A Half Century Among the Siamese and the Lāo: An Autobiography

by Daniel McGilvary

The work in hand was easily turned over to Mr. McFarland, an earnest and successful worker, who had become specially gifted in the Siamese language. The Presbytery was to meet in Bangkok in November. The last busy weeks passed rapidly away. At their end we bade good-bye to our home and friends in Pechaburī.

Friends in Bangkok gave us their hearty assistance. The Ladies’ Sewing Society made a liberal contribution to the new mission. Dr. James Campbell supplied us with medicines and a book of instructions how to use them. The German Consul gave us a Prussian rifle for our personal protection. All our missionary friends added their good wishes and their prayers.

We had great difficulty in securing suitable boats and crews for the journey. On January 3d, 1867, we embarked, leaving Mr. and Mrs. Wilson to follow us the next year. Mr. George accompanied us as far as Rahêng. The trip is always a slow one, but we enjoyed it. My rifle was useful in securing pelicans and other large birds for food. Once I fired into a large flock of pelicans on the river and killed three with a single shot. Fish everywhere abounded. My shotgun furnished pigeons and other small game. The trip afforded fine opportunity for evangelistic work. Nothing of the sort had ever been done there save the little which Mr. Wilson and I had attempted on our earlier trip.

Rahêng was reached in four weeks. There we dismissed the boats that had brought us from Bangkok, and procured, instead, two large ones of the sort used in up-country travel. We should have done better with three of smaller size. We spent nearly a month in toiling up the thirty-two rapids. At one of them we were delayed from Friday noon till Tuesday afternoon. At another, to avoid the furious current of the main river, we attempted a small channel at one side. As we slowly worked our way along, the water in our channel became shallower and shallower, till we had to resort to a system of extemporized locks. A temporary dam was built behind the boat. The resulting slight rise of water would enable us to drag the boat a little further, till again it was stranded—when the process would have to be repeated. After two days of hard work at this, our boatmen gave up in despair. A Chiengmai prince on his way to Bangkok found us in this extremity, and gave us an order to secure help at the nearest village. To send the letter up and to bring the boatmen down would require nearly a week. But there was nothing else to do.

My rifle helped me somewhat to while away the time of this idle waiting. We could hear tigers about us every night. I used to skirt about among the mountain ridges and brooks, half hoping to shoot one of them. Since my rifle was not a repeater, it was no doubt best that my ambition was not gratified. Once, taking a Siamese lad with me, I strayed further and returned later than usual. It was nearly dark when we got back to the boats, and supper was waiting. Before we had finished our meal, the boatmen caught sight of the glowing eyes of a tiger that had followed our trail to the further bank of the river, whence we had crossed to our boat.

One of the boat captains professed to be able to call up either deer or tiger, if one were within hearing. By doubling a leaf together, and with thumb and finger on either side holding the two edges tense between his lips while he blew, he would produce a sound so nearly resembling the cry of a young goat or deer, that a doe within reach of the call, he claimed, would run to the rescue of her young, or a tiger, hearing it, would run to secure the prey. The two captains and I one day went up on a ridge, and, selecting an open triangular space, posted ourselves back to back, facing in three directions, with our guns in readiness. The captain had sounded his call only two or three times, when suddenly a large deer rushed furiously up from the direction toward which one of the captains was facing. A fallen log was lying about twenty paces off on the edge of our open space. The excited animal stopped behind it, his lower parts concealed, but with back, shoulder, neck, and head fully exposed. Our captain fired away, but was so excited that he would have missed an elephant. His bullet entered the log some six inches below the top. In an instant the deer was gone. We found not far off the spot where evidently a young deer had been devoured by a tiger. We tried the experiment a number of times later, but with no success.

After we had waited two days and nights for help from the village above, on the third night the spirits came to our rescue. Either with their ears or in their imaginations, our crew heard strange noises in the rocks and trees about them, which they interpreted as a warning from the spirits to be gone. Next morning, after consultation together, they made another desperate effort, and got the boats off. It was still several days before we met the men that came down in response to the prince’s order. But some of the worst rapids were yet before us. We could hardly have got through without their aid.

The efforts of a single crew, it must be remembered, are utterly inadequate to bring a boat up through any of these rapids. Only by combining two or three crews can the boats be brought up one by one. Some of the men are on the bank, tugging at the tow-rope while they clamber over rocks and struggle through bushes. Some are on board, bending to their poles. Others are up to their waists in the rushing water, by main force fending off the boat from being dashed against the rocks. On one occasion I myself had made the passage in the first boat, which then was left moored in quieter waters. The crew went back to bring up the second boat, in which were my wife and children. With anxious eyes I was watching the struggle; when, suddenly, in the fiercest rush of the current, the men lost control of her. Boat and passengers were drifting with full force straight against a wall of solid rock on the opposite bank. It seemed as if nothing could save them. But one of the fleetest boatmen, with rope in hand, swam to a rock in midstream, and took a turn of the rope about it, just in time to prevent what would have been a tragedy.

At night, about camp-fires on the river bank, we were regaled by the boatmen with legends of the country through which we were passing. One of these legends concerned the lofty mountain which rises above the rapid called Kêng Soi, where we were camped. The story was that on its summit there had been in ancient times a city of sētīs (millionaires), who paid a gold fûang (two dollars) a bucket for all the water brought up for their use. It was said that remains of their city, and particularly an aged cocoanut tree, were still to be seen on the summit.

Since it would take our boatmen at least two days to surmount that rapid, I resolved to attempt the ascent, and either verify or explode the story. Starting at early dawn with my young Siamese, zigzagging back and forth on the slope all that long forenoon, I struggled upward—often despairing of success, but ashamed to turn back. At last we stood on the top, but it was noon or later. We spent two or three hours in search of the cocoanut tree or other evidence of human settlement, but all in vain. I was satisfied that we were the first of human kind that had ever set foot on that lofty summit. We had brought lunch—but no water! Most willingly would we have given a silver fûang for a draught.