As the day wore on, news traveled quickly around the village. Soon, astonished neighbors were visiting Dolly and Kitty to see for themselves that they were really packing to go to India.
While Dr. Thomas helped with the packing, William set out a second time for Northampton. This time, he sang hymns as he walked. John Ryland was thrilled to hear that the whole family would be going with William to India. However, he had not collected any more money for the group. He did have two hundred pounds of his own in the bank, but it was Saturday, and he would not be able to get the money until ten o’clock Monday morning.
William groaned. The Kron Princessa Maria might have come and gone by then. After much discussion, John Ryland came up with a plan. He had several rich friends in London who he felt sure would have two hundred pounds tucked away between them. Hurriedly, John Ryland wrote letters asking his friends to lend the money to William and promising to repay it before the end of the week.
There was no time to lose. William thanked his friend and half walked and half ran back to Piddington. By the time he arrived, the family was packed. Early the next morning, the whole family and Dr. Thomas boarded a stagecoach bound for London.
Dolly peered out the window as the familiar sights that had surrounded her all her life disappeared from view and were replaced with lanes and villages she had never seen before. Kitty reached out and gave her sister’s hand a reassuring squeeze as the coach rumbled along.
William, with Peter sitting on his knee, looked out the window, too, but he was not thinking of the scene flashing before him. He was doing math—the same math—over and over. He had one hundred fifty pounds in his pocket from Captain White’s refund, and he had two hundred pounds to collect in London. That made a total of three hundred fifty pounds. But there were now four adults sailing to India at one hundred pounds each. That made four hundred pounds, plus four children at fifty pounds each. Altogether their passage to India would cost six hundred pounds, two hundred fifty pounds more than he had!
William took a deep breath as he wondered what to do. How ironic it would be, he thought, if after convincing Dolly to travel to India with him, they could not leave because there wasn’t enough money for her passage. Finally, William prayed a silent prayer. “God, You have brought me this far. You have even got Dolly and the children to come. Surely You will show us a way to get to India.”
The group arrived in London on Sunday evening. William had no difficulty in finding one of John Ryland’s friends who was willing to lend him the two hundred pounds. As soon as he arrived back with the money, Dr. Thomas took it and the refunded one hundred fifty pounds and went to see the ship’s agent. Being Dr. Thomas, he had another plan, a plan that he’d discussed with no one but Kitty. Several hours later he returned, waving eight tickets, one for each of them.
“How did you do it?” asked William, with a broad smile.
“I think the agent was impressed with a whole family traveling together. I asked him if Kitty and I might travel as your servants, and he asked me how much money we actually had for the passages. When I said three hundred fifty pounds, he told me India needed missionaries and that a man should not be separated from his family, so if that was all the money we had, then it was enough to get us there. We are bound for India!”
“When does the ship sail?” asked William, after he had examined each of the tickets.
“We must hurry. She sets sail from Dover tomorrow afternoon on the high tide.”
William gasped. It was impossible for them to make it on time, and what about the luggage they had left in Portsmouth?
Dr. Thomas reached into his pocket and pulled out some more tickets. “I called on an old friend, and he gave me enough money to buy the rest of you ferry tickets to Dover.”
“And what about you?” asked William.
“I intend to leave this very minute for Portsmouth to collect the baggage. If God blesses me, I will meet you in Dover with it tomorrow.”
Chapter 8
A Course to India
Dr. Thomas made it to Dover in time with the baggage, which was now stowed safely below deck. The crew was busy making the ship ready to sail. Sailors in the rigging above were unfurling the mainsail. Others were busily stowing or lashing to the deck barrels and crates of all shapes and sizes. Finally, the captain bellowed the order: “Cast off!”
The fore and aft lines that had held the ship securely against the quay were let go, and the Kron Princessa Maria began to drift to sea. William watched as the bustle of people on the quay got smaller and smaller. For the second time in a month, he was setting sail for India, only this time his wife and four sons were standing next to him on the aft deck.
As the ship made its way out into the Straits of Dover, the British frigate Triton was waiting. The Triton had been hired to escort the Kron Princessa Maria through the English Channel and on into the Bay of Biscay. While the Danes were not at war with the French, and therefore were free of the threat of attack, the truth was that the French privateers sometimes got carried away and plundered any ship that was not French.
As the Triton sailed in next to them, William watched the chalky white cliffs of Beachy Head fade from view, and with them, the last glimpse he and his family would ever have of their homeland.
In his journal that night, William wrote: “Thursday, June 13, 1793, on board the Kron Princessa Maria. This has been a day of gladness to my soul. I was returned that I might take all my family with me and enjoy all the blessings which I had surrendered to God.”
William spent the next few days with the oldest three boys—Felix, William Jr., and Peter—exploring from stem to stern the one-hundred-thirty-foot long schooner that would be their home on the journey to India. They explored above deck and below, checking out what was stored in the ship’s hold, and climbing around the rigging, being careful not to slip or go too high. They peered over the side of the ship as William explained how the hulls of most modern ships, like the Kron Princessa Maria, had a copper sheet over their wooden planks. This meant that the ships could go much faster, even making it to India and back in twelve months!
For William and the boys, the voyage was a great adventure. But not for Dolly and Kitty. The week before they had been happily adjusting to life together in their home village of Piddington, not more than a mile from where they were born. Now they were on a ship, pitching and turning in the open ocean, and far away from the safety of their home. Dolly didn’t even like to go up on deck; the vastness of the ocean without a speck of land in sight scared her. And the sound of the crew talking to each other in Danish and Norwegian reminded her that she was leaving the English language behind as well.
Besides Dolly and Kitty, there was one other woman on board, a Black woman who stayed and ate with the crew. She was the first Black person Dolly had ever seen, and the sight of the woman’s flashing white eyes frightened her.
Captain Christmas, an Englishman who had taken Danish citizenship, was very kind. Even though the missionaries had not paid nearly as much as the other four passengers aboard (two Frenchmen and two Englishmen), the captain did his best to make the voyage comfortable for William and his family. He gave them the largest cabin, which William wrote was “half the width of the ship with south windows and papered sides [walls].” He even invited them all to eat at the captain’s table, where each evening for the first few weeks of the voyage they feasted on three-course dinners that included at least two types of meat and a large dessert. They were eating better food than they had in their entire lives. Instead of wasting away at sea, as Dolly had feared, the family got stronger everyday. Little Jabez got so fat that his father took to calling him his “stout fellow.”
Once the ship was safely across the Bay of Biscay and headed out into the Atlantic Ocean, William’s life at sea settled into a routine. William held a prayer meeting in his cabin each morning and night, with much of the rest of his day spent learning the Bengali language from Dr. Thomas. Although Dr. Thomas didn’t know all the ins and outs of the complicated language, he shared William’s passion to see the Bible written down in the various Indian languages. The two men worked together translating the Book of Genesis into Bengali. William’s knowledge of Hebrew was a great help in the process. In his spare time, William took notes from the one hundred or so botanical books and magazines he had brought along with him.
As the ship approached the equator, the days got steadily hotter, and as they did so, William made a personal decision. He was leaving England behind him and starting a new life in a foreign country, and no matter what, he wasn’t going to begin this new life wearing his hot, scratchy wig! It was time for the wig to go. One morning before the rest of the family was up, William climbed the stairs to the aft deck and flung his wig overboard into the Atlantic Ocean. How good it felt to be rid of it. The breeze blew gently over William’s bald head. When Dr. Thomas came up on deck and saw William, he laughed with relief. He said, “Mr. Wilson of Olney [who made the wig for William] is an excellent Christian, but he is one of the worst wigmakers that ever was born!” Both men laughed heartily.
Besides spending time with his family and Dr. Thomas, William became very friendly with Captain Christmas, a well-educated man who delighted in showing William how he plotted their course to India. William had been interested in navigation ever since reading about how Captain Cook had used a Harrison chronometer to plot latitude. William would watch as the captain used his sextant to take readings from the stars at night and the sun during the day. Then from the readings, Captain Christmas would show how he calculated the ship’s position on the large map rolled out on the table in the corner of his cabin.
The course the captain had plotted for the Kron Princessa Maria took them down the northwest coast of Africa until they caught the northwesterly trade winds. They would use these winds to take them across the Atlantic Ocean almost to South America. Once they reached Trinidad Island off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, they would pick up the southeasterly winds, which would take them across the South Atlantic, past the tiny island of Tirstan da Cunha—their most southerly point on the journey—and then due east past the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa and on into the Indian Ocean. There the Kron Princessa Maria would again pick up the southeasterly winds, which would push her all the way to the equator, not far off the coast of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). There the northwesterly monsoon winds would fill the sails and drive them all the way into the Bay of Bengal and on to Calcutta, which lay at the northern end of the bay.
If everything went according to plan, the whole journey should take about five months. However, the winds were seasonal, and if they arrived too late to catch a trade wind, they would have to wait six months until the winds began blowing in the right direction again.
At the Cape of Good Hope, the ship was scheduled to dock for several days at Cape Town. As they neared the cape, William and Dr. Thomas busied themselves writing letters to mail when they docked. But Captain Christmas was getting anxious. The winds were not as strong as they usually were, and time was running out. They had to make it across the Bay of Bengal before the end of the monsoon season in early October. As a result, the ship did not put in at Cape Town but kept straight on going out into the Indian Ocean. William stuffed the letters to his father and the missionary society committee back into his pouch. He would just have to mail them when he got to India.
Dolly wasn’t happy about this. No one had told her she would be aboard ship for five months without once getting off to feel land beneath her feet! It’s just as well they didn’t stop in Cape Town, however, because had Dolly Carey known what lay ahead, she would have insisted on being left behind there.
