Pioneers and Founders

To be nearer to these people, the Boardmans removed to Tavoy, where they had a Burmese congregation; and Mr. Boardman made an expedition among the Karens, who were, for the most part, by no means unwilling to listen, and with little tradition to pre-occupy their minds, as well as intelligence enough to receive new ideas.  At one place, the people were found devoted to an object that was thought to have magic power, and which they kept with great veneration, wrapt up in many coverings.  It proved to be an English Common Prayer Book, printed at Oxford, which had been left behind by a Mahometan traveller.  On the whole, this has been a flourishing mission; the Karens were delighted to have their language reduced to writing, and the influence of their teachers began to raise them in the scale; but all was done under the terrible drawback of climate.  Mrs. Boardman never was well from the time she landed at Moulmein, and her beautiful flower-covered house at Tavoy was the constant haunt of sickness, under which her elder child, Sarah, died, after showing all that precocity that white children often do in these fatal regions.  A little boy named George had by this time been born, and shared with his mother the dangers of the Tavoy rebellion, an insurrection stirred up by a prince of the Burmese royal blood, in hopes of wresting the province from the English.

One night, a Burmese lad belonging to the school close to the Boardmans’ house, was awakened by steps; and, peeping through the braided bamboo walls of his hut, saw parties of men talking in an undertone about lost buffaloes.  Some went into the town, others gathered about the gate, and, when their numbers began to thicken, a cloud of smoke was seen in the morning dawn, and yells from a thousand voices proclaimed, “Tavoy has risen!”

Boardman awoke and rushed out to the door, but a friendly voice told him that no harm was intended him.  The revolt was against the English, and never was a movement more perilous.  The commandant, Colonel Burney, was absent at Moulmein, the English officer next in command was ill of a fatal disease, the gunner was ill, and the whole defence of a long, straggling city was in the hands of a hundred Sepoys, commanded by a very young surgeon, assisted by Mrs. Burney, who had a babe of three weeks old.  The chief of the fight was at the powder magazine, not very far from the Boardmans’ abode.  It was attacked by two hundred men with clubs, knives, spears, but happily with very few muskets, and defended by only six Sepoys, who showed great readiness and faithfulness.  Just as their bullets seemed to be likely to endanger the frightened little family, a savage-looking troop of natives were seen consulting, with threatening gestures aimed at the mission-house, and Mr. Boardman, fully expecting to be massacred, made his wife and her baby hide in a little shed, crouching to escape the bullets; but this alarm passed off, and, at the end of an hour, the whole of the gates had been regained by the Sepoys, and the attack on the magazine repulsed.  Mr. Boardman took this opportunity of carrying his family to the Government house, where they were warmly welcomed by Mrs. Burney; but it was impossible to continue the defence of so large an extent as the town occupied, and therefore the tiny garrison decided on retiring to a large wooden building on the wharf, whither the Sepoys conveyed three cannon and as much powder as they expected to want, throwing the rest down wells.  This was not done without constant skirmishing, and was not completed till three o’clock, when the refugees were collected,—namely, a hundred Sepoys, with their wives and children, stripped of all their ornaments, which they had buried; some Hindoo and Burmese servants; a few Portuguese traders; a wily old Mussulman; Mrs. Boardman and Mrs. Burney, each with her baby; and seven Englishmen besides Mr. Boardman.  Among them rode the ghastly figure of the sick officer, who had been taken from his bed, but who hoped to encourage his men by appearing on horseback; but his almost orange skin, wasted form, sunken eyes, and perfect helplessness, were to Mrs. Boardman even more terrible than the yells of the insurgents around and the shots of their scanty escort.

Three hundred persons were crowded together in the wooden shed, roofed over, and supported on posts above the water, with no partitions.  The situation was miserable enough, but they trusted that the enemy, being only armed with spears, could not reach them.  By and by, however, the report of a cannon dismayed them.  The jingals, or small field-pieces, were brought up, but not till evening; and the inexperienced rebels took such bad aim that all the balls passed over the wharf into the sea, and the dense darkness put a stop to the attempt; but all night the trembling inmates were awakened by savage yells; and a Sepoy, detecting a spark of light through the chinks of the floor, fired, and killed an enemy who had come beneath in a boat to set fire to the frail shelter!

In the morning the firing from the walls was renewed, but at long intervals, for there was a great scarcity of powder, though the unhappy besieged apprehended every moment that the right direction would be hit upon, and then that the balls would be among them.  They could send nowhere for help, though there was a Chinese junk within their reach, for it could not put to sea under the fire of the rebels; and two more days, and two still more terrible nights, passed in what must have been almost a black hole.  The fifth night was the worst of all, for the town was set on fire around, and by the light of the flames the enemy made a furious attack; but just in time to prevent the fire from attaining the frail wooden structure, a providential storm quenched it, and the muskets of the Sepoys again repulsed the enemy.  By this time the provisions were all but exhausted, and there were few among even the defenders who were not seriously ill from the alternate burning sun and drenching rain.  Death seemed hovering over the devoted wharf from every quarter; when at last, soon after sunrise on the fifth day, the young doctor quietly beckoned the Colonel’s wife to the door that opened upon the sea, and pointed to the horizon, where a little cloudy thread of smoke was rising.

It was the steamer bringing Colonel Burney back, in perfect ignorance of the peril of Tavoy and of his wife!  But he understood all at a glance.  The women and children were instantly transferred to the steamer, and she was sent back to Moulmein, but Colonel Burney and the few men who came with him landed, and restored courage and spirit to the besieged.  Not only was a breastwork thrown up to protect the wharf, but the Colonel led a trusty little band of Sepoys to the wall where the cannon stood, recaptured them, and had absolutely regained Tavoy before the tidings of the insurrection had reached Moulmein.  Mrs. Burney’s babe died soon after the steamer had brought the two mothers and their infants to their refuge; but little George Boardman did not suffer any ill effects from these dreadful days and nights, and was, in fact, the only child of his patents who outlived infancy.  Another son, born a few months afterwards, soon ended a feeble existence, and Mrs. Boardman was ill for many months.  Her husband, delicate from the first, never entirely recovered the sufferings at the wharf; yet in spite of an affection of the lungs, he would often walk twenty miles a day through the Karen villages, teaching and preaching, and at night have no food but rice, and sleep on a mat on the floor of an open zayat.

The Moulmein station was a comparative rest, and the husband and wife removed thither to supply the place of Judson and of the Wades, who were making another attempt upon Burmah Proper; the Wades taking up their residence at Rangoon, and Judson going on to Prome, the ancient capital, where he preached in the zayats, distributed tracts, and argued with the teachers in his old fashion; but the Ava Government had become far more suspicious, and interfered as soon as he began to make anything like progress, requesting the English officer now in residence at the Court to remonstrate with him, and desire him not to proceed further than Rangoon.  He was obliged to yield, and again to float down the river in his little boat, baffled, but patient and hopeful.

A great change had come upon the bright, enthusiastic, lively young man who had set out, with his beautiful Ann, to explore the unknown Eastern world.  Suffering of body had not altered him so much as bereavement, and bereavement without rest in which to face and recover the shock.  A strong ascetic spirit was growing on him.  Already on his first return to Moulmein, after joining in the embassy, he had thought it right to cut short the ordinary intercourse of society, to which his residence in the camp had given rise, and had announced his intention in a letter to Sir Archibald Campbell.  He was much regretted, for he was a particularly agreeable man; and it is evident, both from all testimony and from the lively tone of his letters, that he was full of good-natured sympathy, and, however sad at heart, was a cheerful and even merry companion.

But through these years, throughout constant care and unrelaxed activity of mind and body, his heart was aching for the wife he had no time to mourn; and the agony thus suppressed led to an utter loathing for all that he thought held him back from perfect likeness to the glorified Saint whom he loved.  He took delight in the most spiritual mystical writings he could find,—à Kempis, Madame Guyon, Fénélon, and the like,—and endeavoured to fulfil the Gospel measure of holiness.  He gave up his whole patrimony to the American Baptist Mission Board (now separate from England and Serampore), mortified to the very utmost his fastidious delicacy by ministering to the most loathsome diseases; and to crush his love of honour, he burnt a letter of thanks for his services from the Governor-General of India, and other documents of the same kind.  He fasted severely, and having by nature a peculiar horror of the decay and mouldering of death, he deemed it pride and self-love, and dug a grave beside which he would sit meditating on the appearance of the body after death.  He had a bamboo hermitage on the borders of the jungle, where he would live on rice for weeks together—only holding converse with those who came to him for religious instruction; and once, when worn out with his work of translation, he went far into the depths of the wildest jungle, near a deserted pagoda, and there sat down to read, pray, and meditate.  The next day, on returning to the spot, he found a seat of bamboo, and the branches woven together for a shelter.  Judson never learnt whose work this was, but it was done by a loving disciple, who had overcome the fear of tigers to provide by night for his comfort, though the place was thought so dangerous that his safety, during the forty days that he haunted it, was viewed by the natives as a miracle.  He spent several months in retirement.  It was indeed four years after his bereavement, but it is plain that he was taking the needful rest and calm that his whole nature required after the shock that he had undergone, but which he had in a manner deferred until the numbers of workers were so increased that his constant labour could be dispensed with.  He came forth from his retirement renovated in spirit, for the second period of his toils.

Meantime, the Boardmans had returned to Tavoy, where they were eagerly welcomed by their Karen flock, and found many candidates for baptism.  Weak as he was, Mr. Boardman examined them.  He was sometimes able to sit up in his chair and speak for himself, but oftener so weak that his wife sat on his couch and interpreted his feeble whispers; but he was so happy that tears of joy often filled his eyes.  The actual baptism, performed by going down into the water like Philip with the Ethiopian, could hardly have been carried out by a man in his state; but Moung Ing, who had been admitted to the pastorate, touched at Moulmein, on a mission to Mergui, and undertook the baptisms.  The Karens carried Mr. Boardman to the water in his cot, along a street filled with lamaseries, whence the yellow-clothed priests looked down in scorn, and the common people hooted and reviled: “See! see your teacher, a living man borne as if he were already dead!” with still worse unfeeling taunts.  The Christians, about fifty in number, reached the spot, a beautiful lake, nearly a mile in circumference, and bordered by green grass overshadowed by trees.  There they all knelt down and prayed, and then Moung Ing baptized the nineteen new disciples, while the pastor lay pale and happy, and his wife watched him with her heart full of the last baptism, when it had been he who poured the water and spoke the words.

Mr. Boardman lived on into the year 1831, and welcomed a new arrival from America, Francis Mason and his wife, on the 23rd of January, and a week later set out to introduce the former to the Karens, a band of whom had come down to convey the party.  Mr. Boardman was carried on his bed, his wife in a chair, and on the third day they reached a spot where the Karens, of their own accord, had erected a bamboo chapel beside a beautiful stream beneath a range of mountains.  Nearly a hundred had assembled there, of whom half were candidates for baptism.  They cooked, ate, and slept in the open air, but they had made a small shed for Mr. Mason, and another for the Boardmans, too small to stand upright in, and so ill-enclosed as to be exposed to sun by day and cold air by night.

The sufferer rapidly became worse, but he had an ardent desire to see this last baptism, and all the thirty-four women, who were sufficiently prepared, were baptized in his sight, though he was so spent as scarcely to be able to breathe without the fan and smelling-bottle.  In the evening he contrived to speak a few words of exhortation to the disciples, and to give them each a tract or a portion of Scripture.  The next morning the party set out on their return, but in the afternoon were overtaken by a great storm of thunder and lightning, with rain that drenched his mattress and pillows; and when they reached a house, they found it belonged to heathens, who would scarcely let the strange teacher lie in the verandah.

His cot was so wet that he was forced to lie on the bamboo floor, and the rain continued all night.  A boat was expected at twelve the next day, and it was resolved to wait for this, while the Tavoyans looked grimly on, and refused even to sell a chicken to make broth for the sick man.  By nine o’clock he was evidently dying, and the Karens rubbed his hands and feet as they grew cold.  Almost immediately after being conveyed to the boat, the last struggles came on, and in a few minutes he had passed away.  He was buried at Tavoy, beside his little Sarah; all the Europeans in the town attending, as well as a grateful multitude of Burmese and Karens.

“The tree to which the frail creeper clung   Still lifts its stately head,But he, on whom my spirit hung,   Is sleeping with the dead,”

wrote Sarah Boardman; and her first thought was of course to go home with her child, but the Masons had not learnt the languages, and had no experience, and, without her, there would be no schools, no possibility of instruction for the converts of either people until they could speak freely, and she therefore resolved not to desert her work.  She was keeping school, attending to all comers, and interpreting from sunrise till ten o’clock at night, besides having the care of her little boy, and her schools were so good that, when the British Government established some, orders were given for conducting them on the same system.

She tried to learn Karen, but never had time, and it was the less needful that a little Burmese was known to some Karens, and thus she could always have an interpreter.  She sometimes made mission tours to keep up the spirit of the Karens till Mr. Mason should be qualified to come among them.  Her little George was carried by her attendants, and there is a note to Mrs. Mason, sent back from one of the stages of her journey, which shows what her travels must have been: “Perhaps you had better send the chair, as it is convenient to be carried over the streams when they are deep.  You will laugh when I tell you that I have forded all the smaller ones.”  But there is scarcely any record of these journeys of hers, she was too modest and shy to dwell on what only related to herself; and though she several times, with the help of her Burmese interpreter, led the devotions of two or three hundred Karens, it was always with a sense of reluctance, and only under necessity.

She had been a widow four years, when Adoniram Judson, who had returned from Rangoon, and was about to take charge of the station at Moulmein, made her his second wife, on the 10th of April, 1834.  At the same time, an opportunity offered of sending little George back to America for education; but year after year filled the house at Moulmein with other little ones,—careful comforts, in that fatal climate, which had begun to tell on the health of both the parents.  Pain and sorrow went for little with this devoted pair.  To be as holy as the Apostles though without their power, was the endeavour which Judson set before himself, and the work of such a man was one of spirit that drew all to hear and follow him.  The Burmese converts were numbered by hundreds, and one of the missionaries in the Karen country could write: “I no longer date from a heathen land.  Heathenism has fled from these banks; I eat the rice and fruits cultivated by Christian hands, look on the fields of Christians, see no dwellings but those of Christian families.  I am seated in the midst of a Christian village, surrounded by a people that live as Christians, converse as Christians, act as Christians, and, to my eyes, look like Christians.”

All this, like every other popular conversion, involved many individual disappointments from persons not keeping up to the Christian standard, and from coolness setting in when the excitement of the change was over; and great attention had to be paid to rules, discipline, &c., as well as to providing books and schools.  Judson himself had to work hard at the completion and correction of the Burmese Bible, to which he devoted himself, the more entirely because an affection of the throat and cough came on, and for some time prevented him from preaching.  In 1839, he tried to alleviate it by a voyage to Calcutta, where he was received by both Bishop Wilson and by the Marshman family at Serampore; but, as he observes, “the glory of Serampore had departed,” and his stay there must have been full of sad associations.  His work upon the Scriptures was finished in 1840, and he then began a complete Burmese dictionary, while his wife was translating the Pilgrim’s Progress; but both were completely shattered in health, and their children, four in number, had all been brought low by the hooping cough, and then by other complaints.  A voyage to Calcutta was imperatively enjoined on all; but it was stormy and full of suffering, and soon after they arrived at Serampore their youngest child, little Henry, died.  A still further voyage was thought advisable, and the whole family went as far as the Isle of France, where they recovered some measure of health, and their toil at Moulmein was resumed.  Four more years passed, three more children were born, and then the strength that had been for nineteen years so severely tried, gave way, and the doctors pronounced that Sarah Judson’s life could only be saved by a voyage to America.  The three elder children were to go with her, but the three little ones were to remain, since their father only intended to go as far as the Isle of France, and then return to his labour.  The last words she ever wrote were pencilled on a slip of paper, intended to be given to him to comfort him at their farewell:—

“We part on this green islet, love:   Thou for the Eastern main,I for the setting sun, love;   Oh! when to meet again?My heart is sad for thee, love,   For lone thy way will be;And oft thy tears will fall, love,   For thy children and for me.The music of thy daughter’s voice   Thou’lt miss for many a year,And the merry shout of thine elder boys   Thou’lt list in vain to hear.* * * * *Yet my spirit clings to thine, love,   Thy soul remains with me,And oft we’ll hold communion sweet   O’er the dark and distant sea.And who can paint our mutual joy   When, all our wanderings o’er,We both shall clasp our infants three   At home on Burmah’s shore?But higher shall our raptures glow   On yon celestial plain,When the loved and parted here below   Meet, ne’er to part again.Then gird thine armour on, love,   Nor faint thou by the wayTill Boodh shall fall, and Burmah’s sons   Shall own Messiah’s sway.”

What a trumpet-note for a soldier to leave after nineteen years service “through peril, toil, and pain,” undaunted to the last!  For by the time the ship left the Isle of France, she was fading so rapidly that her husband could not quit her, and sailed on with her to St. Helena.  She was fast dying, but so composed about her children, that some one observed that she seemed to have forgotten the three babes.  “Can a mother forget?” was all her answer.  She died on board the ship, at anchor in the bay of St. Helena, and was carried to the burial-ground, where all the colonial clergy in the island attended, and she was laid beside Mrs. Chater, the wife of that Serampore missionary whose expulsion had led to the first pioneering at Rangoon, and who had since worked in Ceylon.  She was just forty-two, and died September 1st, 1845.

Her husband found her beautiful farewell; and, as he copied it out, he wrote after the last verse, “Gird thine armour on,” “And so, God willing, I will yet endeavour to do; and while her prostrate form finds repose on the rock of the ocean, and her sanctified spirit enjoys sweeter repose on the bosom of Jesus, let me continue to toil on all my appointed time, until my change too shall come.”

On the evening of the day of her burial, he sailed with the three children, and arrived at Boston on the 15th of October, 1845.  He remained in his native country only nine months, and, if a universal welcome could have delighted him, he received it to the utmost.  So little did he know of his own fame, that, returning after thirty years, he had been in pain to know where to procure a night’s lodging at Boston, whereas he found half the city ready to compete for the honour of receiving him, and every one wanted to meet him.  Places of worship where he was to preach were thronged, and every public meeting where he was expected to speak was fully attended; but all this fervour of welcome was a distress to him, his affection of the throat made oratory painful and often impossible, and the mere going silently to an evening assembly so excited his nerves that he could not sleep for the whole night after.  Any sort of display was misery to him; he could not bear to sit still and hear the usual laudation of his achievements; and, when distinguished and excellent men were introduced to him, he received them with chilling shyness and coldness, too humble to believe that it was for his goodness and greatness that they sought to know him, but fancying it was out of mere curiosity.

His whole desire was to get back to his work and escape from American notoriety, and, disregarding all representations that longer residence in the north might confirm his health, he intended to seize the first opportunity of returning to Moulmein.  But a wife was almost a necessity both to himself and his mission, and even now, at his mature age and broken health, he was able to win a woman of qualities almost if not quite equal to those of the Ann and Sarah who had gone before her.

Emily Chubbuck, born in 1817, was the daughter of parents of the Baptist persuasion, living in the State of New York.  She was the fifth child of a large family in such poor circumstances that, when she was only eleven years old, she was sent to work at a woollen factory, where her recollections were only of “noise and filth, bleeding hands and aching feet, and a very sad heart;” but happily for her, the frost stopped the works during the winter months, and she was able to go to school; and, after two years, the family removed to a country farm.  They were all very delicate, and her elder sisters were one after the other slowly dying of decline.  This, with their “conversions” and baptisms, deepened Emily’s longing to give the tokens required by her sect for Christian membership, but they came slowly and tardily with her, and she quaintly told how one day she was addressed by one of the congregation whose prayers had been asked for her, “What! this little girl not converted yet?  How do you suppose we can waste any more time in praying for you?”  Her intelligence was very great, and in 1832, when her mother wanted her to become a milliner, she entreated to be allowed to engage herself as a school teacher.  “I stood as tall as I could,” she says, when she went to offer herself, and she was accepted, although only fifteen.  The system was that of “boarding round”—i.e. the young mistress had to live a week alternately at each house, and went from thence to her school, but she found this so uncomfortable that she ended by sleeping at home every night.  She struggled on, teaching in various schools, doing needlework in after-hours, trying to improve herself, and always contending with great delicacy of health, which must have made it most trying to cope with what she calls in one of her letters “a little regiment of wild cats” for about seven years, when some of the friends she had made obtained of two sisters who kept a boarding school at Utica that she should be admitted there to pursue the higher branches of study for a year or two, and then to repay them by her services as a teacher.