The Book of Missionary Heroes Part 28

Sabat's knowledge of Persian was not really so good as he himself thought it was, and some of the Indian translators at Calcutta criticised his translation. At this he got furiously angry, and, like St. Peter, the fiery, impetuous apostle, he denied Jesus Christ and spoke against Christianity.

With his heart burning with rage and his great voice thundering with anger, Sabat left his friends, went aboard s.h.i.+p and sailed down the Bay of Bengal by the Indo-Chinese coast till he came to Penang, where he began to live as a trader.

But by this time the fire of his anger had burnt itself out. He--again like Peter--remembered his denial of his Master, and when he saw in a Penang newspaper an article saying that the famous Sabat, who had become a Christian and then become a Mohammedan again, had come to live in their city, he wrote a letter which was published in the newspaper at Penang declaring that he was now--and for good and all--a Christian.

A British officer named Colonel MacInnes was stationed at Penang.

Sabat went to him. "My mind is full of great sorrow," he said, "because I denied Jesus Christ. I have not had a moment's peace since Satan made me do that bad work. I did it for revenge. I only want to do one thing with my life: to spend it in undoing this evil that has come through my denial."

Sabat left the house of the Mohammedan with whom he was living in Penang. He found an old friend of his named Johannes, an Armenian Christian merchant, who had lived in Madras in the very days when Sabat first became a Christian. Every night Johannes the Armenian and Sabat the Arab got out their Bibles, and far into the night Sabat would explain their meaning to Johannes.

_The Prince from Sumatra_

One day all Penang was agog with excitement because a brown Prince from Acheen, a Malay State in the island of Sumatra, had suddenly sailed into the harbour. He was in flight from his own land, where rebels had attacked him. The people of Acheen were wild and ferocious; many of them were cannibals.

"I will join you in helping to recover your throne," said Sabat to the fugitive Prince. "I am going," said Sabat to Colonel MacInnes, "to see if I can carry the message of Christianity to this fierce people."

So Sabat and the Prince, with others, went aboard a sailing s.h.i.+p and crossed the Strait of Malacca to Sumatra. They landed, and for long the struggle with the rebels swayed from side to side. The Prince was so pleased with Sabat that he made him his Prime Minister. But the struggle dragged on and on; there seemed to be no hope of triumph. At last Sabat decided to go back to Penang. One day he left the Prince and started off, but soldiers of the rebel-chief Syfoolalim captured him.

Great was the joy of the rebels--their powerful enemy was in their hands! They bound him, threw him into a boat, hoisted him aboard a sailing s.h.i.+p and clapped him in the stifling darkness of the hold. As he lay there he pierced his arm to make it bleed, and, with the blood that came out, wrote on a piece of paper that was smuggled out and sent to Penang to Colonel MacInnes.

The agonies that Sabat suffered in the gloom and filth of that s.h.i.+p's hold no one will ever know. We can learn from the words that he wrote in the blood from his own body that they loaded worse horrors upon him because he was a Christian. All the scene is black, but out of the darkness comes a voice that makes us feel that Sabat was faithful at the end. In his last letter to Colonel MacInnes he told how he was now ready (like his friend Abdallah) to die for the sake of that Master whom he had in his rage denied.

Then one day his cruel gaolers came to the hold where he lay, and, binding his limbs, thrust him into a sack, which they then closed. In the choking darkness of the sack he was carried on deck and dragged to the side of the s.h.i.+p. He heard the lapping of the waves. He felt himself lifted and then hurled out into the air, and down--down with a crash into the waters of the sea, which closed over him for ever.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 58: The inn of the Near East--a square courtyard with all the doors and windows inside, with primitive stables and bunks for the camelmen, and sometimes rooms for the well-to-do travellers.]

[Footnote 59: p.r.o.nounce Vi-zah'-ga-pat-ahm.]

[Footnote 60: The Arabic New Testament revised by Solomon Negri and sent to India by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge in the middle of the eighteenth century.]

[Footnote 61: Baptized "Nathaniel" at Madras by the Rev. Dr Kerr.]

CHAPTER XXIV

A RACE AGAINST TIME

_Henry Martyn_

(Dates, b. 1781, d. 1812. Time of Incident 1810-12)

In the story of Sabat that was told in the previous chapter you will remember that, for a part of the time that he lived in India, he worked with an Englishman named Henry Martyn.

Sabat was almost a giant; Henry Martyn was slight and not very strong.

Yet--as we shall see in the story that follows--Henry Martyn was braver and more constant than Sabat himself.

As a boy Henry, who was born and went to school in Truro, in Cornwall, in the West of England, was violently pa.s.sionate, sensitive, and physically rather fragile, and at school was protected from bullies by a big boy, the son of Admiral Kempthorne.

He left school at the age of fifteen and shot and read till he was seventeen. In 1797 he became an undergraduate at St. John's College, Cambridge. He was still very pa.s.sionate.

For instance, when a man was "ragging" him in the College Hall at dinner, he was so furious that he flung a knife at him, which stuck quivering in the panelling of the wall. Kempthorne, his old friend, was at Cambridge with him. They used to read the Bible together and Martyn became a real Christian and fought hard to overcome his violent temper.

He was a very clever scholar and became a Fellow of Jesus College in 1802. He at that time took orders in the Church of England. He became very keen on reading about missionary work, e.g. Carey's story of nine years' work in _Periodical Accounts_, and the L.M.S. Report on Vanderkemp in South Africa. "I read nothing else while it lasted," he said of the Vanderkemp report.

He was accepted as a chaplain of the East India Company. They could not sail till Admiral Nelson gave the word, because the French were waiting to capture all the British s.h.i.+ps. Five men-of-war convoyed them when they sailed in 1805. They waited off Ireland, because the immediate invasion of England by Napoleon was threatened. On board Martyn worked hard at Hindustani, Bengali and Portuguese. He already knew Greek, Latin and Hebrew. He arrived at Madras (South India) and Calcutta and thence went to Cawnpore. It is at this point that our yarn begins.

A voice like thunder, speaking in a strange tongue, shouted across an Indian garden one night in 1809.

The new moon, looking "like a ball of ebony in an ivory cup,"--as one who was there that night said--threw a cold light over the palm trees and aloes, on the man who was speaking and on those who were seated around him at the table in the bungalow.

Beyond the garden the life of Cawnpore moved in its many streets; the shout of a donkey-driver, the shrill of a bugle from the barracks broke sharply through the m.u.f.fled sounds of the city. The June wind, heavy with the waters of the Ganges which flows past Cawnpore, made the night insufferably hot. But the heat did not trouble Sabat, the wild son of the Arabian desert, who was talking--as he always did--in a roaring voice that was louder than most men's shouting. He was telling the story of Abdallah's brave death as a Christian martyr.[62]

Quietly listening to Sabat's voice--though he could not understand what he was saying--was a young Italian, Padre Julius Caesar, a monk of the order of the Jesuits. On his head was a little skull-cap, over his body a robe of fine purple satin held with a girdle of twisted silk.

Near him sat an Indian scholar--on his dark head a full turban, and about him richly-coloured robes. On the other side sat a little, thin, copper-coloured Bengali dressed in white, and a British officer in his scarlet and gold uniform, with his wife, who has told us the story of that evening.

Not one of these brightly dressed people was, however, the strongest power there. A man in black clothes was the real centre of the group.

Very slight in build, not tall, clean-shaven, with a high forehead and sensitive lips, young Henry Martyn seemed a stripling beside the flaming Arab. Yet Sabat, with all his sound and fury, was no match for the swift-witted, clear-brained young Englishman. Henry Martyn was a chaplain in the army of the East India Company, which then ruled in India.

He was the only one of those who were listening to Sabat who could understand what he was saying. When Sabat had finished his story, Martyn turned, and, in his clear, musical voice translated it from the Persian into Latin mixed with Italian for Padre Julius Caesar, into Hindustani for the Indian scholar, into Bengali for the Bengal gentleman, and into English for the British officer and his wife.

Martyn could also talk to Sabat himself both in Arabic and in Persian.

As Martyn listened to the rolling sentences of Sabat, the Christian Arab, he seemed to see the lands beyond India, away across the Khyber Pa.s.s, where Sabat had travelled--Mesopotamia, Arabia, Persia.

Henry Martyn knew that in all those lands the people were Mohammedans.

He wanted one thing above everything else in the world: that was to give them all the chance of doing what Sabat and Abdallah had done--the chance of reading in their own languages the one book in the world that could tell them that G.o.d was a Father--the book of letters and of biographies that we call the New Testament.

_The Toil of Brain_

There was not in the world a copy of the New Testament in good Persian. To make one Henry Martyn slaved hard, far into the hot, sultry Indian nights, with scores of mosquitoes "pinging" round his lamp and his head, grinding at his Persian grammar, so that he could translate the life of Jesus Christ into that language.

Even while he was listening to Sabat's story in the bungalow at Cawnpore, Martyn knew that he was so ill that he could not live for many years more. The doctor said that he must leave India for a time to be in a healthier place. Should he go home to England, where all his friends were? He wanted that; but much more he wanted to go on with his work. So he asked the doctor if he might go to Persia on the way home, and he agreed.

So Martyn went down from Cawnpore to Calcutta, and in a boat down the Hoogli river to the little Arab coasting sailing s.h.i.+p the _Hummoudi_, which hoisted sail and started on its voyage round India to Bombay.

Martyn read while on board the Old Testament in the original Hebrew and the New Testament in the original Greek, so that he might understand them better and make a more perfect translation into Persian. He read the Koran of Mohammed so that he could argue with the Persians about it. And he worked hard at Arabic grammar, and read books in Persian. Yet he was for ever cracking jokes with his fellow travellers, cooped up in the little s.h.i.+p on the hot tropical seas.

From Bombay the governor granted Martyn a pa.s.sage up the Persian Gulf in the _Benares_, a s.h.i.+p in the Indian Navy that was going on a cruise to finish the exciting work of hunting down the fierce Arab pirates of the Persian Gulf. So on Lady Day, 1811, the sailors got her under weigh and tacked northward up the Gulf, till at last, on May 21, the roofs and minarets of Bus.h.i.+re hove in sight. Martyn, leaning over the bulwarks, could see the town jutting out into the Gulf on a spit of sand and the sea almost surrounding it. That day he set foot for the first time on the soil of Persia.

_Across Persia on a Pony_

Aboard s.h.i.+p Martyn had allowed his beard and moustache to grow. When he landed at Bus.h.i.+re he bought and wore the clothes of a Persian gentleman, so that he should escape from attracting everybody's notice by wearing clothes such as the people had never seen before.