DINAPORE AND PATNA, 1807-1809
Until, in 1852 and the ten years following, Lord Dalhousie’s railway up the Ganges valley was completed to Allahabad, the usual mode of proceeding up-country from Calcutta was by the house-boat known as the budgerow, which is still common on the many rivers of Bengal where English planters and officials are found. At the rate of twenty-five miles a day the traveller is towed up against stream by the boatmen. When time is no object, and opportunities are sought for reading, shooting, and intercourse with the natives, the voyage is delightful in the cool season. Henry Martyn rejoiced in six weeks of this solitary life—alone yet not alone, and ever about his Father’s business. His studies were divided between Hindustani and Sanskrit; he was much occupied in prayer and in the reading of the Greek and Hebrew Scriptures. Morning and evening he spent himself among the people on the banks, and at the ghauts and bazaars of the mighty river, preaching Christ and spreading abroad the New Testament. The dense population and the spiritual darkness, as the panorama of native life moved hourly before his eyes, on river and on land, stirred up the busiest of Christians to be still busier, in spite of his fast-wasting body; ‘What a wretched life shall I lead if I do not exert myself from morning till night, in a place where, through whole territories, I seem to be the only light!’ His gun supplied him with small game, ‘enough to make a change with the curry.’
At Cutwa, one of Carey’s mission stations, he had fellowship with Chamberlain, receiving that ‘refreshment of spirit which comes from the blessing of God on Christian communion.’ ‘Tell Marshman,’ he wrote, ‘with my affectionate remembrance, that I have seriously begun the Sanskrit Grammar.’ To Ward he sends a list of errata which he found in a tract in the Persian character. He had his Serampore moonshi with him. At Berhampore, soon to be occupied by Mr. Parson as chaplain, and by the London Missionary Society, he spent some time, for it was the great military station of the old Nawab Nazim’s capital, Moorshidabad, which Clive described as wealthier than London, and quite as populous. Henry Martyn at once walked into the hospital, where the surgeon immediately recognised him as an old schoolfellow and townsman. But even with such help he could not induce the men to rise and assemble for Divine service. ‘I left three books with them and went away amidst the sneers and titters of the common soldiers. Certainly it is one of the greatest crosses I am called to bear, to take pains to make people hear me. It is such a struggle between a sense of propriety and modesty on the one hand, and a sense of duty on the other, that I find nothing equal to it.’ At Rajmahal, like Carey six years before, he met some of the hill tribes—‘wrote down from their mouth some of the names of things.’
At Maldah he was in the heart of the little Christian community which, under Charles Grant twenty years before, had proved the salt of Anglo-Indian society, and had made the first attempt with Carey’s assistance to open vernacular Christian schools. With Mr. Ellerton, whose wife had witnessed the duel between Warren Hastings and Philip Francis, and who as a widow indeed lived to the Mutiny of 1857 as the friend of Bishop Daniel Wilson, he went to Gomalty, and visited one of the schools. ‘The cheerful faces of the little boys, sitting cross-legged on their mats round the floor, much delighted me. While they displayed their power of reading, their fathers, mothers, etc., crowded in numbers round the door and windows.’ Here we see the now vast educational system of Bengal in the birth. Not less striking is the contrast, due to the progress of that system on its missionary side, when we find Martyn, in 1806, recording his surprise at the extraordinary fear and unwillingness of the people to take tracts and books. One postmaster, when he found what the booklet was about, returned it with the remark that a person who had his legs in two boats went on his way uncomfortably. Passing Colgong and Monghyr, he ‘reached Patna. Walked about the scene of my future ministry with a spirit almost overwhelmed at the sight of the immense multitudes.’ On November 26 he arrived at Dinapore—‘the multitudes at the water-side prodigious.’
Nowhere, in British India as it was in 1807, could Henry Martyn have found a better training field, at once as chaplain to the troops and missionary to the Mohammedans, than the Patna centre of the great province of Bihar. For fourteen miles, Patna, the Mohammedan city, Bankipore, the British civil station, and Dinapore, the British military station, line the right bank of the Ganges, which is there two miles broad. Patna itself—‘the city,’ as the word means—was the Buddhist capital to which the Greek ambassador Megasthenes came from Seleukos Nikator, 300 B.C., and the Chinese pilgrim, Hwen T’sang, 637 years A.D. But under the Mogul emperors and down to the present day, Patna has been the focus of the most fanatical sect of Islam. There Meer Kasim murdered sixty Englishmen in 1763; and so little did a century’s civilisation affect the place, which Christian missionaries, except Martyn, neglected till recently, that in 1857 it was a centre of the Mutiny, and in 1872 it was the nucleus of Wahabi rebellion. The second city in Bengal next to Calcutta, and the fifth city in all India in inhabitants, Patna with Bankipore and Dinapore commanded an accessible native population of half a million. Such was Henry Martyn’s first ‘parish’ in the East. For the mass of these he opened schools and translated the Word of God; with their learned men he ‘disputed’ continually, in the spirit of Paul seeking to commend to them the very Christ.
Besides the Company’s civil servants in Bankipore whom he never ceased to influence, he was specially charged with the spiritual care of two European regiments, consisting at one time of 1,700 men and 80 officers in various positions. Then and up till 1860, when what was known as ‘the White Mutiny’ led the Queen’s Government to disband the troops, the East India Company had a European force of its own, specially recruited and paid more highly than the royal regiments. The men were generally better educated than the ordinary private of those days, were, indeed, often runaway sons of good families and disreputable adventurers from many countries. As a fighting force they were splendid veterans; in all other respects their history and character as well as his own experience of them on board ship, justified Martyn’s language in a letter to Mr. Brown. ‘My disdainful and abandoned countrymen among the military; they are impudent children and stiff-hearted, and will receive, I fear, my ministrations, as all the others have done, with scorn. Yet Jesus wept over Jerusalem. Henceforward let me live with Christ alone.’ How loving and faithful, if not always tender, his ministry was among them and their native women, and how it gained their respect till it formed a little Church in the army, we shall see.
Having settled down in barrack apartments at 50 rupees a month till he should get a house against the hot season, and having called on the general commanding and others, after the Anglo-Indian fashion, he reported to his longing friends in Aldeen: ‘I stand alone;[26] not one voice is heard saying, “I wish you good luck in the name of the Lord.” I offered to come over to Bankipore to officiate to them on the Sabbath. They are going to take this into consideration. I have found out two schools in Dinapore. I shall set on foot one or two schools without delay, and by the time the scholars are able to read we can get books ready for them.’ In this spirit and by a renewed act of self-dedication he entered on the year 1807:
Seven years have passed away since I was first called of God. Before the conclusion of another seven years, how probable is it that these hands will have mouldered into dust! But be it so: my soul through grace hath received the assurance of eternal life, and I see the days of my pilgrimage shortening without a wish to add to their number. But oh, may I be stirred up to a faithful discharge of my high and awful work; and laying aside, as much as may be, all carnal cares and studies, may I give myself to this ‘one thing.’ The last has been a year to be remembered by me, because the Lord has brought me safely to India, and permitted me to begin, in one sense, my missionary work. My trials in it have been very few; everything has turned out better than I expected; loving-kindness and tender mercies have attended me at every step: therefore here will I sing His praise. I have been an unprofitable servant, but the Lord hath not cut me off: I have been wayward and perverse, yet He has brought me further on the way to Zion; here, then, with sevenfold gratitude and affection, would I stop and devote myself to the blissful service of my adorable Lord. May He continue His patience, His grace, His direction, His spiritual influences, and I shall at last surely come off conqueror. May He speedily open my mouth, to make known the mysteries of the Gospel, and in great mercy grant that the heathen may receive it and live!
The hostility of the officers and civilians to his message sometimes became scorn, when they saw his efforts to teach and preach to the natives. These were days when the Patna massacre was still remembered. So few baptized Christians knew the power of the Faith which they practically dishonoured, that they had no desire to make it known to others; many even actually resented the preaching of Christ to the people, as both politically dangerous and socially an insult to the ruling race. This feeling has long since disappeared in India at least, though its expression is not unknown in some of the colonies where the land is held by the dark savages. Henry Martyn keenly felt such opposition, and none the less that the natives of the Patna district—especially the Mohammedans—were in their turn hostile to a government which had supplanted them so recently. A few weeks after his arrival we find him writing this in his Journal:
1806, December 1.—Early this morning I set off in my palanquin for Patna. Something brought the remembrance of my dear Lydia so powerfully to my mind that I could not cease thinking of her for a moment. I know not when my reflections seemed to turn so fondly towards her; at the same time I scarcely dare to wish her to come to this country. The whole country is manifestly disaffected. I was struck at the anger and contempt with which multitudes of the natives eyed me in my palanquin.