The Book of Missionary Heroes by Basil Mathews (young adult books to read .txt) 📕

[61] Baptized "Nathaniel" at Madras by the Rev. Dr Kerr.

Henry Martyn

(Dates, b. 1781, d. 1812. Time of Incident 1810-12)

In the story of Sabat that was told in the previous chapter you will remember that, for a part of the time that he lived in India, he worked with an Englishman named Henry Martyn.

Sabat was almost a giant; Henry Martyn was slight and not very strong. Yet—as we shall see in the story that follows—Henry Martyn was braver and more constant than Sabat himself.

As a boy Henry, who was born and went to school in Truro, in Cornwall, in the West of England, was violently passionate, sensitive, and physically rather fragile, and at school was protected from bullies by a big boy, the son of Admiral Kempthorne.

He left school at the age of fifteen and shot and read till he was seventeen. In 1797 he became an undergraduate at St. John's College, Cambridge. He was still very passionate.

For instance, when a man was "ragging" him in the College Hall at dinner, he was so furious that he flung a knife at him, which stuck quivering in the panelling of the wall. Kempthorne, his old friend, was at Cambridge with him. They used to read the Bible together and Martyn became a real Christian and fought hard to overcome his violent temper.

He was a very clever scholar and became a Fellow of Jesus College in 1802. He at that time took orders in the Church of England. He became very keen on reading about missionary work, e.g. Carey's story of nine years' work in Periodical Accounts, and the L.M.S. Report on Vanderkemp in South Africa. "I read nothing else while it lasted," he said of the Vanderkemp report.

He was accepted as a chaplain of the East India Company. They could not sail till Admiral Nelson gave the word, because the French were waiting to capture all the British ships. Five men-of-war convoyed them when they sailed in 1805. They waited off Ireland, because the immediate invasion of England by Napoleon was threatened. On board Martyn worked hard at Hindustani, Bengali and Portuguese. He already knew Greek, Latin and Hebrew. He arrived at Madras (South India) and Calcutta and thence went to Cawnpore. It is at this point that our yarn begins.

A voice like thunder, speaking in a strange tongue, shouted across an Indian garden one night in 1809.

The new moon, looking "like a ball of ebony in an ivory cup,"—as one who was there that night said—threw a cold light over the palm trees and aloes, on the man who was speaking and on those who were seated around him at the table in the bungalow.

Beyond the garden the life of Cawnpore moved in its many streets; the shout of a donkey-driver, the shrill of a bugle from the barracks broke sharply through the muffled sounds of the city. The June wind, heavy with the waters of the Ganges which flows past Cawnpore, made the night insufferably hot. But the heat did not trouble Sabat, the wild son of the Arabian desert, who was talking—as he always did—in a roaring voice that was louder than most men's shouting. He was telling the story of Abdallah's brave death as a Christian martyr.[62]

Quietly listening to Sabat's voice—though he could not understand what he was saying—was a young Italian, Padre Julius Cæsar, a monk of the order of the Jesuits. On his head was a little skull-cap, over his body a robe of fine purple satin held with a girdle of twisted silk.

Near him sat an Indian scholar—on his dark head a full turban, and about him richly-coloured robes. On the other side sat a little, thin, copper-coloured Bengali dressed in white, and a British officer in his scarlet and gold uniform, with his wife, who has told us the story of that evening.

Not one of these brightly dressed people was, however, the strongest power there. A man in black clothes was the real centre of the group. Very slight in build, not tall, clean-shaven, with a high forehead and sensitive lips, young Henry Martyn seemed a stripling beside the flaming Arab. Yet Sabat, with all his sound and fury, was no match for the swift-witted, clear-brained young Englishman. Henry Martyn was a chaplain in the army of the East India Company, which then ruled in India.

He was the only one of those who were listening to Sabat who could understand what he was saying. When Sabat had finished his story, Martyn turned, and, in his clear, musical voice translated it from the Persian into Latin mixed with Italian for Padre Julius Cæsar, into Hindustani for the Indian scholar, into Bengali for the Bengal gentleman, and into English for the British officer and his wife. Martyn could also talk to Sabat himself both in Arabic and in Persian.

As Martyn listened to the rolling sentences of Sabat, the Christian Arab, he seemed to see the lands beyond India, away across the Khyber Pass, where Sabat had travelled—Mesopotamia, Arabia, Persia.

Henry Martyn knew that in all those lands the people were Mohammedans. He wanted one thing above everything else in the world: that was to give them all the chance of doing what Sabat and Abdallah had done—the chance of reading in their own languages the one book in the world that could tell them that God was a Father—the book of letters and of biographies that we call the New Testament.

The Toil of Brain

There was not in the world a copy of the New Testament in good Persian. To make one Henry Martyn slaved hard, far into the hot, sultry Indian nights, with scores of mosquitoes "pinging" round his lamp and his head, grinding at his Persian grammar, so that he could translate the life of Jesus Christ into that language.

Even while he was listening to Sabat's story in the bungalow at Cawnpore, Martyn knew that he was so ill that he could not live for many years more. The doctor said that he must leave India for a time to be in a healthier place. Should he go home to England, where all his friends were? He wanted that; but much more he wanted to go on with his work. So he asked the doctor if he might go to Persia on the way home, and he agreed.

So Martyn went down from Cawnpore to Calcutta, and in a boat down the Hoogli river to the little Arab coasting sailing ship the Hummoudi, which hoisted sail and started on its voyage round India to Bombay. Martyn read while on board the Old Testament in the original Hebrew and the New Testament in the original Greek, so that he might understand them better and make a more perfect translation into Persian. He read the Koran of Mohammed so that he could argue with the Persians about it. And he worked hard at Arabic grammar, and read books in Persian. Yet he was for ever cracking jokes with his fellow travellers, cooped up in the little ship on the hot tropical seas.

From Bombay the governor granted Martyn a passage up the Persian Gulf in the Benares, a ship in the Indian Navy that was going on a cruise to finish the exciting work of hunting down the fierce Arab pirates of the Persian Gulf. So on Lady Day, 1811, the sailors got her under weigh and tacked northward up the Gulf, till at last, on May 21, the roofs and minarets of Bushire hove in sight. Martyn, leaning over the bulwarks, could see the town jutting out into the Gulf on a spit of sand and the sea almost surrounding it. That day he set foot for the first time on the soil of Persia.

Across Persia on a Pony

Aboard ship Martyn had allowed his beard and moustache to grow. When he landed at Bushire he bought and wore the clothes of a Persian gentleman, so that he should escape from attracting everybody's notice by wearing clothes such as the people had never seen before.

No one who had seen the pale, clean-shaven clergyman in black silk coat and trousers in Cawnpore would have recognised the Henry Martyn who rode out that night on his pony with an Armenian servant, Zechariah of Isfahan, on his long one hundred and seventy mile journey from Bushire to Shiraz. He wore a conical cap of black Astrakhan fur, great baggy trousers of blue, bright red leather boots, a light tunic of chintz, and over that a flowing cloak.

They went out through the gates of Bushire on to the great plain of burning sand that stretched away for ninety miles ahead of them. They travelled by night, because the day was intolerably hot, but even at midnight the heat was over 100 degrees. It was a fine moonlight night; the stars sparkled over the plain. The bells tinkled on the mules' necks as they walked across the sand. All else was silent.

At last dawn broke. Martyn pitched his little tent under a tree, the only shelter he could get. Gradually the heat grew more and more intense. He was already so ill that it was difficult to travel.

"When the thermometer was above 112 degrees—fever heat," says Martyn, "I began to lose my strength fast. It became intolerable. I wrapped myself up in a blanket and all the covering I could get to defend myself from the air. By this means the moisture was kept a little longer upon the body. I thought I should have lost my senses. The thermometer at last stood at 126 degrees. I concluded that death was inevitable."

At last the sun went down: the thermometer crept lower: it was night and time to start again. But Martyn had not slept or eaten. He could hardly sit upright on his pony. Yet he set out and travelled on through the night.

Next morning he had a little shelter of leaves and branches made, and an Arab poured water on the leaves and on Martyn all day to try to keep some of the frightful heat from him. But even then the heat almost slew him. So they marched on through another night and then camped under a grove of date palms.

"I threw myself on the burning ground and slept," Martyn wrote. "When the tent came up I awoke in a burning fever. All day I had recourse to the wet towel, which kept me alive, but would allow of no sleep."

At nine that night they struck camp. The ground threw up the heat that it had taken from the sun during the day. So frightfully hot was the air that even at midnight Martyn could not travel without a wet towel round his face and neck.

As the night drew on the plain grew rougher: then it began to rise to the foothills and mountains. At last the pony and mules were clambering up rough steep paths so wild that there was (as Martyn said) "nothing to