And how deeply his heroic nature mourned over the signal to retreat may be seen in the description of the situation at Rangoon, as given by her who shared-with him this bitter experience:
“Dr. Judson, when he could keep down his groans, used to speak of our position as ‘the pass of the Splugen,’ and say he had no doubt we should find sunny vales and fruited vineyards the other side. The Government was certainly very bad, and our prospects, at the best, misty; yet as soon as his health and the children’s began to amend, our courage revived. We could not bear, now we had gone so far, and been through so much, to think of retreating, without an effort to get to Ava. For myself, as I believe is natural to the practical minds of women, I sat down to examine the worst features of the case in detail. We should of course be subjected to inconceivable annoyances, but we must trust Providence to give us wise thoughts. We very likely might be banished; but we could always hold ourselves in readiness to go, and the loss of the few goods we had would not be much. Possibly we should be imprisoned; but I did not think that very likely, and we should always have means of informing our friends in Maulmain. Death was the worst. We must endure it some time. If it came a little earlier, it would be in a good cause; and there would be faithful Christians about us, who would never rest till they had taken the children to Maulmain. The way seemed clear to me. Dr. Judson said it was scarcely possible for us to encounter the complication of troubles that we had already passed through in Rangoon. Ava, he said, was always better governed than Rangoon; and this starving of people during Lent had never occurred before in all his missionary-life, and was not likely to occur again; besides, the rains were less heavy, and consequently the rainy season less sickly. In addition to this, he had a friend at court—a Burman of rank, who loved him, and was exerting himself to the utmost to gain respect for the ‘wise man,’ and to explain that Americans were not Englishmen. The plan of going to Ava really seemed, on the whole, feasible. Accordingly Dr. Judson used his first returning strength to call on the governor, to obtain permission to go. Not that we could not go without permission; but it was polite and conciliatory to ask, and in the permission would be an implied exemption from annoyance in getting away, and protection—probably that of a Government flag or official umbrella—on the river. The Lent was not yet over; but what with boxes of biscuit from Maulmain, bribing a Mussulman—a rascally fellow, who afterward came and robbed us of our dearly-bought treasure—to obtain fowls for us secretly, and the improved health of some of us, we began to be quite valorous. As Dr. Judson expressed it, ‘our faces began to shine.’ Indeed, we had not been very desponding any of the time. Never, except during an occasional hour, when his illness was most alarming, did his courage falter. It was delightful to be so directly in the hands of God. Then, we had not expected much when we left Maulmain. The church in Rangoon had been aroused, a few baptisms had taken place, and several more hopeful conversions; and the way to Ava, if not the golden city itself, was open before us.
“The letter from Maulmain with no appropriation for our contemplated expedition, and giving us only twenty rupees to cover the eighty-six rupees we were even then monthly expending, came upon us like a sudden tornado in a sunny day. Oddly enough, it had not once occurred to us that the money could be wanting. You will readily appreciate the one broad feature of the case, which would have made the blow heavy to any sincere Christian having much of the missionary spirit; but to my husband there was additional bitterness in the manner of his disappointment, and in the hands from which it came. ‘I thought they loved me,’ he would say, mournfully, ‘and they would scarcely have known it if I had died.’ ‘All through our troubles, I was comforted with the thought that my brethren in Maulmain, and in America, were praying for us, and they have never once thought of us.’ At other times he would draw startling pictures of missionaries abandoning the spirit of their mission, and sacrificing everything to some darling project; and at others he would talk hopelessly of the impulsive nature of the home movements, and then pray, in a voice of agony, that these sins of the children of God might not be visited on the heathen. This was an unnatural state of excitement—for him peculiarly unnatural—and he was not long in recovering from it. He very soon began to devise apologies for everybody, and said we must remember that so far as we were concerned, or the missionary cause itself, God had done this thing, and done it, as He always does, for good. It was not His will that we should go to Ava then, and we had no right to complain of the means He made use of to prevent it. He insisted, too, that our obedience was not to be yielded grudgingly; that it must be a cheerful acquiescence in all that God had done, and a sincere, careful study of the indications of His providence afterward, without any suspicion that our ways were hedged by anything harder or thornier than His love and mercy. By the time he had an opportunity to send letters to Maulmain and Boston, his mind was restored to its usual serenity. My impression, however, is, that his first letter to the Board was written in a slightly discouraged tone. He wrote more hopefully to Maulmain, but I have sometimes thought that his generosity took the point from his letter, and that his meaning was not understood in saying that it was for the best. I think now that they mistook resignation to God for a personal willingness to abandon the enterprise.”
Two years afterward, only a few months before his death, he received permission from the Board to go to Ava. It was couched in the following resolutions:
1. “That the Executive Committee accede to the proposition of Dr. Judson to visit Ava, for the purpose of perfecting his Burman dictionary.
2. “That the sum of one thousand rupees be appropriated to defray the expense of said visit.
3. “That the Foreign Secretary be requested to assure Dr. Judson of the earnest wish of the Committee, that he should carefully avoid all that may jeopard his life, or interfere with his invaluable labors.”
But this permission came too late. The opportunity of penetrating Burmah proper had passed, and the aid of an excellent Burmese scholar, once a priest at Ava, had been secured at Maulmain, and then the toiling translator replied to the resolutions as follows:
“Considering, therefore, the uncertainty of life, and the state of my manuscripts, so effaced by time, or so erased and interlined as to be illegible to any other person but myself, I have thought it was my duty to forego, for the present, what I can not but regard as an interesting expedition, in order to drive forward the heavy work of the dictionary in the most satisfactory manner, and without increasing the hazard of any serious interruption.”
Thus after spending half a year of toil and suffering at Rangoon, he was compelled to fall back upon Maulmain. He arrived there with his family on September 5, 1847.