Abstract
Henry Martyn (1781–1812) was a Cornishman who from 1806 served the East India Company in Bengal as an Anglican chaplain. A keen evangelical, he had hoped to go to India as a missionary with the Church Missionary Society, but was put off by the stipend of £400 offered by the Society; an inadequate sum to support his impecunious family in Cornwall (the Company in comparison paid £1,000 a year). However, his pastoral responsibilities to Company servants, British troops and other Europeans in Bengal proved modest enough to enable him to devote much of his time to missionary pursuits, especially the translation of the New Testament. A brilliant mind – he was Senior Wrangler (best mathematician) at Cambridge in 1801 – Martyn, working closely with Indian munshis (instructors), completed translations of the New Testament into Hindustani (modern Urdu) in 1810, and Persian in 1812, whilst his work on an Arabic version was brought to posthumous completion in 1816. After a year resident at the court of the Shah of Persia in 1811–12, Martyn died at Tokat in modern Turkey while attempting to travel home to England. He attained posthumous cult status in Britain, and was Charlotte Brontë’s model for the character of Saint John Rivers in Jane Eyre.
This collection of 527 of Martyn’s letters marks a substantial contribution to scholarship on the ambiguous role of Christian missions in the history of the East India Company. The volume is fully annotated by the editor, who has spent 18 years assembling Martyn’s correspondence, much of it previously unpublished. Ayler has added a 58-page introduction, placing Martyn and his work in religious and historical context.
Although this work will attract attention mainly from historians of India and Christian missions, it should also be of interest to readers of this journal. Letters 46 to 67 narrate Martyn’s sea journey to Calcutta. He boarded the 570-ton East Indiaman Union at Portsmouth on 11 July 1805, but fears about the intentions of the French fleet in the Channel meant that it was 10 August before the Union finally set sail from Falmouth as part of a convoy of 15 vessels under the naval command of Sir (later Rear-Admiral) Home Riggs Popham. The convoy was to transport six British regiments to the Cape of Good Hope. It sailed via Cork, Madeira and São Salvador da Bahia in Brazil. Martyn recounts in several letters the shipwreck in November 1805 of the East Indiaman Britannia and the troop transport King George on the notorious Roca atoll off the Brazilian coast. He also describes the lush vegetation and agricultural produce of the Portuguese slave plantations in São Salvador. Although treated as ‘cattle’, the slaves struck him as ‘very cheerful and well-looking’, in contrast to the planters, who seemed ‘very unhappy’. Even a close associate of William Wilberforce could thus in 1805 still write about plantation slavery without overt comment on its moral unacceptability. Martyn was more disturbed subsequently by what he saw of Dutch slavery in the Cape Colony, where pious Dutch Protestants refused to sit on the same seats as their ‘Caffre’ or Malagasy slaves. The convoy’s troops were offloaded at Cape Town to fight the battle of Blaauwberg on 8 January, which helped to bring about the British annexation of the Cape Colony from the Batavian republic. Martyn traversed the battlefield ministering to the wounded. After a stay of five weeks at the Cape, the Union sailed for Madras, which she reached in ‘a long and wearisome voyage’ of over 10 weeks. Martyn finally arrived in Calcutta on 15 May 1806. He had suffered badly from seasickness ‘in the tempestuous nights off the Cape’, and later wrote that he ‘loathed’ the sea. He presented a more rosy picture to the object of his affections, Lydia Grenfell, whom he had left behind in Cornwall, and was trying to persuade to join him in India: ‘the voyage is very agreeable’, he assured her two months later.
Letters 301 to 312 narrate Martyn’s second, and last, sea voyage from Calcutta to Persia, via Ceylon, Goa, Bombay and Oman. He left Bengal in January 1811, partly in order to rescue his failing health, but also so that he might improve his Arabic and Persian translations of the New Testament by sitting at the feet of Muslim scholars in Arabia and Persia. His companion as far as Bombay on the Ahmoody was Mountstuart Elphinstone, lately British ambassador at Kabul, who was on his way to become the British Resident at Poona (Pune), capital of the Maratha empire. Elphinstone liked Martyn and introduced him in Bombay to Sir James Mackintosh, the Recorder of Bombay; Mackintosh accorded Martyn faint praise ‘as a mild and benevolent enthusiast’. The Ahmoody’s crew included Arabians and Abysinnians. Martyn appreciated the beauty of the Cinnamon Gardens in Colombo, but Goa, with its ornamented Portuguese splendour, ‘deeply disappointed’ him. From Bombay Martyn sailed on the East India sloop Benares under the command of Charles Sealy, with 12 artillerymen on board and two accompanying cruisers. Their mission was to hunt down 25 armed Arab pirate ships known to be plundering the Persian Gulf and ‘murdering every Christian’. The pirates made themselves scarce, and Martyn landed at Bushehr on the Persian coast on 22 May.
Ayler knows Martyn exceedingly well, but is less secure in his grasp of wider scholarship. Penny Carson’s authoritative study of The East India Company and Religion, 1698–1858 (2012) is not cited, though the PhD thesis on which it is based is in the bibliography. Another surprising omission is reference to Geoffrey Oddie’s Imagined Hinduism (2006), given that Martyn used the newly minted term ‘Hinduism’ as early as 1806 (177). Hinduism does not have ‘four major castes’ (179), but rather innumerable castes (jātis), grouped within four varnas (colour categories). The Griqua people of Cape Colony are not to be identified with the Batswana (p. 163). Nevertheless, this is an extremely useful collection of primary sources on the British encounter with India in the early nineteenth century.