I must not omit another anecdote of Mr. Martyn, which amused us
much at the time, after we had recovered the alarm attending it.
The salary of a chaplain is large, and Mr. Martyn had not drawn
his for so long a time, that the sum amounted perhaps to some
hundreds. He was to receive it from the collector at Cawnpore.
Accordingly he one morning sent a note for the amount, confiding
the note to the care of a common coolie, a porter of low caste,
generally a very poor man. This man went off, unknown to Mr.
Sherwood and myself, early in the morning. The day passed, the
evening came, and no coolie arrived. At length Mr. Martyn said
in a quiet voice to us, 'The coolie does not come with my money.
I was thinking this morning how rich I should be; and, now, I
should not wonder in the least if he has not run off, and taken
my treasure with him.' 'What!' we exclaimed, 'surely you have
not sent a common coolie for your pay?' 'I have,' he replied. Of
course we could not expect that it would ever arrive safe; for
it would be paid in silver, and delivered to the man in cotton
bags. Soon afterwards, however, it did arrive--a circumstance at
which we all greatly marvelled.
Cawnpore, of which Henry Martyn was chaplain for the next two years,
till disease drove him from it, was the worst station to which he
could have been sent. The district, consisting of clay uplands on the
Doab between the Ganges and the Jumna rivers, which unite below at
Allahabad, was at that time a comparatively desolate tract, swept by
the hot winds, and always the first to suffer from drought. The great
famine of 1837 afterwards so destroyed its unhappy peasantry and
labourers, that the British Government made its county town one of the
two terminals of the great Ganges canal, which the Marquis of
Dalhousie opened, and irrigated the district by four branches with
their distributing channels. Even then, and to this day, Cawnpore has
not ceased to be a repulsive station. Its leather factories and cotton
mills do not render it less so, nor the memory of the five massacres
of British officers, their wives and children, by the infamous Nana
Dhoondoo Panth, which still seems to cover it as with a pall,
notwithstanding the gardens and the marble screen inclosing the figure
of the Angel of the Resurrection with the palm of victory above the
Massacre Well. The people of the town at least have always been
disagreeable, from Hindu discontent and Mohammedan sulkiness. The
British cantonment used to be at Bilgram, on the opposite bank, in the
territory of Oudh. Well might Martyn write of such a station as
Cawnpore: 'I do not like this place at all,' although he then enjoyed
the social ministrations of the Sherwoods, and was constant in his own
service to the Master among British and natives alike, and at his desk
in translation work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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