William had to face the fact that Dolly’s mental condition was getting worse. He tried to do what he could for her, but in 1794, there was not much that could be done. Kitty watched over the children and often took them to visit Mr. Short at the salt factory. She always had a servant accompany them because she was terrified of meeting a wild animal on the short boat trip.
William, on the other hand, had little time for visiting. He had to get a garden planted as quickly as possible so that it could start producing food for the family. At the same time, he and Ram Boshu took every opportunity they could to go downstream in their boat to nearby villages and share the gospel message.
After one such visit, William came home shaken by what he had seen. He and Ram had tied up their boat at a village where a large, cheering crowd had gathered. After inching his way to the front, William was horrified by what he saw. There, about six feet off the ground was a man being swung around in circles. The man was hanging from a rope suspended from a long bamboo pole. The men of the village took turns running around underneath him and spinning him or holding up the ends of the pole. All of this would have done nothing more than make the swinging man a little dizzy, except for one thing. The man was attached to the rope by two hooks that were jabbed through his bare back. He was hanging by his flesh. William had to look away. He had read about this practice, but to see a man actually hurting himself as an act of worship to Siva, a Hindu god, made him sick to his stomach.
The man swung on the hooks from the rope for over fifteen minutes before he was finally lowered to the ground bleeding and grimacing in pain. William longed to be able to give the villagers the gospel message and tell them about how God loved them.
About this time, William came to the conclusion that preaching to the Indian people alone would not be enough. The Hindu religion in particular possessed many ancient books of sacred writing that Hindus revered and followed. If Christian missionaries were to be successful in the country, William knew that the Bible needed to be translated as quickly as possible into the various Indian languages. He decided it was time to once again get to work on the Bengali translation of the Book of Genesis that he and Dr. Thomas had begun on the journey from England.
As he was finishing work on the Carey family’s new bamboo hut, William heard some good news. Word had spread around the district that there was now a white man with a gun building a house near Dechatta. This gave the local people who had fled the area renewed confidence, and many of them began to return. Soon William was surrounded by Indian people, many of whom were interested in hearing the gospel message. After all the setbacks, William was greatly encouraged, especially when a party of five Brahmins (upper-caste Hindus) came and thanked him for settling among them. Surely, Dechatta was the open door to missionary work William had been searching for!
Chapter 11
Mudnabatti
Unbeknownst to William, at the same time he had been desperately seeking money and support for his family in Calcutta before finally moving to Dechatta, an event had occurred in a dangerous channel of the Hooghly River near Malda, one hundred twenty miles to the north. The event, tragic as it was, would change the course of William’s life in India.
The event was a boating accident in which two English people, Robert Udney and his wife, were drowned. The couple had just moved to Dinadjpur Province to work with Robert’s brother, George. George Udney lived in Malda, where he was commercial resident for the East India Company. This meant that he was the most powerful English person in the area. George Udney was responsible for improving agriculture and industry in the province. He was able to make loans and help start new farming and industrial projects.
George Udney was also a good Christian who knew Dr. Thomas from his previous visit to India. As was the case with many of Dr. Thomas’s friends, George Udney had loaned him money, which Dr. Thomas had never repaid. This had caused a rift in their friendship. However, when Dr. Thomas read of the drownings in the newspaper, he immediately wrote to his “friend” to say how sorry he was to hear of his brother’s death.
Being a forgiving man, when he received the letter from Dr. Thomas, George Udney wrote back and invited him to visit Malda. Dr. Thomas did so, and the two men became friends again. During his visit, Dr. Thomas told how he was not doing well in Calcutta. Yes, he was making good money as a doctor, but the problem was that he and his wife were still spending more than they made. He longed for a simpler life. George Udney had just the answer to his problem. He explained that his dead brother had been given the job of overseer at one of two new indigo-dye factories being built in the province. Now that his brother was dead, George had to find someone else to run the factory and wondered whether Dr. Thomas might be interested in the position. A large house and generous salary came with the job, plus Dr. Thomas would get a small share of any profit the factory made.
Dr. Thomas immediately accepted the position and then asked whether George Udney had anyone in mind to run the second factory. George Udney did not, but Dr. Thomas knew just the man for the job.
“Papa, papa, there is a letter for you,” yelled nine-year-old Felix as he ran up the path to Mr. Short’s house waving an envelope.
William was on the veranda working on the translation of the Book of Genesis that he and Dr. Thomas had begun. He smiled broadly as his son ran up with the envelope. At last, after six months in India, a letter! He was not sure whom he would most like it to be from, his friends on the missionary society committee or his father. It was from neither.
As he took the envelope from Felix and turned it over, William immediately recognized the handwriting—the same handwriting he’d just been reading, that of Dr. Thomas. William tore open the letter and began to read. The more he read, the more excited he became. George Udney, commercial resident for Dinadjpur Province, had offered him a job overseeing an indigo dye factory. And the job came with a house and two hundred fifty pounds a year as salary! The salary alone was five times as much as William had ever earned before. William did some fast math in his head and discovered that his whole family could easily live on a quarter of the amount, leaving over one hundred eighty pounds per year to put toward translating and printing the entire Bible in Bengali. More than that, Dr. Thomas pointed out that George Udney was a godly man who understood that William would want time off to preach to the local people and continue his translation work. As well, if he accepted the job, George Udney would get him a five-year permit to work in India. William would no longer have to worry about being caught and sent to jail in England. It all sounded almost too good to be true.
William thought about all the wonderful opportunities the job would give him. The letter had stated that the factory would employ ninety workers, and William felt sure that he would have the chance to share the gospel message with each worker. It was a thrilling prospect. Of course, he would miss Dechatta, which was already beginning to feel like home. But somehow the job offer seemed to William to be God’s direction for him and his family. “Just think,” he told Dolly, “we won’t have to worry about money for food anymore!” And then he wrote in his journal: “This appears to be a remarkable opening in divine providence, for our comfortable support.”
May 23, 1794, was moving day, but not into the bamboo hut that William had labored to build. Instead, William was headed with his family up the Hooghly River to Malda to meet George Udney and begin work in the indigo dye factory.
Despite the wonderful job that awaited her husband, Dolly Carey was not eager to leave Mr. Short’s house, for good reasons. First, the journey itself was a dangerous one. It involved poling their boat two hundred miles in one-hundred-ten-degree heat in the height of mosquito season. Second, her sister Kitty would not be traveling with them. Kitty and Mr. Short had fallen in love and planned to marry the following year. This meant that Dolly would be in charge of the boys for three or four weeks on a boat no bigger than a full-sized bed.
And what if the job didn’t work out? Dolly asked William this question many times. After all, they had moved back to Calcutta to the job at the botanical gardens only to find it was already taken. What if there were a similar mix-up with this job? If that happened, they would be in a much worse situation than if they had stayed in Dechatta.
William was determined that it was the right thing to do. So, early in the morning, they said farewell to Kitty and Mr. Short and climbed aboard their little boat. It was difficult for the boys to say good-bye. They clung to their Aunt Kitty, who, in many ways, had been more of a mother to them than Dolly had been. But finally, after many tears, they got under way.
The trip to Malda took twenty-two long, hot days. Dolly and Felix were still suffering from the effects of dysentery and spent most of the time lying in the center of the boat under the full shade of the straw canopy that stretched most of the length of the craft. Even in the shade, the temperature hovered around one hundred degrees. It was so hot that the other children, who were not sick, hardly had the energy to sit up. In the evenings, they would tie the boat up beside a village. William and Ram Boshu would spend an hour or so preaching in the village while Dolly and the children did their best to set up camp for the night. The food for the journey consisted mostly of curried vegetables and rice, which they purchased from the many vendors along the well-traveled waterway.
As they traveled, William heard many people speaking in Hindustani, the language of the lower castes, and he immediately began to take notes on how to translate the Bible into it.
Progress on the journey was slow and reminded William of the month when the Kron Princessa Maria had tacked her way up the Bay of Bengal. This time, though, the trip was slow not because of the wind conditions but because of the shape of the rivers they were traveling. The entire Bengal region was a giant alluvial plain, across which the rivers sluggishly meandered, almost doubling back on themselves in places. Sometimes it took William and Ram Boshu two whole days to make four miles in a straight line!
On June 7, the boat reached the town of Bassetpore, where they purchased some square sails and rigged their boat for sailing. This made the rest of the trip much faster, but it also meant that they couldn’t “feel” their way along the bottom as they had been able to when poling the boat. As a result, they were constantly running aground on the many shallow sandbars in the nine-mile-wide river.
On June 15, William Carey wrote in his journal: “I feel now as if released from a prison.” The prison was the boat. They had made it safely to Malda, where they were greeted by George Udney and his mother, who lived with him. The two welcomed the group into their house for a large meal, and then one of their servants supervised the children while Dolly rested and William went over the job contract with George Udney.
Much to his relief, William found that for once Dr. Thomas had not exaggerated. George Udney was a wonderful Christian who cared deeply about the Indian men who worked for him. He told William that as long as everything ran smoothly at the factory, he was free to take as much time as he liked to do his Bible translation work.
That evening, after a delicious supper of venison, William wrote to the missionary society committee. With great joy he told them about the new job. He asked the committee not to send him any more money, although he hadn’t yet received any they might have already sent. Instead, he urged them to send out another missionary with the money they had set aside to support him and his family. Finally, everything was working out the way he had imagined it would.
