INDIA AND THE EAST IN THE YEAR 1806

Henry Martyn reached India, and entered on his official duties as chaplain and the work of his heart as missionary to North India, at a time when the Anglo-Indian community had begun to follow society in England, in a reformation of life and manners, and in a corresponding desire to do good to the natives. The evangelical reaction set in motion by the Pietists, Moravians, and Marrow-men, John Wesley and Whitfield, Andrew Fuller and Simeon, John Erskine and the Haldanes, had first affected South India and Madras, where Protestant Christian Missions were just a century old. The Danish-Halle men, led by Ziegenbalg and Schwartz, had found support in the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge from the year 1709. So early as 1716 an East India Company’s chaplain, the Rev. William Stevenson, wrote a remarkable letter to that society,[19] ‘concerning the most effectual way of propagating the Gospel in this (South India) part of the world.’ He urged a union of the several agencies in England, Denmark, and Germany into one common Society for Promoting the Protestant Missions, the formation of colleges in Europe to train missionaries, the raising of an annual income of 3,000l., and the maintenance therewith of a staff of at least eight well-qualified missionaries. By a century and a half he anticipated the proposal of that union which gives strength and charity; the erection of colleges, at Tranquebar and Madras, to train native ministers, catechists, and schoolmasters, and the opening of free schools in every considerable place superintended by the European missionaries on the circle system. Another Madras chaplain, the Rev. George Lewis, was no less friendly and helpful to Ziegenbalg; he was Mr. Stevenson’s predecessor, and wrote in 1712.

In North India—where the casteless races of the hills, corresponding to the Shanars around Cape Comorin, were not discovered till far on in the present century—almost everything was different. By the time that the Evangelical Church directed its attention to Calcutta, the East India Company had become a political, and consequently an intolerant, power. It feared Christian proselytism, and it encouraged Hindu and Mohammedan beliefs and institutions. Whereas, in Madras, it gladly used Schwartz, subsidised the mission with 500 pagodas or 225l. a year, and had always conveyed the missionaries’ freight in its ships free of charge, in Bengal it kept out missionaries, or so treated them with all the rigour of the law against ‘interlopers,’ that William Carey had to begin his career as an indigo planter, and seek protection in Danish Serampore, where he became openly and only a preacher and teacher of Christ. North India, too, with Calcutta and Benares as its two Hindu centres, and Lucknow and Delhi as its two Mohammedan centres, Shiah and Soonni, was, and is, the very citadel of all the non-Christian world. The same Gospel which had proved the power of God to the simple demonolators of the Dravidian south, must be shown to be the wisdom of God to the Koolin of Bengal, the Brahman of Kasi, the fanatical Muslim from Dacca, and ultimately to Peshawur and Cabul, Persia and Arabia. The Himalayan and Gangetic land—from which Buddhism overran Eastern and Southern Asia—must again send forth a missionary message to call Cathay to Christ.

The Christianising of North India began in 1758, the year after the battle of Plassey, when, as Governor, the conqueror, Clive, welcomed his old acquaintance, of the Cuddalore Mission, the Swede Kiernander, to Calcutta, and gave him a rent-free house for eight years. Even Burke was friendly with Clive, writing of him: ‘Lord Clive once thought himself obliged to me for having done what I thought an act of justice towards him;’[20] and it is pleasant thus to be able in any way to link that name with the purely spiritual force which used the Plassey and the Mutiny wars, as it will direct all events, for making India Christ’s. The first church, built in 1715 by the merchants and captains, had been destroyed by a hurricane; the second had been demolished by Suraj-ood-Dowlah, in the siege of Calcutta, two years before, and one of the two chaplains had perished in the Black Hole, while the other was driven away. For the next thirty years the few who went to the chaplains’ church worshipped in a small bungalow in the old fort, where Kiernander opened his first school. By 1771-4 he had formed such a congregation of poor Christians—Portuguese, Roman Catholics, and Bengali converts—that he built and extended the famous Mission Church and School-house, at a cost of 12,000l., received from both his marriages. When, by becoming surety for another, the old man lost his all, and blindness added to his sorrows, he left an English congregation of 147 members, and a Native congregation of 119, half Portuguese or Eurasians, and half Bengali.

Kiernander’s Mission Church was the centre of the religious life of Calcutta and Bengal. Six years after its foundation there came to Calcutta, from Madras, Mr. William Chambers—who had been converted by Schwartz—and John Christian Obeck, who had been one of the catechists of the Apostle of South India. Chambers had not been a year in the capital when he found out Charles Grant, at that time overwhelmed by a domestic sorrow, and brought him to Christ. Grant soon after went to Maldah as Commercial Resident, where he had as his subordinates, George Udny, Ellerton, W. Brown, W. Grant, J. Henry, and Creighton. These men, with their families, Sir Robert Chambers, of the Supreme Court, Mrs. Anne Chambers who was with her sons, Mrs. Chapman, and others less known, formed the nucleus of a Christian community which first supported Thomas as a medical missionary, then welcomed Carey, and, with the assistance of two Governor-Generals, Sir John Shore and Lord Wellesley, changed the tone of Anglo-Indian society. Sir William Jones, too, in his brief career of six years, set an example of all the virtues. Henry Martyn had two predecessors as Evangelical chaplains and missionary philanthropists, the Yorkshire David Brown, and the Scottish Claudius Buchanan.

David Brown, an early friend of Simeon and Fellow of Magdalen College, was recovering from a long illness in 1785, when a letter reached him from London, proposing that he should seek ordination, and in ten days he accompanied Captain Kirkpatrick to Calcutta to superintend the Military Orphan School. The officers of the Bengal Army had unanimously resolved to tax themselves for the removal and prevention of the scandal caused by the number of boys and girls left destitute—no fewer than 500 at that time. This noble school, the blessings of which were soon extended to the white and coloured offspring of non-commissioned officers and soldiers also, was organised at Howrah by Brown, who then was made chaplain to a brigade, and afterwards one of the Fort William or Presidency chaplains. He found the Mission practically non-existent, owing to Kiernander’s losses and old age. To save the buildings from sale by the sheriff, Charles Grant bought them for 10,000 rupees and vested them in himself, Mr. A. Chambers, and Mr. Brown, by a deed providing that they remain appropriated to the sole purposes of religion. Until the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge could send out a minister, David Brown greatly extended the work of Kiernander. At one time it was likely that Henry Martyn would be sent out by Mr. Grant. Under the Church Missionary Society the Mission Church of Calcutta has ever since been identified with all that is best in pure religion and missionary enterprise in the city of Calcutta.

When sending out the Rev. A.T. Clarke, B.A. of Trinity College, Cambridge, who soon after became a chaplain, the Christian Knowledge Society, referring to Schwartz and Germany, fertile in missionaries, declared, ‘It has been the surprise of many, and the lamentation of more, that fortitude thus exemplified should not have inspired some of our own clergy with an emulation to follow and to imitate these champions of the Cross, thus seeking and thus contending to save them who are lost.’ That was in 1789, when the Society and Dr. Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, along with Simeon, Wilberforce, and the other Clapham men, had before it, officially, the request of Charles Grant, Chambers and Brown to send out eight English missionaries on 350l. a year each, to study at Benares and attack Hinduism in its very centre. Not till 1817 was the first Church of England missionary, as such, the Rev. William Greenwood, to settle in Ceylon and then in Bengal. Even he became rather an additional chaplain to the invalid soldiers at Chunar.

After a career not unlike that of John Newton, who first directed his attention to India, Claudius Buchanan, whom his father had intended to educate for the ministry of the Church of Scotland, wandered to London, was sent to Queen’s College, Cambridge, by Mr. Thornton of Clapham; there came under Simeon’s influence, and was appointed to Bengal as a chaplain by Mr. Grant. That was in 1796. For the next ten years in Barrackpore and Calcutta as the trusted chaplain of Lord Wellesley, by his researches in South India, by his promotion of Bible translation, and by the interest in the Christianising of India which his generous prizes excited in the Universities and Churches of England and Scotland, Dr. Claudius Buchanan was the foremost ecclesiastic in the East. He at once gave an impulse to the silent revolution which David Brown began and the Serampore missionaries carried on. His Christian statesmanship commended him to all the authorities, and soon the new Cathedral of St. John, which Warren Hastings had erected to supersede the old Bungalow Church, became filled with an attentive and devout congregation, as well as the mission church. These two men and William Carey formed the pillars of the College of Fort William, by which Lord Wellesley not only educated the young civilians and military officers in the Oriental languages, and in their duties to the natives, but developed a high ideal of public life and personal morality. Such was the growth of Christian feeling alike in the army and the civil service, and such the sense of duty to the rapidly increasing Eurasian community, as well as to the natives, that by 1803 Claudius Buchanan submitted to the Governor-General, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Bishop Porteus, his Thoughts on the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India. It took ten years, covering the whole period of Henry Martyn’s activities and life, from this time for the proposal to be legislatively carried out in the East India Company’s Charter of 1813.

Practically—except in Maldah residency during the influence of Grant, Udny, and Carey at the end of last century—the reformation was confined to Calcutta, as we shall see. It was a young lieutenant of the Company’s army who was the first to draw the attention of the Governor-General, Sir John Shore, in 1794, to the total neglect of religion in Bengal. Lieutenant White wrote that he had been eleven years in the country without having had it in his power to hear the public prayers of the Church above five times. He urged the regular worship of God, the public performance of Divine service, and preaching at all the stations. He proposed ‘additional chaplains to the Company’s complement for considerable places which now have none to officiate. Unless places were erected at the different stations for assembling to Divine service, it must be impossible for chaplains even to be able to do their duty, and to assemble the people together.’ The letter delighted the Governor-General, who said of it to David Brown, ‘I shall certainly recommend places to be made at the stations, and shall desire the General who is going up the country to take this matter in charge, and to fix on spots where chapels shall be erected.’ Nothing was done in consequence of this, however. It was left to Martyn, and the other chaplains who were in earnest, to find or create covered places for worship at the great military stations. Claudius Buchanan himself could not hold regular services at Barrackpore, close to Calcutta, for want of a church, and that was supplied long after by adapting and consecrating the station theatre!

The figures in Buchanan’s published Memoir on the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment, enable us to estimate exactly the spiritual destitution of the Protestant subjects of the British Government in Asia. Twelve years after Lieutenant White, Sir John Shore, David Brown, and Claudius Buchanan first raised the question, and when Henry Martyn began his ministrations to all classes, there were 676,557 Protestant subjects in India, Ceylon, Java, Sumatra, and Canton, Roman Catholics and Syrian Christians not included. In the three Presidencies of India alone there were 156,057, of whom 7,257 were civil and military officers and inhabitants, 6,000 were the Company’s European troops, 19,800 were the King’s troops, 110,000 were Eurasians, and 13,000 were ‘native Protestant Christians at Tanjore.’ In Bengal alone—that is, North India—there were fifty stations, thirty-one civil and nineteen military, many of which had been ‘without the offices of religion for twenty years past, though at each there reside generally a judge, a collector, a commercial resident, with families, together with their assistants and families, and a surgeon;’ also indigo planters, tradesmen, and other European inhabitants and the alarmingly large number of Eurasians. In Bengal alone there were 13,299 European Protestants, of whom 2,467 were civil servants and military officers; of the whole 13,299, ‘a tenth part do not return to England,’ and desire Christian education and confirmation for their children. Yet ‘at present there are but three churches in India, the chief of which was aided in construction by Hindu contribution.’ The India Journals and Letters of Martyn must be read in the light of all this.

It was thus that the successive generations of soldiers and civilians who won for Christian England its Indian Empire in the century from Clive to Wellesley, Hastings, and Dalhousie, were de-Christianised. Not till the close of the Mutiny war in 1858 did John Lawrence, first as Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab and then as Viceroy, and Sir Robert Montgomery as Lieutenant-Governor, lead the Queen’s Government to do its duty, by erecting, or helping Christians to erect, a chapel in every station up to Peshawur and Burma—that, to use Buchanan’s language in 1806, ‘the English soldiers and our countrymen of all descriptions, after long absence from a Christian country, may recognise a church.’ Including Ceylon, Buchanan’s scheme proposed an annual expenditure of 144,000l. for four dioceses, with 50 English chaplains and 100 native curates, 200 schoolmasters and 4 colleges to train both Europeans and natives for the ministry; of this, Parliament to give 100,000l. The ecclesiastical establishment of India—without Ceylon, but including Church of Scotland chaplains, and grants to Wesleyans and Roman Catholics—now costs India itself 160,000l. a year, while the annual value of the lands devoted to the non-Christian cults is many millions sterling. With all this, and the aid of the Additional Clergy and Anglo-Indian Evangelisation Societies, and of the missionaries to the natives, Great Britain does not meet the spiritual wants of the now enormous number and scattered communities of Christian soldiers and residents in its Indian Empire.

Henry Martyn went out to India at a time when the government of India had been temporarily entrusted to one of the only three or four incompetent and unworthy men who have held the high office of Governor-General. Sir George Barlow was a Bengal civilian of the old type, whom Lord Wellesley had found so zealous and useful in matters of routine that he had recommended him as provisional Governor-General. But the moment that that proconsul had seated the East India Company on the throne of the Great Mogul, as has been said, and Lord Cornwallis, who had been hurried out a second time to undo his magnificent and just policy, had died at Ghazipore, Sir George Barlow showed the most disastrous zeal in opposition to all his former convictions. By withholding from Sindia the lamentable despatch of September 19, 1805, which Lord Cornwallis had signed when the unconsciousness of death had already weakened his efficiency, Lord Lake gave the civil authorities a final opportunity to consider their ways. But Barlow’s stupidity—now clothed with the almost dictator’s power of the highest office under the British Crown, as it was in those days—deliberately declared it to be his desire, not only to fix the limit of our empire at the Jumna, a river fordable by an enemy at all times, but to promote general anarchy beyond that frontier as the best security for British peace within it. The peace of Southern Asia and the good of its peoples were postponed for years, till, with difficulty, the Marquis of Hastings restored the empire to the position in which Lord Wellesley had left it. Sir George Barlow is responsible for the twelve years’ anarchy of British India, from 1805 to 1817. His administration, which became such a failure that he was removed to Madras, and was from even that province recalled, must rank as a blot on the otherwise unbroken splendour and benevolence to the subject races of the government of South Asia in the century and a half from Clive to Lord Lansdowne.

The man who, from dull stolidity more than from Macchiavellian craft, thus again plunged half India into a series of wars by chief upon chief and creed upon creed, was no less guilty of intolerance to Christianity within the Company’s territories. On the one hand, in opposition to the views of Lord Wellesley, and even of the Court of Directors led by Charles Grant, he made the Company’s government the direct manager of the Poori temple of Jaganath and its dancing girls; on the other, he would have banished the Serampore and all Christian missionaries from the country, but for the courageous opposition of the little Governor of that Danish settlement. All too late he was relieved by Lord Minto, whom the Brahmanised officials of 1807 to 1810 used for a final and futile effort to crush Christianity out of India, to the indignation of Henry Martyn, whose language in his Journal is not more unmeasured than the intolerance deserves. But in his purely foreign policy Lord Minto proved that he had not held the office of President of the Board of Control in vain. He once more asserted the only reason for the existence of a foreign power in India, ‘the suppression of intestine disorder,’ clearing Bundelkhund of robber chiefs and military strongholds. Surrounded and assisted by the brilliant civilians and military officers whom Wellesley and Carey had trained—men like Mountstuart Elphinstone, Metcalfe and Malcolm—Lord Minto proved equal to the strain which the designs of Napoleon Bonaparte in the Treaty of Tilsit put upon our infant empire in the East. He sent Metcalfe to Lahore, and confined the dangerous power of Ranjeet Singh to the north of the Sutlej. He despatched Elphinstone to Cabul, introducing the wise policy which has converted Afghanistan into a friendly subsidised State; and through Malcolm he opened Persia to English influence, paving the way for the embassy of Wellesley’s friend, Sir Gore Ouseley, and—unconsciously—for the kindly reception of Henry Martyn.

It was on April 22, 1806, at sunrise, that the young chaplain landed from the surf-boat on the sands of Madras. His experience at San Salvador had prepared him for the scene, and even for the crowds of dark natives, though not for ‘the elegance of their manners.’ ‘I felt a solemn sort of melancholy at the sight of such multitudes of idolators. While the turbaned Asiatics waited upon us at dinner, about a dozen of them, I could not help feeling as if we had got into their places.’ He visited the native suburb in which his Hindustani-speaking servants dwelt, and was depressed by its ‘appearance of wretchedness.’ His soul was filled with the zeal of the Old Testament prophets against idolatry, the first sight of which—of men, women, and children, mad upon their idols—produces an impression which he does not exaggerate: ‘I fancy the frown of God to be visible.’ He lost not a day in commending his Master to the people. ‘Had a good deal of conversation with a Rajpoot about religion, and told him of the Gospel.’ The young natives pressed upon the new-comer as usual. ‘Rose early, but could not enjoy morning meditations in my walk, as the young men would attach themselves to me.’

He was much in the society of the Rev. Dr. Kerr[21] and the other Madras chaplains; one of these was about to proceed to Seringapatam, where Martyn urged him to ‘devote himself to the work of preaching to the natives.’ This was ever foremost in his thoughts. He spent days in obtaining from Dr. Kerr ‘a vast deal of information about all the chaplains and missionaries in the country, which he promised to put in writing for me.’ Schwartz was not then dead ten years, and Dr. Kerr, who had known him and Guericke well, gave his eager listener many details of the great missionary.

On his first Sunday in India, April 27, 1806, Henry Martyn assisted in the service in the church at Fort St. George, and preached from Luke x. 41, 42, ‘One thing is needful.’

The ‘Lord William’ of the Journal is the Governor of Madras, Lord William Bentinck, whom, at the beginning of his Indian career, it is interesting to find thus pleasantly brought into contact with Henry Martyn—just as he became the fast friend of Alexander Duff, at the close of his long and beneficent services to his country and to humanity. In two months thereafter the Vellore Mutiny was to break out, through no fault of his, and he was to be recalled by an act of injustice for which George Canning and the Court of Directors atoned twenty years after by appointing him Governor-General.

After a fortnight off Madras, the Union once more set sail under the convoy of the Victor sloop-of-war. Every moment the young scholar had sought to add to his knowledge of Hindustani and Persian. He changed his first native servant for one who could speak Hindustani. He drove with Dr. Kerr to Mr. Faulkner’s, the Persian translator to Government. ‘We had some useful conversation about the languages.’ On the voyage to Calcutta, he was ‘employed in learning Bengali. Passed the afternoon on the poop reading Sale’s Al Coran.’ Only missionary thoughts and aspirations ruled his mind, now despairing of his own fitness; now refreshed as he turned from the Church Missionary Society’s reports to the evangelical prophecies of Malachi; again praying for the young missionaries of the London Society as he passed Vizagapatam, and for ‘poor India’ as he came in sight of the Jaganath pagoda, ‘much resembling in appearance Roche Rock in Cornwall ... the scene presented another specimen of that tremendous gloom with which the devil has overspread the land.’ After taking a pilot on board in Balasore Roads, where Carey had first landed, the ship was driven out to sea by a north-wester, and Henry Martyn suffered from his first sunstroke. In three days she anchored in the Hoogli, above Culpee, and on May 13 bumped on that dreaded shoal, the James and Mary. ‘The captain considered the vessel as lost. Retired as soon as possible for prayer, and found my soul in peace at the prospect of death.’ She floated off, exchanging most of the treasure into a tender which lay becalmed off the Garden Reach suburb, then ‘very beautiful.’

Henry Martyn landed at Calcutta in the height of the hot season, on May 16, 1806. Claudius Buchanan had passed him at the mouth of the Hoogli, setting out on the tour of the coasts of India, which resulted in the Christian Researches. David Brown was in his country retreat at Aldeen, near Serampore.

The man whom, next to his own colleagues, he first sought out was the quondam shoemaker of Hackleton, and poor Baptist preacher of Moulton, the Bengali missionary to whose success Charles Simeon had pointed him when fresh from the triumph of Senior Wrangler; the apostle then forty-five years of age, who was busy with the duties of Professor of Sanskrit, Bengali, and Marathi, in the College of Fort William, that he might have the Bible translated into all the languages of Asia, and preached in all the villages of North India.