Book manuscript- (c) 2009 by William Sims Bainbridge
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At Lucknow, Lucy wandered “through the empty rooms riddled and broken by shot and shell, and down into the cellar, where for fifteen long weeks the women and children of the garrison were huddled together, with scarcely room to lie upon the stone floor until death had decreased the number.”356 At Cawnpore, about a thousand people, a third of them women and children, had been beseiged by an overwhelming force of mutineers led by Nana Sahib, a nobleman who was still angry at the British for refusing him a pension. Crowded into barracks whose mud walls hardly slowed a speeding bullet in its course, the defenders suffered terribly from the constant barrage and the overpowering heat of early summer. One bullet killed a soldier, broke both his wife’s arms, and wounded the infant she was carrying. A round shot blew off the head of a wounded Englishman before the very eyes of his mother and sisters. Fire ignited the thatched roof of a building filled with women, children, sick, and wounded, and artillery pounded their rescuers. All the medical supplies were destroyed, so there was nothing to soothe the wounded. By night, men crawled silently to the only well to draw a bucket of water for the children, knowing that a single sound would draw deadly fire on their position. In June, Nana Sahib sent a message to the defenders, offering them safe passage down the river to Allahabad. Just as they were boarding the boats, a bugle sounded and the thousand sepoys encircling them opened fire. The great Cawnpore Massacre began. Nana Sahib took into captivity the remaining hundred and twenty-five women and children, but the slaughter of the men was soon completed. On July 15, he ordered these defenseless women and children killed, too, and their bodies were thrown into a nearby well, the dying with the dead. Lucy had read all the details of the Cawnpore Massacre, first in the newspaper soon after it occurred, and then in books as the fuller story began to be told. Now she stood by that grim well, praying for the murdered children, consoled by the statue of an angel whose stone lips seemed to say, “Peace!”357 In Dehli Lucy watched low-caste women, in dull blue clothing, dart among the horses on the street, gathering their manure and patting it into balls they would sell for fuel. Unexpectedly, the sounds of “Yankee Doodle” announced Dr. Baldwin from Foochow with his family, on their way home to America, so the Baldwins blended with the Bainbridges for their remaining days in India. In Agra, Lucy was drawn to the Moslem Taj, dedicated to the memory of Mumtaz Mahal, a mere woman. “The most exquisitely beautiful tomb in all the world, and built by the emperor of a people who despise women, and whose holy book does not recognize that they possess souls.”358 Four times Lucy saw the Taj: once at dawn, once at midday, once in the night when blue lights transformed the interior into sapphire, and finally at sunset when it appeared from the distance like pearl. Standing alone inside that resonant dome, Lucy sang out a defiant hymn: “In the cross of Christ I glory towering o’er the wrecks of time!” Half a world from home, she stood proud in her faith. “It was a simple air, sung by an untrained voice, but as the sounds were caught up, and repeated by the unseen choir, the impurity seemed to be lost, and, from the dim heights of the vast marble space above, it returned in an echo, soft and sweet and clear.”359 In Bombay, as usual Lucy headed straight for the most fascinating graveyard, although none but the Parsees were permitted inside. She drove “through the lonely avenue, and leaving the carriage to walk through the paths, under the trees black with screaming and impatient crows and vultures, until a quite near glimpse of the black building or temple, where the eternal fire from Persia is guarded, was obtained... It is said that when a corpse is laid upon the top of the tower, a man is stationed to carefully watch which eye is picked out first by the vultures; for by this the fate of the dead man may be known. This manner of disposing of the dead, which seems to us so repulsive, is to the Parsees most beautiful. ‘There is no corruption,’ they say. ‘The bones are left clean, while the flesh is carried off into the air.’”360
At Basra he transferred to a river steamer that conveyed him to Bagdad, where he stayed in the English residency. From there, he went south through sand and storm to Babylon under the protection of two Circassian guards whom he suspected of being outlaws of the type recently responsible for atrocities in Bulgaria. He slept little the night he spent in a caravansary, as cats crawled all over him, and packs of dogs rushed in and out “barking solo and chorus.” Earlier in the century, heroic archaeologists had unearthed the ancient civilizations of the Tigris-Euphrates region and deciphered some of their clay tablets and chiseled stone inscriptions. For twenty years, however, there had been a hiatus in the scientific work, except for the haphazard digging of Hormuzd Rassam, who had been trained by the excavator of Nineveh, Austen Henry Layard.362 Constructed primarily of sun-dried mud brick, the ruins of Mesopotamian palaces had reverted to earth and retained none of their original beauty. Layard, whose books William admired, observed that the sight of these lifeless mounds admid the wastelands makes a deep impression on a sensitive visitor. “The more he conjectures, the more vague the results appear. The scene around is worthy of the ruin he is contemplating; desolation meets desolation: a feeling of awe succeeds to wonder; for there is nothing to relieve the mind, to lead to hopes, or to tell of what has gone by.”363 Many of the excavation sites had been identified with places described in the Bible, some on the solid basis of inscriptions and others by chains of conjecture. William rode over the ruins of Babylon, imagining he could see its walls and canals, and like many travelers before him he confidently assumed that the two principal piles were the palace of Nebuchadnezzar and his celebrated hanging gardens.364 He watched a gang of workmen quarrying ancient brick for new buildings in Hillah, and philosophized about the fall of pagan empires. With his Bible in hand, he went “along the banks of the Euphrates where the Hebrew captives hung their harps upon the willows, weeping, as they remembered Zion.” Deeply impressive was the ten-foot dark grey granite statue of a lion standing over a prostrate man, tucked away in a depression amid the mounds, which William thought marked the den where Daniel braved the beasts.365 William was guest of the pasha of Hillah, a town that straddled the Euphrates, doctoring the mayor with an American pain killer.366 He saw Kifil, twelve miles southwest over the desert, which local Jews believed to be the tomb of Ezekiel, and a mound where he believed Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego had been cast into the firey furnace.367 Four miles from Hillah stood Birs Nimroud, which he was sure was the Tower of Babel. The scene must have struck him as it did John Newman, another American who had come through five years earlier. “Such was the enchanting power of the vision, that the eye was transfixed, and the spell of history was upon the soul. Before us was the oldest historic monument known to man. Its form assumed a new outline with each curve in our devious path. Now it resembled a fallen pyramid with a portion of a tower remaining on the summit; now it appeared like a truncated cone, abruptly broken by some Titan’s power; anon, it loomed up a vast mass of shapeless ruins, as when, by some mighty convulsion of nature, temples are thrown on temples, and towers are piled on towers.”368 William returned to Bagdad, then rode north through the sandy waste, spending one night in a Bedawy tent, beset by sand-flies and fleas, listening to five lambs bleating in the corner. At Mosul he crossed the Tigris to the ruins of Nineveh, scattered over an area of eighteen by twenty miles where only a few mud huts sheltered the living, and starvation littered the roadside with fresh corpses. He saw the remains of the palace of Sennacherib, where Layard had excavated bas-reliefs that illustrated the seige of Lachish, mentioned in the Bible.369 These ruins only hinted at the outines of rooms, corridors and doors, but bits of ornamentation and fragments of cuneiform writing were scattered everywhere. In Kurdistan, William encountered the Yezidis, a people reputed to be devil-worshippers who indulged in midnight orgies.370 Once a powerful tribe, they had been beaten down by the Turks, who readily slaughtered them whenever it seemed profitable to do so. In fact, despite the rumors and the massacres, the Yezidis were a quiet and innofensive people who retained virtues of cleanliness, sobriety and industriousness. To some observers their religion seemed to draw upon both Judaism and Christianity, as they baptized their children seven days after birth and practiced circumscision. They revered fire, ritually passing their fingers through the flame and kissing them, and they worshiped toward the rising sun. Satan, they believed, was the chief of the angels and prince of this world, and they propitiated him through many gestures, such as adorning the entrances to their houses with bouquets of scarlet anemones. When Satan regained the throne of heaven, they hoped, he would remember their loyalty and raise them up to their own former greatness.371 William passed a peaceful night with these devil worshippers, then continued on through the Zackow pass. After lunching at the Christian villiage of Djizireh he became dangerously ill and telegraphed for a physician to Mardeen, a hundred miles further onward. There Doctor Andrus operated a Christian mission, and he brought William slowly to their school and nursed him back to health. The Mount Masius of the ancients, Mardeen was a city of twenty thousand souls, half Moslem and the rest divided among various Christian denominations plus a few Jews.372 To William, the city resembled a wasps’ nest on a wall, clinging so precariously to the mountain that he felt the houses must soon slide down to the vast plain stretching southward. Once he had fully recovered, he rode straight west to the Medeterranian. Three months after Lucy and Willie left William in Bombay, he sailed into Beirut harbor on a Russian steamer from Iskanderoon, looking almost as dark and rough as the well-worn saddle he carried. Willie waved his American flag, and Lucy welcomed him with a swarm of questions about the ancient ruins and wild tribes he had seen in his journey of twelve hundred miles through Mesopotamia.
Along the way, they visited missionaries from many denominations. John Nevius, William's cousin, was a Presbyterian, for example. Although they gazed with reverence upon the site where Catholics had been martyred at Tientsin, their hosts were always Protestant. Through their lives, Lucy and her son would be ambivalent about Catholicism, at times having friendly relations with Catholics, and at times, hostilities. They and their denomination were adapted to cooperate best with other evangelical denominations, which at the time included the Presbyterians, within a Protestant world. That religious system was spanned by the dimension of sectarian tension which ran from tiny sects like the Adventists at the high-tension end, through the somewhat high tension Baptists, through the Presbyterians to the Congregationalists and Episcopalians or Anglicans at the low-tension end. The Catholic religious system was structured differently, with a single denomination that included orders and local churches that varied among themselves in social class and otherworldly tension, and with a stricter division between higher-tension clergy and low-tension laity. Yet the fundamental religious culture of Catholicism was the same as Protestantism, endorsing the same general compensators rooted in the same historical tradition. The story was very different with respect to non-Christian faiths. Lucy and William were uncompromising Christian soldiers in a culture war against heathens. In their tour of the Holy Land, they had expressed sympathy for the Jews but not for the adherents of Christianity's great rival, Islam. But Islam, at least, was monotheistic. In Buddhism and Hinduism, William and Lucy found implacable enemies to their own faith. Optimistically, they believed that the suffering humanity of Asia could be saved from misery and damnation by Jesus. Their circumnavigation of the globe would prove that the world was becoming a great unity, infused with the spirit of Christianity as well as the machinery and commerce of Western Civilization. Liberal religious scholars of the late twentieth century are uncomfortable with the brutal fact that competing religious traditions exist in fundamental, irreconsilable conflict with each other. As liberal intellectuals, they have learned to take seriously the perspectives of people from different cultures, and they follow norms of bookish politeness. This is another way of saying that these scholars, themselves, dwell at the low-tension end of the sectarian dimension. But the strength of religion is in the middle, or even at the high-tension end where the power of faith can still work miracles of the spirit. Put more abstractly, each independent religious tradition is a cultural system, with a high level of logical coherence and functional integrity.373 Systems cannot easily adjust to each other. Of course, in a large, cosmopolitan society, two very different religions can coexit, and a few individuals may even try to create a hybrid out of them. Every major world religion adjusts somewhat to local conditions and may incorporate elements of indigenous religion and magic. However, the Hindu-Buddhist tradition and the Judeo-Christian tradition are based upon very different general compensators. At death, a virtuous immortal soul either goes to heaven or is reincarnated on earth in the karmic cycle, not both. Thus it was quite reasonable for William and Lucy to see themselves as Christian soldiers fighting in a battle in which there could be no truce. To them, the loathesome Chinese practice of binding girls' feet was but one more piece of evidence why China needed Christ. Lucy and William disdained Chinese medicine, yet objectively it was no more ridiculous than the homeopathic treatments employed by Lucy's physician mother. Their judgement was limited both by their background and their pride. Understandably, they could not easily distiguish the progress achieved by western technology and political institutions from the benefits of Christianity.374 William and Lucy encountered clear evidence that the major world religions are distinct systems, practically impossible to reconsile. Sadly, from their perspective, the evangelical attempts to convert Japan, China, Burma and India were failures. For example, the heroic effort of the Judsons, and all the American Baptist efforts invested in Burma, achieved almost nothing375 Of all the societies they visited, only Japan was changing rapidly, but there the progress of Christianity was painfully slow. But at the beginning of the eighteen-eighties, it was easy to believe that Christianity would soon triumph in the great war between world religions, and two warriors of the faith could expect great honor when they returned home from battle. Chapter 6: From Glory to Disgrace
In Munich, Lucy visited the home of the dead. “A broad paved walk extends through the old portion of the cemetery, at the end of which is a low wide building with several glass doors. Men to and from work, school-children and sad-faced women are to be seen passing back and forth along this avenue. Sauntering to the end, what a sight met our eyes! In the shaded rooms within the glass doors, in the midst of flowers and boughs and vines, artificial and natural, lay more than a score of the city’s dead. An aged grandmother, men in middle life, a young bride, a nun, and children of all ages were there. Upon some were the marks of the struggle with slow disease; upon other faces death had left no stamp. “It is the law of the city that an hour, or very soon after the death of one in the household, the police shall be notified, and the body brought here to remain three days before burial. There is no packing of ice about the lifeless body. It is brought to this room and placed under a wire, which is attached by means of a thimble to the apparently dead finger. The wire leads to a clock in the next room, which is one of the living apartments of the keeper and his family. The slightest movement of the thimble will stir the delicately-hung wire, and set off a gong, which bangs and whirrs until some one stops it. One of the places was vacant, and the keeper kindly permitted us to touch off the wire. The faintest move started the alarm. As every wire is numbered, the keeper, awakened by the terrific sound, has only to look at the tall clock in the corner to know which corpse has indicated life. A physician and restoratives are said to be ever close at hand. Unpleasant as it may seem at first to think of having one’s friends taken away from the house so soon after death, it is comforting to feel that by no possibility can there be a burial alive of any one in Munich.”377 After an envigorating hike through Switzerland and a pleasant pause in Paris, they crossed the Channel during bad weather. “We feel doubtful whether the steamer would have held together amid those rough waves,” Lucy commented, “had we not at times so firmly clutched at the sides of the hull, and given undivided attention to the possible opening of seams. Most of the way across, however, I had to lie still in my birth to keep the vessel evenly balanced, and to set an example of calm composure before fellow passengers who were quite beside themselves with alarm.”378 In London, William led his family through the British Museum, lecturing about ancient languages and the connections to scripture. “Here especially is the Rosetta stone,” Lucy noted, “which to modern scholarship has given the key to the hieroglyphics of Egypt, and enables the learned antiquarians to read not only the monuments of stone, but also the almost innumerable papyrus rolls, which are being found in the mummy cases and in the tombs of the sacred bulls.” They frequented the rooms of winged beasts with men’s faces, to contemplate the many proofs of biblical truth excavated in Mesopotamia. “I have never envied my husband his trip to Babylon and Nineveh,” Lucy said, “as since visiting and revisiting the Assyrian collection of the British Museum, guided by his interpretation and enthusiasm.”379 The City of Berlin was among the largest liners, and Captain Kennedy had crossed the Atlantic fully four hundred and fifty-six times, so Lucy had reason to hope they would reach New York safely. It was her husband’s thirty-seventh sea voyage, and nearly that high a number for her. One passenger observed, “Never since the time when Noah started out of port with his load was there ever a more motley company together on an ocean vessel.”380 The richest of them was Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the tallest, the Chinese Giant on his way to Barnum’s circus. Lucy observed, “The saloon ceiling being too low for him to stand erect, he showed a wonderful skill of telescoping himself when moving about the room, except when he reached the part covered with the skylight, and then for a moment he could elongate himself to his fullest dimensions ¾ eight or nine feet.”381 Willie and the giant became friends, taking walks on the deck together. Lucy blessed the ship's sturdiness, when the weather turned wicked. “For six days and seven nights the storm raged. The waves dashed up over the decks, and coated the funnel white with salt spray. It was a series of storms, one following close upon the other, until the climax was reached on the second night after Thanksgiving. Then for three hours the vessel was kept with her nose to the hurricane. The engine worked, but no progress was made. When danger was passed, the captain said that it was one of the most terrific storms to be met with on the Atlantic. But through storm and sleet as well as calm, the comforts and luxuries of life were not omitted. The brilliant electric lights, with which the whole steamer is lighted, turned night into day. Every delicacy, that could reasonably be desired, was promptly at hand, including genuine New York ice cream, which is taken over in quantities sufficient to last a double passage, and given out in liberal portions every day at dinner.”382 When they reached Manhattan four days late, Willie ran down the gangplank first. There on the dock, brought East by the wife of a former mayor of Cleveland, was his sister Helen. “Willie, can you spell significant?” He replied, “You ought to see my Chinese giant!” Grandmother Mary had drilled Helen well in spelling, but Willie was forced to admit that his mother’s private tutoring had not taught him how to spell significant.383 Helen's stay with Mary must have been stormy, because she is not listed in Mary's household at the 1880 census, and many years later she exclaimed spontaneously, "I hate grandmothers!" At the Gilsey House hotel at the corner of Broadway and Twenty-ninth street, Lucy reacquainted herself with the adopted daughter she had not seen in two years.
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