Ann Hasseltine Judson

Ann Hasseltine married Adoniram Judson in February 1812 and sailed for Asia thirteen days later, the first American woman commissioned to go. Her father had let her go with a line people quoted for a century: he would not stand in the way of her doing good. In Burma she learned the language faster than her husband, taught women who had never been taught anything, and translated the Gospel of Matthew into Siamese — the first Scripture that language had.

When war broke out between Britain and Burma in 1824, Adoniram was chained in the death prison at Ava. For seventeen months Ann walked there with food, argued with officials who could have killed her for it, gave birth in a nearby hut, and hid the manuscript of his Burmese New Testament sewn into a hard pillow the guards thought worthless. He survived. She died of fever at Amherst a year later, aged thirty-six.