William Carey Sails for India

The tide at Dartmouth stinks of tar and low water when I first see them, three trunks and a milk goat, and a woman crying without moving her face. I am hauling a rope coil across the wet planks of the Danish ship Kron Princessa Maria, and I stop because a crying woman is more interesting than rope. Her name, I will learn within the hour, is Dorothy Carey, and beside her stand four boys, the smallest barely weaned, and a man in a plain black coat who keeps touching the rail of the gangway like he cannot quite believe it will bear his weight.

His name is William Carey. He does not look like a man setting out to conquer anything. He looks like what he was before all this, a man who mended shoes for a living and read Greek grammar propped against his cobbler's last, teaching himself letters no one in his village could check him on. I hear this from the ship's mate, who has it from the other Englishman traveling with them, a doctor named Thomas who has been to India before and speaks of Bengal the way other men speak of their own front garden.

It is the thirteenth day of June, seventeen hundred and ninety-three, and the reason this family stands on Danish planking instead of an English deck is a story the crew already knows before the anchor comes up. The English company that rules trade with India, the great East India Company, wants no missionaries crossing to its territory. No ship of theirs will carry a man like Carey. Every English captain who might have taken him has found some reason not to. So the passage falls to us, a Danish vessel under a flag the Company cannot forbid, and I think even then that there is something almost comic in it, that the door to India for an Englishman's gospel opens only through a foreign hull.

Thomas tells it better than I can, later, leaning on a coil of cable in the evening heat somewhere past Madeira. He says the two of them met for the first time back in January, in Mr. Fuller's study in Kettering, a committee sitting late into the night deciding whether Carey should go. He says he had heard of this cobbler-preacher and could not wait for morning, burst into the room while the men were still talking, and when Carey rose from his chair the two of them fell on each other's necks and wept like brothers who had been parted twenty years instead of never having met at all. I did not see it. But I believed him, because I saw the same thing happen a dozen times crossing that ocean, this readiness in both men to weep over the work in front of them.

What I did see, because he told me himself one still night when the wind had dropped and there was nothing to do but talk, was his father's face when he announced he meant to go. Old Mr. Carey said only four words: William, are you mad. Carey laughed telling it, though there was no real laughter in it, the kind of laugh a man makes when a wound has healed crooked but healed. His father had been a parish clerk, and his grandfather too, good Church of England men who thought dissenters beneath contempt, and here was the son gone over to the Baptists and now sailing off the edge of everything they understood as sense.

Dorothy's opposition ran deeper and lasted longer, and I think it is the part of the story the crew spoke of with the most quiet respect, because none of us doubted what it cost her. She had said, flat as a nail driven true, that she and the children would stay in England whatever came. Carey had resigned himself to sailing without her, taking only the eldest boy, Felix, and leaving the rest under the Society's care, a plan that sat in his chest like a stone by every account I heard. It was only at the last, some turn of heart nobody aboard could fully explain to me, that she agreed to come, four children and all, into a heat and sickness she had no way of imagining from a kitchen in Northamptonshire.

I watched her those first days out past the Lizard, gray coast sliding away behind us, and she did not look like a woman glad of her decision. She looked like a woman who had made it anyway. There is a kind of courage that has nothing of eagerness in it, only will, and I have thought of her more than once since, whenever people speak of missionary zeal like it is a fire that only warms and never burns the hand that carries it.

Carey himself was a different case entirely. He carried books wrapped in oilcloth against the salt air, and within a week of open sea he had them out, working through some grammar or other by lantern light while his sons slept in the swinging berth beside him. He told me once, with that same crooked-healed laugh, that he had taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Dutch inside seven years with scarcely a soul to help him, and I believed that too, because I watched him do something very like it with Bengali before we ever raised the coast of India, working from whatever scraps Thomas could give him, mouthing sounds under his breath at the rail like a man practicing a tune he meant never to forget.

He had a sermon in him he liked to repeat, or rather two halves of one sermon, and Thomas said he had preached it the year before at a gathering in Nottingham, from a text in Isaiah about a woman barren and desolate told to enlarge the place of her tent. Expect great things. Attempt great things. He said it aboard ship sometimes to no one in particular, the way a man repeats a thing that has become the marrow of him rather than a thought he still needs to have.