Death Prison Days (1824)

C H A P T E R X V I I

Death Prison Days

[ I824]

ANCY now resolved to try to get a petition to the eyes of

the queen. It was impossible to go directly, but Nancy knew her brOther’s wife, whose liking she had won in better days.

She found this exalted lady “lolling on her carpet... with her attendants around her.” As usual, Nancy brought a present, but instead of waiting to be asked what she wanted, according to convention, she boldly spoke out that the missionaries were being treated unfairly. They had nothing to do with England, or the war. Yet they were treated like criminals and were being tortured. Would the queen’s sister-in-law help?

The princess opened Nancy’s present but avoided meeting her eye. “Your case is not singular,” she replied with head down. “All the foreigners are treated alike.”

“But it is singular,” insisted Nancy. “The teachers are Americans. They are ministers of religion, and have nOthing to do with war or politics, and they came to Ava in obedience to the king’s command. They have never done anything to deserve such treatment. Is it right they should be treated thus?”

“The king does as he pleases,” said the princess. “I am not the king. What can I do?”

“You can State their case to the queen and obtain their release,” Nancy proposed earnestly. “Place yourself in my situation: Were you in America, and your husband, innocent of crime, thrown into prison, in irons, and you a solitary, unproteCted female—what would you do?”

In spite of herself, the princess displayed a little feeling. “I will present your petition,” she said. “Come again tomorrow.”

Nancy went home feeling more hopeful. There she learned that Gouger’s property, amounting to some fifty thousand dollars, had been carried to the palace. The officials who had done it soon came to her door, greeted her with bows, and told her politely, “We shall visit your house tomorrow.”

As soon as they had gone she gathered together most of the silver and all the small articles she could lay her hands on. After dark she buried them in the garden. Scurrying around for one thing after another, her eye fell on the manuscript of Adoniram’s translation of the Bible and his voluminous notes. This material she wrapped carefully in a bundle which she buried in the garden a safe distance from the other treasure.

Sure enough, the next morning she had visitors—no less than the Royal Treasurer himself, Prince Sarawady, the Chief Wun and Koung-tone Myoo-tsa, attended by a royal secretary and some fifty followers, as befitted his rank. Nancy welcomed them at the door, a well-bred New England hostess, smiling and gracious. The prince ordered the crowd to stay outside. Only the three officials and a royal secretary entered. Nancy ordered the servants to give them chairs and held the chair for the prince herself. She served them tea and sweetmeats, as self-possessed as if they came at her express invitation. The Burmese officials drank and ate, sitting un—easily on the edges of their chairs. But Nancy’s composure suddenly broke. She began to sob quietly into her handkerchief.

The three officials apologized for the necessity of their visit. “It is painful for us to take possession of property not our own, but weare compelled to do so, by order of the king,” they said.

When Nancy recovered control of herself a little, the confiscation began. Nancy prepared herself inwardly to contest every step.

The Royal Treasurer began: “Where is your silver, gold and jewels?”

“I have no gold or jewels,” said Nancy, “But here is the key of a trunk which contains the silver. Do with it as you please.”

The servants brought out the trunk. The silver was weighed on a portable scale. “This money,” Nancy pointed out, knowing full well that the Burmese disliked taking religious offerings, “was collected in America by the disciples of Christ, and sent here for the purpose of building a kyoung, and for our support while teaching the religion of Christ. Is it suitable that you should take it?”

“We will state this circumstance to the king,” said one of the officers. “Perhaps he will restore it. But is this all the silver you have?”

It was not, of course. Most of the silver was in the garden. Nancy could not lie but she could evade. “The house is in your possession,” she said. “Search for yourselves.”

“Have you not deposited some silver with some person of your acquaintance?”

“My acquaintances are all in prison,” retorted Nancy. “With whom should I deposit silver?”

“Have you already given any silver to anyone in the government?” she was asked.

Nancy could not evade this question and perhaps even welcomed it. “Yes,” she admitted; and being questioned further told of the two hundred ticals she had paid to the city governor.

The next step was a thorough examination of all of the trunks and furniture. In deference to Nancy’s feelings, only the secretary went with her on this search. Everything “nice or curious” he took to the three officers. When he displayed in this manner whole armfuls of clothing, Nancy begged that at least these be left. “It would be disgraceful,” she pleaded, “to take clothes partly worn into the presence of His Majesty, and to us they are of unspeakable value.”

The officers agreed. They decided to take only a list of the clothing, the books, the medicines and similar articles. For a moment she thought they would take her little work table and her rocking chair, her presents from Elnathan; but in the end they merely added them to the list and went away.

They had scarcely left before Nancy hurried to the queen’s brother’s palace, to learn the effect of her petition to the queen. His wife, Still cool and distant, said, “I stated your case to the queen, but Her Majesty replied, ‘The teachers will not die. Let them remain as they are.’ ”

Nancy had pinned all her hopes on the petition. Now they were dashed. With heavy steps she went to the prison, to be turned back at the gate.

For the next ten days she went to the prison every day and every day was refused admittance. She bribed a jailer to carry messages; but he was caught, beaten, and put in the Stocks. She had to bribe Father with twenty ticals to get him out again.

Very little that went on in government circles in Ava could be kept a secret. Nancy soon learned that the officers who visited her house had said to the king: “Yoodthan is a true teacher. We found nothing in his house but what belongs to priests. In addition to this money there are an immense number of books, medicines, trunks of wearing apparel, and like things, of which we have only taken a list. Shall we take them, or let them remain?”

“Let them remain,” ordered the king charitably. “And put this property by itself, for it shall be restored to him again if he is found innocent.”

So much had Nancy gained.

The foreign prisoners, lodged in an open-sided shed during the days, quickly settled into a routine. As they went to the gate for their food, they seized the opportunity to exchange a word or two with the bearer. Soon each had a little white pillow. Nancy wrote a note to Adoniram on a flat cake, afterwards baked and hidden in a bowl of rice. He replied on a tile invisible when the tile was wet, visible when it dried. But this was too cumbersome. Presently she hit on the simple device of inserting a rolled-up note in the long nose of the teapot in which she brought his tea.

The prisoners received fresh clothing, too. The shirts they could put on, but with leg-fetters they thought it would be impossible to put on or take off trousers without cutting them. Then one of the jailers, who had guarded a trouser-wearing prisoner before, told them how to solve this problem.1

Of all the prisoners, Gouger probably bore himself with most equanimity. Adoniram was anxious about Nancy as well as himself; and the dirt drove him nearly to distraction. Laird was a fatalist. Twice he had been shipwrecked and each time had been one of the few to escape alive. He was convinced these escapes proved he would not die now. The others thought that if his experience proved anything at all, it was that he was not fated to die by drowning. Laird, incidentally, was the ugliest of all the prisoners.

1But the method was not told—at least in print—by Gouger, who tecounted this incident.

His face had been so discolored and ravaged by smallpox that the king, when Laird was first presented as a native of Scotland, had innocently asked whether all the Scottish were as ugly as he was. But his heart was good and he made an equable prison companion.

Rodgers, the only white prisoner who thought the Burmese could defeat the English, was sure he was going to be tortured to death. To escape it, he had resolved to poison himself and had asked his wife to send the necessary poison. She never did, but every day when his rice bundle came, the others watched with horrified fascination his painstaking search for the poison and his visible disappointment when he failed to find it.

The other two foreigners Spoke no English and very little Burmese. The Greek, Constantine, hated the English and they on their part thought he had leprosy. They avoided each other as much as possible. The young Armenian, Arrakeel, they liked better. He kept his spirits up and made no disturbance, but conversation with him was impossible.

They had been in the shed only a few days when all but Adoniram were suddenly ordered back inside to the same gloomy corner they had occupied before. It was a long time before they knew why. Nancy had been the unwitting cause.

When the Royal Treasurer’s delegation had returned to the palace, they had confronted the city governor and demanded the two hundred ticals Nancy had given him. Giving up the money threw him into a rage. As soon as Nancy heard of it, she went to him. “You are very bad,” he stormed at her. “Why did you tell the Royal Treasurer that you had given me so much money?”

“The Treasurer inquired. What could I say?”

“Say that you had given nothing, and I would have made the prisoners comfortable. Now I know not what will be their fate.”

“But I cannot tell a falsehood,” insisted Nancy. “My religion differs from yours. It forbids lying. If you had stood by me with your knife raised, I could not have said what you want.”

Fortunately for Nancy, the governor’s wife, who was sitting beside him, came to her rescue. “Very true,” she affirmed. “What else could she have done? I like such straightforward conduct. You must not be angry with her.”

Nancy had brought with her a very beautiful opera glass she had received from England just before the war. Now she gave it to the governor and begged him not to make things worse for the prisoners because he was angry with her. “I will try to make you presents which will make up for your loss,” she promised.

This mollified him a little. “You may intercede for your husband only,” he ruled. “For your sake he may remain where he is. But let the other prisoners take care of themselves.”

Nancy pleaded that at least he exempt Price; but it took ten days and the promise of two handkerchiefs and a piece of broadcloth before Price rejoined Adoniram in the shed. The other foreigners remained in the dark inner prison, where their little white pillows made, Gouger remembered, a ridiculous sight on the floor, “glittering like so many stars in a firmament of unspeakable dinginess.”

But in or out, there was no water for washing. The grime on their faces grew thicker and thicker. Vermin appeared in their hair. This was worse than their own smells, which were becoming insupportable. They borrowed a pair of scissors from Father—almost the only favor he ever did them—and clipped‘ themselves bald. The Burmese, proud of their long locks, did not follow their example, and the Englishmen became the laughingstock of the prison community; but they were more comfortable.

So the time passed. After a few days, the prisoners heard the booming of a single gun by the river. They learned by the prison grapevine that this meant news from the war front. The king had commanded that after a battle the boat bringing the word should fire one gun; if the Burmese had won a victory, two guns; if the English had been driven back into the sea, three guns.

Thus the one gun meant no victory. Before the day was over the Spotted Faces were gloomy, their tempers vicious. The prisoners heard that the British had charged out of their lines and carried the Burmese stockades with the bayonet, killing hundreds.

The rumor was correct. During the whole war, “the worst managed in British history,” 2 the British were to receive only one repulse, and although thousands of troops were to die of disease only hundreds would perish in battle. The individually brave but undrilled Burmese soldiers, their officers far in the rear and invariably the first to run, could not stand up against European discipline in

2D. G. E. Hall, Europe and Burma. defending stockades. The sight of orderly lines of men steadily approaching with bayonets, closing up without faltering as some dropped under musket fire, advancing even when bleeding, dismayed the Burmese, and they almost always soon broke in panic. The legend spread that British soldiers never stopped even when arms or legs were cut off, because after the battle the old limbs were picked up and sewed back in place by the surgeons. At the beginning of the war a Burmese recruit could be secured for four or five ticals. Within months volunteers against these English were scarce at a hundred ticals apiece.

But this the prisoners did not know as yet. They only knew there had been a defeat and were afraid their heads would roll on account of it. When the fateful afternoon gong sounded that day and they remained alive, they took heart.

Outside the prison Nancy was still working for the prisoners from daylight until late at night, in the face of every kind of threat and extortion. Once she was officially summoned to the courthouse, and, standing at the foot of the steps in the presence of a crowd of hundreds, was officially accused of having given to the care of a Burmese officer a string of pearls, a pair of diamond earrings and a silver teapot. She must answer the truth, or die. Had she done this? By now, she had courage to face anybody. “It is not true,” she replied boldly. “If you, or any other person, can produce these articles I refuse not to die.” And she immediately began to beg for Adoniram’s release.

Day after day she visited the queen’s sister-in-law until the woman’s looks told her she had better stay away for a while. Nearly every day she called on some official or member of the royal family. She gave as many gifts as she could. Here and there she found friends who would drop hints in the palace that the missionaries had nothing to do with the war. Some of these secretly helped Nancy with gifts of food.

There were, of course, annoyances. Some days the prisoners were not allowed to speak to each other or to anyone bringing them food. Sometimes the bearers had to pay extra bribes to bring in food. Often Nancy would be so busy with her palace rounds that she could not go to the prison until dark. After the two-mile walk home it might be nine at night before she could throw herself into her rocking chair, weak with anxiousness and activity, shed a few tears, and after a few minutes’ rest try to think again of some way she might gain the prisoners’ freedom. Occasionally her thoughts would turn to Bradford and her friends in America, but seldom for more than a moment. All her energies were concentrated on her job in Ava.

One day the prisoners heard another signal gun. Another defeat. Shortly afterwards a new prisoner was brought in, an iron ring around his waist with a length of chain dangling from it, by which he was staked to the floor like a bear. He was an Irishman named Cassiday, a private in the East India Company’s Madras EurOpean regiment. He had been captured while wandering away from the camp looking for pineapples.

Late that night he was interrogated by a group of Wungyis, Rodgers interpreting. Later Rodgers regaled the other prisoners with the highlights of the interview.

THE WUNGYIS: What do the Kulas want by coming to Rangoon?

CASSIDAY: I believe they are going to march up to take the country. ( A loud laugh from the Wungyi: at this preposterous statement.)

THE WUNGYIS: How many men have they brought with them?

CASSIDAY: About three thousand British soldiers, besides a good many black troops.

THE WUNGYIS: What do you think will become of them, when they are attacked by one hundred thousand of our army?

CASSIDAY: I think we should make’ very short work of your army, if they are no better than those we met in the stockades. My regiment has great experience with the bayonet. (Great excitement, tinged with consternation, 0n the part of the Wungyis.)

There was more to the interview; but this, and the loud laugh of the Wungyis when Cassiday innocently asked what kind of rations the Burmese allowed to their prisoners, were what the three Englishmen rclishfully rolled over and over in their minds.

Well along in the summer, Nancy’s efforts began to have some effect. The foreign prisoners were moved out of the inner prison and each given a tiny cell or hut along the inside edge of the stockade enclosing the prison yard. Each hut was about six feet long and five wide, barely high enough for a man to stand erect where the peak of the roof rose in the center. But it was heaven compared to the inner prison. Nevertheless, their nights they spent in the inner prison, as before.

As usual, Gouger promptly set about organizing the beSt possible life for himself. One of the jailers had a very pretty sixteenyear-old daughter who took a great fancy to him. She supplied him with water for washing, an inexpressible boon. He in turn supplied her and her father with rats, a great delicacy to Spotted Faces, which he Speared after luring them out of their holes with grains of boiled rice. He took immense pleasure in talking with the girl, but when she was not with him he could amuse himself further by peeking through the cracks in the stockade wall of his cell at the traffic outside.

Nancy was now permitted to spend an hour or two at a time with Adoniram in the open shed. Eventually, she was even allowed to build him a little enclosed shed of bamboo where he could be by himself. With this new privacy, and a little water to wash in, he felt he had achieved nearly the utmOSt goal of ambition.

Not that he had lOSt all others. When they could talk his thoughts turned to his New Testament manuscript. Nancy told him how she had wrapped it up and buried it. But it could not be allowed to remain thus in the garden, for it would soon rot. Finally Adoniram thought of a plan. Let Nancy take the translation and pack it into a pillow so hard and uncomfortable, and so poor in appearance, that no jailer could possibly covet it. Then let her give it to him; he would guard it himself as well as he could. This she did, and from then on he cushioned his head on the only complete copy of the Burmese New Testament in exiStence.

With the translation in Adoniram’s hands, Nancy began to think what else she could do. The wretched food she had to bring him, usually nothing but rice with ngapi, diSturbed her. Finally she decided to surprise him with a real reminder of home. She managed to procure some buffalo meat, and after some experimentation with plantains eventually produced a very good approximation of a New England mince pie. But the day she meant to bring it she was detained and had to send Maung Ing instead, having carefully explained to him that this was a native food of Americans, and something Mr. Judson would particularly relish. Thus Adoniram was curious when he received the mysterious package from the smiling Maung Ing. But when he opened it, and realized what it was, memory was too much. The very thought of eating closed his throat. With the pie on the ground beside him, he rested his head on his knees and wept. Then, blindly, he thrust his gift into the hands of the amazed Price, hobbled hurriedly to his little shed, and there secluded himself for hours.

Nancy’s mince pie had been only too successful. Plymouth—Bradford—his father and mother and brother and sister... like a flood, carefully repressed memories overwhelmed him. And in the misery of his thoughts there was one which, at any other time, would have given him the greatest pleasure. Now, it was most bitter of all.

Nancy was pregnant. The baby would be born, as far as they could determine, in late January or early February.