Siam and Laos, as Seen by Our American Missionaries

by Unknown

The Minister of the Interior in his reply, dated April 3d, states that “his views coincide with the consul’s. Mr. McG. had in no respect offended against any of the laws of the country. His Excellency has some solicitude about the matter, however, inasmuch as the king of Cheung Mai is a difficult man to deal with, being often arbitrary and unscrupulous. He is constrained to say this much, that the consul may be apprised of the true state of things.”

The warning was kindly given, but at Cheung Mai the king, failing in this attempt to have the foreign teachers expelled, concealed his hostility to them and their work, and outwardly all went on as usual. Meanwhile, the truth was working in the hearts of not a few who heard it, and the truth made them brave to confess their newfound Lord and Saviour. In seven months from the time when Nan Intah had been received six more Laos men had professed themselves Christians and been baptized. Then suddenly the storm that had been long gathering burst upon the infant church. On the 12th Sept., 1869, two of the newly-made converts were seized by orders from the king on some false pretext, painfully pinioned, and after a night’s imprisonment, without trial, barbarously put to death, being beaten with clubs on the neck, one of them pierced also with a spear. “Faithful unto death,” who can doubt they have received from the Lord Jesus, to whom dying they commended their departing spirits, the crown of life, the martyr’s crown, for they were as true martyrs as any who were slain in the cruel Nero’s day? The other five church-members, taking flight, contrived to secrete themselves from those who “sought their lives to destroy them.”

The situation of the missionaries themselves was now perilous in the extreme. They and their wives and their little ones were in the hands of a merciless, self-willed, reckless, bigoted despot, who hated them and their doctrines, and were five hundred miles away from consular or other aid. Succeeding at last in getting a letter to their friends at Bangkok, the brethren of the mission, startled by the tidings, and not knowing indeed if the Laos missionaries were yet in the land of the living, hastened to lay the matter before the regent. He kindly promised to despatch a special commissioner to Cheung Mai at once with any missionaries that might go, with stringent orders that the missionaries there and their families receive from the Laos authorities the protection the treaty between Siam and the United States guaranteed them. He declined, however, to interfere in behalf of the native Christians.

Messrs. McDonald and George bravely volunteered on behalf of the mission to go to the comfort and aid of their brethren in peril, and set out on the long journey, proceeding by boat to Rahang, thence traveling over the Laos mountains on elephants with the Siamese commissioner and his attendants. In a stormy interview which the missionaries had with the king in the presence of the commissioner he was forced to admit that the two men had been put to death because they had become Christians, and he avowed his set purpose “to kill all his people who should do the same.” As to the missionaries, “they might remain, as the Siamese government had so ordered, but they must not teach religion nor make Christians.”

The future of the Laos misson did indeed look dark, and there seemed to be no alternative but to withdraw from the land while this king reigned. But he who was thus “breathing out threatenings and slaughter” speedily had his power for evil taken from him and was called to his account by a higher Power. Soon after, during a visit he made early in the year 1870 to Bangkok to attend the imposing ceremonies at the cremation of his late suzerain, the king of Siam, he was taken ill. His sickness increasing, he hastened home, but did not live to enter again the walls of his capital, and the supreme power passed into the hands of the second king, his son-in-law, who from the first, with his truly noble queen, had been kindly disposed to the missionaries.

In February, 1870, Mr. McDonald, whose health had become seriously impaired, found it necessary to visit the United States, and left Siam with his family. A young Siamese who accompanied them, giving evidence of true conversion, was baptized by Mr. McDonald during his sojourn in America.

In April, 1871, Mrs. House was obliged to make a trip for a season to the more temperate clime of the United States, and, leaving her husband at his post, returned alone. This year C. W. Vrooman, M. D., was sent out as a medical missionary to the Laos. Proceeding to Cheung Mai after the rains, during his stay of a year and a half he accomplished a good work for the mission. Oct. 11, 1871, Miss Fielde of the Baptist mission to the Chinese left Siam, eventually to join the mission of the Board in Swatow, China.

Toward the close of this year Mr. McDonald and family returned to Siam, and with them the Rev. R. Arthur and wife, the Rev. J. Culbertson and Miss E. S. Dickey. Miss Dickey proved a most efficient and acceptable teacher in the mission-school at Bangkok, and subsequently at Petchaburee. The last day of 1871 brought back to Siam, his native land, the Rev. Cornelius Bradley and wife, to be associated with his father in the mission-work of the American Missionary Association.

In June, 1872, Ayuthia, the ancient capital of Siam, and still a town of considerable importance, was occupied as a missionary station by the Rev. J. Carrington and family, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur joining them before the expiration of the year. At Petchaburee their new chapel was dedicated with interesting services in August. In October, 1872, twenty church-members were reported at Petchaburee, and eighteen at Bangkok. In December, Mrs. House returned from her health-trip to America, accompanied by Miss Arabella Anderson.

The women of the Presbyterian Church at home were now waking up to realize their special privilege and duty to work and give and pray for the women and children of benighted heathen lands. The ladies of the Troy branch of the Albany Synodical Missionary Society, from which two laborers had gone out to Siam, becoming thus particularly interested in that country, had undertaken to establish a female boarding-school at Bangkok, and raised three thousand dollars for that purpose. A little before this a lot of ground on the west bank of the river, nearly opposite the palace of the second king, some five miles above the lower station, had been secured by the mission, and a dwelling-house partially completed on it. Mr. and Mrs. George, who were to have occupied it as a new station, having to return to the home-land, Mrs. George’s health failing, the Board tendered the place and the building to the Troy ladies for their school purposes, on condition of their investing their own funds in the building and completing it. They accordingly took possession, Dr. and Mrs. House and Miss Anderson occupying it in December, 1873. The school was opened in May, 1874, in charge of Mrs. House and Miss Anderson, and by the close of the year had a large number of boarding pupils, some of them noblemen’s daughters.