Dr. Price had been left behind at Ava. He had entered the service of the Burman king. He thought it his duty to live and die in the capital city; and proposed to open a school for teaching several branches of useful learning, such as geography, astronomy, chemistry, etc. And he thought that “in a few years, perhaps twenty, the whole system of Burman religion, founded as it was on false astronomy and geography, would be completely undermined and subverted.”
When Mr. Judson arrived at Rangoon, he found that his little mission, the result of ten years of hard work, was completely broken up. He had left the Wades and Houghs in charge, but the war had driven them to Calcutta. At the very beginning of the campaign, before advancing up the Irrawaddy River, the English army had, of course, captured Rangoon, situated at its mouth—Burmah’s great seaport. Rangoon offered but little resistance to the foreign invader. The missionaries, however, narrowly escaped with their lives. As the English fleet approached the town, Mr. Hough and Mr. Wade were arrested, imprisoned, and even put in irons. It was in vain for them to remonstrate, saying that “they were Americans and not English,” for Burmans were not disposed to make any such nice distinctions. The prison-guard were ordered to massacre them upon the discharge of the first British gun. The executioners sharpened the instruments of death, and brandished them about the heads of the missionaries, to show with what dexterity and pleasure they would execute the fatal orders. The floor was strewn with sand to receive their blood. At this moment the foundations of the prison were shaken by a heavy broadside from Her Majesty’s ship Liffey, and a thirty-two-pound shot passed with a tremendous noise directly over the prison. The executioners, stricken with panic, threw down their knives and fled from the prison, fastening the door, however, behind them. Soon other Burmans came and dragged the prisoners to the place of execution. They were forced to kneel down. The executioner, with a large knife, was ordered to proceed. He had just lifted it to strike off the head of the prisoner nearest him, when Mr. Hough begged permission to speak to the officer in charge. He proposed that one or two of the prisoners be sent to the English ships, and assured the cowardly Burman that the firing would then cease directly. At that moment another broadside came from the Liffey, and the Burman officers and men again forsook their prisoners, and took refuge under the banks of a neighboring tank.
During all this time Mrs. Hough and Mrs. Wade had been exposed to the greatest danger, from which they had escaped by disguising themselves as Burman women. Over their own clothes they had put the garments of their servants; had dressed their heads in the Burman style and blackened their hands and faces. Meanwhile Sir Archibald Campbell had sent a message to the governor of Rangoon: “If the Burmans shed a drop of white blood, we will lay the whole country in ruins and give no quarter.”
The Burman officials who had been frightened from their victims by the discharges of artillery, again seized them, and proceeded to confine them in a brick building. Here they were at last discovered, and rescued by the advancing British troops. Having thus narrowly escaped martyrdom, Mr. Hough and Mr. Wade, with their wives, embarked for Calcutta, where they thought it best to remain until the close of the war. So when Mr. Judson returned to Rangoon he was without a missionary associate. Mr. Wade was ready to join him as soon as he should decide as to the best place for renewed operations; while Mr. Hough soon after entered the service of the British Government.
But missionary reinforcements had already come from America. Mr. Wade, while waiting in Calcutta for the war to close, was joined by George Dana Boardman, whose brief and saintly career was destined to make his name peculiarly fragrant to American Christians. He seemed an ideal missionary, so completely was he fitted for his work by his scholarly tastes, affectionate disposition, and fervent piety. He had taken up a newspaper a little while before, and had seen a notice of Colman’s untimely death in Arracan. In the twinkling of an eye there flashed through his mind the question and answer: “Who will go to fill his place?” “I will go.”
He had married Sarah Hall, a native of Salem, Massachusetts. Those who knew her speak of “faultless features, moulded on the Grecian model, beautiful transparent skin, warm, meek blue eyes, and soft hair, brown in the shadow and gold in the sun.” She was pronounced by her English friends in Calcutta to be “the most finished and faultless specimen of an American woman that they had ever known.” From her earliest years she had possessed an enthusiasm for missions. When ten years old, she wrote a poem upon the death at Rangoon of Mrs. Judson’s infant Roger. Little did the child dream that many years after she was to take the place of the ideal heroine of her childhood, who, worn out with the prolonged horrors of Ava and Oung-pen-la, lay down to rest beneath the hopia-tree at Amherst.
Mr. Wade and Mr. Boardman waited anxiously in Calcutta for news from the Judsons. They did not, however, wait in idleness. They were learning the Burman language, as best they could, and preaching in English in the Circular Road Baptist chapel, where they were permitted to see, as a result of their labors, many persons converted and baptized. When news came at last from Mr. Judson, they were ready to join him and labor wherever he should think it best.
But to return to Mr. Judson in Rangoon. Not only did he find that the white teachers and their wives had been driven away by the war, but the native church membership was much reduced. He had left a church of eighteen disciples. He found on his return only four. With the exception of two, none, however, had disgraced their holy profession.
The learned teacher, Moung Shwa-gnong, had gone into the interior of the country, and soon afterward died of the cholera. The only four whom Mr. Judson could muster after the war had swept over Rangoon were Moung Shwa-ba, who had remained at the mission-house; Moung Ing, who with such fidelity served Mrs. Judson through all her long, bitter experiences at Ava; and two faithful women, Mah-men-la and Mah-doke, who had been living in boats at Prome, the half-way place between Rangoon and Ava, and who instantly resolved to accompany the Judsons to Rangoon. These four faithful disciples were ready to follow their white teacher wherever he should think it best to establish a mission.
It was out of the question to think of remaining at Rangoon. The English were only holding the place temporarily, until the Burmans should pay their war debt. Indeed, at the close of the year, the English army did vacate Rangoon, and the Burmans resumed possession of their chief seaport. Should the missionaries therefore remain in Rangoon, they would still be under the cruel sway of Burman despotism. In addition, the monarch at Ava was peculiarly exasperated with his subjects in the southern part of the empire, because they had put themselves under the benignant protection of the English; many of the peaceful inhabitants were no doubt to be massacred by the royal troops. A state of anarchy followed the war. A famine succeeded, in which beasts of prey became proportionally bold. Tigers began to infest the suburbs of Rangoon, and carry off cattle and human beings. A tiger was killed even in the streets of the city. All these circumstances impelled the missionaries to leave Rangoon.