The Burman officials who had been frightened from their victims by the discharges of artillery, again seized them, and proceeded to confine them in a brick building. Here they were at last discovered, and rescued by the advancing British troops. Having thus narrowly escaped martyrdom, Mr. Hough and Mr. Wade, with their wives, embarked for Calcutta, where they thought it best to remain until the close of the war. So when Mr. Judson returned to Rangoon he was without a missionary associate. Mr. Wade was ready to join him as soon as he should decide as to the best place for renewed operations; while Mr. Hough soon after entered the service of the British Government.
But missionary reinforcements had already come from America. Mr. Wade, while waiting in Calcutta for the war to close, was joined by George Dana Boardman, whose brief and saintly career was destined to make his name peculiarly fragrant to American Christians. He seemed an ideal missionary, so completely was he fitted for his work by his scholarly tastes, affectionate disposition, and fervent piety. He had taken up a newspaper a little while before, and had seen a notice of Colman’s untimely death in Arracan. In the twinkling of an eye there flashed through his mind the question and answer: “Who will go to fill his place?” “_I_ will go.”
He had married Sarah Hall, a native of Salem, Massachusetts. Those who knew her speak of “faultless features, moulded on the Grecian model, beautiful transparent skin, warm, meek blue eyes, and soft hair, brown in the shadow and gold in the sun.” She was pronounced by her English friends in Calcutta to be “the most finished and faultless specimen of an American woman that they had ever known.” From her earliest years she had possessed an enthusiasm for missions. When ten years old, she wrote a poem upon the death at Rangoon of Mrs. Judson’s infant Roger. Little did the child dream that many years after she was to take the place of the ideal heroine of her childhood, who, worn out with the prolonged horrors of Ava and Oung-pen-la, lay down to rest beneath the hopia-tree at Amherst.
Mr. Wade and Mr. Boardman waited anxiously in Calcutta for news from the Judsons. They did not, however, wait in idleness. They were learning the Burman language, as best they could, and preaching in English in the Circular Road Baptist chapel, where they were permitted to see, as a result of their labors, many persons converted and baptized. When news came at last from Mr. Judson, they were ready to join him and labor wherever he should think it best.
But to return to Mr. Judson in Rangoon. Not only did he find that the white teachers and their wives had been driven away by the war, but the native church membership was much reduced. He had left a church of eighteen disciples. He found on his return only four. With the exception of two, none, however, had disgraced their holy profession.
The learned teacher, Moung Shwa-gnong, had gone into the interior of the country, and soon afterward died of the cholera. The only four whom Mr. Judson could muster after the war had swept over Rangoon were Moung Shwa-ba, who had remained at the mission-house; Moung Ing, who with such fidelity served Mrs. Judson through all her long, bitter experiences at Ava; and two faithful women, Mah-men-la and Mah-doke, who had been living in boats at Prome, the half-way place between Rangoon and Ava, and who instantly resolved to accompany the Judsons to Rangoon. These four faithful disciples were ready to follow their white teacher wherever he should think it best to establish a mission.
It was out of the question to think of remaining at Rangoon. The English were only holding the place temporarily, until the Burmans should pay their war debt. Indeed, at the close of the year, the English army did vacate Rangoon, and the Burmans resumed possession of their chief seaport. Should the missionaries therefore remain in Rangoon, they would still be under the cruel sway of Burman despotism. In addition, the monarch at Ava was peculiarly exasperated with his subjects in the southern part of the empire, because they had put themselves under the benignant protection of the English; many of the peaceful inhabitants were no doubt to be massacred by the royal troops. A state of anarchy followed the war. A famine succeeded, in which beasts of prey became proportionally bold. Tigers began to infest the suburbs of Rangoon, and carry off cattle and human beings. A tiger was killed even in the streets of the city. All these circumstances impelled the missionaries to leave Rangoon.