William Carey’s Wig
On June 13th, 1793, William Carey and his wife Dorothy set sail from England for Bengal. The journey was to take five months. Fellow traveler, Dr. John Thomas, wrote later, “Mrs. Carey had many fears and troubles, so that she was like Lot’s wife until we passed the Cape.” Imagine this young woman who had never been more than 100 miles from her home, now traveling into the great unknown! It is no wonder that soon after arriving in India, Dorothy was to suffer a nervous breakdown. Eventually her husband would record in a letter, “Poor Mrs. Carey is quite mad.”
That quote has passed into our own family vocabulary. In our early days as missionaries in Mozambique, in a particularly stressful moment one or the other of us would quip, “Poor Mrs. Ker is quite mad!”
While Dorothy was taking leave of her senses, William was bidding farewell to the fashion mores of his day. Carey, who was prematurely bald had for several years worn a truly ugly wig. According to Mr. Riley, one of Carey’s friends, “Good Mr. Wilson of Olney is an excellent Christian, but one of the ugliest wigmakers that ever was born.” At some point on the journey, Carey grabbed the wig off his head and threw it overboard. I’ve always loved that image, imagining the dreadful wig sailing through the air to land with a plop on the water’s surface. I imagine Carey watching with satisfaction as the wig sank below the surface. While he would no longer have to wear a hot, itchy and ugly wig, he would now have to contend with sunburn on his stark white head!
Despite arriving in Bengal without official authorization (Carey entered as a businessman to bypass the India Company’s prohibition on missionary activity) and the fact that he and his family were surviving under the most difficult possible living conditions, Carey was able to write back to England after less than a year, “I intend to send you soon a copy of Genesis, Matthew, Mark and James in Bengali Also a small vocabulary and grammar of the language in manuscript of my own composing.” In less than three years, Carey translated the entire New Testament in Bengali, while working as the manager of an indigo factory, pastoring a local congregation, and studying Sanskrit in his spare time.
According to Kellsye Finney, in the book William Carey:
“By 1832 complete Bibles, New Testaments, or separate books of Scripture had been issued in forty-four languages and dialects. This was a task representing team work at its highest level.”
As a modern day Bible translator, I look at such numbers in awe. How is it possible to translate Genesis, Matthew, Mark and James in less than a year? And that being the first year on the field! How could one man find time to participate in forty-four Bible translations? Don’t forget that he was also a full-time pastor and university lecturer as well.
When my wife told our children how many Bibles William Carey had translated, one of them responded, “And Daddy hasn’t even finished one!”
In the year before his death on June 9th, 1834, William always carried with him the proofs of his latest revision of the Bengali New Testament. He died with the latest edition of the Bengali New Testament in his hands.
Source: Much of the information and quotes in this post comes from Kellsye Finney’s book William Carey, OM Publishing, 1986. Some information was taken from the Wikipedia article “William Carey.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carey.htm)
Perhaps he made such good progress because he ignored his wife and family. Poor Mrs Carey!
But this does raise questions about the efficiency of sending half way round the world translators with large families, who tend to make much slower progress than single translators and cost a lot more.
But then not all single translators can move at the pace of William Carey. It took me, as a single man, and the team I was with more than nine years to complete just one Old Testament, and another three years at least for the New Testament (done in this order because there was an existing but not very good New Testament). By some standards that is quick progress (but the language was already well established as a written language), but not by Carey’s! And some delay was caused by personal issues of my own which would have been less serious if I was not single, so singleness is not an unqualified advantage.
I must get on with finishing off that New Testament, as I have no wife to tell me off for blogging when I’m supposed to be working.