In all his letters back to England, William continually mentioned the need to send more missionaries to India. There was enough work in the Bengal region alone to keep a thousand missionaries busy. In his letters, William also suggested to the committee that future missionaries be sent out as assistant indigo-dye factory overseers. That way they would be granted an entry permit and be allowed to come and work with him.
One day in late 1796, as William was bent over his desk studying Sanskrit, he heard a knock at the door. William opened the door to find his Indian neighbor and a young white man standing there.
“Here is a man from England,” said the neighbor in Bengali. “I found him in Malda asking where your house was, so I brought him here to you.”
William sprang forward, eager to meet another Englishman. “Welcome to my house,” he said, as he reached for the man’s hand and shook it. “It’s wonderful to see a fellow countryman. Sit down. Tell me who you are and why you’re here.”
“My name is John Fountain,” began the tall stranger. “I’m the missionary society’s new recruit!”
The neighbor excused himself, and for the next few hours, the two Englishmen peppered each other with questions. William learned that John Fountain was from Rutland, in the next county to Northamptonshire, and knew many of William’s friends. John Fountain was also a man after William’s own heart. He had left his fiancé behind, and to save money for the committee, he had served as a servant on the voyage to India. And according to his entry permit, he had come to India to be an assistant overseer of the indigo dye factory in Mudnabatti.
John Fountain turned out to be a good factory overseer, too. Having him take over a number of the factory responsibilities meant that William could put in longer hours on his translation work.
By March 1797, William’s initial translation of the Bible into Bengali was complete and ready to print. The question was how and where to print it. The original plan had been to send the finished manuscript back to England for printing, but with the number of French pirates prowling for English ships, this no longer seemed like a good idea. It took a year of mulling before William became convinced that the new translation of the Bible should be printed in India. To aid this process, George Udney purchased a secondhand printing press in Calcutta for William.
“The printing press will be here in a month,” William excitedly told John Fountain. “It is being sent up the river on a barge, but there’s much to do to prepare for its arrival. I’m thinking of setting it up in the dining room, right under the window for natural light.”
As the news of what William was up to spread through the district, a friend offered to lend him enough money to buy the type and paper needed to produce one thousand copies of the Bible. (Because of the size of the translation, each Bible would actually consist of four separate books.) William planned to sell half the Bibles produced to pay back the loan, and then he would give away the rest.
William waited anxiously for the press to arrive. When it finally did, he was so excited that the Indian servants decided that the machine must have some magic, and they called it “Sahib’s idol.” William longed for them to understand that, far from being an idol, the press was going to produce books that would tell people how to free themselves from idols.
After the press was set up in his dining room, William decided to make the trip to Calcutta himself to buy the lead type he needed for printing. Along the way, he witnessed an event he’d only heard about up till then.
One evening, after he and a helper had moored their boat at a village for the night, William took a short walk along the riverbank. He saw a large crowd of excited people gathering. Wondering what could attract such a crowd, William wormed his way to the front, where he saw a large pile of wood. On top of the pile was the body of a dead man. Beside it was a woman dressed in white. The woman danced as if in a trance and threw little packages of food into the crowd from a basket she was carrying. William watched as people scrambled to pick them up.
With chilling clarity, William suddenly realized what he was about to witness: sati, the Hindu practice whereby a wife was burned on the funeral pyre with her dead husband. It was a common practice, because Hindus believed that if a wife died beside her husband, it would carry him and his entire family fourteen steps closer to heaven.
Right there, William began to preach. He pleaded with the crowd not to allow the woman to kill herself. He begged the woman to reconsider, telling her he would look after her if she would walk away. But she would not, and within minutes she lay quietly down on top of the body of her dead husband and placed her arm around his neck. Thick bamboo poles were clamped over them both so that there was no way the woman could move or escape. A hot butter called ghee was poured over them both, and then with a great whoosh, the fire was started. “Hurree-bol, hurree-bol,” the crowd began shouting. The words were a Hindu shout for joy.
William felt sick to his stomach, and he turned to walk back to the boat. Whatever happened, he promised himself that night, he would find some way to stop the dreadful practice.
When he got back home from his trip to Calcutta, William found a letter waiting for him from the missionary society committee. Two more missionaries were on their way to India! With this news, William knew it was time to make a move. As the years had rolled by, it had become clear that the indigo dye factory in Mudnabatti had been built in the wrong place. The Tangan River flooded much too often, flooding the factory in the process. As a result, the business was not as profitable as it could or should be. While it was able to support William and his family and John Fountain, it would not financially support an entire community of missionaries.
For some time, William had been admiring a small indigo-dye factory at Kidderpore, twelve miles farther up the Tangan River. There the river didn’t flood as often, and the main house had a large area of flat land around it where more houses and a workshop could easily be built. Upon hearing that new missionaries would be arriving, William decided to buy the factory.
It was a bold move, but one that had many advantages. William’s oldest son, Felix, was now fourteen years old, and William wanted him to learn how to work hard and to help oversee the factory. Buying the factory would also provide a permanent base and steady income for the coming missionaries. William made a down payment on the factory with the money he had saved as overseer in Mudnabatti. Then he began the job of supervising the building of more houses and a printshop for the printing press.
Finally, on October 27, 1799, William sent John Fountain to Calcutta to await the arrival of the two missionaries from England. The letter from the committee had said to expect them about this time, though no mention had been made of exactly which ship they would be traveling on.
Two weeks later, William received a note and a newspaper article from John Fountain. The note said that John was headed for Serampore, and the newspaper article, cut from the front page of the Calcutta Gazette, told the rest of the story. Its headline blazed “Papist Missionaries Told to Go Home.”
It was quite a shock. The article was about the missionaries William had sent John to meet. The word papist meant Roman Catholic; and to the British in India at that time, Roman Catholic meant French; and French meant spies! Somehow, the reporter had confused papist for Baptist. William read on and discovered that the missionaries had fled to Serampore, the Danish settlement fourteen miles north of Calcutta on the Hooghly River. The captain of the Criterion, the American ship that had transported the missionaries, was being held responsible for transporting unlicensed persons, possibly even spies, to India. Unless he handed them over to the British authorities or promised to return them to England, his ship would not be allowed to unload or reload cargo in India.
As if that were not enough, the newspaper reported that the missionary party consisted of eight adults and five children! Could all of them have been sent to work with him? William wondered. From Mudnabatti, there was little he could immediately do except pray and wait to hear more news from John Fountain.
Two weeks later, John arrived back in Mudnabatti with none other than William Ward, the young printer William had met and prayed with in Hull during his speaking tour of England six years before. William Ward had been given a temporary Danish visa by Colonel Bie, the governor of Semaphore. The visa had allowed him to travel unhindered through British territory.
As the three men talked, William learned that there were indeed eight adults and five children in the group, and not two people, as the missionary society committee had said. The group that set out from England consisted of William Grant, his wife, and their two children; Daniel Brunsdon and his wife; Joshua Marshman, his wife Hannah, and their three children; William Ward; and a Miss Mary Tidd. Tragically, soon after making it to Serampore, William Grant had become violently ill and had died, probably from typhoid fever, a common illness in the region. There was also some good news to report, at least as far as John Fountain was concerned. Mary Tidd was the fiancé John had left behind in England. A week after her arrival, she and John were married in Serampore.
As the men talked on, the rest of the story came tumbling out. Despite William’s letters pleading that all missionaries coming to India get permits ahead of time, which would allow them to be his assistants in the indigo dye factory, the new recruits had decided to declare their occupation as Baptist missionaries. They didn’t seem to grasp William’s warning of just how unwelcome official missionaries were in India. Nor had they considered the difficult position they’d put the captain of the Criterion in when they disembarked his ship before the East India Company officials boarded it to arrest them.
After fleeing the ship, the group had hired a small boat to take them upriver to the Danish settlement of Serampore, where they were now all staying in a boardinghouse. They had also visited the Danish governor of the settlement. Governor Bie was an active Christian, and he welcomed them warmly, but he held out little hope that he could help them get permits to live in British India. Instead, he had offered them visas to live in Serampore under Danish protection.
Once the story was out, William wrote letters to everyone he knew of importance in Calcutta, but nobody could help the group. The message was clear: The East India Company did not want missionaries interfering in their territory. Period. However, after realizing that the group was made up of English Baptists and not French Papists, as reported in the newspaper, and that the group had escaped to Serampore, where it was out of the reach of the captain of the Criterion, the captain was allowed to unload his cargo and take on a new cargo of cotton.
All of this left William with a difficult decision to make. Should he finish the move to Kidderpore and the new indigo-dye factory, or should he go to Serampore, where Colonel Bie had given the missionaries permission to live and work under Danish protection?
William had good reasons for continuing with the move to Kidderpore. He had just invested all the money he had in the place. He had also already moved his family into their new home there and had set up the printing press. And he knew that the factory should produce enough indigo dye to more than adequately provide financially for his family and the growing mission work. And then there were the many people in the area who had given generously to help open mission schools throughout the Dinadjpur area. And even though there were not yet any Christian converts, many people had heard the gospel message preached, and William hoped for a breakthrough soon. And how could he give up his permit to work, knowing he would not be granted another one? Where would the money come from for them all to live if he couldn’t work?
