CHAPTER III.

PREPARATION TIME.

Mr. and Mrs. Judson might well have been excused had they hesitated to settle in Rangoon, for the prospects before them in that place were anything but hopeful.  The Emperor of Burmah was an absolute monarch, and rumour gave him the credit of being unjust, tyrannical, grasping, capricious and cruel.  The people were described as “indolent, inhospitable, deceitful and crafty;” and in spite of the natural wealth of the land the majority of the inhabitants were miserably poor.  This was largely due to the fact that all property was held on the most uncertain tenure, everything being liable to be seized at any time by the emperor or by some of his officials.

More than one unsuccessful attempt had been made to form a missionary settlement in Rangoon previous to the arrival of the Judsons.  Preachers had been sent out from Serampore, and by the London Missionary Society; but none of them had been able to occupy the field for any length of time.  When the Judsons arrived there was only one other Christian teacher in Burmah, Mr. Felix Carey, who was then at Ava, the residence of the emperor.  Mrs. Carey, a native of the country, was staying at Rangoon, in a house built by the Serampore Baptist missionaries, and she welcomed the new-comers to her home, where they stayed for some months.

The first work to which the Judsons set themselves was the study of the Burmese tongue.  This was a task of extreme difficulty, for the only part of the language put into writing which would help them was a small portion of a grammar and six chapters of St. Matthew’s Gospel, which had been translated by Mr. Felix Carey.  Even with all the aids at present in use, Burman is anything but easy to acquire.  It has been called the “round O language,” on account of each word being made up of a number of small circles; and to an untrained eye the words seem almost exactly alike.  “The letters and words are all totally destitute of the least resemblance to any language we have ever met with,” Mr. Judson wrote to a friend in Salem, “and these words are not fairly divided and distinguished as in Western writing by breaks, and points, and capitals, but run together in one continuous line, a sentence or paragraph seeming to the eye but one long word; instead of clear characters on paper, we find only obscure scratches on palm leaves, strung together and called a book.  We have no dictionary and no interpreter to explain a single word, and must get something of the language before we can avail ourselves of the assistance of a native teacher....  It unavoidably takes several years to acquire such a language in order to converse and write intelligibly on the truths of the Gospel.”