Bible, which he had kept in his pillow at Ava till it was torn away by the jailors on his removal. The faithful Ing, thinking only to secure a relic of his master, had picked up the pillow and secured the treasure.
Solitude was the greatest boon to Judson, whose fastidious delicacy suffered greatly in the thronged prison, but his faithful Ann was suffering terribly. One of the little Burmese girls who lived with her had caught the small-pox, and was very ill: Mrs. Judson inoculated the other child and her own little Maria, but Maria's inoculation did not take effect, and she caught the disease, and had it very severely. Then Mrs. Judson herself fell ill of a fever, and remained for two months unable to visit her husband, both of them owing all their food to the exertions of their good Bengalee cook. Poor little Maria was nearly starved, no milk was to be had, and the only food she obtained was when the jailers were bribed to let her father carry her round the village to beg a little nourishment from the nursing mothers. Her moans at night rent the heart of her sick mother, and it is scarcely possible to imagine how either survived. By this time, the English troops were so far advancing that the King was reduced to negotiate, and, being in need of an interpreter, he sent an order for Mr. Judson's release; but as his wife was not named in it, she had great difficulty in effecting her departure, and half-way through the journey a guard came down and carried him off to Ava without her. Arriving next day, she found him in prison, but under orders to embark in a little boat and go at once to the camp at Maloun. She hastened to prepare all that was needful for his comfort, but all was stolen except a mattress, pillow, and one blanket. The boat had no awning, and was so crowded that there was no room to lie down for the three days and three nights of alternate scorching heat and heavy dew; there was no food but a bag of refuse-rice, and the banks on either side of the Irrawaddy were bordered with glittering white sand, which in sunlight emitted a metallic glare intolerable to the eyes, and heat like a burning furnace. The fever returned upon Judson, and, when he reached Maloun, he was almost helpless; but he found himself lodged in a small bamboo hut in the middle of the white sand, where he could not admit air by rolling up the matting without letting in the distressing glare, and where the heat reflected from the sand was like a furnace. He could not stir when the officers came to summon him to the presence of the Burmese general, and they thought it stubbornness, and threatened him; then they brought him papers and commanded him to translate them, while he writhed in torture and only longed that the fever in his brain would deprive him of his senses. This it must have done, for he had only a confused impression of feet around him, and of fancying that he was going to be burnt alive, until he found himself on a bed in a somewhat cooler room. As he lay there, papers were continually brought him to explain and translate, and he found that the greatest difficulty was in making the Burmese understand that a State paper could mean what it said, or that truth and honesty were possible. Sometimes, as he tried to explain the commonest principle: of good faith and fair dealing among Christian nations, his auditors would exclaim, 'That is noble,' 'That is as it should be;' but then they would shake their heads and say, 'The teacher dreams; he has a heavenly spirit, and so he thinks himself in the land of the dwellers in heaven.'
He remained here six weeks, suffering much at night from cold, for his only covering was a small rug and his well-worn blanket. Then, on the advance of the English, he was sent back to Ava, but was marched straight to the court-house without being suffered to halt for a moment at his own abode, to discover whether his wife was there. He was placed in a shed, guarded all day, and left without food, till Moung Ing found him out in the evening, and replied to his questions, that the Mamma Judson and the child were well; yet there was something about his manner that was unsatisfactory, and Judson, thinking it over, became terribly uneasy, and in the morning, being sent for by the governor of the jail, obtained permission to go to his own house.
At the door he saw a fat, half-naked Burmese woman with a child in her arms, so dark with dirt that it never occurred to him that it could be his own; and entering, he found, lying across the foot of the bed, his wife, ghastly white and emaciated, her hair all cut away, and her whole appearance that of a corpse. She woke as he knelt down by her in despair! She had been ill all this time with a horrible spotted fever. The day she had fallen ill, the Burmese woman had offered to take charge of little Maria, and the Bengalee cook had attended on her. Dr. Price was released from prison and had cut off her hair, bled, and blistered her, but she could hardly move when the tidings came of her husband being in the town, and she had sent Moung Ing to him. The husband and wife were at last together again, and Dr. Price was sent to conduct the treaty at the English camp.
As soon as Sir Archibald Campbell heard of the sufferings of the Judsons, he demanded them as well as the English subjects; but the King was aware that they were not English, and would not let them go. This attempt at a treaty failed; but its failure, and the alarm consequent upon a report of the advance of the English, led to Mr. Judson's being sent off, almost by force, with two officials, to promise a ransom if Ava were spared. Sir Archibald Campbell undertook that the city should not be attacked, provided his terms were complied with before he reached it; and among these was the stipulation that not only English subjects, but all foreigners should have free choice whether to go or to stay. Some of the officials tried to persuade Mr. Judson to stay, declaring that he would become a great man, but he could not refuse the freedom offered him after such cruel sufferings, and he was wont to declare that the joy of finding himself floating down the Irrawaddy in a boat with his wife and baby, made up for their twenty-one months of peril and misery.
They were received with courtesy, and indeed with gratitude, respect, and veneration at the English camp. The Englishmen who had been in captivity bore witness to the kindness with which Mrs. Judson had relieved their wants, as well as those of her husband: how she had brought them food, mended their clothes, obtained new ones, and, as they believed, by her arguments and appeals to the ignorant and barbarous Government, had not only saved their lives, but convinced the authorities of the necessity of accepting the British terms of peace.
These terms included the cession of a large portion of the Burmese territory; and this it was that decided the missionaries to leave Ava; for the state of exasperation and intolerance into which this brought the Court, made it vain to think of continuing to give instruction where they would be regarded with enmity and suspicion. Meantime, the officers in the English camp, who had not seen a lady for nearly two years, could not make enough of the graceful, gentle woman, so pale and fragile, yet such a dauntless heroine, and always ready to exert herself beyond her strength for every sufferer who came in her way.
There was a curious scene at a dinner given to the Burmese commissioners, in a magnificent tent, with all the military pomp the camp could furnish. When Sir Archibald appeared with Mrs. Judson on his arm, and seated her by his side, there was such a look of discomfiture on the faces of the guests, that he asked her if they were not old acquaintance who had treated her ill. 'That fellow with the pointed beard,' he said, 'seems taken with an ague fit.' Then Mrs. Judson told how, when her husband lay in a burning fever with the five pairs of fetters, she had walked several miles with a petition to this man, had been kept waiting till the noontide sun was at its height, and not only was she refused, but as she departed her silk umbrella was torn out of her hand by his greediness; and when she begged at least to let her have a paper one to go home with, the officer only laughed at her, and told her that she was too thin to be in danger of a sunstroke! The English gentlemen could not restrain their countenances at least from expressing their indignation; and the Burmese, who thought she was asking for their heads, or to have them laid out in the sun with weights upon their chests, were yellow with fright, and trembled visibly. Mrs. Judson kindly turned to them with a smile, assuring them that they had nothing to fear, and, on repeating her words to Sir Archibald Campbell, he confirmed them to the frightened barbarians.
That visit to the English camp was one of the few spaces of comfort or repose in those busy lives. It concluded by the husband and wife being forwarded to their old home at Rangoon.
It was in the height of the war, when anxieties for the fate of Mr. and Mrs. Judson were at the utmost, that, on the 4th of July, 1825, George Boardman and Sarah Hall were married, and sailed for Calcutta, thinking it possible that they might find their predecessors martyred, and that they were coming 'to step where their comrades stood.'
At Calcutta they found Mr. and Mrs. Wade, who had with great difficulty escaped, and soon after they heard of the rescue of the Judsons, and welcomed Dr. Price. Rangoon, in the meantime, had been occupied by the English, and then besieged by the Peguans; the mission-house was ruined, and the people dispersed, and Moung Shwaygnong had died of cholera, faithful to the last. The city was to be restored to the Burmese, and the King, though willing to employ Judson politically, refused toleration to his subjects; so that, as the provinces on the Martaban river were to be ceded to the English, it seemed wise to take advantage of the reputation which the Judsons had established to found a mission-station under their protection in the new town of Amherst, which Sir Archibald Campbell proposed to build on the banks of the Martaban river.
Hither was transported the old zayat of Rangoon; and Mount Ing, Moung Shwaba, and a few other of the flock accompanied their teachers, to form the nucleus of the mission. Sir Archibald Campbell had made a great point of Mr. Judson's accompanying the English embassy that was to conclude the treaty at Ava; and he, hoping to obtain something for the Christian cause, complied, leaving that most brave and patient woman, his wife, with her little
