Alarms and Excursions (1817 - 1818)

Alarms and Excursions

[ 1817—1818 ]

DONIRAM finished his translation of Matthew in late May,

1817, and, while Hough printed it, began work on a Burmese dictionary. With the dictionary and the grammar he had already prepared, future missionaries should be able to learn the language and begin preaching without losing as much time as he himself had been forced to Spend.

At best, Burmese was almost impossibly difficult for a Westerner. Although Hough could set it in type he sometimes wondered despairingly whether he would ever understand it, and all but decided it was useless for a man over thirty years old even to make the attempt. Once he suggeSted that the only way to make missionaries to Burma was to send teen-age boys over from New England and teach them the language while their minds Still had the flexibility of youth.

Both men knew, of course, that Hough’s idea was impracticable. More missionaries would arrive, and they would be grown men and women. Dynamic Rice, with his amazing persuasive powers, would be coming soon and certainly bring others with him. Adoniram could not know that, this very month, Rice had asked the mission board when it would let him go to Burma and that the board had told him his duty lay among American congregations for some time yet, in promoting foreign missions.

As a matter of fact, Rice was never to join the Burman mission or any other. But the same meeting of the board which had told Rice to stay home had accepted two young candidates for the mission, James Colman and Edward Wheelock, both of Boston. And Adoniram’s father made a decision of his own. Adoniram’s baptism four years earlier had forced him to reconsider his own position. Eventually that uncompromisingly honeSt old man came to the same conclusion his son had reached. At the age of sixtyseven, he resigned his pastorate in Plymouth and was baptized on the last day of August, 1817, by Dr. Baldwin in the Second Baptist Church of Boston, together with his wife and his daughter Abigail.

But news of these events could scarcely reach remote Rangoon in less than a year. Meanwhile Adoniram worked on the dictionary, Hough printed and studied the language, and Adoniram and Nancy talked about the Gospel and gave out tracts, catechisms and copies of the Matthew to curious inquirers.

But they made no converts. Several times that summer, Adoniram felt sure one or another of the Burmese men was beginning to take a serious VieRfif Christianity; but every time he was disappointed.

Nancy had t e same experience with the fifteen or twenty women with whom she met every Sunday. They would seem to accept what she told them but would not give up Buddhism. Some told her frankly they preferred spending eternity in hell with their families and ancestors to spending it in heaven by themselves.

Hough doubted whether any of the mission would live to see a Burman baptized. Some of his discouragement may have been due to his situation. He was in a distinctly subordinate position in the mission, partly because his usefulness was confined to the mechanical job of printing what Adoniram wrote, partly because Adoniram and Nancy were in the habit of doing what they thought right without even considering that anyone else might have another opinion. And Hough, recognizing their superior experience and command of the language, would have been diffident about expressing an opposing view. His wife was constantly occupied with the two children, and both the Houghs must have worried about the children’s health in the dirt and heat of the tropics.

Adoniram was more dissatisfied than discouraged. He felt that the mission house was too isolated from the rest of Rangoon. He wished he could erect a small building—a “zayat,” the Burmans would call it—on one of the busy main streets of the city where he could preach openly and attract more inquirers; but the expense put this out of the question for the present. The mission was already overdrawn on the account it kept with Serampore. More important, it was plain that the Burmans were still suspicious of the foreigner’s religion and fearful of what might happen to them if they showed too much interest. Often Adoniram would sit on the verandah of the mission house animatedly discussing the Gospel with two or three Burmans who were mutual friends, only to see them fall silent and presently depart when a stranger appeared. Once his teacher was publicly threatened for helping a foreigner make subversive religious books. This threat came to nothing: the teacher replied that he merely taught the foreigner the language and had no concern with the foreigner’s publications. He had strong connections in Ava, and in any case it was well known that his foreign pupil enjoyed the favor of the viceroy and the viceroy’s wife, who continued to take Adoniram and Nancy on elephant rides.

Through the summer Adoniram considered plans for gaining more acceptance. He began to think of going to Ava and introducing the matter gradually and gently to the knowledge of the emperor:

I am fully persuaded that he has never yet got the idea that an attempt is making to introduce a new religion among his slaves. How the idea will strike him it is impossible to foresee. He may be enraged, and order off the heads of all concerned. The urbanity, however, with which he treats all foreigners, and his known hatred of the present order of Boodhist priests, render such a supposition improbable. And if he should only be indifferent, should discover no hostility, especially if he should treat the missionaries with complacency, it would be a great point gained. No local government would dare to persecute the espousers of a new religion if it was known that they had friends at court.

The more Adoniram toyed with the thought, the better he liked it. Late in the year, with the dictionary nearly finished, he had all but decided to petition the viceroy for permission to go to Ava, when another possibility presented itself.

He had heard that in Chittagong there were a few Christian natives who had been converted by a Baptist mission which had existed there for a short time. Although Chittagong was in Bengal and under East India Company control, these converts belonged to the people known as “Mugs,” Burmese-speaking natives of Arakan, a neighboring coastal province which had been conquered in 1784 by the same Burmese emperor Adoniram proposed to visit. To all intents and purposes these Baptist Mugs were Burmese, and Adoniram had long wished he had a few of them in Rangoon. Their mere presence would refute the stubbornly held Burman notion that Christianity was purely a white man’s religion.

Chittagong was just a ten or twelve days’ sail north of Rangoon, but ordinarily ships touched there only on their way to somewhere else. Opportunity for direct passage from Rangoon to Chittagong and speedy return in the same vessel almost never occurred. But in December Adoniram learned that the ship Two Brothers was about to make just such a round trip.

Adoniram decided he would never have a better opportunity to find one or two of the Arakanese Baptists and bring them back with him. He had worked so hard on the dictionary that he was showing signs of exhaustion. The voyage would refresh his health. Nancy and the Houghs could easily care for the mission during the few months he would be away. He boarded the Two Brothers on the twenty-fourth of December. Christmas Day she weighed anchor and began to drOp down the river.

The voyage that followed was one he never forgot. No sooner was Two Brothers out of the river than Adoniram suffered a’ return of his old eye and head ailment and had to take to his bunk. As soon as the ship rounded Pagoda Point and headed northward for Chittagong, she was struck by headwinds in which she proved unmanageable. It took a whole month of beating back and forth in the dangerous waters to reach the coast of Arakan, and at that rate it would have taken months longer to reach Chittagong. The captain gave up, reversed his course to sail south for a few days, and finally headed westward across the Bay of Bengal for Madras, while Adoniram Stood at the rail and bitterly “saw the summits of the mountains of Arracan [Arakan], the last indexes of my country, sinking in the horizon, and the ship stretching away to a distant part of India, which I had no wish to visit and where I had no object to obtain.”

Madras proved as unattainable as Chittagong. Two Brothers made a quick passage across the Bay of Bengal, but on the Coromandel Coast ran into a combination of headwinds and offshore currents that kept her beating helplessly up and down, getting nowhere. The captain—incompetent, as Adoniram saw by now—Optimistically decided he could make Masulipitam, north of Madras, in a few days. Once more wind and current kept him beating about the Bay until food and water gave out completely.

Adoniram came down with fever. Starving, thirsty and filthy—he had taken clothing for a two-week voyage and by now they had been at sea two months -— he lay half dead in his bunk. Occasionally the ship met a native vessel and begged a few buckets of water and a bag of mouldy broken rice. Adoniram could not eat the rice and the water was not enough. It had to be rationed by Spoonfuls and in his flaming fever he wanted gallons.

It was another month— twelve weeks in all from the time Two Brothers left Rangoon—before the ship dropped anchor in the mud a few miles off the beach of Masulipitam. When the captain asked Adoniram whether he would like to be taken ashore, he was so stuporous that the idea of land seemed only “a kind of dreamy illusion.” Finally, however, he managed to pencil a note to “any English resident of Masulipitam” asking for a place to die on dry land.

Later one of the crew came below with word that a boat was on its way toward shore. Adoniram crawled feebly to the porthole and dragged himself up until he could see the boat, and in it the red coats of British soldiers and the white coats of Englishmen. Then he collapsed on the floor, tears streaming down his face. He thought he had never seen anything so like the faces of angels as the shocked faces of the Englishmen who entered his cabin to behold a haggard, dirty, unshaved scarecrow, so weak he had to be carried to shore.

He recovered his strength quickly in the house of one of the officers, who supplied him with clothing, food, and even a nurse; but for some time his eyes remained very weak. Meanwhile he learned that Two Brothers‘would unload her cargo at Masulipitam and would not sail for Rangoon for several months. His only chance was to go by land to Madras, some three hundred miles, and look for a ship there. He hired a palanquin and bearers and reached Madras on the eighth of April, only to find that no ship had sailed for Rangoon that year and probably none would for some months.

The next three months he stayed part of the time with his friends the Lovelesses, part with the Reverend Mr. Thomason of the East India Company, while he haunted the beach for a ship. It was late in July before he found one. This time, fortunately, the voyage was uneventful, and he heaved a sigh of relief when the vessel dropped anchor in the mouth of the Rangoon River on the second of August. He had been away more than seven months; he had never reached Chittagong; his quest had been an utter failure; but at least he was almost in sight of home.

But when the pilot who was to guide the ship up the river to Rangoon came aboard the next morning, he brought news that made Adoniram turn pale.

The mission had been broken up, said the pilot. The Houghs and Nancy had taken passage for Bengal. But at the last moment Nancy had refused to leave. She was waiting in the mission house for Adoniram. The Houghs were there too, but not through any wish of their own. Their ship had been detained as unfit for sea, and they were merely staying on until it should be ready to sail.

All that day Adoniram fretted as the ship slowly worked her way up the river under the pilot’s guidance. When he saw the glowing golden spire of the Shwe Dagon slowly soar up from the green jungle horizon, he felt more apprehension than relief. His mind was filled with a single troubling thought: What had happened to the mission?

Nancy and Hough met him at the rickety wharf —-Nancy resplendent in the colorful Burmese costume she affected, and fairly glowing with happy relief. In the intervals between the tedious formalities of passing his belongings through the customs they began to tell him what had happened; and before he went to bed in the mission house that night he had the whole story.

For a few weeks after Adoniram’s departure things had gone on much as usual in the mission. The viceroy’s wife had continued to invite the missionaries to go elephant riding at intervals, and had accepted from Nancy a copy of the tract, the catechism and the Matthew. Occasionally she had even permitted Nancy to talk to her “privately on the subject of religion.” Nancy could not see that her efforts produced any effect, but all these evidences of favor from such a high quarter created a comfortable sense of serenity within the mission.

To add to the general air of good feeling, the Burman who had been Adoniram’s first serious inquirer returned. This was the man who had wanted nothing but more of Adoniram’s religious books. The man had not revisited the mission, he told Nancy, because he had been appointed governor of a cluster of villages on the Syriam River in the Pegu country east of Rangoon.

When Nancy asked him if he had become a Christian yet, he replied, “Not yet, but I am thinking and reading in order to become one. But I cannot yet destroy my old mind. When I see a handsome waistcloth or turban I still desire it. Tell the great teacher when he returns that I wish to see him, though I am not yet a disciple of Christ.”

Nancy gave him the rest of the Matthew and distributed tracts and catechisms to his retinue. He told Nancy that he governed about a thousand houses. If Adoniram would honor his villages with a visit, he would call the people together to hear Adoniram preach.

Not all that happened was good, of course. Adoniram had been gone scarcely a month when Nancy heard that the leader of the ChriStian Mugs at Chittagong, the teacher of the others, had murdered the missionary de Bruyn. If the murderer was typical of the other “converts” there, they seemed not likely to prove much of an addition to the mission in Rangoon!

It was in March, however, about the time they were expecting Adoniram’s return, that the mission’s real troubles began. First, the viceroy and his friendly wife were ordered back to Ava and replaced by a man they did not know. He came without his wife, so Nancy had no way to gain a friendly ear in his court.

A little later a native boat arrived from Chittagong with word that neither Adoniram nor the Two Brothers had ever arrived there. About the same time Nancy received letters from friends in Bengal with word that the ship had not been reported anywhere. It was common knowledge that contrary winds in the Bay of Bengal could force ships to take all kinds of strange courses, but the news was dismaying just the same. Nancy stoutly refused to admit that Adoniram might have been lost at sea, but when her spirits were low — and they were, more and more, as the weeks passed —she could not suppress her fears.

In a few days another blow fell. An order was delivered to Hough, “couched in the most menacing language, to appear immediately at the court-house, to give an account of himself.” No one in the mission had ever received an order anything like this, and it caused immediate consternation. Hough obeyed promptly, followed—at a safe distance—by some of the servants. They heard several of the government minor officials say that by royal command, directly from Ava, all foreign teachers were to be banished from Burma.

That day the officials merely made Hough give security for his appearance next morning, with the chilling threat that if he did not tell them everything about what he was doing in Burma “they would write with his heart’s blood.”

Adoniram’s absence was never more regretted than that night. Hough could not appeal to the viceroy because he did not know the language. As a woman, Nancy could not appear at the viceroy’s court. Nancy and the Houghs racked their brains half the night for some expedient, without success, before finally retiring for a few restless hours.

Hough spent the next two days, a Friday and a Saturday, at the courthouse answering thousands of questions concerning his activities in Rangoon, including how many suits of clothing he had and what were the names of his parents. While he fidgeted—he was denied food and water, and not even permitted to leave the room to relieve himself—all his answers were written down with grave formality.

By the second night both Nancy and Hough were convinced there was a hidden purpose under the questioning. From what they knew of Burma, it was not hard to guess: Hough’s inquisitors were merely harassing him in order to extract a large bribe, because they felt sure that in Adoniram’s absence the missionaries would not be able to take their case before the viceroy personally. Nancy had seen the viceroy perform his duties, and she knew that only important cases were brought to his attention—and, even those, privately. She felt certain that the viceroy had no idea what was being done to Hough.

Now they knew the purpose of the rapacious officials. But how could they thwart them? Sunday morning brought the answer. That morning, just as another summons arrived from the courthouse, Nancy’s teacher came to the house. Nancy, Hough and the 210 T H E D A N G E R O U S teacher took counsel together and presently concocted a petition, which the teacher wrote down, reSpectfully “stating the grievances to which Mr. Hough had been subject, and the present order for his appearing, in public, on our sacred day —and requesting that it might be the pleasure of his highness that those molestations should cease.”

Nancy and Hough took the petition to the government building, where the viceroy was holding audience. They had no sooner entered the outer court of the building than the viceroy, seated in the midst of his officers, caught sight of them. Nancy held up the petition. The governor called them in and had a secretary read the petition.

As he listened, the viceroy’s face darkened with anger. At the end he turned to the official who had been most unpleasant to Hough, who happened to be sitting almost next to him, and asked coldly, “Why has the examination of this foreign teacher been prolonged in this way?”

The viceroy’s voice was known as “the voice which issues life or death.” At the moment, it sounded more like death. Blanching, the official began a lame explanation which the viceroy interrupted with a command — obeyed with alacrity — that Hough be molested no more, and never be called on his sacred day.

Later, they learned the reason for the original order. A royal decree had been issued for the banishment of all the Portuguese priests in Burma. There were only a few—three, thought Nancy —in Rangoon, but “to ascertain who they were, the viceroy had issued an order, that all the foreign priests should be summoned to the courthouse, not intending that any but the Portuguese should undergo an examination, farther than to ascertain that they were not Portuguese.” In fact, the viceroy had no intention of carrying out the royal decree at all if he could avoid it, but the opportunity his order offered his subordinates to mulct the mission was too good to miss; and, like almost all Burmese officials in similar situations, they took advantage of it.

Although Hough had been vindicated this time the incident had a bad effect because it made plain to all Rangoon that white foreigners enjoyed a less privileged position than had been supposed. From then on, very few Burmans came to the mission. Even the women were afraid, and attendance at Nancy’s Sunday “female meetings” suddenly drOpped from more than thirty to a mere dozen. Everyone was uneasy, especially Hough, who as the only man felt only too keenly both his responsibilities and his inability to meet them.

At this moment, cholera broke out. There had never been an epidemic in Burma. Until the preceding year it had never been seen outside India, where it had smoldered in certain areas since time immemorial. Suddenly it blazed up in Rangoon and spread like one of the terrible conflagrations that periodically devastated the city from one end to the other. The inhabitants died like flies. No age was immune, no rank, no locality. Death drums boomed dully all day long from every quarter. There was something peculiarly terrifying in the tigerish way the sickness pounced on its victims. A man—or a woman, or a child—might rise hale and hearty in the morning, be seized by the most violent diarrhea and cramps at noon, collapse and literally shrivel during the afternoon, and be dead by night. It seemed to be utterly capricious in its choice of viCtims. It could select one person in a house, or all, or arbitrarily skip over a whole street.

Hysterical panic gripped the whole population. The people had never seen the disease before, could not understand it and had no idea of how to deal with it. They could only suppose “that some evil spirits had entered the city, and were continually traversing the streets, and from pure maliciousncss, destroying the inhabitants.”

If so, there was one way of dealing with malicious spirits: they could be frightened away by a tremendous noise. Therefore, after due announcement, signal cannons were fired off one day at the courthouse. Immediately every Burman in Rangoon fell to beating on his house with Clubs or any kind of noisemaker available. No one failed. The people had been warned that the evil spirits would enter the house of those who did not make enough noise. For three successive nights the ear-splitting uproar continued, but the spirits were deaf and refused to part.

The cholera had begun in the middle of the hottest season of the year. It was not to subside until the rains came, months later.

As if Adoniram’s absence, official disfavor and cholera were not enough for the harried occupants of the mission to bear, an alarming rumor began to circulate just as the epidemic was at its worst: that the English would soon invade Burma.

In sober fact, the rumor was not hard to believe. Relations between the English and Burmese governments had been uneasy for years. When the emperor had overrun the border provinces with fire and sword a generation ago, thousands of dispossessed people had fled in huge masses to the adjoining British areas. The emperor considered that these people belonged to him. His troops were constantly crossing into British territory to force them back into Burma, plundering and burning as they went. Inevitably they clashed with the British outposts from time to time. The British, their hands full in India, had so far taken a conciliatory attitude which the Burmese mistook for cowardly weakness, although as a matter of fact the English were slowly coming to feel they would eventually have to deal with the Burmese annoyance once and for all. But the situation had existed for a generation without open war, and people had grown accustomed to it. The current rumor seemed to have some basis, however. For months no ships had arrived in Rangoon from any British port. The few foreign captains still in the city were suddenly beginning to make ready to leave.

This war scare was the last Straw for Hough. Never sure of himself in this unfriendly place, doubtful almost from the first of the prospects of converting the Burmese, he now lost confidence completely. Adoniram was probably dead. Only Providence had kept cholera from the mission family up to now, but the epidemic still raged. If war came—the signs pointed to it, in his opinion—Rangoon would be the first battleground. He decided it was his duty to remove his wife and children to the safety of Bengal.

He urged Nancy to accompany them, but she refused—she hardly knew why. Certainly the mission seemed to be accomplishing little. Inquirers seldom came. Her little school for the women had dwindled almost to the vanishing point. Nevertheless she delayed. Suppose, she thought, Adoniram were alive and returned to Rangoon -—perhaps sick, even dying—«to find the mission house deserted? He would need her. And if he returned to Rangoon even in good health, and she were in Bengal, how would they ever find each other again? So in spite of Hough, she clung obstinately on until late June. By then only one foreign ship still lay in the river and it was nearly ready to leave. Then at last, thinking heavy—hearted in her room through the hor nights, while the death drums beat and the lizards pattered on the ceiling, she finally decided to go with the Houghs. If war came and Adoniram were still alive, he would not be able to enter Rangoon in any case until peace. But she did not believe there would really be a war; and war or no war, she would have hazarded the consequences—if she had only felt sure Adoniram were still alive.

She went aboard the ship with the Houghs early in July. She had taken passage for Adoniram’s teacher, so that Adoniram could continue his Studies if she found him in Bengal. But at the last moment the teacher changed his mind. His defection nearly made her give up the voyage herself. But her baggage was on board and her passage paid; she stayed with the ship as it weighed anchor and dropped down the river.

At the mouth of the river, just before putting out to sea, the captain found that the ship was so improperly loaded that it would be too dangerous to take her out into the Bay of Bengal. There was nothing to do but put in at the last anchorage in the river and spend a few weeks shifting cargo.

This was all the excuse Nancy needed. She arranged to have her baggage removed from the ship and she herself was back in the mission house, “to the great joy of all the Burmans left on our premises,” only a little more than a week after she had left it. No matter what the Houghs did, she now intended to stay where she was, keep on with her Studies, “and leave the event to God.”

She appreciated the wisdom of her decision when Two Brothers unexpectedly put in at Rangoon. As soon as she heard of the ship’s arrival Nancy hurried to the captain and learned that Adoniram had disembarked at Masulipitam and gone on to Madras by land. At least he is alive, she thought with joy.

In another ten days the Houghs returned. Their ship had turned out to be so badly fitted that the sailing would have to be delayed for several weeks. They had scarcely settled down in the mission home when the best of all news came: Adoniram’s ship was at the mouth of the river. He was nearly home!

Nancy had to share the news with someone. She flew to her writing table and added to one of those long letters she was almost perpetually in the process of writing to her father and mother:

How will you rejoice with me, my dear parents, when I tell you, that I have this moment heard that Mr. Judson has arrived at the mouth of the river! This joyful intelligence more than compensates for the months of dejection and distress which his long absence has occasioned. Now, I feel ashamed of my repinings, my want of confidence in God, and resignation to his will. I have foolishly thought, because my trials were protracted, they would never end; or rather, that they would terminate in some dreadful event which would destroy all hope of the final success of the mission. But now, I trust, our prospects will again brighten, and cause us to forget this night of affliction, or to remember it as having been the means of preparing us for the reception of that greatest of blessings—the conversion of some of the Burmans.