ssionary of great skill, a printer of the
Oriental languages trained by Ward, and a scholar, especially in
Sanskrit and Pali, Bengali and Burman, not unworthy of his father. He
early commended himself to the goodwill of the Rangoon Viceroy, and was
of great use to Captain Canning in the successful mission from the
Governor-General in 1809. At his intercession the Viceroy gave him the
life of a malefactor who had hung for six hours on the cross.
Reporting the incident to Ryland, Dr. Carey wrote that "crucifixion is
not performed on separate crosses, elevated to a considerable height,
after the manner of the Romans; but several posts are erected which are
connected by a cross piece near the top, to which the hands are nailed,
and by another near the bottom, to which the feet are nailed in a
horizontal direction." He prepared a folio dictionary of Burmese and
Pali, translated several of the Buddhist Sootras into English, and
several books of Holy Scripture into the vernacular. His medical and
linguistic skill so commended him to the king that he was loaded with
honours and sent as Burmese ambassador to the Governor-General in 1814,
when he withdrew from the Christian mission. On his way back up the
Irawadi he alone was saved from the wreck of his boat, in which his
second wife and children and the MS. of his dictionary went down. Of
this his eldest son, who "procured His Majesty's sanction for printing
the Scriptures in the Burman and adjacent languages, which step he
highly approved," and at the same time "the orders of my rank, which
consist of a red umbrella with an ivory top, gold betel box, gold
lefeek cup, and a sword of state," the father wrote lamenting to
Ryland:--"Felix is shrivelled from a missionary into an ambassador." To
his third son the sorrowing father said:--"The honours he has received
from the Burmese Government have not been beneficial to his soul.
Felix is certainly not so much esteemed since his visit as he was
before it. It is a very distressing thing to be forced to apologise
for those you love." Mr. Chater had removed to Ceylon to begin a
mission in Colombo.

In July 1813, when Felix Carey was in Ava, two young Americans,
Adoniram Judson and his wife Ann, tempest-tossed and fleeing before the
persecution of the East India Company, found shelter in the Mission
House at Rangoon. Judson was one of a band of divinity students of the
Congregational Church of New England, whose zeal had almost c