Chapter 8
Chapter 8
A Course to India
Dr. Thomas made it to Dover in time with the baggage, which was now stowed safely below deck. The crew was busy making the ship ready to sail. Sailors in the rigging above were unfurling the mainsail. Others were busily stowing or lashing to the deck barrels and crates of all shapes and sizes. Finally, the captain bellowed the order: “Cast off!”
The fore and aft lines that had held the ship securely against the quay were let go, and the Kron Princessa Maria began to drift to sea. William watched as the bustle of people on the quay got smaller and smaller. For the second time in a month, he was setting sail for India, only this time his wife and four sons were standing next to him on the aft deck.
As the ship made its way out into the Straits of Dover, the British frigate Triton was waiting. The Triton had been hired to escort the Kron Princessa Maria through the English Channel and on into the Bay of Biscay. While the Danes were not at war with the French, and therefore were free of the threat of attack, the truth was that the French privateers sometimes got carried away and plundered any ship that was not French.
As the Triton sailed in next to them, William watched the chalky white cliffs of Beachy Head fade from view, and with them, the last glimpse he and his family would ever have of their homeland.
In his journal that night, William wrote: “Thursday, June 13, 1793, on board the Kron Princessa Maria. This has been a day of gladness to my soul. I was returned that I might take all my family with me and enjoy all the blessings which I had surrendered to God.”
William spent the next few days with the oldest three boys—Felix, William Jr., and Peter—exploring from stem to stern the one-hundred-thirty-foot long schooner that would be their home on the journey to India. They explored above deck and below, checking out what was stored in the ship’s hold, and climbing around the rigging, being careful not to slip or go too high. They peered over the side of the ship as William explained how the hulls of most modern ships, like the Kron Princessa Maria, had a copper sheet over their wooden planks. This meant that the ships could go much faster, even making it to India and back in twelve months!
For William and the boys, the voyage was a great adventure. But not for Dolly and Kitty. The week before they had been happily adjusting to life together in their home village of Piddington, not more than a mile from where they were born. Now they were on a ship, pitching and turning in the open ocean, and far away from the safety of their home. Dolly didn’t even like to go up on deck; the vastness of the ocean without a speck of land in sight scared her. And the sound of the crew talking to each other in Danish and Norwegian reminded her that she was leaving the English language behind as well.
Besides Dolly and Kitty, there was one other woman on board, a Black woman who stayed and ate with the crew. She was the first Black person Dolly had ever seen, and the sight of the woman’s flashing white eyes frightened her.
Captain Christmas, an Englishman who had taken Danish citizenship, was very kind. Even though the missionaries had not paid nearly as much as the other four passengers aboard (two Frenchmen and two Englishmen), the captain did his best to make the voyage comfortable for William and his family. He gave them the largest cabin, which William wrote was “half the width of the ship with south windows and papered sides [walls].” He even invited them all to eat at the captain’s table, where each evening for the first few weeks of the voyage they feasted on three-course dinners that included at least two types of meat and a large dessert. They were eating better food than they had in their entire lives. Instead of wasting away at sea, as Dolly had feared, the family got stronger everyday. Little Jabez got so fat that his father took to calling him his “stout fellow.”
Once the ship was safely across the Bay of Biscay and headed out into the Atlantic Ocean, William’s life at sea settled into a routine. William held a prayer meeting in his cabin each morning and night, with much of the rest of his day spent learning the Bengali language from Dr. Thomas. Although Dr. Thomas didn’t know all the ins and outs of the complicated language, he shared William’s passion to see the Bible written down in the various Indian languages. The two men worked together translating the Book of Genesis into Bengali. William’s knowledge of Hebrew was a great help in the process. In his spare time, William took notes from the one hundred or so botanical books and magazines he had brought along with him.
As the ship approached the equator, the days got steadily hotter, and as they did so, William made a personal decision. He was leaving England behind him and starting a new life in a foreign country, and no matter what, he wasn’t going to begin this new life wearing his hot, scratchy wig! It was time for the wig to go. One morning before the rest of the family was up, William climbed the stairs to the aft deck and flung his wig overboard into the Atlantic Ocean. How good it felt to be rid of it. The breeze blew gently over William’s bald head. When Dr. Thomas came up on deck and saw William, he laughed with relief. He said, “Mr. Wilson of Olney [who made the wig for William] is an excellent Christian, but he is one of the worst wigmakers that ever was born!” Both men laughed heartily.
Besides spending time with his family and Dr. Thomas, William became very friendly with Captain Christmas, a well-educated man who delighted in showing William how he plotted their course to India. William had been interested in navigation ever since reading about how Captain Cook had used a Harrison chronometer to plot latitude. William would watch as the captain used his sextant to take readings from the stars at night and the sun during the day. Then from the readings, Captain Christmas would show how he calculated the ship’s position on the large map rolled out on the table in the corner of his cabin.
The course the captain had plotted for the Kron Princessa Maria took them down the northwest coast of Africa until they caught the northwesterly trade winds. They would use these winds to take them across the Atlantic Ocean almost to South America. Once they reached Trinidad Island off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, they would pick up the southeasterly winds, which would take them across the South Atlantic, past the tiny island of Tirstan da Cunha—their most southerly point on the journey—and then due east past the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa and on into the Indian Ocean. There the Kron Princessa Maria would again pick up the southeasterly winds, which would push her all the way to the equator, not far off the coast of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). There the northwesterly monsoon winds would fill the sails and drive them all the way into the Bay of Bengal and on to Calcutta, which lay at the northern end of the bay.
If everything went according to plan, the whole journey should take about five months. However, the winds were seasonal, and if they arrived too late to catch a trade wind, they would have to wait six months until the winds began blowing in the right direction again.
At the Cape of Good Hope, the ship was scheduled to dock for several days at Cape Town. As they neared the cape, William and Dr. Thomas busied themselves writing letters to mail when they docked. But Captain Christmas was getting anxious. The winds were not as strong as they usually were, and time was running out. They had to make it across the Bay of Bengal before the end of the monsoon season in early October. As a result, the ship did not put in at Cape Town but kept straight on going out into the Indian Ocean. William stuffed the letters to his father and the missionary society committee back into his pouch. He would just have to mail them when he got to India.
Dolly wasn’t happy about this. No one had told her she would be aboard ship for five months without once getting off to feel land beneath her feet! It’s just as well they didn’t stop in Cape Town, however, because had Dolly Carey known what lay ahead, she would have insisted on being left behind there.
All was going well until William was called to perform a funeral service at sea. The Black woman traveling on the ship had become ill and died. She was buried at sea off the Cape of Good Hope. The death and funeral made Dolly even more nervous. Dolly had tried hard not to think of the dangers involved in what the family was doing, but the woman’s death brought all her fears flooding back. Dolly clung to the children and hardly let them out of the cabin. She spent her days sitting in the cabin, facing away from the porthole.
Then in the early morning hours of August 26, the Kron Princessa Maria ran into a violent storm. Fifty-foot high waves crashed around the little ship, tossing it one way and then the other. Every plank in the hull moaned and creaked. William was jarred awake with the scream of one of the boys being tossed from his bunk by the pitching, rolling ship. He leapt from his bed, trying to steady himself as best he could. He found William Jr. shaking and still on the floor where he had landed. William helped him back into his bunk. Dolly was already awake and clutching Jabez tightly against her. She was crying quietly, and William put his arm around her to comfort her as he stumbled back into bed.
Soon the cabin door flung open, and Kitty staggered in from her cabin next door. Her face was white, and she was trembling as she climbed onto the bed. William tried to comfort them all as they listened to the thunderous waves break against the ship. Above all the noise, they could hear Captain Christmas on deck frantically barking orders to the crew.
William was wondering what he should do next when Dr. Thomas appeared in the doorway. Dr. Thomas braced his arms and legs against the door frame as the ship rolled violently. “It looks bad,” he yelled against the backdrop of crashing waves and the creaking of the hull. “The main and fore topmasts have been washed overboard.”
“Stay in your bunks,” William instructed his family. “I’m going to see if they need help.” He pulled on his shirt and trousers and headed off into the darkness with Dr. Thomas.
The storm raged for two days, during which time William and Dr. Thomas took their turn helping the crew make sure the things stowed on deck stayed lashed down, and cutting free tangled lengths of rigging and broken yardarms that had snapped and swung menacingly in the ferocious wind. Then, as quickly as the storm had come, it was gone, but not before the sails had been shredded to rags and two of the three masts had broken.
It took ten days of feverish work to rig a jury-mast where the main mast had been and patch enough of the torn sails to get the Kron Princessa Maria under way again. Although no one was killed during the storm, several days later, the ship’s carpenter died as a result of pneumonia he caught during the storm. Once again, William held a funeral service at sea.
Beyond worrying about his own situation, William thought about all the continents and islands they had passed during the voyage. He wondered how many people in those places had never heard the gospel message. William put his thoughts down in a letter to the missionary society committee:
I hope the Society will go on and increase, and that the multitudes of heathen in the world may hear the glorious words of truth. Africa is but a little way from England; Madagascar but a little way farther; South America, and all the numerous and large islands in the Indian and Chinese Seas, I hope will not be passed over. A large field opens on every side and millions of perishing heathens tormented in this side by idolatry, superstition, and ignorance, and exposed to eternal miseries in the world to come are pleading.
As they headed farther out into the Indian Ocean, the situation aboard the Kron Princessa Maria became more desperate with each passing day. There was no more meat or pudding for dinner, not even at the captain’s table. The quartermaster had stowed only enough food and water to get from Dover to Cape Town, where normally they would have taken on more supplies. But since they hadn’t stopped in Cape Town, the quartermaster was forced to ration what little food was left. They were blessed to have some rain showers along the way, and the water that fell on the ship was carefully collected and stored in barrels on deck.
Finally, in October, the small Danish ship, proudly flying its red flag with a white cross on it, sailed into the Bay of Bengal. They were now only two hundred miles from their destination. But Captain Christmas was worried, and he was right to worry. The last of the monsoon winds had come and gone. Now the wind and current were against them, flowing out of the north. It was going to be a slow and tedious job sailing north toward their destination.
A sailing ship cannot sail directly into a headwind. It has to zigzag, or tack, as it is called, backward and forward across the wind, inching its way slowly in the direction of the headwind. William, who was interested in the whole process of navigation and sailing, spent many hours bent over the map with Captain Christmas, charting their progress. He wrote about what he learned in his diary:
A ship sails within six [compass] points of the wind; that is, if the wind blows from the North, a ship will sail ENE [east northeast] upon one tack, and WNW [west northwest] upon the other; if our course is North, we must therefore go ENE for a considerable way, then WNW; and if the wind shifts a point, the advantage is immediately taken,… sometimes, in spite of all that we can do, we go backwards instead of forwards.
Finally, on November 9, 1793, a full month after entering the Bay of Bengal, the Kron Princessa Maria pitched at anchor in the mouth of the Hooghly River, waiting for a pilot to come aboard and guide the ship up the river to Calcutta and Serampore beyond it. At the head of the Bay of Bengal, two mighty rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, fanned out to form a large delta. The Hooghly River was one of the many river branches that ran from the confluence of these two great rivers to the sea.
As the ship bobbed at anchor, many questions whirled around in William’s mind. Where should they start their missionary work? Where would they all live? And what would the East India Company do when they found out that two Englishmen were preaching to Indians? William had read that there were only about fifteen hundred English people in the whole of India at that time, and most of them worked for the East India Company. How could they ever hope to go unnoticed for very long?
None of these questions, however, was as important as the gloomy question William did not even want to think about but knew he had to: How were they going to get past the East India Company officials on their way to Serampore? If they were discovered on their way up the river, they might not even be allowed to set foot in India, let alone preach there.
William peered over the side of the ship into the yellow river water. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. Somehow, he had to find a way to get around what was written on that paper.