Quiet Years; the Family (1834 - 1839)

C H A P T E R I V

Quiet Years; the Family

[ 1834-1839 ]

HE home which Adoniram provided for Sarah and little George in Moulmein, like the houses of the other missionaries, was a glorified version of a native hut, containing “three good-sized rooms and two small ones.” The cookhouse, a small separate building, stood on stilts some four feet off the ground, in the Burmese fashion. The roof was thatched, the walls made of bamboo mats. A wide, shaded porch ran the length of the front. The whole cost Adoniram three hundred dollars.

The location of the new house in the heart of the mission community signified that Adoniram’s hermit life was over. The printing house—~constantly being enlarged —was scarcely a hundred steps from his front porch, and the school and the other missionaries’ houses nearby.

Their life together began inauspiciously. Although Sarah considered herself “pretty well,” she was pale and thin. Her appetite was poor. A half-mile walk taxed her endurance to the limit. Soon she fell seriously ill. She spent weeks in bed. Occasionally Adoniram carried her in his arms from her bed to a couch to give her a little change; once even this made her worse. The doctor gave up hope for her life. He continued to prescribe medicines, but more to placate Adoniram than from any expectation they would help.

Little George, six years old, sobered and matured beyond his years by the harsh demands of life, spent a good deal of time by her bedside, reading the Bible to her or reciting hymns he had learned.

Gradually, however, Sarah began to recover. As soon as she was on her feet, Adoniram persuaded her to try his favorite Specific—riding on horseback, the remedy he had learned in the early days in Rangoon. Every morning before sunrise the two went for a long ride. At first Sarah resisted. The rides simply tired her. But Adoniram insisted. After a while, somewhat to her surprise, she found her strength and spirits returning. After four or five months, her “nice little pony” died. But by now she was so enthusiastic about Adoniram’s regimen of exercise that she decided to take up walking; and from then on each rising sun found them afoot, “far over the hills beyond the town.”

By the end of the year the time came for her to carry out a decision she had made about George even before her marriage. If he were to live to adulthood he must go to America, like the Bennetts’ children. The opportunity to send him came in December, when the ship Cashmere arrived from Boston with the Wades, the Osgoods, and some missionaries. The Cashmere was to return directly to Boston after a stop of a few weeks in Singapore. So good an opportunity to send George in careful hands might not occur again for years.

It was a heartrending parting. George was unusually dear to his mother: “and his nature had about it a clinging tenderness and sensitiveness which peculiarly unfitted him for contact with strangers.”

But there was no help for it. “Oh! I shall never forget his looks,” wrote Sarah to her sister, “as he stood by the door and gazed at me for the last time. His eyes were filling with tears, and his little face red with suppressed emotion. But he subdued his feelings, and it was not till he had turned away and was going down the steps that he burst into a flood of tears.”

While Sarah, her heart breaking, hurried to her room and fell to her knees in tearful prayer, Adoniram carried the little boy in his arms to the small boat that would take them to the Cashmere, anchored in the harbor at AmherSt down the river. All the way down, Adoniram comforted the boy as best he could, and reported to Sarah afterwards that “his conversation was very affectionate and intelligent.” On board the Cashmere, Adoniram saw George’s little bed properly made up in the cabin, made sure that he would be well cared for, “and then, as George expressed it, returned to ‘comfort Mama.’ ”

It was juSt as well that Sarah was not to know for a long time what happened to George at Singapore. J. T. Jones and William Dean—the latter a new missionary—had taken care of him while the Cashmere lay fifteen miles below the city. When it was time to sail, the two missionaries took a native-rowed boat out to the ship. They carried with them a box of letters destined for America. Ten miles from shore and five from the Cashmere, the boat was attacked by a crew of Malay harbor pirates who thought the box contained treasure. While little George cowered under a bench, Jones was thrown overboard, and Dean, after a struggle, stabbed in the side and finally transfixed through the wrist by a threepronged fishing spear. Luckily, when the pirates had the box they drew off and Jones, not quite drowned, was pulled aboard. Little George, terrified but uninjured, was finally taken aboard the Cashmere; but he never forgot the experience.

The beginning of the year 183 5 marked the real beginning of Adoniram’s and Sarah’s married life together. Sarah had completely recovered her health. Her blue-eyed beauty, her quietly glowing disposition, her ability and experience made her an ideal wife and colleague. At last Adoniram seemed to have sailed out into calm seas. He was well fitted to enjoy his new life. His health was excellent. Although he was approaching fifty, his still luxuriant hair was without a fleck of gray, incredible when one pauses to think of the hardships he had endured. His face was unlined, his eyes bright, his energy apparently as overflowing as when he sailed from Salem in 1812.

Both Adoniram and Sarah made languages their main labor. In Moulmein was a numerous population of Talings, or Peguans.1 They differed from the Burmese in everything but their Buddhism. Some of these people came across the Gospel message in a Burmese tract which had somehow been translated into Taling. But none of the missionaries knew enough about the dialect to give them any real help. At Adoniram’s suggestion Sarah, who already knew Karen and Burmese, began to study Taling and with the help of Ko Man-boke, a Peguan Christian, to translate into it the Burmese tracts and catechisms.

Adoniram’s preoccupation was the Burmese Bible. He had come 1 Also known as the Mons people. to feel that the making of a good translation was a life work in itself and more than important enough to justify giving a life to it. All missionary work—in fact, all knowledge of ChriStianity—reSted on the Bible, particularly the New Testament. More, every Bible that found its way into a Burmese village was a missionary in itself, one that needed no pay, no support, and never grew tired or fell sick. No sooner, therefore, had he finished the translation of the Old Testament than he threw himself into its revision and correction for the press, utilizing every scholarly publication upon which he could lay hands to make it more nearly accurate.

But although translation took most of their time, neither .Sarah nor Adoniram neglected other duties. While Sarah organized prayer meetings, classes and mothers’ societies for the women, Adoniram preached seven sermons a week—one on Sunday to “a crowded assembly” and one every evening to a smaller gathering. Every morning before breakfast he met with the native assistants who spent their days going about Moulmein preaching, so that he could keep track of their work and make suggestions for improving their effectiveness. He kept charge of the native church, too, which numbered ninety-nine and was shortly to pass the one hundred mark, and performed baptisms.

Among these baptisms was one which gave him special pleasure: that of Koo-chil, the Bengali cook whom Nancy had brought with her from Calcutta to Ava on her return from the United States. It was Koo-chil’s faithfulness which had kept Nancy and little Maria alive through the worst days at Oung-pen-la. Ever since he had served one or another of the missionary families.

“Though a faithful, good servant,” wrote Adoniram, “he persisted for years in rejecting all religious instruction, and maintained his allegiance to the false prophet.” But in 1834 his Burmese wife was baptized, and by late 1835 Koo-chil himself was won over. “But the process was slow, the struggle strong; he felt deeply the responsibility of changing his religion, and when he made his formal request for baptism, he trembled all over. Poor old man! He is above sixty; his cheeks are quite fallen in; his long beard is quite gray; he has probably but a short time to live... He affectionately remembers his old miStress, and frequently sheds tears when speaking of the scenes of Ava and Amherst, where he saw her suffer and die.”

There were white men whom Adoniram and Sarah influenced, too. One of them was James Delaney, an artilleryman with the East India Company, one of the many soldiers who thronged the streets of Moulmein and sometimes attended services in English. Delany had been converted by Kincaid in 1831 and baptized in the Salween. In time Adoniram recognized his ability and planted in him a desire to become a minister. When he received his discharge in 1834, Adoniram and Sarah helped to arrange for his passage to America and enrollment in the theological seminary at Hamilton, New York. Sarah even gave him twenty-five dollars from her meager stock of money. He eventually settled in Appleton, Wisconsin, as a minister and remained there the rest of his life except for a period as chaplain with the Union Armies during the Civil War. But more than fifty years after leaving Moulmein, he still remembered Adoniram and Sarah with warm affection.

September 26, 1835, Adoniram completed his revision of the Old Testament. A little more than a month later, on October 31, Sarah gave birth to Abigail Ann Judson—the “Abigail” for his mother and sister, the “Arm” for the memory of Nancy. Commending little Abby to her two living namesakes, he revealed in a letter to Plymouth the next day how his feelings were beginning to soften.

DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER:

Since I have attained, in some measure, the great objects for which I came out to the East, and do not find it necessary to be so exclusively and severely engrossed in missionary labors as I have been for a long course of years, my thoughts and affections revert more frequently, of late, to the dear home where I was born and brought up; and now especially, after having been childless many years, the birth of a daughter and the revival of parental feelings, remind me afresh of the love with which my dear mother watched over my infancy, and of all the kindness with which she led me up from youth to man. And then I think of my earliCSt playmate, my dear siSter, and delight to retrace the thousand incidents which marked our youthful intercourse, and which still stand, in the vista of memory, tokens of reciprocated brotherly and sisterly affection.

In another two months, exactly a month after he baptized the one hundredth member of the Burmese church—December 29, 18 3 5 — he sent to press the last sheet of the Old Testament. “I used to think,” he had written earlier to his mother and sister, “when first contemplating a missionary life, that, if I should live to see the Bible translated and printed in some new language, and a church of one hundred members raised up on heathen ground, I should anticipate death with the peaceful feelings of Old Simeon.”

But of course, he did not. He had been away from home and in the Orient longer than any other missionary alive except three—Marshman, Robinson, and Moore of Serampore. But he certainly did not feel his life was over. In a sense, it was only beginning. Little Abby, already showing signs of becoming a “sweet, fat baby,” perhaps might be only the first of a real family whom he devoutly hoped he could see grow up around him.

Toward the end of February, the ship Louvre arrived at Amherst from Boston with another load of missionaries. Among them was a Visitor, a member of the missionary board, the first agent sent out for the Specific purpose of surveying the work of the missionaries on the spot, to make suggestions and take home suggestions, and in general to gather information and settle points on which correspondence had proved inadequate. He was the Reverend Howard Malcom, pastor of Boston’s Federal Street Church.

Malcom stayed with Adoniram and Sarah while he was in Moulmein and took one trip up the Dagyaing River with Sarah and anOther up the Salween with Adoniram in the intervals between excursions to all the missionary posts.

Of all the missionaries, it was Adoniram—by now a legendary figure to Americans—who interested Malcom most. Adoniram himself did not realize how Burmese he had become. But he had lived in Burma more than half his life now, and the Burmese language and customs were more familiar to him than those of his native land.

On his very first Sunday in Moulmein Malcom was struck with differences that Adoniram never even noticed. At morning worship with the Burmese congregation in the zayat, for instance, everyone sat—Adoniram on a chair, the audience on mats on the floor. Long horizontal bamboos about a foot and a half above the floor served as back rests. In prayer, the Americans knelt; but the Burmese merely leaned forward from their sitting position and, resting their elbows on the floor, placed their palms together. Sermon, prayer and all, were in Burmese except for one word which surprised Malcom when he heard it. As Adoniram concluded his prayer, every person in the congregation spoke the “Amen!” aloud.

About the middle of May Malcom left for Rangoon, from which place he made a voyage up the Irrawaddy to Ava, where Kincaid had been stationed several years. Missionaries were tolerated again in Ava—all but Adoniram. He had never been forgiven for his services to General Campbell in writing the Treaty of Yandabo, although many individuals remembered him with friendly feelings.

With Malcom’s departure, Adoniram began a revision of the New Testament at which he worked steadily for months with only one interruption, a visit to the Tavoy station with Sarah and the Vintons. Toward the end of March, he sent the laSt sheet of the revised Gospel to the press. Just as Sarah had given birth to a girl shortly after the completion of the revision of the Old Testament, so now on April 7, 1837, after the revision of the New, shé presented Adoniram with a son: Adoniram Brown Judson.

Both Abby Ann and the new baby flourished. A year later Adoniram wrote his mother and sister:

We have just carried Adoniram through the small-pox by inoculation. He had it very lightly, and is now quite recovered. He is one of the prettiest, brightest children you ever saw. His mother says that he resembles his uncle Elnathan. Abby is growing fast. She runs about, and talks Burman quite fluently, but no English. I am not troubled about her not getting English at present, for we shall have to send her home in a few years, and then she will get it of course. She attends family and pub—lic worship with us, and has learned to sit still and behave herself. But Fen, or Pwen, as the natives call him [the words meant flower], when he is brought into the chapel, and sees me in my place, has the impudence to roar out Bah (as the natives call father), with such a stentorian voice, that his nurse is obliged to carry him out again.

“Pwen” and Abby soon had another brother, Elnathan Judson, born July 15, 1838. With three children to care for, Sarah had to turn over her Peguan translation to another missionary, James Haswell. But she had produced one book, a life of Christ, and some tracts. Until Elnathan came, she had been able to keep on by letting “The little ones play in the verandah, adjoining the room where I sit all day with my Peguan translator.”

Since I commenced this letter, I happened to look up, and saw a man leaning over the balustrade, looking at me very attentively... So I asked him what he wanted. He replied, he was looking to see me write. I immediately laid down my pen, invited him in, and he sat a long time listening to the truth.

For four years Adoniram’s health had been excellent except for the low fever that came on him for a few months every fall. But late in 1838, after little Elnathan’s birth, he began to be aware of a soreness in his lungs and throat. He acquired a painful cough. He began to lose his voice. Preaching became impossible and even ordinary conversation was difficult. Everyone in the mission suspCtd tuberculosis, the scourge which had carried off so many of the missionaries. The Moulmein doctors prescribed a long sea voyage; and on February 19, 1839, he embarked for Calcutta on the ship Snipe, Captain Spain.

It was the first time he had been away from Sarah and the children for more than a few days, and, as he wrote from shipboard, he felt “very low in spirits. It is sad, dull work to go to a place which you have no wish to see, and where you have no object scarcely to obtain.... The bosom of my family is almost the only bright spot that remains to me on earth.”

Although the soreness persisted, his cough improved rapidly once the Snipe was at sea. Another passenger, “probably in an incurable consumption,” scoffed at Adoniram “for pretending to be consumptive when I have only a slight cough, without raising anything. He says he has no doubt the trip will cure me.”

Adoniram landed at Calcutta on the ninth of March. During a stay of three weeks he managed to visit all the Baptist missionaries in the city and a great many of other denominations. He spent one week end at Serampore at “old Mrs. Marshman’s.” The original trio of Serampore, Carey, Marshman and Ward -—VV:1r<l had baptized Adoniram and Nancy so long ago — were all dead. Marshman’s son John was Still there, along with other missionaries. “But,” observed Adoniram, “the glory has departed from Serampore.”

Still, he enjoyed himself. For once he had no reSponsibilities except to take his watch to the watchmaker and get shoes and clothing made for the children, and this latter duty was taken over by his Calcutta hostess, Mrs. Ellis. His life was a pleasant round of breakfasts, teas, and evenings of conversation with various groups, which included Opportunities to discuss the principles of translation and the standard text of the Bible with such men as Dr. William Yates, who was continuing Carey’s work in translation. But he was lonely for his family—mostly for Sarah. He wrote her that the Calcutta missionaries...

.. all thought that you must be a wonderful woman to make books as you do; and they all say, particularly Mrs. Ellis, how sorry they are that you did not come with me. I almOSt think that if I had known all things, and what good accommodations we could have had in this house, we should have come together. And he continued with the intimate frankness of which he was capable:

I should have been 50 happy to have had you with me. If such exquisite delights as we have enjoyed with those now in paradise, and with one another, are allowed to sinful creatures on earth, what muSt the joys of heaven be? Surely there is not a single lawful pleasure, the loss of which we shall have to regret there. What high and tranSporting intercommunion of souls we may, therefore, anticipate, and that to all eternity! -—intercommunion between one another, and between the “Bridegroom” and the “Bride,” of which wedded love on earth is but a type and shadow.

It is not surprising that he wrote Sarah as soon as he learned the Snipe would sail again for Moulmein at the end of March:

How joyfully do I hope to embark! How joyfully retrace my way, and at length see the hills of AmherSt and Maulmain rising in the distant perSpectivc! And how joyfully do I 110pe to see your dear face, and take you to my loving arms, and find again “that home is home.”

When he left Calcutta, Adoniram’s throat and lungs seemed to have healed almOSt completely. But on the return trip he tried his; voice by conducting worship in Burmese with Koon-gyah, a convert whom he had taken along on the trip. Although “the effort was very small, I was dismayed to find, in the course of the afternoon, the old soreness of lungs and tendency to cough come on.” He made a partial recovery before reaching Moulmein, but no sooner had the rainy season begun in May than his throat was almost as bad as ever.

Some of the missionaries advised him to go to America for a year or two, but Adoniram felt “I should be of no use to the cause at home, not being able to use my voice.” Perhaps, he thought in one of his characteristic fits of depression, “I have lived long enough. I have lived to see accomplished the particular objects on which I set my heart when I commenced a missionary life. And why should I wish to live longer? I am unable to preach; and since the last relapse, the irritation of my throat is so very troublesome that I cannot converse but with difficulty, or even sit at the table, as I have done to-day, and prepare copy for the press.”

No one seemed able to diagnose his ailment. “My complaint, it is said, is very much like that of which the late Mrs. Osgood died -- not common pulmonary consumption, but something in the throat which puzzled even her attending physicians, one of whom maintained, till near her death, that she was not in a consumption, and would recover.”

He would prefer to die and to go to the reward he hoped was waiting for him—“But I shrink back again, when I think of my dear wife and darling children, who have wound round my once widowed, bereaved heart, and would fain draw me down from heaven and glory.”

The growth of the children made him think of his own childhood and his mother and sister Abby still in Plymouth. He wrote them more often than he ever had before, telling them of his fears he would die before he could see the children grown up and happily settled. But he had passed the age of fifty. Abby Ann, the eldest, was only four, Adoniram Junior two, and Elnathan just a year old. It seemed unlikely he would live to see their adulthood.

Abby Ann [he proudly wrote], has begun to go to school, with julia Osgood, to Mrs. Simons.... Abby attends every forenoon, and just begins to read words of one syllable. Adoniram says, “I want go school”; but he stays at home and deports himself like a little man. Elnathan has been very ill. We thought we should lose him; but he is now better, and begins to be bright and playful.”

The end of the year there was a fourth child, I-Ienry, born December 31, 1839, “but,” remarked Adoniram, “there was no earthquake, nor anything.”

From time to time Adoniram tried to resume preaching, but one sermon a week was all he could manage. Even this he had to deliver in a low tone of voice, barely audible to the listeners at the back of the chapel. For the rest, in the intervals of revising the Old Testament for the printer, he spent what time he could in personal conversation with converts and inquirers.

Early in February he made a brief visit to Rangoon, reading two books on Napoleon on the way. They struck him as “A history of infernals.” But Rangoon was still unreceptive to missionaries. He and K0 En,l his native assistant, gave out about a thousand tracts when Ko En was ordered to the government house by the Ray-wun, the city governor. It was night before Captain B00thby, who had made the trip from Moulmein with Adoniram, and Mr. Staig, an Englishman who lived in the city, could see the Ray-wun and arrange for Ko En’s release. All Adoniram could do was wait.

He was still unpopular with the Burmese government. They dared not touch him directly but they took every opportunity to strike through his native associates. Unable to distribute tracts, he could do little the rest of his stay but discuss religion with the Englishmen who lived in the city and the few remaining Burmese converts. In his spare time he walked out to the great golden Shwe Dagon pagoda, near the abandoned mission grounds and the grave of little Roger, who would have been a man of twenty-five by now if he had lived.

Rangoon had grown. Adoniram thought it was twice the size of Moulmein. But the war and the changes since had erased most of what had once been so dear. Memories of the early days of the mission and his life there with Nancy still stirred, but they no longer had the power to rack his heart. It was ahnOSt as if that one 1 Formerly “Maung En."

Adoniram Judson had died with his wife and children. The new Adoniram Judson’s affections centered in Moulmein, with Sarah and Abby Ann and the three little boys.

Meanwhile the church in Moulmein was declining again, with “many of the younger members falling into open sin, and the older ones cold and negligent of religious duties,” as the wife of one of the missionaries wrote. On Adoniram’s return he decided to do something about it. He wrote “a covenant of eight items, taken from the New Testament,” which each church member was required to sign. As soon as the complete Burmese Bible had been printed and bound, he planned to make a formal presentation of a copy to the head of each family. He decided to increase the number of Sunday services for the Burmese to three.

These measures may have had some result, but probably his private meetings with church members were most effective. By now he knew the Burmese so well that they believed it was impossible to conceal a sin from him. Even at the moment “a culprit was exulting in fancied security, he would suddenly find an eye fixed upon him that was absolutely irresistible, and would be obliged, in spite of himself, to go to the teacher and confess.”

One reason may have been that Adoniram never made accusations unless he was absolutely certain of the facts. Hearsay he ignored. When one member of the church would tell him of the faults of another, Adoniram would ask, “Have you told him his fault between you and him alone?”

Usually, naturally, the complainer had elaborate reasons for not doing so, but merely “thought the teacher ought to know.”

“He knew us,” recalled one of these Burmese Christians, “through and through, much better than we know ourselves. If we had done anything amiss, he called us pleasantly, talked so,” ——and he picked up a toy from the floor and ran his finger gently around the rim ——“talked, and talked, and talked, till suddenly, before we knew it, he pounced upon us there” —- and he struck his finger on the center of the toy —— “and held us breathless till we had told him everything.”

One Burmese woman remembered vividly how Adoniram had once sent for her when she planned to do something he thought might harm her spiritually. She refused to give up her project.

Finally Adoniram took a ruler from the table and marked a zigzag line on the floor. “Look here,” he said. “Here is where you have been walking. You have made a crooked track, to be sure—out of the path half of the time; but then, you have kept near it, and not taken to new roads, and you have— not so much as you might have done, mind, but still to a certain extent—grown in grace; and now, with all this growth upon your heart and head, in the maturity of your years, with ripened understanding and an every day deepening sense of the goodness of God, here you stand.” And he placed the tip of the ruler firmly on a point along the line. “You know where this path leads. You know what is before you —-—some struggles, some sorrows, and finally eternal life and a crown of glory. But to the left branches off another very pleasant road, and along the air floats, rather temptingly, a pretty bubble. You do not mean to leave the path you have walked in fifteen years—fifteen long years—altogether. You only want to step aside and catch the bubble, and think you will come back again; but you never rwill. Woman, think! Dare you deliberately leave this strait and narrow path, drawn by the Saviour’s finger, and go away for one moment into that of your enemy? Will you? Will you? Will you?”

“I was sobbing so,” the woman recalled, “that I could not speak a word. But he knew, as he always did, what I meant; for he knelt down and prayed that God would preserve me in my determination. I have made a great many crooked tracks since; but whenever I am unusually tempted, I see the teacher as he looked that day, bending over in his chair, the ruler placed on the floor to represent me, his finger pointing along the path of eternal life, his eye looking so strangely over his shoulder, and that terrible ‘Will you?’ coming from his lips as though it was the voice of God. And I pray, just as Peter did, for I am frightened.”