CHAPTER IFrom America to Burma
TheChurch of Jesus Christ has just closed its first century of missionary effort within modern times. The nineteenth century began with only a few heroic spirits urging the Church to awake to its responsibility of giving the gospel to the Christless nations. The century has just closed with a steadily increasing army of missionaries, who are determined to give the gospel to every man in his own tongue at the earliest possible day, while the whole Church is beginning to feel the missionary impulse, so far at least, that an increasing multitude are eager to hear of mission lands, the condition of the peoples without Christ, the victories of the gospel, and to have some share in its triumph.
Adoniram Judson, the great missionary hero, enrolled the land of Burma in the list of great mission-fields. He began his labors in Burma during the second decade of the century. The following pages are written as a report of missionary labors and observations in that land in the closing ten years of the century.
How the writer came to be a missionary, and to be honored with an appointment to Burma, maywarrant a brief statement. In almost all life’s important steps, individual influence proves the determining factor. This is true in my call to the mission-field. In 1867, when only ten years of age, living on my father’s farm in Andrew County, Mo., I heard a Methodist preacher make a plea for the heathen world. I have never been able to recall his name, that being the only time he ever preached in that place, which was a schoolhouse on my father’s farm. The sermon made a profound impression on me, and I decided to give half of my little fortune of one dollar, saved from pennies, to the cause of missions, with pleadings for which he so warmed our hearts and moved our eyes to tears. Later experiences have shown that missionary sermon to have been the most potential influence of my childhood or youth in determining what I should be in after years. The experience itself seemed to die away for a term of years, due, I think, to the fact that I had little religious training and no missionary information during youth. The reawakening of missionary interest came in 1880, when in college in the Iowa Wesleyan University I heard William Taylor tell of his missionary labors in many lands. Had I then been near the close of my college course, instead of at its beginning, I would have volunteered to go to his mission in South America. Seven or eight years went by, and I was in Garrett Biblical Institute. At that time Bishop Thoburn delivered a series of thrilling missionary addresses to the school. I now think, though without beingclearly conscious of it, that from that time I was called to go to India. In 1889, I was pastor of the Arlington Methodist Church in Kansas City, Mo., and so became one of the entertainers of the Missionary Committee that met in the city that year. In listening to the missionary addresses for ten days, and more especially in conversation with Dr. Oldham, who was present, being commissioned by Bishop Thoburn to secure re-enforcements for India, the whole question whether my wife and I should offer ourselves to the Missionary Society for work in the foreign field came up for final settlement. I sought the counsel of Bishop Ninde, who had once been to India, and whose kindly manner always invited confidences of this sort. He agreed to come and spend a day with us, two months later, which he did, and as a result of his counsel and advice, we decided to offer to go to India as missionaries. The offer was promptly accepted, and from that time we laid our plans to leave for our new field of work the following fall. It has always been an inspiring memory to recall the steps by which we were led to let go of America and set our faces toward Asia, and the personal agencies that led us to this decision.
There was another consideration which had great weight in our choice of the foreign mission-field. At home there are men ready for all places. In the foreign mission-fields, especially in Southern Asia, to which we were drawn, there are several places for every man. Here any one of adozen valuable men can be had for any important charge. On the mission-fields there are most important posts that call in vain for re-enforcements. At home supplies can be had to meet any emergency within a very short time; but on the mission-field we often must wait years for the right man. I left Kansas City in the morning, and my successor, a very worthy and successful man, arrived in the evening of the same day. But out in Burma I have pleaded for years for one man to re-enforce the mission. The Arlington Church, which I was serving, was then and is now a very enjoyable pastorate—one in which the people, always cherish their pastor, and better, where they have from the founding of the Church cordially supported every effort for the salvation of men. The decision to leave that Church to go half way round the world to a people I had never seen, was largely due to the fact that we were needed most on this picket-line of missions, and good men, who for any reason could not go to the foreign fields, could be found to take up promptly the work I laid down at home.
The farewells in Kansas City were of the cheerful and happy kind that send missionaries on their way to their peculiar missions strong in heart. Arlington Church spoke its own farewell in a reception to their pastor and his family, while Grand Avenue Church, the Methodists of Kansas City, followed with a general reception to the outgoing missionaries. This general gathering was under the direction of the pastor, Dr. Jesse BowmanYoung, and Dr. O. M. Stewart, the presiding elder. The latter sounded the note of cheerfulness for the farewell. He said, “Let us have nothing of a funeral sort about this reception.” We have always thanked him for the cheerful and hopeful tone which ran all through the meeting. Dr. Young was of the same spirit, and in his address, which at one moment bordered on the emotional at the thought of a long parting from those to whom he had been one of the best of friends, recovered himself by saying, “If you discover anything suspicious in my eyes, charge it up to the hayfever.” These good brethren did more than they knew to set a standard of joyful anticipation on the part of the Church and the outgoing missionaries in the honorable service to which they were called, that toned up their courage when facing the actual separation from home ties. This was of very great value to us who were leaving a very enjoyable pastorate, a native land in which we had taken deep root, and most of all, an aged father and mother.
We left Kansas City on September 3, 1890, and after a little over two months spent in resting and arranging our affairs, we sailed from New York for Liverpool on November 12th. The closing hours in New York were very different from those in Kansas City, and made it appear very real to us that we were being plucked up from the home land and transplanted to a foreign country. We had no acquaintances at all in New York, except one of the Missionary Secretaries, who had visitedus in Kansas City. He and his associates were as kind as they could be; but then as now, they were men worked beyond their strength with the burdens of business there is upon them, and at that particular time were hurried to get off to Boston, to the annual Missionary Committee meeting, and they had to tell us a hasty farewell at the Mission Rooms, and leave us to go alone to the ship. While our sailing was more lonely than that of most missionaries, yet it is now the custom to make very little out of the departure of men and women to mission-fields, however distant. The older missionaries contrast this formal dispatch of recruits with the custom of forty years ago, when men still in active service, were first sent out. Then it was the plan to have the new missionaries gathered in one or more churches, and after speeches and exchange of good-will all around, to send them forth with the feeling that their outgoing on this great mission was a matter of moment to the whole Church. It is presumable that custom may change in this matter from time to time, and especially as the number and frequency of the departure of missionaries increase; but it is certain that the departure of missionaries to our distant fields on this, the highest mission of the Church, can not be made less of than it has been in recent years.
We sailed on the steamshipCity of New York, the largest and swiftest ship then afloat. She loosed her moorings at five o’clock in the morning of November 12th. It was a gloomy morningwith a cold rain, and though I was on deck to note any objects of interest amidst the gloom, nothing at all of importance was in view, save the Statue of Liberty holding its light aloft in the harbor. No departure from the shores of the home-land could have been less cheering and romantic. But as the great ship made her way out to sea, there was a peculiar satisfaction in the feeling that came over us, that we were actually on our way to Burma. Some time before sailing, it had been decided that we would go there, making headquarters at Rangoon, the capital of that province of the Indian Empire.
Our voyage across the Atlantic was uneventful for the most part, but not uninteresting. On a great ship one has a good opportunity to study his fellow-passengers. One among our company has since become an international character, and even then had become widely known. This personage was none other than Paul Kruger, President, then and since, of the Transvaal Republic. We then thought of Majuba Hill and its consequences, but could not foresee that this son of the African velt would, before ten years had passed, throw so large a part of the world into turmoil and lead in a great war. I was impressed with his strong leonine features, and the less heroic fact that he was one of the first among the passengers to yield to the power of a rough sea.
Four days out we ran into a great storm that lasted nearly two days. Up to that time we were making a quick passage, but the wind and wavessoon destroyed all hopes of making a high record. The storm was worst at midnight, and as we were being rolled until it was hardly possible to remain in our berths, the ammonia pipes broke and flooded the lower cabins with gas. Our cabin was located near that part of the ship where the trouble occurred, but no one was seriously injured. A similar thing recently happened on the same ship in a storm on the Atlantic, and again the suffocating gas spread through the ship with one fatality and a number of prostrations.
Landing at Liverpool, we went to London for ten days, returning to the former place to take the first ship direct for Rangoon. There are two general routes from English ports to points in India. By one you travel across the continent, and usually take ship at some Mediterranean port, and sail to Bombay. By the other you sail via Gibraltar, and so go by sea all the way. Our route was the latter course, and at the time we went out there was only one line of steamers, the Patrick Henderson, direct from English ports to Rangoon. We took passage on a new vessel, the steamshipPegu, making its third voyage. “What a strange name for a ship!” we said. We soon learned that the name was taken from an old, ruined city of Burma, and that all the company’s steamers bear the name of some city, ancient or modern, in the land of Burma. So, at the very docks, as we started Eastward, we met a name suggestive of the ancient history of the land of our future labors. In the appointments ofthe steamer we were much impressed with the fact that we had no arrangement for heating the vessel, but every plan for thorough ventilation. We found it very cold on board until we passed the Suez Canal. Otherwise the appointments were every way satisfactory, and the fare reasonable.
This good ship made but one voyage more under its Scotch ownership. It was then sold to the Spaniards and renamed theAlicante. This circumstance became of much interest to us at a later date, when this ship was the first to be loaded with defeated Spanish troops at Santiago.
The outward voyage had its many objects of interest to the passengers going out for the first time. We sailed in plain view of the Portuguese and Spanish coasts, but were disappointed in passing Gibraltar at night. The next day, however, we were charmed with a magnificent view of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Southern Spain, as they lifted their snowy heights into cloudless skies, and their vineclad slopes dropped away to the level of the sea. For nearly a whole day we sailed close by the picturesque shores of Sardinia. Here we noted a singular confusion of the compass by reason of being magnetized by the land. As the good ship swung off from the southern cape of the island, it made two great curves to correct the erratic state of the compass. We entered the harbor of Naples in the full floodlight of a Mediterranean noon. The afternoon was spent in the city. Our party was not favorably impressed withthe gay people in their holiday attire. It seems they have many holidays of the like kind. In the evening we sailed southward; and as darkness closed around us, distant Vesuvius sent its fiery glow upward on the black mass of overhanging cloud, making a lurid night scene. In the morning we woke in plain view of the great volcanic cone of Stromboli, rising out of the sea. We were near the island, which seems to have no land except the volcano itself; yet houses nestle here and there around its base. What a choice for a home—at the base of an actual volcano! The weather was perfect as we sailed through the Straits of Messina, but great Mount Ætna, which we hoped to see, was hid in clouds.
The second stop in our journey was at Port Said. The Suez Canal is the gateway of the nations. Port Said is its northern entrance. It is under international control, and hence its government is less responsible than that of almost any other city. It is one of the most wicked cities of the world. Representatives of all races are congregated there. It is not our purpose to describe this city, but to point out that here for the first time we had a glimpse of the Orient. The fellaheen of Egypt loaded our ship with coal, carrying great baskets on their heads. We arrived in the night, and the coaling began almost immediately. My wife and I got out of our cabin before day to go on deck and see these people at work by the light of torches. A strange, weird sight it was to Western eyes; and their shoutingin strange tongues emphasized the fact that we had indeed come to a strange land.
The Suez Canal is the natural dividing-line between the Western and the Eastern civilizations, between the cold Northlands and the perpetually tropical countries of Southern Asia. Looking westward and northward, you find energy put to practical account; looking eastward, you find lethargy and life no more aggressive that it must be to keep peoples as they have been for a thousand years. Westward you greet progress, but Eastward life has been stagnated for ages, and only stirs as it is acted upon from the West. Westward you have an increasing degree of prosperity and material comforts and advantages of modern civilization, but Eastward you have such poverty among the millions as can not be conceived by people more favored. Westward you have civilizations never content with present attainment; but Eastward you have peoples whose highest ideals are only to be and to do what their fathers were and did before them. The West seeks to produce new things, but the East condemns all improvement for no other reason than that it is new. All this, and much more, is suggested by the Suez Canal, from which you plunge downward into Asiatic civilization. Climatically you are henceforth to know only the tropics, a climate, so far as Southern Asia is concerned, that you will come to know henceforth as dividing the year into two seasons, “Three months very hot, and nine months very much hotter.” At Port Saidyou will be informed of the change that is just ahead of you. Whatever you may have bought in New York or London, you will need one more article of dress at Port Said—a helmet, to protect your head from the tropical sun. You will never see a day in Southern Asia in which you can go forth in the noonday sun with an ordinary hat, or without a helmet, except at your peril; and most of the time you will wear that protection for your head from early morning until five in the evening, or later. You will have another indication that you are going down into the tropics. If you have made your journey, as we did, in the colder months, the sunniest place on the deck has been the most comfortable until you arrive at Port Said; but there they raise double canvas over the whole ship, and from that on, as long as you go to and fro in the tropical seas, you will never travel a league by sea that you do not have that same double canvas above you when the sun is in the heavens. No wonder the Suez Canal means so much besides commerce or travel to all who have passed through it to Southern Asia!
Through the fifteen hundred miles of the Red Sea we took our way. Then the Gulf of Aden was traversed, and next through the Arabian Sea our good ship bore us on our journey. The heat, like very hot summer at home, was upon us, though we were out at sea in December. Coming on deck one morning before other passengers were astir, I was delighted to see the green hills of Ceylon a few miles to our left. We hadrounded the island in the night. The decks had been scrubbed in the early morning, as usual; the ocean was smooth, and the tropical sun flooded sea and land, while the sweetest odor of spices filled the air. At once I thought of “Ceylon’s spicy breezes,” but I suddenly noted that the wind wastoward the shore, which lay some miles away, and then I was prepared for the sentiment of the chief steward who had sprinkled spices out of the ship stores over the wet deck to please the passengers’ sense of smell as they came forth to give their morning greetings to this emerald isle of the Indian Ocean. In rounding Ceylon we reached our lowest latitude, six degrees north. We were still six days’ sail from Burma, and our course took us nearly northeast from this point. The entire voyage from the Suez Canal to Burma was made under cloudless skies and through calm waters. A day from Rangoon we passed near the beautiful little Cocoa Islands, while the Andamans showed above the horizon far to the southward. It is remarkable how much interest there is among passengers when a ship is sighted, or land appears on a long voyage. These Cocoa Islands are important as being guides to vessels homeward or outward bound, and they mark the line between the Bay of Bengal and the Gulf of Martahan. An important lighthouse has been maintained there for the past fifty years. The Andamans are shrouded in gloomy mystery, due to the fact that they are used as a penal colony of criminals transported from India. On the 31stof December, 1890, after passing several light-ships, we came, about noon, in sight of the low-lying shores of Burma. We had been thirty-five days from Liverpool, and were getting weary of the sea, to say nothing of our curiosity to land in a country new to us. But no land could be less interesting than this shore-line of Burma, first sighted on coming in from the sea. It lies just above the sea-level, and besides a fringe of very small shrubbery, and here and there a cocoanut palm-tree, it is absolutely expressionless. After lying at anchor for three hours at the mouth of the Rangoon River, waiting for the incoming tide, we began the last twenty miles of our journey up the broad river to the city of Rangoon.
The passengers were made up mostly of people who were returning to Burma after a furlough in England. The anticipation of friendly greetings and the appearance of every familiar object along the river created a quiver of pleasant excitement among them. Our missionary party were almost the only ones who had not special friends in Rangoon to meet them.
Sway Dagon Pagoda
Sway Dagon Pagoda
Presently all eyes were turned up the river as the second officer called out, “There is the Great Pagoda.” Yes, this, the greatest shrine of the Buddhist world, rising from a little hilltop just behind the main part of the city of Rangoon, lifted its gilded and glistening form hundreds of feet skyward. This is the first object of special importance that is looked for by every traveler going up the Rangoon River. It is seen before anypublic building comes into view. But presently the smoke from the great chimneys of the large rice mills of Rangoon appeared, and then the city was outlined along a river frontage of two or three miles. The city has no special attractions, as viewed from the harbor; but the whole river presents an animated scene, always interesting even to any one familiar with it, but full of startling surprises to the newcomer to the East. With the single exception of Port Said, our missionary party had seen nothing of Oriental life. The panoramic view of that river and shore life seen on that last day of 1890 will remain a lifetime in the minds of our party. Steamers of many nations and sailing-vessels under a score of flags, native crafts of every description, steam launches by the dozen, and half a thousand small native boats of a Chinese pattern, called “sampans,” moved swiftly about the river, while two or three thousand people crowded the landing and the river front. It is possible that half a hundred nationalities were represented in that throng, but to us strangers there were only two distinctions to be made out clearly: a few men and women with fair skins, and the remainder of the multitude men of darker hue. “Europeans and natives” is the general distinction used in all India.
Some incidents at such moments in our lives, as our landing in this strange country, make profound impressions far above their actual importance. It was just six o’clock in the evening as we made fast to the wharf. Suddenly, as I facedthe new world life of labor just before me, and began to contrast it with that of the past, I remembered that just eleven years before, on that day and at that hour, allowing for difference of latitude, I stepped off the cars in a college town, and parted with my old life as a farmer boy for the new life of a college student. A great change that proved to be, and this was destined to prove even more in contrast with life hitherto. The curious circumstance was that the two transitions corresponded by the year and hour.
I awoke suddenly to the fact of great loneliness. There were multitudes of people, but in the whole company not a familiar face. There were some whose names we had heard, and they were ready to give us a cordial welcome as fellow-workers, but we did not know them from all the others in the throng in whose thoughts we had no place. For myself, I have never had a more lonely moment, even when unattended in the Burma jungles or lost on the mountains at night.
Another incident, of a painful kind, occurred. As I stood beside the ship’s doctor, who had been coming and going to India for thirty years, he volunteered information of the people who were boarding the ship to greet expected friends. One young lady passenger was greeted by her sister, whose husband stood by her side. She was a fair English lady; he was a tall, well-proportioned man of good features, but he was very dark. The doctor said: “That young lady is destined to a great disappointment. Her sister is married toa Eurasian, and she, as an English girl, will have no social recognition among English people here because she has that Eurasian relationship.” To my inquiries of interest, he said many things about these people, in whose veins flow the blood of European and Asiatic, concluding with the following slander on these people, “They inherit the vices of both Europeans and Asiatics and the virtues of neither.” I refer to this expression here to show how such unjust expressions fall from careless tongues; for I have heard it scores of times, breathing out unkind, even cruel injustice. It is a slander that is not often rebuked with the energy its injustice calls for. As I will discuss this people in another chapter, I only say here that for ten years I have been connected with them, and while they have their weaknesses, this charge against them is entirely groundless.
We were presently greeted by the small band of Methodist missionaries and some of their friends, and taken immediately to our Girls’ School in the heart of the town. Here we rested in easy-chairs of an uncouth pattern, but which we have hundreds of times since had occasion to prove capable of affording great comfort. While resting and making the acquaintance of Miss Scott, our hostess, an agent of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, I was impressed with several features of our new surroundings. Though it was New-Year’s Eve, the whole house was wide open, and three sides of the sitting-room had open venetian blinds instead of walls, to let in the air.
Then we were quickly conscious of the noise, mostly of human voices, speaking or shouting strange speech in every direction, which the wooden open-plank house caught up much as a violin does its sound, and multiplied without transferring them into music. We came, by later painful experiences, to know that one of the enemies of nerves and the working force of the missionary in Rangoon is the ceaseless noise from human throats that seems inseparable from this Oriental city. I have been in some other noisy cities, but, as Bishop Thoburn once remarked, our location in Rangoon was “the noisiest place in the world.” Before these thoughts had taken full possession of our minds, we were greeted by another surprise. As we leaned back in the easy-chairs and our eyes sought the high ceiling of the room, there we saw small lizards moving about, sometimes indeed stationary, but more often running or making quick leaps as they caught sluggish beetles or unsuspecting flies from the ceiling. We counted nine of them in plain view, seemingly enjoying themselves, unmindful of the presence of the residents of the building or the nerves or tastes of the new arrivals.
A watch-night service was held that night intended for sailors and soldiers especially, to which I went, while my wife remained and rested at the school with our children. At the service I saw for the first time what is so common in all like gatherings in Eastern cities, the strange mingling of all people who speak the English language.Being a seaport, the sailors from every European land were present, and, so far as they can be secured, attend this wholesome service, while the soldiers from the garrison come in crowds, and others interested in these meetings are there also. Every shade of Eurasians was present. Some of the people whom I saw that night for the first time became my friends and co-laborers in the Church and mission for the entire time of which I write. Late that night, or in the earliest hour of the new year, I fell asleep with my latest conscious thought, “We are in Burma.”