vessel bound for Penang. It was simple to find a Madras-bound ship, the Countess of Harcourt.

Before they sailed from Isle of France, Nancy paid a visit—her only one, on account of the cemetery’s remoteness—to Harriet’s grave under its evergreen tree.

The visit revived many painful, solemn feelings. But a little while ago, she was with us on board ship, and joined us daily in prayer and praise. Now her body is crumbling to dust, in a land of strangers.

But Harriet’s spirit, Nancy was sure, was already in heaven, and she consoled herself by thinking “that Jesus has himself entered the grave, and opened a path to eternal glory. He is with his disciples when they enter the gloomy passage. He was with my dear departed sister. 0 may he be with me.”

On the seventh of May, 1814, the two embarked on the Countess of Harcourt, and on the fourth of June arrived at Madras. They received a warm welcome from Mr. and Mrs. Loveless, two English missionaries stationed there, and from many other people in the city, but they saw quickly that Madras would be another Calcutta. The attitude of the East India Company was hardening. Their presence was already reported to the police, who had forwarded an account of their arrival to the supreme government in Bengal. It would be merely a matter of time before an order came for deportation to England. Anxiously Adoniram haunted the vessels in the Madras roads looking for one going to Penang; but days went by without success. In desperation he began to look for a ship leaving for anywhere—he did not care where, so long as it sailed before that dreaded deportation order could arrive. He found only one, “a crazy old vessel,” a Portuguese ship named Georgiana.

But Georgiana was bound for Rangoon, in Burma!

He told Nancy what he had learned. They could go to Burma in the Georgiana and begin their mission, or they could go to England in custody and vegetate until a better opportunity offered, if one ever did. There was no other choice.

Nancy and Adoniram had come to regard a mission to Burma “with feelings of horror,” but it was beginning to seem almost as if their destiny were linked in some strange way with that terrible Golden Kingdom. Was it really chance that had brought Adoniram to read Symes’s Embassy to Ava at Andover——- the one book about Burma that painted the land in bright colors? In Calcutta, everything they heard about Burma had been bad; yet Felix Carey, a Baptist, had been able at least to stay there; and presently they had become Baptists—so that no objection to a joint mission existed any more. In fact, Felix had wanted them to return to Rangoon with him. And now, in Madras, only one vessel was leaving, and it was bound for Burma. Could this be nothing but chance? Or could Providence be suggesting gently, subtly, that if they really meant to be missionaries, Burma, with all its dangers and horrors, was the place they were meant to go?

They talked it over with the Lovelesses and their other friends in Madras. Everyone had the same opinion: Stay away from Burma. Let yourselves be taken to England. Lose a few years. For the sake of yourselves, for the child you are to have, for the sake of your mission, a few years lost are better than losing all to no purpose in the living hell of Burma.

This argument did not convince Adoniram. He felt that they should at least try Burma, to find out whether a mission could exiSt there. Rangoon was a seaport on a river; foreign ships called there often. A few Europeans had managed to remain; perhaps the Judsons could. But if they found no profit in a mission, they could surely leave and still try Penang or the Malay Islands later.

Nancy agreed. They should at least attempt, with Felix Carey, a mission among “a people who have never heard the sound of the Gospel, or read, in their own language, of the love of Christ.”

... The poor Burmans are entirely destitute of those consolations and joys which conStitute our happiness; and why should we be unwilling to part with a few fleeting, inconsiderable comforts, for the sake of making them sharers with us in joys exalted as heaven, durable as eternity! We cannot expect to do much, in such a rough, uncultivated field; yet, if we may be instrumental in removing some of the rubbish, and preparing the way for others, it will be a sufficient reward. I have been accustomed to View this field of labor, with dread and terror; but I now feel perfectly willing to make it my home the rest of my life.

Thus they decided. And, as Adoniram remarked, “dissuaded by all our friends at Madras, we commended ourselves to God, and embarked the 22d of June.”

With Nancy’s pregnancy so far advanced, they did take a few practical measures before sailing. Because it was altogether possible, even probable, that her baby would be born aboard the Georgiana, Nancy employed a European woman to go with her as servant and nurse — a fine, strapping woman, the picture of health. She went on board the ship a few days early to make things comfortable for Nancy. But no sooner had Nancy and Adoniram entered the ship themselves, just as it was about to sail, than “she fell on the floor, apparently in a fit. We made every possible effort to recover her, but she gasped a few times and died.”

There was no time to find another servant, and the Georgiana sailed out into the Bay of Bengal with Nancy stricken with shock and the heavy exertions she had made to try to save the woman’s life. The ship was small and dirty, the winds strong and the waters rough. Even lying in a bunk called for hard effort.

They had been at sea like this only a few days when Nancy went into labor. Like Harriet she had “no physician, no attendant but Mr. Judson.” The baby was born dead. For a while it looked as if Nancy, growing more and more exhausted from the continual tossing of the ship, would have to be buried in the waters of the Bay after her baby.

To make things worse, the ill-smelling, cranky Georgiana could not be held on her course. Her captain had headed her southeastward for the Nicobar Islands, above the upper tip of Sumatra, some hundreds of miles south of Rangoon, where he intended to take in a cargo of coconuts. Instead the ship was driven farther north, “into a dangerous strait, between the Little and Great Andamans, two savage coasts, where the captain had never been before, and where if we had been cast ashore, we should, according to all accounts, have been killed and eaten by the natives.”

But great as the danger was, the mishap brought relief, perhaps life, to Nancy. The strait was filled with reefs, black fanglike rocks which came so close to the surface that the horrified watchers on deck could actually see them, but the water was still as a millpond and Nancy could rest. For once, the Georgiana behaved well and the captain was able to thread her successfully through the reefs. On the eastern side of the Islands, in the Andaman Sea, the ship found favorable winds from the south, and the captain, giving up any intention of getting coconuts, let the ship sail with the winds as they “gently wafted us forward to Rangoon.”

Thursday, July 13, 1813, three weeks out of Madras, the Georgiana found the entrance of the Rangoon River, one of the Irrawaddy’s many mouths.

Adoniram stayed on deck as the ship passed the Burmese watchboat a few miles up the river, picked up a pilot, and moved slowly on up the broad stream.

His first sight of Burma consisted of low, swampy land bordered, at the water’s edge, by tall reeds and brushwood. It was not prepossessing, nothing like the cultivated, populous country along the Hooghly below Calcutta. The river itself was magnificent, fully three quarters of a mile wide, with no shoals and ample depth for any ship. But there was something menacing about the steamy, silent lowlands sluggishly slithering out of the water, something less indolent than threatening, like a snake waiting motionless for the time to strike. He felt a curious unease, which communicated itself to Nancy when he went below to tell her what he saw.

As the Georgiana moved slowly upstream during the day, Adoniram saw that the country was not without people — for they passed miserable little fishing villages huddled along the banks here and there, and there were boats on the river — but the same impression of desolation persisted. But this was border country, Adoniram may have consoled himself; for years armies and rebels had passed and repassed over it, crushing out nearly all life and destroying men’s work. Perhaps Rangoon would be better.

Later that day he caught his first sight of the city itself, in the form of a distant glint of gold flashing above the trees of the jungle in the late afternoon sun. The glint rose higher and higher as the ship approached, seeming to climb out of the horizon, until it revealed itself as a towering, pointed, glowing spire.

Adoniram had heard of that spire. It was the tremendous golden Shwe Dagon Pagoda, one of the wonders of the world.

The Shwe Dagon was the prime object of veneration in Burma. It had been erected little by little through generation after generation to enshrine certain holy relics which had been sealed up for centuries in a vault underneath. The three Buddhas who preceded the great Buddha, the Gautama, were represented in that vault by the Staff of one, the water filter of another, and a piece of the robe of the third. And, holiest of all, with these relics were eight hairs from the head of the great Buddha himself.

No wonder the shining cupola of the pagoda, towering nearly four hundred feet into the air, was religiously overlaid with pure gold every three years. No wonder pilgrims by the tens of thousands came to worship at it during the great annual festival held there every spring.

But Adoniram had seen pagodas before. To him, this was simply a bigger, more lavish one, though its very size and magnificence amply foretold the difficulty of the task ahead of him.

He was more interested in the city; and soon, as the pagoda towered higher and higher ahead, he saw it — a disappointing huddle of thatched bamboo and teak houses, extending perhaps a mile along the river, cut by stagnant muddy creeks, almost like canals, which ran back from the shore, each giving off a perceptible reek of decay. Rangoon was certainly no Calcutta. It was a dirty, bedraggled overgrown village of ten thousand people at most, surrounding a square fortlike enclosure close to the riverbank, a quarter of a mile or so to the side, which seemed to protect the heart of the city.

Just below it, next .to a few huts, three wharves with cranes for landing goods projected into the river. The middle one was surmounted by a kind of fort with portholes for ten or a dozen cannon. The Whole suggested a garrison town, always half expecting a siege, and always at least partly prepared.

It was dusk when the Georgiana dropped anchor near the wharves. Adoniram knew where the mission house was—in fact, he could see it bulking large over the buildings near it outside the city walls, and he was at once determined to take a look at it. But he did not stay on shore long, nor did he even go very close to the house. Everything looked “so dark, and cheerless, and unpromising,” that he soon returned to the ship and Nancy, to tell her what he had seen.

Still exhauSted and sick, still suffering the anguish of losing her child, Nancy had lost her usual optimism. She could read Adoniram’s impressions on his gloomy face and hear them in the tone of his voice. They alone were enough to describe Rangoon.

It was the unhappiest evening they had ever spent. At last they had arrived at the destination Adoniram had aimed at for three years, the place he had dreamed of, the goal of his ambition; and they had never regretted anything more in their lives.

But they muSt make the best of it. All they could do, with despair in their hearts, was commend themselves to the disposal of God in the hope of a speedy transition— which seemed all too likely —— “to that peaceful region where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.” In this distressed mood they finally fell into troubled sleep.