Little Roger (1814 - 1816)

C H A P T E R V

Little Roger

[ 1814—1816]

5 it happened, Adoniram and Nancy were never to see the

Careys again. When only a few miles up the river, the Careys’ brig overturned in a squall. Felix, along with a few of the menservants, managed to reach shore alive, but not before he had seen his wife, baby and little son drown in front of his eyes in spite of his frantic efforts to save them. So poor were communications (after the accident Felix had continued on upriver alone) that the Judsons did not learn of the tragedy for two weeks. Meanwhile, they had established themselves in a routine which was to continue for years. Nancy described it:

Could you look into a large open room, which we call a verandah, you would see Mr. Judson bent over his table, covered with Burman books, with his teacher at his side, a venerable looking man, in his sixtieth year, with a cloth wrapped around his middle, and a handkerchief over his head. They talk and chatter all day long, with hardly any cessation.

My mornings are busily employed in giving directions to the servants, providing food for the family, etc. I have many more interruptions than Mr. Judson, as I have the entire management of the family. This I took on myself, for the sake of Mr. Judson’s attending more closely to the study of the language; yet I have found, by a year’s experience, that it is the most direct way I could have taken to acquire the language; as I am frequently obliged to speak Burman all day. I can talk and understand others better than Mr. Judson, though he knows more about the nature and construction of the language.

It was true: Nancy was more at home with the day-to-day Speech of Burma. But Adoniram consoled himself with the realization that he was laying a foundation which would eventually make it possible for any European to learn Burmese and —mOSt important—bring the Bible to the Burmese people in their own tongue.

In fact, he had undertaken several tasks simultaneously, any one of them formidable. One was the making of a Burmese grammar. Along with the grammar he was gradually accumulating a wordlist, the embryo of a dictionary.

The growing word-list had already revealed a peculiar problem. Burmese itself almOSt completely lacked any words for the kind of ethical and abstract ideas which made up the core of New Testament Christianity. The best educated men employed some such terms, but they were not natively Burmese. They had been adapted from Pali, a language related to Sanskrit and the Indo- European tongues, which was used a good deal by the learned men of Burma.

For Buddhism had been brought to Burma in Pali nearly two thousand years ago, and the sacred writings taught by Burmese priests were still essentially in Pali, as was the form of the written language, although the speech of the people was very much like Chinese. Pali was partly a dead language by now, but it looked to Adoniram as if he would have to draw on it for a good many words and somehow transplant them into Burmese in order to make his ideas understood by the people. Promptly he set about making a Pali grammar and word-list.

At the same time he began testing his conception by beginning a tentative translation of one of the books of the New TeStament, the GOSpel of Matthew.

Months passed. Adoniram worked with his teacher all day on Pali and Burmese word-lists and grammars and translation, only interrupted when Nancy summoned him out to deal with an emergency, such as a cobra in the garden or an invasion by one of the numerous kinds of pests—bats, giant cockroaches, beetles, spiders, lizards, rats and bedbugs—which infested the houses of Rangoon. Nancy spent her mornings directing the household—thereby increasing her already enviable fluency in the popular speech-—her afternoons in study with Adoniram and the teacher.

Sometimes they broke the monotony with early morning walks around the huddled, steaming and smelly, but interesting city. Regularly they bathed in one of the many tree-lined artificial ponds called by English-speaking people “tanks.” They looked at the saffron-robed priests shuffling along the dusty streets, inspected the fantastic ornamentation of the Shwe Dagon pagoda, almost a city of lace in stone, and listened to the continuous tinkling, clanking cacophony of the temple bells.

They were beginning to make acquaintances. Soon they were spending “whole evenings very pleasantly in conversing with our Burman friends.”

A new Viceroy came to Rangoon, one “much beloved and respected by the people,” unlike his fierce predecessor Mya-day-men, from whom everyone shrank as he stalked about with his long spear. The new Viceroy actually visited the mission house and told Nancy and Adoniram they must call on him often. He was an old man, with many concubines and at least twenty or thirty children. His principal wife took a great liking to Nancy, and they became good friends—so much so that at one great party the Viceroy gave for the English and French in Rangoon she asked Nancy to dance “in the English way” for the guests. Fortunately, Nancy now knew enough of the language to explain that as the wife of a priest she could not dance. This satisfied the Burmese. They understood that priests and their wives were a special sort of people, bound by their own rules.

But the better Adoniram and Nancy came to know the Burmese, the more they realized that even a lifetime was too short for more than the beginning of a mission. Although they were now fluent enough to talk fairly easily about ordinary subjects...

We find the subject of religion by far the most difficult, on account of the want of religious terms in their language. They have not the leaSt idea of a God who is eternal—without beginning or end. All their deities have been through the several grades of creatures, from a fowl to a deity. When their deities take heaven, as they express it, they cease to exist, which according to their ideas, is the highest state of perfection. It is now two thousand years since Gaudama [Gautama], their last deity, entered on his state of perfection; and though he now ceases to exist, they still worship a hair of his head, which is enshrined in an enormous pagoda, to which the Burmans go every eighth day. They know of no other atonements for sin, than offerings to their priests and their pagodas. You cannot imagine how very difficult it is to give them any idea of the true God and the way of salvation by ChriSt, since their present ideas of deity are so very low.

Still they had to do it somehow, so they persevered. Yet at times they felt terribly alone. They had received no word whatever from America, or, in particular, from Rice. Whether American Baptists would undertake to support them, they had not the faintest idea. Their only visitors from outside, occasional sea captains from England, could tell them nothing.

So matters stood at the beginning of 1815, when they had lived in Rangoon a year and a half.

Then Nancy fell sick with one of those wasting diseases so common in the Orient. There were no doctors in Rangoon, and Adoniram’s few medical books gave them no idea of what the ailment was or how to cure it. For a while they hoped Nancy would get better by herself, but instead she slowly grew weaker. And she believed she might be pregnant again.

There was only one thing to do, they decided. She must take the first ship for Madras, where there were good doctors. Adoniram took it for granted that he would go with her, but Nancy refused. She would not permit him to interrupt his studies for the many months she might be away.

Reluctantly, Adoniram agreed. But he insisted that she at least take a woman servant with her. This might be difficult, on account of a Burmese law which forbade any native woman to leave the country; but they decided to approach the friendly old Viceroy with a small gift — “which is customary when a favour is asked” —and ask. To their surprise, he granted their petition immediately.

Nancy sailed late in January and returned, feeling much better, in the middle of April after a stay of six weeks in Madras. She brought with her Emily Van Someren, an orphan girl seven years old, whom she had agreed to bring up as one of the family. Perhaps Nancy thought of Emily as a companion for the baby she knew she would have early in the fall of the year. Emily was to spend the next seven years as a member of the household before returning to Madras. Beyond the bare mention of her coming to live with Adoniram and Nancy we know little about her.

They spent the summer quietly. They were acquiring the language rapidly now, enough to begin to talk to the people about religion, thanks partly to a new teacher—the fourth since their arrival in Burma—who proved to be an unusually learned man, a former priCSt who had lived “at the Golden Feet,” in the capital, and who, remembering the dismissal of his three predecessors, was unusually anxious to please Adoniram. f But their efforts at conversion were unsuccessful. The people had a religion already. Before they could accept a new one they had to reject the old one. When Adoniram told the men about Jesus’ atonement for their sins they replied politely that “their minds were stiff.” When Nancy spoke to the women, they said, “Your religion is good for you, ours for us. You will be rewarded for your good deeds in your way—we in our way.” ‘ Once their hopes were raised “by the serious attention” of a son of the viceroy, who had been sent to them to learn English. During his year of study with Nancy and Adoniram he “at times appeared solemn and inquisitive.” \ But in the summer of 1815, the father was replaced by the same much-feared spear-stalker, Mya-day-men, who had been viceroy when Adoniram and Nancy first arrived in Rangoon. And when the father “105t his office” the son “of course lost his sense of dignity, mixed with his servants, and lost, we fear, mOSt of his seriousness.”

Even a Mr. Babasheen, “an aged Armenian, in high office under government,” was a disappointment. He was a ChriStian by birth and had a Bible in his own language. Surely, thought Adoniram, it would be possible to show him the merits of Baptism. But Babasheen insisted that Adoniram’s church, the Armenian church and the Roman Catholic church were really all the same thing, with their common mm in the Bible. Adoniram tried to show him “that the Bible was indeed the same, but only those who adhered to it would be saved.” But Babasheen merely replied, “You cannot speak the language fluently. When you can talk better, come and see me often, and I shall get wisdom.”

But at least, Adoniram and Nancy consoled themselves, they were able to discuss religion a little. A year before they would not have been able to do even that much.

Soon they had heart-warming news. On the fifth of September came letters from America — the first direct words from home since Luther Rice had left them at Isle of France more than two years ago.

Nothing could have been more encouraging than the news in those precious letters. As soon as the New England Baptists had learned that the Judsons had been baptized, they had begun to form local societies for the support of the new missionaries. When he arrived in the United States Luther Rice had thrown himself into the work of forming more. Starting in the Southern states, he had soon organized BaptiSt missionary societies in nearly every state of the union. In May of 1814 a national missionary society had been established in Philadelphia under the name of “The General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States of America for Foreign Missions.” A Board of Managers had been elected, and the Reverend Dr. Thomas Baldwin of Boston made President, with the Reverend Dr. William Staughton of Philadelphia Corresponding Secretary. One of its first actions had been to appoint Adoniram its missionary. Rice was also appointed a missionary, but for the present placed in charge of setting up new missionary societies and raising funds in the United States.

Some months later the Managers had even accepted a new missionary, Mr. George H. Hough, a printer, who would be able to print anything Adoniram could put into Burmese. Hough and his wife Phebe were already preparing to sail for Calcutta.

For a few days Adoniram and Nancy neglected work to exult in this wonderful intelligence. They were not forgotten after all. They had support. Best of all, they would not be alone. Hough would more than double their effectiveness. With him at the press they could broadcast the main ideas of the Gospel all over Burma.

Their elation had hardly begun to cool when, six days after the arrival of the letters, Nancy’s labor began. On the eleventh of September, 1815, with no attendant but Adoniram, she gave birth to a little boy, Roger Williams Judson.

The baby flourished from the start. He fed well, never cried except when in pain, and to his doting mother and father seemed unusually sensitive to his surroundings. Nancy felt better than in years, “almost in a new State of eXiStence.”

As if all this were not enough, when Roger was three weeks old Adoniram had a conversation with a native Burman which led him to believe that at last he was not so very far from being able to replace Buddhism with Christianity in the heart of at least one Burman.

The Burman was his teacher, who had been with him some three months now, a man forty-seven years of age who had proved to be “the most sensible, learned, and candid man that I have ever found among the Burmans.” His name would probably be Spelled today as U Aung Min, but Adoniram, spelling words as they sounded to his ear and making his rules as he went along, wrote it variously as Oungmen, Oo Oungmen, and 00 Oungmeng.

The conversation had begun one day when they were working together at the book-piled study table on the veranda. Always alert for an opportunity to bring up religion, Adoniram had remarked that a man they both knew had died. The teacher admitted he had heard so. “His soul is lost, I think,” said Adoniram.

“Why so?”

“He was not a disciple of Christ.”

The teacher was skeptical. “How do you know that? You could not see his soul.”

“How do you know whether the root of the mango tree is good?” Adoniram rejoined. “You cannot see it; but you can judge by the fruit on its branches. Thus I know the man who died was not a disciple of Christ, because his words and actions were not such as to indicate the disciple.”

“And so all who are not disciples of Christ are lost!” The teacher was amazed.

“Yes, all, whether Burmans or foreigners.”

“This is hard,” answered the teacher, after digesting the ideaj little while.

“Yes, it is hard, indeed; otherwise I should not have come all this

‘ way, and left parents and all, to tell you of Christ.”

The teacher paused. Nothing in his experience or reading had ever hinted a religion like this. Yet there was force in Adoniram’s last statement. After all, the teacher must have reflected, why should a man leave country and home except on a matter of desperate urgency? It must have been a strange moment: the young black-coated missionary, not yet thirty, facing the turbaned Burman, learned and wise, the latter beginning to grasp for the firSt time in his many years that here was a man ——one of many white men, he knew—who believed with his whole heart in a future existence which involved perpetual punishment for one’s beliefs on earth if they were wrong, but evidently something better if they were right. The thought led him to a question: “How is it that the disciples of Christ are so fortunate above all men?”

Adoniram sensed that he had made an impression. Cautiously he approached his real argument by asking a question which he knew could receive only one answer: “Are not all men sinners, and deserving of punishment in a future state?”

“Yes,” the teacher admitted at once. “All muSt suffer, in some future state, for the sins they commit. The punishment follows the crime, as surely as the wheel of the car follows the footsteps of the ox.”

This was Adoniram’s opening. “Now, according to the Burman system,” he said seriously, “there is no escape. According to the Christian system, there is. Jesus Christ has died in the place of sinners; has borne their sins, and now those who believe in him, and become his disciples, are released from the punishment they deserve. At death they are received into heaven, and are happy forever.”

He had unveiled the heart of his doctrine: the innate sinfulness of man; the atonement of Jesus; the prospect of heaven inStead of hell. It was too much for the teacher. “That I will never believe,” he said firmly. “My mind is very stiff on this one point, namely, that all existence involves in itself principles of misery and destruction.”

But at leaSt, Adoniram muSt have thought to himself, Studying the brown face of the learned Burman, now you know what I preach. Let us see, now, whether we can go at it another way. Aloud, he said, “Teacher, there are two evil futurities, and one good. A miserable future exiStence is evil, and annihilation or nigban [nikban] is an evil, a fearful evil. A happy future existence is alone goodf’

With this much the teacher could agree. “I admit that it is best. if it could be perpetual; but it cannot be. Whatever is, is liable to change, and misery, and destruction. Nikban—annihilation, nothingness—is the only permanent good, and that good has been attained by Gautama, the last deity.”

“If there be no eternal being,” replied Adoniram, “you cannot account for anything. Whence this world, and all that we see?”

“Fate,” was the teacher’s reply.

“Fate! The cause must always be equal to the effect.” Adoniram raised the book-loaded study table slightly. “See, I raise this table. See, also, that ant under it: suppose I were invisible; would a wise man say the ant raised it? Now fate is not even an ant. Fate is a word, that is all. It is not an agent, not a thing. What is fate?”

“The fate of creatures is the influence which their good or bad deeds have on their future existence.”

“But if influence be exerted, there must be an exerter. If there be a determination, there must be a determiner.”

The teacher shook his head. “No. There is no determiner. There cannot be an eternal being.”

“Consider this point,” urged Adoniram. “It is a main point of true wisdom. Whenever there is an execution of a purpose, there must be an agent.”

In short, Adoniram was saying, where there is an effect there must be a cause. But such a conception was not part of Burmese logic. Things happened. They did not have to have causes or effects. Fate was reasonless — at least, so it seemed the Oriental mind was trying to tell the Western mind.

The teacher said: “I must say that my mind is very decided and hard, and unless you tell me something more to the purpose, I shall never believe.”

“\Well, teacher,” said Adoniram, “I wish you to believe, not for my profit, but for yours. I daily pray the true God to give you light, that you may believe. Whether you will ever believe in this world I do not know, but when you die I know you will believe what I now say. You will then appear before the God you now denyf’

“I don’t know that,” politely rejoined the teacher.

Defeated, Adoniram turned to another matter, perhaps the very thing that had emboldened him to open the discussion. “I have heard,” he said, “that one Burman many years ago embraced the Portuguese religion, and that he was your relation.”

“He was a brother of my grandfather.”

“At Ava, or here?”

“At Ava he became a Portuguese. Afterwards he went to a ship country with a ship priest, and returned to Ava.”

“I have heard he was put to death for his religion.”

“No, he was imprisoned and tortured by order of the Emperor. At laSt he escaped, fled to Rangoon, and afterwards to Bengal, where they say he died.”

“Did any of his family join him?” asked Adoniram.

“None. All forsook him; and he wandered about, despised and rejected by all.”

“Do you think that he was a decided Christian, and had got a new mind?”

“I think so,” affirmed the teacher; “for when he was tortured, he held out.”

“Did he ever talk with you about religion?”

“Yes,” the teacher admitted.

“Why did you not listen to him?”

The question struck too close to home. The teacher replied noncommitally, “I did not listen.”

“Did you ever know any other Burman who changed his own for a foreign religion?”

“I have heard that there is one now in Rangoon, who became a Portuguese; but he keeps himself concealed, and I have never seen him.”

Thus the conversation ended.

Adoniram was not discouraged. He had failed, but only because the idea of an inescapable linkage between cause and effect was foreign to the teacher. And, even more reason for hope, Burmans had become Christians. The teacher U Aung Min belonged to an important family. His very title “U” meant that he had position or prestige, or at least merited reSpect. His grandfather’s brother must have moved in court circles in the capital. If he could be converted and hold to his faith under torture, others could. Burma had seemed a closed door. The door showed no signs of opening but Adoniram felt that it might, if he persevered. In this conversation he had pushed hard, and now he was sure he felt it give a little. Someday he would turn the key in the lock, the bolt would slide back, the door would swing wide on its hinges and he would Open the way to the conversion of all Burma.

But the key was the language. He must study, and study, and study. He resolved to work harder than ever before.

The new year 1816 came and Adoniram continued to drive himself. Little Roger, who still flourished, was almost his only relaxation. The baby seemed to show an unusual desire to be with his parents. Sometimes when they went by his cradle without picking him up, “he would follow us with his eyes to the door, when they would fill with tears, and his countenance so expressive of grief, though perfectly silent, that it would force us back to him, which would cause his little heart to be as joyful as it had been before sorrowful.”

He would lie for hours on a mat by his papa’s study table, or by the side of his chair on the floor, if only he could see his face. When we had finished study or the business of the day, it was our exercise and amusement to carry him round the house or garden, and though we were alone, we felt not our solitude when he was with us.

The first baby of white parents born in Rangoon within living memory, Roger was the talk of the city as well as the pride of his parents. Once Nancy took him to the house of the viceroy’s wife. The great lady was overcome with wonder. She placed him on the velvet cushion on which she usually sat herself and exclaimed admiringly over and over, “What a child! How white!” She played with the child so long that Nancy, thinking she was overstaying her welcome, rose to leave. But the woman insisted that she remain until the viceroy could see him.

When the viceroy came in, she showed him the child, saying, “Look, my lord, see what a child! Look at his feet! Look at his hands!” Even the ferocious Mya-day-men, stalking about with his long fierce spear, was impressed; he smiled at the baby Roger and admired his plump pink arms and legs before stalking out.

190 T H E

For six months Roger waxed fat and healthy. Then, in early March of 1816, Nancy began to notice that he was feverish and perspired heavily at night. Like any mother she was alarmed, but her fears quieted when she saw that his appetite continued good in the daytime and he seemed quite well. He even kept on gaining weight. She finally concluded that the baby had some childish ailment which would end when he cut his teeth.

Soon she almost forgot her worries about Roger in her concern for Adonirafn. All at once he was attacked by severe headaches. His eyes hurt, and he became so weak that he could hardly stand. Reading, writing, or making any kind of effort caused such unbearable pain that he had to stop working. In a mood of depression he decided his missionary career was closing, and in the few moments when he felt well began to assemble his grammar and write a tract in Burmese to help his successor carry on without him.

So things went until the beginning of May—Adoniram sick and miserable most of the time, little Roger well enough during the day but feverish and sweating at night. Then one morning when Nancy lifted Roger from his cradle he was taken with a paroxysm of coughing which lasted half an hour. Within an hour or so he had developed a high fever. Both Nancy and Adoniram were alarmed. But when the fever abated the next day, they decided the attack had passed.

They were mistaken. The following morning, a Thursday, the cough and fever returned, worse than before. Something in his throat seemed to be choking him. His heavy breathing could be heard all over the house.

In all Rangoon the only person who knew anything about medicine was a Portuguese priest. They sent for him at once, but all he could give the baby was “a little rhubarb and gascoign powder,” neither of which relieved the cough or the difficulty in breathing.

All through the night and the next day Roger continued the same while Nancy sat up, anguish in her heart, holding him. But the second night, about two in the morning, exhaustion overcame her and Adoniram, sick as he was, took the baby. “The little creature drank his milk with much eagerness (he was weaned) and Mr. Judson thought he was refreshed and would go to sleep. He laid him in his cradle — “he slept with ease for half an hour, when his breath stopped without a struggle, and he was gone!”

In that climate funerals could not be delayed. On the far side of the garden a circle of mango trees surrounded a little bamboo hut where Nancy was in the habit of writing letters home. Within the enclosure of trees a grave was dug beside the hut that very day, the fourth of May, and there, in the afternoon, Roger was buried while Adoniram and Nancy numbly watched in the company of forty or fifty Burmese and Portuguese acquaintances who tried to console them.

His death and interment occurred almost before they could feel grief. But in the next few days, as they put away the little evidences of his short life -—the cradle, his clothing, the few toys—until the only tangible reminders were his absence and the fresh grave in the mango circle, their hearts began to bleed.

For more than a week they secluded themselves with their sorrow. Then the viceroy’s wife paid them a visit of condolence accompanied by her whole retinue, numbering some two hundred people. She had heard the news only that day.

“Why did you not send me word, that I might have come to his funeral?” she exclaimed, smiting her breast.

Nancy explained that in her distress she never thought of it. The viceroy’s wife comforted them as well as she could. She told them not to weep, and begged Adoniram not to let Roger’s death affect his already poor health. Somehow her concern had its effect and began to restore them a little, enough so that Nancy could offer her “tea, sweetrneats and cakes, with which she appeared much pleased.”

But her thoughtfulness did not stop there. A few days later she invited them to accompany her on a ride into the country, both for their health and, as she expressed it, that their minds might “become cool.”

Nothing could have helped more to take their minds off their troubles than the outing the viceroy’s wife provided.

For conveyance she sent them an elephant. When they had climbed into the magnificently decorated houselike howdah strapped on top of the elephant’s back, the driver guided the huge beast to where they were to meet the viceroy’s wife.

The party that set out on the ramble muSt have looked like a circus parade lOSt in the jungle. In front went the guard — “thirty men with guns and spears and red caps on their heads, which partly covered their shoulders.” Two elephants followed, side by side. In the howdah of one rode Nancy and Adoniram. The howdah of the larger elephant was gilt. In this rode the viceroy’s wife, “a tall, genteel female richly dressed in red and white silk.”

Behind them followed three or four more elephants, carrying the viceroy’s son and some of the higher government officials. And behind the elephants trailed the reSt of the procession, which consisted of two or three hundred male and female retainers.

This was the party which proceeded on a three or four mile ramble through the dense jungle. “Sometimes the small trees were so near together, that our way was impassable, but by the elephant’s breaking them down, which he did with the greatest ease at the word of the driver.”

The route had been planned so that it ended in a garden of the viceroy’s, a wildly beautiful Spot full of luxuriant fruit trees of all kinds and varieties, growing untended as in nature. Here, in the shade of a huge banyan, mats were laid by the attendants and the hostess and her guests seated themselves.

NOthing [wrote Nancy] could exceed the endeavors of the Viceroy’s wife to make our excursion agreeable —she gathered fruit and pared it; culled flowers and knotted them, and presented them with her own hands, which was a mark of her condescension. At dinner, she had her table spread by ours, nor did she refuse to partake of whatever we presented her.

We returned in the evening, fatigued with riding on the elephant, delighted with the view of the country and the hOSpitality of the Burmans, and dejected and depressed with their superstition and idolatry—their darkness and ignorance of the true God.

The ride had made them forget their grief for a while. But when they had returned to the mission house, and the elephant had departed, Nancy’s glance fell on Roger’s fresh grave in the circle of mango trees and she began to weep again bitterly.

Our hearts [she reflected, with a touch of resentment] were bound up in this child; we felt he was our earthly all, our only source of innocent recreation in this heathen land. But God saw it was necessary to remind us of our error, and to strip us of our only little all. 0 may it not be vain that he has done it. May we so improve it, that he will stay his hand and say, ‘It is enough.’ ”

And, weeks later...

... When for a moment we realize what we once possessed... the wound opens and bleeds afresh. Yet we would still say, “Thy will be done.”