Noble Deeds of American Women: With Biographical Sketches of Some of the More Prominent
History
Noble Deeds of American Women: With Biographical Sketches of Some of the More Prominent
Women -- United States -- Biography
"It was on the eighth of June, 1824, that a company of Burmans, headed
by an officer, and attended by a 'spotted-faced son of the prison,' came
to the mission house, and, in the presence of Mrs. Judson seized her
husband and Dr. Price, and after binding them tight with cords, drove
them away to the court house. From this place they were hurried, by
order of the king, without examination, to a loathsome dungeon, known as
'the death prison,' where along with the other foreigners they were
confined, each loaded with three pairs of fetters and fastened to a long
pole, so as to be incapable of moving. Meanwhile, Mrs. Judson was shut
up in her house, deprived of her furniture and of most of her articles
of property, and watched for several days by an unfeeling guard, to
whose rapacious extortions and brutal annoyances she was constantly
exposed, without being able to make any exertion for the liberation of
the prisoners, or the mitigation of their cruel sentence. She however,
at length succeeded in addressing a petition to the governor of the
city, who had the prisoners in charge. By a present of one hundred
dollars to his subordinate officer, their condition was somewhat
meliorated, and by the unwearied perseverance of Mrs. Judson, and her
affecting appeals to the sympathies of the governor, he was induced to
grant her occasional permission to go to the prison, and at length to
build for herself a bamboo shed in the prison yard, where she took up
her abode, in order that she might prepare food for the prisoners, and
otherwise minister to their necessities.
"At the end of nine months they were suddenly removed from Ava to
Amarapura, and thence to a wretched place several miles beyond, called
Oung-pen-la, where it was arranged that they should be put to death in
presence of the pakah-woon, as a kind of sacrifice in honor of his
taking command of a new army of fifty thousand men about to march
against the English. This sanguinary chief had been raised from a low
condition to the rank of woongyee; but in the height of his power, just
as he was about to march at the head of the army he had mustered, he
fell into disgrace, was charged with treason, and executed, at an hour's
notice, with the unqualified approbation of all classes of people at
Ava. His timely execution saved the missionaries from the fate which
hung over them, and they were left uncared for in the miserable cells of
Oung-pen-la, till the near approach of the English to the capitol
induced the king to send for Mr. Judson, to accompany the embassy that
was about to start for the English camp, for the purpose of averting the
destruction that now threatened the Golden City.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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