Joshua Marshman hung his head. Large tears rolled down his cheeks onto his shirt. “We did lose everything,” he said.
“But…” William’s voice trailed off. He could think of nothing to say.
When Joshua Marshman regained his composure, he continued with the story. “After the fire had died down, William Ward and I left. He had some papers he wanted to move out of his office just in case there was any looting during the night. I took the schoolboys back to their dormitory. They had been helping fight the fire, and it was well past their bedtime.
“No one is quite sure who did it, but while we were away, somebody opened all the doors and windows in the print shop. With a tremendous whoosh, the fire leapt back to life and spread quickly. By the time William Ward and I got back, the whole building was well ablaze, and the wind had picked up, fanning the flames and sending sparks onto the school buildings. I got the children up again, and about a hundred of us formed bucket lines to get water to the fire, but it wasn’t much help. Finally, about two o’clock this morning, the fire burned itself out. But the damage is done. The whole print shop and everything in it is ruined.”
“I must see what can be done,” said William, after a long silence. “You wait here while I tell the provost what has happened and ask to be released from my lectures.”
An hour later they were rowing back up the Hooghly River toward Serampore. The Reverend Thomason, the college chaplain, had been sent with the two missionaries to help in any way he could.
The scene that greeted William as he stepped from the boat was dreadful beyond words. Where the print shop had stood there was now a tangle of charred wood mixed with pieces of twisted iron and clumps of still smoldering paper. Thin pillars of smoke rose into the air. Everyone stopped what he was doing as William walked silently around the charred remains. As he walked, William wept quietly. Then he turned to Joshua Marshman and said, “In one short evening, the labors of years are consumed. How unsearchable are the ways of God!”
William Ward came out of the mission house to greet William.
“Was nothing saved?” William asked him.
“The news is better than we first thought,” he replied. “The press itself survived the fire and, with a little work, can be made to print again. And there are about four thousand letters of typeface unharmed. Some of the paper in the middle of the stacks is also still usable.”
“But the manuscripts?” William asked in a whisper, knowing in his heart what the answer would be.
“The manuscripts are all burned. I am so sorry,” replied William Ward, taking William Carey gently by the arm. “Come inside. Charlotte is anxious to see you.” He steered William Carey away from the destruction and into the house. Inside, William’s wife was lying on the couch, as she often was. When she saw William, she reached for his hand. William sat on the floor beside her, and together they wept.
That evening, William and the missionaries met to go over all that had been lost in the fire: the final draft of the multilanguage dictionary, the Sikh and Telugu grammars, ten versions of the Bible that were in various stages of being printed, a translation and interpretation of Hindu religious writing that William and Joshua Marshman had been working on for over six years, many sets of hand-cut type fonts in various Asian languages, and hundreds of reams of paper.
“All in all,” William told his fellow missionaries, “I estimate between nine and ten thousand pounds worth of goods went up in flames last night.” (Of course, there was no way to put a price on the manuscripts of the various translations William had completed, which had been in the print shop waiting to be printed.) “However,” he continued, “we must not let this bring us down. We must stay the course, trusting God, who had brought us safe thus far. We can rebuild and replace what has been lost.”
It took four days before the remains of the print shop were cool enough to search thoroughly. Each fragment of paper was carefully brought to William to be identified. Some pieces were pages from his translations. William gently laid these pages in boxes to be recopied later.
As they combed through the remains, they were not able to determine what had caused the fire. Nor were they able to find out who had opened the doors and windows in the print shop, allowing the fire to be fanned back to life.
The Indian servants were surprised by how quickly the missionaries started to rebuild. They had assumed the missionaries would simply pack up and leave after the fire.
News of the disaster quickly spread throughout the district. Help began to pour in. William’s students at the college took up a collection for him. George Udney, who had originally donated the printing press, was again living in India, and he also made a donation. Altogether, this money amounted to almost nine hundred pounds.
It took six months for news of the fire to reach Great Britain, but when it did, Christians there sprung into action. William Carey and the printing press were the topic of conversation and prayer in nearly every church in the nation. It was the first time many people in England had heard of William, and what they heard interested them. Individuals and churches gave what they could toward rebuilding the print shop. The Baptist church in Moulton, where William had been pastor, gave fifty pounds, while churches in Edinburgh banded together to raised eight hundred pounds. William Wilberforce, the antislavery campaigner, sent ten pounds, and the Bible Society, which had been formed in 1804, donated two thousand reams of paper.
Within two months of news of the fire reaching England, ten thousand pounds had been collected, much of it coming from Anglican churches as well as Baptist and other denominations. By Christmas, Andrew Fuller had to send out letters on behalf of the missionary society telling people that enough money had been collected to replace everything destroyed by the fire and that they need not send any more.
Everywhere members of the missionary society committee went in England, they were asked to show a portrait of William Carey. People had heard so much about him, but they wanted to see what he looked like. However, there was no portrait of William. So Andrew Fuller wrote to William Ward and asked him to arrange for one to be painted. William Ward contacted Robert Home, supposedly the best artist in Asia, and with reluctance, William posed while his picture was painted. He chose to be painted sitting at a desk, surrounded by papers and books, with an assistant at his side and a Sanskrit translation in his hand.
William Ward had the portrait sent back to England, where engravings of it were made. The committee then sold the engravings for one pound each. The profit from sales went to the missionaries in the Serampore mission.
Soon portraits of William Carey hung in churches and homes across Great Britain. It was a good thing William never found out how many engravings of himself had been sold. He would have been embarrassed to think that so many people wanted the picture of a bald, fifty-two-year-old missionary hanging in their parlor!
The fire in Serampore and subsequent fund-raising in Great Britain had another effect. People who had not cared about missionaries before now began to question the East India Company’s policy of not allowing more missionaries into India. Indeed, while William Carey, William Ward, and Joshua Marshman had been in India for many years and had powerful friends there and in England, the East India Company was still officially opposed to missionaries. It had demonstrated this opposition over the years by refusing to allow into India a group of five families from North America who had come to join the Serampore mission and by deporting Dr. William Johns, who had come to India to work alongside the missionaries.
William Wilberforce, who had successfully campaigned to abolish slavery on British soil, led the fight against the East India Company. Everywhere he went, he spoke out for sending more missionaries to India. “Now that the slave trade is abolished, the exclusion of missionaries from India is by far the greatest of our national sins,” was his battle cry.
Churches all over Great Britain joined the fight, and in 1813, William Wilberforce presented to Parliament a petition with over half a million signatures, all urging that more missionaries be allowed into India.
The petition led to a long debate in Parliament. Men who had been past governors-general of India were asked to testify. Lord Wellesley spoke up on behalf of missionaries, using all the good done by the Serampore Triad as evidence of the value of the work of missionaries. Other men tried to stir up suspicion and fear. What if missionaries ended up causing riots? they asked. Or what if they insulted the local religions and disturbed the peace? And worse, what if trade was interrupted as a result of their actions?
In the course of the debate, William Wilberforce gave a speech in which he described William Carey’s contributions to literature, translation work, cultural understanding, horticulture, and agriculture. It seemed, however, to be the fact that William gave all of his fifteen-hundred-pound salary to the mission that really impressed the politicians! In the end, William Wilberforce won the day, and on June 28, 1813, the charter of the East India Company was amended to say that it was the duty of Britain to “promote the happiness of the Indian people” and that a part of doing this was to offer them “useful religious and moral teachings.”
The way was finally open for missionaries to travel freely to and around India. William Carey received the news in the best way possible. His brother Tom’s youngest son, Eustace, was the first person issued a license to be a missionary in India. Eustace arrived and presented himself to his uncle William for service.
Chapter 16
Growing Pains
The act of Parliament that amended the charter of the East India Company and allowed for the free flow of missionaries into India brought many opportunities to the Serampore mission. For the first time, the governor-general was allowed to officially request missionary help. Within weeks of receiving notification of the new law, the governor-general at the time, Lord Moira, asked William to visit him to ask William for missionaries to be sent to the Moluccan island of Amboyna on the other side of the Bay of Bengal.
William rushed back to Serampore to share the good news and ask for a volunteer to go. To his surprise, his nineteen-year-old son, Jabez, took up the call. Within three days, Jabez was baptized, ordained as a Baptist minister, married, and ready to go! His brother Felix, himself married with three children, was visiting Serampore at the time and was able to participate in the service to commission Jabez for his new calling.
Felix knew what it was like to go out alone as a missionary. Several years earlier he had set out from Serampore and gone to Burma, where he had established his own mission station. He had his father’s gift for languages and translated portions of the Bible into Burmese. He also compiled a dictionary of the Burmese language.
Before leaving for Burma, he had also become interested in medicine and had read about Edward Jenner’s daring experiment in 1796 with the first smallpox vaccine. After he arrived in Burma, Felix became convinced that the Burmese people were likely to catch many deadly diseases as their contact with people from other places grew. He convinced the king of Burma to let him give smallpox vaccinations to the local people. At that time, this represented the most widespread use of a vaccine in the world. When it proved successful, Felix Carey became well-known in Burma.
Sadly, though, on the trip back to Burma after visiting Serampore, the boat in which Felix and his family were traveling capsized in a storm. Felix was the only one who made it to shore. The rest of his family were drowned. A printing press, copies of the Gospels in Burmese, and the only copy of his Burmese dictionary were also lost. The loss of his family sent Felix into deep depression, from which he took a long time to recover.
