Gordon Taylor: Life and Death in the Perkins Family, 1834 - 1852 (Persia)

The piece that follows was written for the Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies. The readers of that journal, small as it is, would know immediately the name of Justin Perkins. Justin Perkins, D.D., was a pioneer American missionary in Iran, then still known as Persia. For the Nestorian Christians (now called Assyrians) of Urmia and the mountains of Hakkari, in Turkey (the snow-flecked mountains in the above photograph), he made a revolution, working with native helpers to create a written version of their modern Syriac dialect, and translating into that new written language the ancient Aramaic texts which they used in their church services but could not understand. Besides the New and Old Testaments in modern Syriac, Perkins translated numerous religious tracts, as well as texts for the mission school in geography, natural science, and history. In English he wrote several accounts of his mission years in Persia, the most useful of which is Eight Years in Persia (1841).

In a letter dated 29 January 1849, Justin Perkins, senior missionary at the American Mission in Urmia, made one of his regular reports to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Boston.[1] Among other things, he discussed the recent conquest of Hakkari, central Kurdistan, by Ottoman Turkish forces. Perkins exulted in the Turks’ defeat of Nurullah, the last independent Kurdish Mir of Hakkari. Calling Nurullah a “monster, ” Perkins said of his downfall, “The right hand of the Most High has at length put a ‘hook’ in the nose of this modern ‘Assyrian.’” Besides this interesting choice of label, Perkins’s 29 January letter contained news of a more personal nature. His youngest child, Fidelia, he revealed, had died only six days earlier. This meant one more heartbreak for Perkins and his wife, Charlotte. Fidelia, aged eleven months at her death, was the fifth child that they had buried in Persia. Charlotte’s previous child, Jonathan, born just three years earlier, had lasted only two months. The remaining Perkins children, Henry, age five, and Judith, soon to be nine, continued to thrive. But the fact was, these were only two out of seven.[2]

For Justin and Charlotte Perkins, trouble began at the dock before their missionary careers had even started. Perkins, deathly ill and having almost missed his embarkation, had to be carried aboard in a litter on the day, 21 September 1833, that their ship sailed from Boston. To add further insult, immediately out of port the ship was hit by storms. Still, after a rapid passage and a winter in Istanbul, by June 1834 Justin and Charlotte Perkins (aged 29 and 25 respectively) were aboard caravan horses riding from Trebizond to Tabriz, by way of Erzurum.[3]

News of murders by the Jelali Kurds, raiding along the caravan route west of Ararat, led to a detour into Russian-held Georgia and Armenia. This detour, projected to last six days, stretched to four weeks as Russian officials did everything they could to harass, rob, and delay the unfortunate newlyweds. Charlotte spent her twenty-sixth birthday (Aug. 2) in quarantine with her husband, listening to travellers being flogged by the Russian police just a few feet from their tent. For the rest of his life Justin Perkins would contrast the behavior of this “Christian” power with that of the Turks, whose kindness and hospitality he always appreciated....