Jemima and Maria’s Choice
Above – a Chinese river scene in the nineteenth century by C F Gordon-Cumming
The sailing ship Jemima Bausum and her young children travelled on from Penang to China may have avoided typhoons and pirates but there were stormy times ahead in Ningbo.
When she arrived in Ningbo in October 1856 she and her children, Mary (7), George (almost 6) and William (4) were enveloped by a missionary community where everyone helped each other no matter what their denomination or background. It is likely she first went to Dr William Parker’s small hospital in a farmhouse among the paddy fields so that those infected tonsils could be removed.
By November she had moved to Miss Aldersey’s household in the city so that she could start learning how to run the school of 60 girls at which Maria and Burella Dyer and San Avong were teaching. Miss Aldersey was looking forward to retiring from the school she had founded in 1843 as she wanted to do more missionary work. The transition was hastened by the advent of the Second Opium War.
By the end of 1856 Canton had been seized by foreigners following a bombardment by British and French gunboats. Cantonese pirates around Ningbo were out for revenge and by January were planning to massacre all the foreigners. Several missionary wives and their children were evacuated to Shanghai and Miss Aldersey wanted to send the Dyer sisters as well. But when Jemima decided to move to the American Presbyterian compound across the river the sisters went with her. Miss Aldersey had agreed that when she retired her school would be amalgamated with that at the American Presbyterian compound and so the transfer was completed.
But even if the Dyer sisters were no longer living with her Miss Aldersey believed she was still acting as their guardian while they were in Ningbo. By late January she was concerned about Maria as the young woman had already already turned down two proposals of marriage. One had been from an older missionary and the other from the deputy British consul Robert Hart. That month Maria confided in the “wise and motherly” Jemima that she had been praying about Hudson Taylor after his first visit to Ningbo between October and December 1856. Then, in February, Maria believed those prayers had been answered for she received a proposal of marriage from him. Miss Aldersey, however, was adamant – Maria had to refuse him and tell him not to be in contact with her. Very soon even her sister, Burella, was telling Maria to stay away from Hudson Taylor. For Maria it was going to be a long, hard year, one in which young Mary Bausum would remember her often looking very sad. “It seemed as if God’s will and Miss Aldersey’s were opposite,” Maria wrote to her brother, Samuel. It was hard to accept that a woman she had come to love and respect could be so wrong. As she struggled with this she wrote: “ … no man is infallible and I must allow no one’s judgement to come between me and my God.”
When Hudson Taylor returned to Ningbo in June 1857 he was very careful not to approach Maria. He soon found, however, that Miss Aldersey was actively working against him. She asked other missionary couples not to help the two to meet and told Maria not to visit those with whom Hudson Taylor was working. The missionary community was split, divided by Miss Aldersey’s fierce opposition to Hudson Taylor. He did find an ally in Jemima and it was from her that he learnt that Maria was interested in him. And it was Jemima who, in July, arranged a meeting between Maria and Hudson Taylor which she chaperoned. At that meeting Maria gave him permission to write to her official guardian in England, William Tarn, asking for permission to marry her. But it would take four months or more before he would get a reply. Miss Aldersey was furious when she learnt that both Maria and Hudson Taylor had written to Tarn. To her Jemima was just as guilty because she had allowed them to meet. When Hudson Taylor went to see her she left him in no doubt how far she would go to stop him and Maria being together. She told him he was neither a Christian nor a gentleman because he had approached a minor without seeking her permission as Maria’s “guardian” in Ningbo.
There was much more she had against him. When he arrived in Ningbo in October 1856 he had already discarded the hot, tight fitting western apparel for Chinese clothing. In Shanghai he had been ridiculed by the foreign community for “demeaning their superior race” for dressing like a Chinese. He had done so because he did not want to be immediately recognised as a foreigner when he travelled illegally outside the treaty ports as an evangelist.
He was also often penniless because he was determined to “live by faith” and depend upon prayer to God for his daily needs. He wasn’t getting a regular allowance from the China Evangelisation Society as that agency didn’t have the funds to support the missionaries it had sent to China. But in addition his pietist beliefs led him to give to anyone who asked him for food and money.
If that wasn’t enough he had broken the cardinal rule of travelling on a Sunday. He tried to explain to Miss Aldersey that he had been helping a missionary who needed urgent medical care when he had committed that “sin” but to no avail. To another senior missionary, W.A.P. Martin, Hudson Taylor was “a mystic absorbed in religious dreams.”
One of those who did understand him was Jemima for her late husband had wanted to “live by faith”. And, of course, Maria’s mother had also embraced John George Bausum’s pietist approach when she married him. Maria’s father, Samuel Dyer, had given up studying for a degree in law when he felt the call to become a missionary – so it wasn’t much good telling her (as Burella’s fiancé, the Rev John Burdon did) that Hudson Taylor should go back to England and finish his medical studies before he could propose to her.
Miss Aldersey was not used to being opposed but in Maria, Jemima and Hudson Taylor she met her match. Maria was more in line with that strong independent streak of Protestantism which allowed each person to have their own personal relationship with Jesus and made it possible, even for a young single woman, to make decisions of her own so long as she felt they were backed up by God. As Hudson Taylor commented to his mother, the whole row centred on the fact that many did not think a maiden lady was qualified to judge on matters of love. He also wrote home about Miss Aldersey: “There is a good deal to be said in excuse for one now about 60, with failing memory, who has always ruled supreme over a large establishment and been spoiled by the deference and flattery shown her. She cannot brook contradiction.”
It was on December 11 that Maria received a letter from her aunt and uncle giving her permission to accept Hudson Taylor’s proposal so long as the wedding took place after her 21st birthday on January 16, 1858. They also asked Jemima to be like a mother to the young couple – which she was very happy to do. After that the couple often met at her home where her daughter, Mary, noted that they flouted convention by sitting together and holding hands.
Miss Aldersey still tried to stop the marriage. She was by then living with the Rev William Russell and his wife, Mary (who had been Miss Aldersey’s ward for many years). Russell should have officiated at the wedding as he was the most senior CMS missionary in Ningbo, but he refused, and another took his place. Russell also took the British Consul on a shooting trip on the day of the wedding -January 20. But the Consul signed the necessary papers before he went and left his deputy, Hart, to act for him.
On January 20 Hudson Taylor was penniless and his wedding suit was a plain cotton Chinese robe. Others rallied around to make it a special day and the Consul helped by returning the wedding fee in lieu of the groom’s assistance as a translator. The couple would go on to become two of the most influential missionaries in China in the 19th century through the mission they founded: the China Inland Mission. They would owe much to Jemima in the early days of that mission. But first Jemima had a price to pay for supporting the couple against the wishes of Miss Aldersey.
Sources:
Records of the Society for Promoting Female Education of the East held in the Special Collection at Birmingham University; and The Female Intelligencer 1856-1860.
Church Missionary Society Intelligencer 1853 (Report of the Bishop of Victoria about a visit to Ningbo in the spring of 1852).
Geraldine Guiness The Story of the China Inland Mission, Morgan and Scott 1894; J C Pollock Hudson Taylor and Maria, Hodder & Stoughton 1962; A J Broomhall If I had a Thousand Lives – Hudson Taylor & China’s Open Century Vol III Hodder & Stoughton 1982.
Dorothy Lord Bausum Evans He Led All the Way Xulon Press 2007.