17
Ann Hasseltine Judson
Bringing the Knowledge of Truth to Burma
Go then, and do all in your power to enlighten their minds, and bring them to the knowledge of the truth,” the reverend advised the young girl sitting before him in the pew. “Teach them that they have immortal souls.”1 It was a tall order for a girl of twenty-three, married in her parents’ dining room only hours before. But the young lady, still dressed in her wedding finery, met the preacher’s stern gaze with a firm gaze of her own, refusing to shrink from his command. Ann Hasseltine Judson was about to become America’s first female missionary, and she was ready.
Born in Bradford, Massachusetts, in 1789, the same year the young United States began its government under the Constitution, Ann Hasseltine didn’t always entertain such lofty spiritual ambitions. As a teenager, she enjoyed parties and dancing more than piety and prayer. But Ann’s priorities changed dramatically after she read Hannah More’s Strictures on Female Education. Try though she might, Ann could not get More’s teachings out of her head, particularly this adage: “She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.”2 Although her friends continued to pursue frivolity and fun, Ann took More’s adage to heart and turned inward, spending more and more of her time praying and reading books like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
Ann’s life changed forever the day a young man named Adoniram Judson came to dine with the Hasseltines. The two fell in love almost immediately, and not long after, Adoniram wrote to Ann’s parents, asking for her hand in marriage. John and Rebecca Hasseltine were appalled. After all, Adoniram was about to embark on what many in the small community considered a preposterous idea. He planned to sail to Burma, where he would spend the rest of his life as a missionary. Her parents realized that if Ann accepted Adoniram’s marriage proposal, they would likely never see their daughter again.
Adoniram and Ann were married on February 5, 1812. The following morning before dawn the two crept out of her parents’ house while the family slept and departed via horse and carriage through the thick snow toward Salem. Goodbyes were painful, Adoniram convinced Ann; this way was for the best. Deacon Hasseltine apparently disagreed. Less than a mile from home, Ann’s father, a cloak thrown hastily over his nightshirt, caught up with the two runaways on horseback and demanded they return home to say a proper good-bye.
A few hours later, tearful farewells finally behind them, Adoniram and Ann made their way to Salem, where they boarded the Caravan. The ship sailed on February 9, 1812, and finally anchored in the Bay of Bengal three months later. Despite the fact that the new missionaries met unexpected resistance from both the Indian government and the East India Company, who feared the Gospels could stir a revolutionary reaction in the natives, Adoniram and Ann persevered. They initially spent several months in the Isle of France (now the Republic of Mauritius), five thousand miles southwest of India, and then finally secured passage on a ship to Burma. En route, as the ship heaved on the roiling waves, Ann lay on the deck beneath a thin canvas tarp and gave birth. The baby was stillborn and was buried at sea. A few days later Adoniram carried a weak and grieving Ann to the rail as they neared shore so she could glimpse the land she would call home.
Nearly eighteen months after they had departed from Massachusetts, the Judsons watched together as the creaking Georgiana sailed into the entrance of the Rangoon River. From the swampy banks, a handful of Burmese stared awestruck at the foreigners as the ship crept upstream. Rangoon itself was a tiny town, comprised of nothing more than a motley collection of teak and bamboo houses. Along the crowded, muddy streets, priests with shaven heads and saffron-colored robes jostled destitute lepers and naked children smoking cigars. A cacophony of voices all yelling in an incomprehensible language created an intolerable din as Ann and Adoniram surveyed the place they would make their home. It was, Ann recalled later, the unhappiest day of her life.
Baptizing the Burmese
The couple was forced to adapt to life in Rangoon quickly and was soon accustomed to the oppressive heat, the sight of elephants parading regally in funeral processions, and the foreign flavors of curry and plantains. Because she communicated with servants and merchants on a daily basis, Ann learned Burmese much more quickly than her husband, who spent every morning practicing the language with a teacher.
Their mission work, on the other hand, was another story. “Your religion is good for you, ours for us,” the Burmese repeated time and time again.3 Still, the Judsons persevered. Adoniram constructed a zayat, a small bamboo building with a thatched roof where Buddhist lay preachers traditionally offered instruction. From the front steps he shouted, “Ho! Everyone that thirsteth for knowledge,” over and over until a small crowd of fifteen curious adults had gathered for the first service.4 Each Sunday more and more Burmese were drawn to the zayat, until finally, after six years of the Judsons’ continuous praying, a timber merchant named Maung Nau rose before the congregation of thirty and proclaimed his belief in Jesus. A few weeks later, a substantial crowd gathered as Nau was immersed in a pond a few steps from the zayat and baptized beneath the gaze of a Buddhist statue.
When he wasn’t preaching from the steps of the zayat, Adoniram worked on translating the Bible into Burmese, beginning with the Gospel of Matthew. After another American missionary arrived in Rangoon with a printing press, they printed what they called “holy books,” including the Gospel of Matthew, the story of Adam and Eve, the Ten Commandments, and a catechism Ann had written for the small group of Burmese children she taught every day in the mission house.
Ann also held Sunday meetings for Burmese women in her home. Although they listened politely as she discussed Christianity, most had no desire to give up their Buddhist faith. One woman confessed she’d rather spend eternity in hell with her own family and ancestors than in heaven with a lot of people she didn’t know. Finally, though, Ann’s persistence was rewarded. In June of 1820, a young Burmese woman awakened Ann and Adoniram in the middle of the night. Mah Men-lay had participated in Ann’s Sunday meetings for several months and had decided she was ready to be baptized. In the darkness, with Ann holding the lantern, Adoniram baptized the first Burmese woman into the Christian faith and the tenth member of the Burmese Christian church.
Affliction and Mercy
While victories were few, hardships were ever-present. When her eight-month-old son died in 1816, Ann, though wracked by grief, willed herself to focus on the grace of God. “Eight months we enjoyed the precious little gift, in which time he had so completely entwined himself around his parents’ hearts, that his existence seemed necessary to their own,” she wrote to her parents. “But God has taught us by afflictions what we would not learn by mercies—that our hearts are His exclusive property, and whatever rival intrudes, He will tear it away. . . . We do not feel a disposition to murmur, or to inquire of our Sovereign why He has done this. . . . Oh, may it not be in vain that He has done this.”5
Although Ann eventually grew to love Burma, the oppressive climate proved detrimental to her fragile health. Suffering from a severe liver ailment, she was forced to leave her adopted home in 1822 and return to America, a journey she never anticipated she would make when she left New England ten years earlier. While she regained her health, she wrote a history of the Burmese mission, a book that was widely read in America and awakened many to the conditions of the Burmese women and the importance of female missionaries working among them.
After more than a year apart from her husband, Ann returned to Burma. Shortly after, war broke out between Britain and Burma, and on June 8, 1824, more than a dozen Burmese burst through the front door of the mission house and interrupted the Judsons at dinnertime. During a few panicked, chaotic moments, Adoniram’s arms were lashed tight with a cord and he was dragged from the house, paraded through the streets of Rangoon, and thrown into Let-may-yoon, the death prison. The Burmese assumed that Adoniram, an American missionary, was working as a spy for the British.
Pregnant with her third child, Ann moved into a shack outside the prison and lobbied unsuccessfully for months for Adoniram’s release. When she wasn’t petitioning government officials, she provided food and clothing for her husband and hauled an earthenware chamber pot to and from his cell. When the couple was allowed to meet privately for a few moments, Adoniram begged her to dig up his manuscript of the New Testament, which he had buried in the garden. Ann sewed the book into a pillow, and although Adoniram didn’t dare read it in his cell, resting his head on it each night comforted him.
On January 26, 1825, Ann gave birth to a baby girl. The baby was small and sickly, and Ann was so weak after the birth that she was unable to walk to the prison to introduce Adoniram to his new daughter until nearly three weeks had passed. Finally, after more than seventeen months in prison and nearly a year after his daughter was born, Adoniram was released near the end of the Anglo-Burmese War. Ann had suffered from dysentery and spotted fever during her husband’s last weeks in prison, and by the time he was freed, she was near death. When Adoniram first glimpsed her prone figure on the bed in their home, he didn’t recognize the gaunt, lifeless body as Ann’s. Her black curls had been shorn, and a dirty cotton cap covered her bare scalp. When he cradled her limp body to his chest, her eyelids barely flickered open.
Although she was not expected to live, Ann recovered enough to travel with her infant daughter to Amherst, a British-occupied city in lower Burma that was thought to be the best option for her fragile health. Immediately after arriving she began to oversee the construction of a new mission and school. But as it turned out, her health had been irreparably weakened. On October 26, 1826, Ann died at the age of thirty-six as she waited for her husband to return from a trip. After Adoniram received the news of Ann’s death via a black-sealed letter, he wrote to her mother back in America, noting that according to those who had been at her deathbed, Ann had borne her sufferings with meekness, patience, magnanimity, and Christian fortitude. “Much she saw and suffered of the evil of this evil world; and eminently was she qualified to relish and enjoy the pure and holy rest into which she has entered,” he wrote. “True, she has been torn from her husband’s bleeding heart, and from her darling babe; but infinite wisdom and love have presided, as ever, in this most afflicting dispensation. Faith decides that it is all right; and the decision of faith, eternity will soon confirm.”6 The Judsons’ daughter died six months after Ann.
In spite of the dire hardships she endured, Ann never lost faith in her mission or her God. “The consolation of religion, in these trying circumstances, were neither few nor small!” she wrote to her brother while Adoniram was imprisoned. “It taught me to look beyond this world, to that rest . . . where Jesus reigns and oppression never enters.”7 Nor did she regret her decision to dedicate her life to missionary work in Burma, despite the fact that the visible results of her work were so few. Though she departed from America’s shores with a romanticized, idealized vision of mission work, she quickly adjusted to the hard reality of life in a dangerous, foreign environment. After ten long years in Rangoon, Ann and her husband had managed to convert only eighteen Burmese, yet nothing in her letters or journals indicates that she or Adoniram despaired. Ann believed that eighteen converted Christians, although an incremental start, were enough to carry the mission forward. And she was right. By the time Adoniram died in 1850, sixty-three churches had been established in Burma, with 163 missionaries and native preachers leading more than eight thousand converted Burmese.
Although Ann served only fourteen years in Burma, she lived the words her preacher had spoken on her wedding day—and then some. She brought the knowledge of truth to Burma and has since inspired thousands more around the globe.