After he had read for a while, Adoniram looked up. “Very good writing,” he said to his traveling companion. “Fanny Forester certainly has a way with words. Do you know if she is a Christian?”
“Yes,” replied the pastor, “I know for a fact she is. Her real name is Emily Chubbock, and she used to be a teacher in a seminary before she took to writing.”
“What a pity,” sighed Adoniram, and then a plan began to form in his mind. “I wish I could meet her.”
Mr. Gillette laughed loudly. “That can most certainly be arranged,” he exclaimed. “She is staying at my house right now!”
Adoniram chuckled. “Well, how is that for providence?” he said.
The following day, Christmas Day 1845, Adoniram got to meet Emily Chubbock. Emily was about thirty years old, with long black hair. Adoniram noted she was not particularly pretty, yet her sense of humor shone through in her personality, just as it had in her books. Adoniram was surprised to learn she had been a Baptist all her life and had made it a point to read all the newsletters published by the Baptist mission society that told the story of his life in Burma.
This was what Adoniram had been waiting to hear. Since arriving back in the United States he had been praying he would meet the right person to write a biography of his late wife Sarah. Now, looking at Emily Chubbock, he felt sure that God had answered his prayers.
Adoniram stayed on in Philadelphia to help Emily make an outline of Sarah’s life and to answer the many questions she had about life in Burma. It seemed the more time Emily spent with Adoniram, the more she grew to respect and then love him. As strange as the match may have seemed to others, thirty-year-old romance writer Emily Chubbock, alias Fanny Forester, and Adoniram Judson, a fifty-seven-year-old missionary, had fallen in love. Emily agreed to marry Adoniram and return with him to Burma and help raise his two small sons.
When word of the impending marriage reached the newspapers, it sent people all over the United States into an uproar. “How could a frothy writer like Fanny Forester possibly fit in as a missionary’s wife?” people asked. Others wanted to know whether it was a fitting match for someone with Adoniram’s public standing. After all, he was old enough to be her father! Emily Chubbock’s readers were upset, too. Why was such an aspiring writer going to throw her life away to live in some far-off country? They thought she should stay in America and keep writing. Adoniram didn’t care one bit what people thought or said. Emily Chubbock had agreed to marry him, and that was all that mattered.
The wedding took place June 2, 1846. The newlyweds spent a few quiet days together before visiting New York, Boston, Plymouth, and Bradford for a round of final farewells.
As the Faneuil Hall weighed anchor in Boston Harbor, Adoniram and Emily, the new Dr. and Mrs. Judson, waved from the ship’s railing to the hundreds of people who had gathered to see them off. Adoniram felt sure it would be the last time he ever saw his native homeland, and he stood on deck long after the scene had faded from view. As he stood there, he thought about the last time he had watched America recede from view. The other three people who had stood with him on the deck of that ship were all dead. Now a new wife stood at his side. She had not even been alive when he and Ann had first ventured out for Burma.
The voyage “home” was a happy one. Emily was curious about everything aboard ship, and she did not suffer from seasickness at all. When they finally arrived back in Moulmein, they found Adoniram’s two boys, Henry and Edward, healthy and well taken care of. The boys took to Emily right away, the memory of their own mother having faded to a distant shadow.
Soon after arriving back in Burma, Adoniram decided to move his family to Rangoon. He had begun work on a more complete Burmese-to-English dictionary, and there were many Burmese language scholars in Rangoon who could help him with the exact meaning of certain words.
Emily was happy to move, and she kept a meticulous and colorful diary of all that went on. When she finally arrived at the house in Rangoon she wrote: “We are blessed with our full share of cockroaches, beetles, lizards, rats, mosquitoes, and bedbugs. With the last the woodwork is alive…perhaps twenty have crossed my paper since I have been writing.”
Emily also went on to describe the ongoing battle with bats in the rafters: “We have had men at work nearly a week trying to thin [the bats] out, and have killed a great many hundreds.… Everything, walls, tables, chairs, etc., are stained by them.”
Still, Emily was determined not to complain or to compare her new life with her old one in America. She worked hard at raising the children. She also worked hard at writing the biography of Sarah, grateful as she did so to be living in the land she was writing about.
On the first anniversary of their marriage, Emily wrote home to her sister: “It has been far the happiest year of my life; and, what is in my eyes still more important, my husband says it has been among the happiest of his.”
As Adoniram continued to work on the dictionary, he tried to locate the Burmese Christians he had left behind years before. This proved difficult. A new governor was now ruling over Rangoon. He and his underlings had a wide range of torture techniques at their disposal which they seemed eager to use on anyone in the city and surrounding area who was seen to be “favoring Jesus Christ’s religion.” The small band of about twenty Christians left in Rangoon dared not meet together, or even know each other’s names. Adoniram met with them separately or occasionally in groups of two or three at a time.
Living expenses in Rangoon were high, and the family found themselves dining mostly on rice and fruit and occasionally an unknown meat, which was later identified as rat meat.
When the rainy season arrived, Emily became ill. Each day it took almost every ounce of energy she had to write a page of Sarah’s biography. She would have to take long rests between sentences. However, Adoniram suffered much more. One Saturday night his stomach began cramping in excruciating pain. Although he had seen many sick missionaries in the past, neither he nor Emily could work out what was wrong with him. They tried all the usual treatments, laudanum shots, rhubarb, and calomel, but nothing stopped the searing pain.
Eventually the illness left him, though he was weak for a long time. As he lay recovering, Adoniram thought about all the obstacles he had faced in Burma. Now, as he had when he translated the Old Testament into Burmese, he felt he needed to concentrate whatever energy he had left on revising the Burmese-to-English dictionary. Other missionaries would follow to Rangoon, and a thorough, well-written Burmese dictionary would make their job a lot easier.
On August 31, 1847, the Judson family packed up and returned to Moulmein. Moulmein was much smaller than Rangoon and provided a much easier environment in which to live. Emily was relieved to be moving. She was expecting a baby soon and would be glad to be living closer to Amherst and its European doctor.
Baby Emily Frances Judson was born the day before Christmas, 1847. She was a healthy child who thrived from the beginning. Adoniram and Emily were both very proud of her.
By now Emily had finished the biography of Sarah, and the manuscript had been sent to the United States for publication.
The family struggled on in Moulmein. Sometimes Adoniram would be ill for weeks on end, and other times Emily would be laid low by some sickness. Whenever they were well enough, they went about their duties—Adoniram to work on his dictionary and Emily to looking after the children and learning the Burmese language.
By March 1850, Dr. Morton, the family’s physician, was very worried about Adoniram’s health. Adoniram was weak and vomited often. The doctor suggested a sea voyage as the only hope of cure. Since Emily, who was expecting their second child any day, was unable to go with him, Thomas Ranney, who oversaw the printing press for the mission, offered to accompany Adoniram on the voyage.
Adoniram’s symptoms became worse; his feet swelled, and then the entire left side of his body. Emily began to suspect he was dying, and so the night before he was due to set sail, she asked him if he was prepared for the possibility of death.
Adoniram replied, “I am not tired of my work; neither am I tired of the world. Yet when Christ calls me home, I shall go with the gladness of a boy bounding away from his school!”
On Wednesday, April 3, 1850, sixty-one-year-old Adoniram was carried aboard the French barque Astride Marie, bound for the Isle of France. It was a sobering moment. The church members gathered at the dock to beg him not to go. They told him they could not bear the thought of his being buried at sea with no grave for them to visit. Adoniram sympathized with them, but the doctor had told him that a voyage was his only hope for survival, and he felt it would be wrong not to do all he could to live.
Nine days out to sea, on April 12, 1850, Adoniram Judson died. The ship’s carpenter made a rough coffin, and Adoniram’s body was placed inside the coffin, which was slid overboard that same evening. There were no hymns, no prayers, no speeches, no dramatic good-byes, just a few simple words muttered by the French captain of the Astride Marie as the ship sailed by the Andaman Islands. Ironically, Adoniram was buried at sea in almost the same spot that his and Ann’s first child had been buried on their first voyage to Burma thirty-seven years before.
Ten days later, back in Moulmein, Emily Judson gave birth to a second child, a son whom she named Charles but who died that same day. Four months later, at the end of August, she received word that Adoniram had died. After giving it much thought, Emily decided to take the three children (two of Adoniram and Sarah’s and her own daughter Emily) back to the United States. They arrived home in October, 1851.
Emily immediately set about helping the president of Brown University with the biography he was writing of her late husband. After her time in Burma, however, she was never healthy again, and soon after her arrival home she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Two and a half years later, on June 1, 1854, Emily Judson, also known as Fanny Forester, died.
The three children Emily brought home with her from Burma all lived into adulthood. Henry fought for the Union Army in the Civil War, during which he was seriously injured. Edward became a pastor, and Emily’s only child, Emily Frances, became a wife and mother. The three children Adoniram had left in America on his trip home also thrived. Like her aunt before her, Abigail became headmistress of Bradford Academy. Adoniram Jr. became a doctor, and Elnathan became a pastor. George Boardman Jr., Sarah and George Boardman’s son, also became a pastor.
The translation of the Bible that Adoniram Judson worked so hard to complete remains to this day the only translation of the Bible into Burmese.
