The letter sounded wonderfully challenging, though Lottie herself had no real idea of the struggles and challenges that lay ahead of her on the other side of the world.
It was a sad moment when Lottie finally had to say good-bye to Orie. She knew she would probably never see her older sister or her nephews again. After all, she had signed the standard Baptist missionary contract stating that she was committed to staying in China until a “total breakdown of health, or death.”
Lottie consoled herself with the thought that she would be joining Edmonia in China. In that respect, Lottie knew that she was more fortunate than most other missionaries headed for China; none of them had a blood relative eagerly awaiting their arrival. Yet it was still difficult to leave behind in America Orie and her family, her younger sisters Mollie, who had married Dr. William Shepherd and now lived in Norfolk, Virginia, and Colie, who was working at the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C., and her older brother Isaac and his wife, who were back trying to eke out a living at Viewmont.
The train to San Francisco raced along at twenty-two miles per hour, transporting Lottie in two weeks from one side of the American continent to the other. The transcontinental railroad had been completed less than five years before, and it was still a great novelty for those riding on the train to see the old established cities of the East give way to the huge rolling prairies, and then to the towering, majestic Rocky Mountains. Lottie spent hours looking out the window. She had never seen such breathtaking scenery. She felt almost as if she were in a foreign country already. Finally the train crossed the last of the mountain ranges and began puffing its way down the last leg of the journey to San Francisco and the Pacific Ocean. On the other side of this sparkling ocean that Lottie was finally seeing for the first time lay China.
Chapter 6
China at Last
The Costa Rica lay at anchor in the calm waters of San Francisco Bay. Two days after arriving in San Francisco by train, Lottie was ferried out to the ship. She clambered aboard, eager to be on her way to her new life as a missionary. Lottie was the only single woman on the voyage, and she soon made friends with almost everyone aboard, including six couples from various denominations who were on their way to Japan and China to be missionaries.
Once the last-minute details were taken care of and they set sail, there was little for the passengers to do. The sea was unusually calm, and they passed the time playing cards and chess, listening to lectures, and reading. Despite the calm, Lottie was glad when the coastline around Yokohama, Japan, finally came into view on September 21. It was her first sea voyage, and she had not been able to adjust to the constant rocking motion of the ship.
Yokohama was the first of three ports in Japan where the Costa Rica was scheduled to stop. From Yokohama they sailed on to Kobe and Nagasaki. At each port, Lottie eagerly disembarked and hired a rickshaw driver to show her the sights of the city. She was enchanted by everything she saw, especially the gardens. Lottie had never seen such beautifully kept lawns or artistically designed rock-and-water gardens. She tried to recall every detail so that she could accurately describe the places in letters back home to her family.
On September 28, 1873, the Costa Rica set sail from Nagasaki for Shanghai, China. The voyage should have taken only several days, except for the hurricane! The vicious storm struck without warning the first night out from Nagasaki. Lottie was already in bed in her topside cabin with the lamp turned out when the ship began to creak and roll ominously from side to side. Soon she could hear heavy objects crashing against the side of her cabin, bashing first against one wall and then against the other. Lottie stayed in her bunk and prayed feverishly, but the sound of shattering glass and splintering wood kept distracting her. She began to wonder whether she would make it to China after all. The storm raged on throughout the night, and by the next morning it was fiercer than ever. With the arrival of daylight, Lottie threw a coat on over her nightgown and stepped outside her cabin to see what was happening. She steadied herself against the fierce wind and hand over hand slowly made her way along the ship’s mangled railing to the dining room. The dining room was a complete mess, plates and glasses lay shattered on the floor, and the windows, along with one entire wall, were gone.
“Over here,” yelled Mr. Whitehead, one of the missionaries, over the howl of the wind.
Lottie staggered over to the corner where several of the missionary couples were seated on the floor. “What’s happening?” she asked.
“Most of the crew are out on deck trying to keep the mast from breaking,” Mr. Whitehead replied. “And the ship’s surgeon and most of the other passengers are down below drinking whiskey. Some of them are so drunk they would probably fall overboard even if the ship was sailing on a millpond!”
“I’m glad I found you,” Lottie replied. “I’m sure God will have His way with this ship one way or the other.”
The group prayed and sang together throughout the rest of the morning. Finally around midday the force of the hurricane began to subside, although the crisis was not yet over. The Costa Rica had sustained heavy damage, its rudder had been swept away, the main mast was broken, and large portions of the upper deck had been washed overboard. There was no way to steer the ship, which drifted aimlessly.
Finally the captain and crew were able to regain some control over their ship, and the Costa Rica limped back to Nagasaki. Everyone aboard was glad to see land. As soon as they dropped anchor, they made plans to repair the ship. By now Lottie was so exhausted that it was two days before she had the strength to disembark ship and take advantage of the hospitality of some Dutch Reformed Church missionaries. She stayed with them a week until the Costa Rica was repaired and ready to set sail again.
This time the voyage to Shanghai was as smooth as the trip across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco had been. On October 7, 1873, Charlotte (Lottie) Digges Moon finally set foot in China. Tarleton and Martha Crawford, along with the Reverend Matthew Yates, were waiting to meet her and escort her to the Reverend Yates’s home, where they would all be staying for several days.
Lottie was a little surprised that Edmonia hadn’t come to meet her. Tarleton Crawford explained that someone had to stay behind to supervise the building of the wonderful two-story extension he was having added onto his house. This four-room tower was being built for Edmonia and Lottie to share. Of course, Lottie was impressed, but she was also impatient to see her sister. To her dismay, she would have to wait in Shanghai for a week while Tarleton Crawford conducted some private business. Martha Crawford explained that during the Civil War very little support money had been sent to the missionaries in China. Rather than go home, Tarleton had gone into business for himself, buying and selling land in China at a profit, and his dealings in Shanghai were related to this business.
While they waited, Martha showed Lottie around Shanghai. They visited the international compounds where most of the foreigners in the city lived. As they wound their way through the streets of the bustling old city, Lottie was impressed by many of the sights she saw. She was appalled, however, to see the girls and women teetering along with their feet bound in half with rags in accordance with the Chinese practice of foot binding. Even though Lottie had grown up in the country, nothing could have prepared her for the sights and sounds of the Chinese market. Before she even reached it, she could smell it. She could make out the odor of fish baking in the midday sun and the putrid odor of chicken that had been dead several days too long before being sold. But there were many odors she couldn’t make out, and not all the odors were bad. Her nostrils picked up the sweet smell of jasmine and orange blossom.
When she finally entered the market, Lottie was overwhelmed by what she saw. Everywhere people were buying and selling almost everything imaginable. One vendor had Chinese shoes arranged on the ground in front of him, while the next vendor sold trousers and tunics, and the next dried fish, and the next fruits and vegetables, many of which Lottie had never seen. Lottie followed Martha around the market, her mouth agape at all she was seeing.
Throughout the week, Lottie peppered Martha with questions about what it was like to live in Tengchow, where they would soon be headed. She quickly found out that there were many differences between the two cities.
“Shanghai is a treaty port, as you know,” Martha explained, “and many Western ideas are tolerated here. One clause of the treaty says that any foreigner or Chinese person can practice Christianity here freely, but once you get outside the treaty ports, it’s not the case. Things are more difficult.”
“What kind of difficulties do you have?” asked Lottie, fearing that Eddie had cast the work in Tengchow in too bright a light.
“Well…” Martha replied slowly. “It’s not easy work, I’ll give you that. We are often spat upon and called foreign devils.” She looked at Lottie and went on briskly. “It’s more a bluff than anything, but sometimes it does get out of hand. Last month, for example, your sister and I had to stop our daily visits to some women who had invited us to their homes. A crowd of jeering men followed us everywhere we went, brandishing clubs and knives. After they chased us, yelling that they would chop off our heads, we decided it was not safe to go out for a while.”
“Oh…” was all Lottie could think to say. “And how is Edmonia when it comes to ordeals like that?” she finally asked.
“Edmonia is doing fine,” Martha replied, then darkly added, “for the most part.” With that she would not say another word.
Lottie would have liked to have asked Martha what she meant, but it was obvious that she would have to wait to get to Tengchow to find out for herself.
Tarleton Crawford’s business was taking longer than anticipated, making him rather grumpy. So Martha and Lottie decided to go on ahead to Tengchow without him. Once again, Lottie climbed aboard a boat. This time the vessel took them northward along the coast to Chefoo on the Shantung peninsula. There the two women stayed with a missionary couple, the Hartwells, while Martha hired shentzes that would take them overland to Tengchow. It seemed odd to Lottie that they would have to travel overland to Tengchow when it was a coastal port. Martha explained that Tengchow’s harbor was quite silted up, and deep-hulled ships were unable to navigate their way into it.
The shentze reminded Lottie of a wheel-less covered wagon supported by two long poles, one on either side, attached to the saddles of two donkeys, one in the front and one at the rear. At first Lottie thought the shentze looked like a comfortable place to ride, but before they had gone half a mile down the road, she had changed her mind about that. As the shentze jolted and lurched its way sixty miles northwestward to Tengchow, it felt to Lottie as though every bone in her body was broken and bruised.
Finally, after two of the longest days in Lottie’s life, the magnificent walled city of Tengchow came into view. Lottie had never seen anything quite like it. The city and its huge gray mud brick wall were over two thousand years old. What fascinated Lottie was the way the wall was designed to provide safe harbor for sampans and other small boats. The wall ran along the edge of the harbor and had openings where canals ran inside it. Large wooden gates that opened and closed to let boats in and out spanned the openings in the wall. Eighty thousand people lived in and around the old walled city.
“See there, it’s the spire of the church,” yelled Martha from her shentze, pointing to a high structure with a cross on top that, along with a beautifully carved Chinese gate, dominated the skyline of the city. “It cost three thousand dollars of Tarleton’s own money to build, but it’s worth it. Isn’t it magnificent?”
