The days dragged into weeks, and the prisoners waited for something, anything, to happen. Occasionally, they would hear a single shot fired from a Burmese gunboat on the nearby river. This was a signal for the city that the Burmese army had lost another round of fighting to the British. It was also a warning to the foreign prisoners that there would be no visitors, no talking, and no walks in the sunlight for the next few days.
Eventually Ann’s persistence at trying to get someone in an official position to help Adoniram and the other foreign prisoners paid off. The prisoners were all moved to tiny day sheds, small bamboo huts in the prison courtyard where they could sit during daylight hours. It was an enormous relief to Adoniram to be out of the cell and in the fresh air. Regrettably, it also brought him closer to the screams of prisoners being tortured throughout the day. He hated to hear the screaming, but he learned to put up with it because being outside was much better than being locked up twenty-four hours a day in a stinking, rat-infested, overcrowded cell. At night, the prisoners were returned to the cell to be hoisted up by their feet on the bamboo shaft.
The hours when Ann was not visiting dragged for Adoniram, who passed the time playing chess. He had always loved the game but had seldom had the time to play it since arriving in Burma. Now he had all the time in the world. He and Henry Gouger made a set of chess pieces from slivers of bamboo. They used soot from the oil lamp in their cell to draw a chessboard on an old piece of cowhide a dead Burmese prisoner had left behind. Adoniram and Henry played chess for hours each day.
When Ann had to stop visiting him, Adoniram was particularly glad of the distraction of chess. Ann was due to have the baby any day, and Adoniram worried constantly about the birth. Ann had already lost two children, and it was more than he could bear to think of her losing a third.
On January 26, 1825, a messenger slipped a note through the cell door to Adoniram. “Maria Elizabeth Butterworth Judson born today. Thank God we are both alive. Love Ann,” it read.
Relief washed over Adoniram, but the feeling was soon replaced with waves of sadness. What lay ahead for little Maria? Would she ever see her father? Would she and her mother be killed if the British army came any closer to Ava? As Adoniram sat fettered in his day shed in the prison courtyard, he could not predict what lay ahead for his little family. He could only pray that the future would be less bleak than the present.
It was March first when things changed dramatically in the prison. In the late afternoon, a group of Spotted Faces surrounded the day shed that Adoniram was lying in. “Get up now and go inside,” growled the largest Spotted Face.
Adoniram’s chains jangled as he crawled from the shed, clutching his pillow with the Burmese translation of the New Testament inside.
“Leave that there,” the Spotted Face commanded, poking at the filthy pillow with a stick.
Adoniram left the pillow and began walking. He was nearly across the courtyard before he turned around. What he saw sent terror through him. The Spotted Faces were whacking at the hut with long sticks. Before he ducked his head to go into the inner prison, Adoniram took one last look. The shed was now a pile of broken pieces of bamboo lying on the ground, and in the middle of the pile was the pillow that held the precious translation. Dejected, Adoniram walked back into the cell.
Once inside, Adoniram wondered what was happening. Had the British arrived in Ava? Once he was seated in his usual spot on the teakwood floor with his back resting against the cracked wall, Adoniram soon heard the rumors that were being whispered around. The most persistent one was that they were all to be executed at three in the morning. As if to confirm this, the sound of knives being sharpened started up outside their cell.
“Thank goodness,” muttered Henry Gouger. “I was worried we might be strangled. A slit throat isn’t such a bad end compared to some of the ways I’ve seen people die in here.”
Adoniram nodded in agreement. They would all be thankful if they died quickly without being tortured first.
At 3 a.m. the door to the cell clanked open, and a group of toothless Spotted Faces appeared. Some of the prisoners began to yell and scream. Others sobbed quietly. Adoniram and Henry looked knowingly at each other and waited for the inevitable. The bamboo pole was lowered, and only the foreign men were unchained from it and ordered to form a line and march outside.
It had been many months since Adoniram had been outside at night. The cooler evening air seemed to embrace him. At least if he was going to die, it would be with fresh air filling his lungs.
The prisoners were led to the slab of granite in the center of the courtyard. This was where Adoniram’s fetters had been riveted together around his ankles when he had arrived at the prison. Adoniram thought it would make a good chopping block as he waited for the final order to be given to execute the prisoners. It never came. Instead, Aphe himself barked an order from behind them. “Put two more sets of fetters on each prisoner.”
Adoniram looked around, puzzled. Why would they be having two extra sets of leg irons put on them if they were going to die?
The hammering of rivets continued until daybreak. The prisoners were then returned to their cell, where they tried to work out what the last twenty-four hours might mean for them.
Things never returned to “normal” after that. The eight foreign prisoners were kept in the inner cell and were not allowed to go outside except for a few brief minutes in the middle of the night. Since they had not been killed, Adoniram began to fret about the fate of the pillow containing the translation of the New Testament. Would he ever see it again? If he survived this wretched ordeal, would there be a manuscript to publish, or would he have to start all over again with his translation work? He wished he knew what had happened to the pillow.
The way the foreign prisoners were being treated made no sense to Adoniram, at least not until Ann, who was still able to visit, told him what was happening outside the prison.
The war was going badly for the Burmese, who were no match for the disciplined ranks of British soldiers with their superior weapons. Ann had visited the governor of the city so many times to plead for Adoniram’s life that the two of them had become good friends. The governor was fascinated with America and American ways, and he spent hours plying Ann with questions and listening to stories of her childhood. In return, he agreed to do whatever he could for the foreign prisoners, though since they had been jailed under direct order of the king, he could not secure their release.
The queen’s brother, Prince Menthagee, had a particular hatred for foreigners, and he had hinted three times that the foreign prisoners should all be killed. The governor had ignored his suggestions, but he knew that if an order came in writing he would have no choice but to obey it. In an attempt to keep the foreigner prisoners alive, he had banished them all back to their inner cell, where few people would see them. He told Ann he hoped that once they were out of sight the prince would forget about them.
Things stayed this way until May 2, 1825, when the doors to the cell were flung open again.
“Get up. We are moving you,” yelled Aphe, the head Spotted Face.
By now Adoniram had been in prison for eleven months, and even if he had not been suffering from fever, he would hardly have had the strength to pull himself up from the wooden floor. Henry Gouger helped him.
“I wonder where we’re…” began Henry.
“Silence,” yelled Aphe, reinforcing his command by cracking his whip across Henry’s back.
The prisoners stood in line and shuffled silently out the door. Outside, each man waited as his fetters were chiseled off. Then all eight of the prisoners were roped together in pairs and prodded with spears as they were herded through the prison gate.
Adoniram was roped to Captain Laird, the Scottish sea captain who had been a stocky, strong man before being thrown in jail. Now the captain was bent over, weak, and haggard from his months of mistreatment in prison.
The road the men were marched down led to the courthouse. As the prisoners stumbled along, men and women on the side of the road turned their heads away. Only the children stopped to stare at the four pairs of walking dead.
At the courthouse, the prisoners stood in one-hundred-degree heat as official custody of them was handed over to the commander of Lamaing province, which led Adoniram to believe they were about to take a journey. He was right. They were to travel eight miles on foot, wearing no shoes, and with feet tender from eleven months of sitting in a darkened cell.
The commander rode on in front of the prisoners. The Spotted Faces, their long spears ready to prod anyone who fell, walked beside the men. They had scarcely gone a hundred yards when Adoniram’s feet began to blister from the hot bricks that paved the street around the courthouse. Half a mile later, the procession of filthy, emaciated prisoners shuffled across the Mootangai Bridge. For a fleeting moment, Adoniram thought about throwing himself off the bridge and onto the rocks below. His death would be quick and sure, unlike the endless nightmare he was now living. But he was roped to Captain Laird, so even escape through death was not an option for Adoniram.
Another half mile farther on, one of the prisoners, a Greek man, collapsed. The Spotted Faces beat him mercilessly, but not surprising, this did not help him to get up and walk any farther. Finally, the commander ordered a cart to be sent for him, and one Spotted Face waited while the rest of the prisoners went on. Adoniram longed to be on a cart, too. His feet were a mass of bloody blisters, and the heat from the blazing sun made it nearly impossible for him to focus on his next step.
After two miles of walking, one of Henry’s old servants came running up to see his master one last time. When he saw Adoniram’s condition, he pulled the turban off his head and ripped it into pieces. The prisoners were not allowed to stop even for a moment, and so with great difficulty, the servant wrapped Adoniram’s feet in cloth, and then he did the same for Henry Gouger. This eased the pain a little, and when the servant returned to help support Adoniram as he walked, the missionary sobbed quietly. During his time in prison he had become unused to such acts of human kindness.
Eventually, they reached Amarapura. The seven prisoners sat with their backs against a wall, glad to be stopped. They had walked only four miles, but because of their pitiful physical condition, it may as well have been four hundred miles. Soon a cart rumbled up with the Greek man on it. The man was dead.
Through a haze of pain and fever, Adoniram learned that they were to spend the night where they had stopped and go on to Oung-pen-la, a tiny village four miles away, the next day. However, by the following morning, none of the prisoners could move. The men were weak from hunger, and their feet and legs were swollen. By now the Spotted Faces had turned the prisoners over to the commander’s guards and returned to the prison. The new guards soon realized that their prisoners could not be bullied into walking any farther. As a result, a cart was ordered to take them the rest of the way.
Even lying in the cart required tremendous effort. Every jolt jarred Adoniram’s bony body until he was barely conscious. And even though they started out at daybreak, it was mid-afternoon, with the merciless sun baking down on them, before the cart squeaked to a halt outside a long, deserted hut. Like all Burmese huts, this one stood on stilts, and it took supreme effort for the seven prisoners to drag themselves up the steps and inside.
Inside, the roof had long since caved in, and the door had been torn off. Much to Adoniram’s dismay, a bamboo pole ran down the center of the room. And a pile of leg irons sat in the corner. Once more they were in prison. Adoniram lay down quietly and allowed the leg irons to be clamped around his ankles. He felt so wretched, he didn’t care; he was just relieved to be still. He began to lapse in and out of consciousness. At one point as he balanced on the edge of consciousness, he thought he saw Ann and three-month-old Maria standing over him. Ann was shaking him saying, “Wake up, Adoniram, wake up. I have come to see you.”
