Allen Francis Gardiner | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 28 January 1794 |
| Died | 1851 (aged 56–57) |
| Education | Royal Naval College |
| Occupation(s) | Royal Navy officer, missionary |
| Spouses | Julia Susanna (m. 1823;died 1834)Elizabeth Lydia (m. 1836) |
| Parents |
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Allen Francis Gardiner was a British missionary and Royal Navy officer.
Gardiner was the fifth son of Samuel Gardiner of Coombe Lodge, Oxfordshire, by Mary, daughter of Charles Boddam of Capel House, Bull's Cross, Enfield, Middlesex. He was born on 28 January 1794 in the parsonage house at Basildon, Berkshire, where his parents were temporarily residing. He was religiously educated, and in May 1808 entered the Royal Naval College, Portsmouth. [1]
On 20 June 1810 he went to sea as a volunteer on board HMS Fortunee. He next served on HMS Phoebe as a midshipman during the War of 1812 until August 1814. He distinguished himself in the capture of the American frigate Essex, and was sent to England as acting lieutenant of that prize. Being confirmed as lieutenant on 13 December, he served in the frigate HMS Ganymede in the Mediterranean Fleet, then in Leander, and Dauntless in various parts of the world.
He returned invalided to Portsmouth on 31 October 1822.
As second lieutenant of Jupiter, Gardiner was at Newfoundland in 1824, and in 1825 returned to England in charge of Clinker. He was promoted to commander on 13 September 1826. After that, although he often applied for positions in the Royal Navy, he never succeeded in obtaining another appointment. [1]
On 1 July 1823, Gardiner married Julia Susanna, second daughter of John Reade and his wife of Ipsden House, Ipsden, Oxfordshire. They had several children together including one son, Allen W. Gardiner. Not all his daughters survived to adulthood. Julia Gardiner died in the Isle of Wight on 23 May 1834.
About two years later, Gardiner married secondly, on 7 October 1836, Elizabeth Lydia, eldest daughter of the Rev. Edward Garrard Marsh, vicar of Aylesford, Kent. [2]
Long interested in the missionary work being done in non-Christian populations, after the death of one of his daughters, he decided to enter that field. With this view Gardiner went to Africa in 1834. Exploring the Zulu country, he started the first mission on near the Tongaat river. [3] He took the name Hambanathi, which means "come with us" in the Zulu language from Numbers 10:29.
From 1838 to 1843, Gardiner laboured among the indigenous peoples of Chile, and went from island to island in the Indian Archipelago (now called Tierra del Fuego). His efforts were foiled by the opposition of the various governments. [1]
Gardiner's first visit to Tierra del Fuego took place 22 March 1842, when, coming from the Falkland Islands in the schooner Montgomery, he landed in Oazy harbour. He appealed to the Church Missionary Society to send missionaries to Patagonia, but was declined for lack of funds to support such a distant endeavour. Similarly, he appealed to the Wesleyan and London Missionary societies.
In 1844 a special society was formed for South America, which took the name of the Patagonian Missionary Society. [4] [5] Robert Hunt, a schoolmaster, was sent out as the first missionary and accompanied by Gardiner. They were unable to establish a mission and returned to England in June 1845. Gardiner departed England again 23 September 1845, and, in company with Federico Gonzales, a Spanish Protestant, from whom he learnt Spanish, went to Bolivia. They distributed Bibles to the Indian population, but were strongly opposed by the Roman Catholics, who were the predominant Christian group in the country.
He established Gonzales as a missionary at Potosi, and returned to England, landing at Southampton on 8 February 1847. The next year he sailed to Tierra del Fuego, where he surveyed the islands with a view to a mission, and suffered great hardships. He tried to interest the Moravian Brethren and the Foreign Missions of the Church of Scotland in this enterprise, but neither could render any aid. He proposed that a mission should be established on a substantial ship, rather than trying to set up one on land. At last, a lady at Cheltenham having given £700, the mission was determined on.
Accompanied by Richard Williams, surgeon; Joseph Erwin, ship-carpenter; John Maidment, catechist; and three Cornish fishermen, Pearce, Badcock, and Bryant, Gardiner sailed from Liverpool on 7 September 1850 in Ocean Queen. The party landed at Picton Island on 5 December. He had with him two launches, each 26 feet (7.9 m) long, in which had been stowed provisions to last for six months. The Yahgan people were hostile, the climate severe, and the country barren. The party were also hindered by failures such as the devastating realisation that they had left nearly all their shot on the ship, leaving them unable to hunt for fresh food. Six months elapsed without the arrival of additional supplies, which were detained at the Falkland Islands for want of a vessel. After relocating to Spaniard Harbour on the southeast coast of the main island, the unfortunate men gradually died of starvation. Gardiner, the last survivor, is believed to have died on 6 September 1851. [6]
Before he died, Gardiner kept a journal and they found the journal next to his body. The last entry in the journal cited Psalm 34:10, “Young lions do lack and suffer hunger.” Now here’s a man dying of hunger. “But they that seek the Lord shall not lack any good thing.”
The very last thing Gardiner wrote in his journal was essentially this, “I am overwhelmed with a sense of the goodness of God.” Here’s a man dying of starvation. Here’s a man far from home. His body is broken. All his hopes are dashed. His last words are, “I am overwhelmed with a sense of the goodness of God.”
Now let’s think about that for a second. How do you and I ordinarily come to the conclusion that God is good? When do you say God is good? Do you know when you say God is good? When things are going well for you.
On 21 October the vessel John Davison arrived to resupply the group, and found all the men dead. On 6 January 1852 HMS Dido visited the place, but all the sailors could do was to bury the bodies and bring away Gardiner's journal. Two years later in 1854, Allen Gardiner, an 88-ton schooner named for him, was sent out to Patagonia as a British missionary ship. In 1856 Allen W. Gardiner, the captain's only son, went to that country as a missionary. [2]
An islet in the Chilean group of islands which includes Picton island remains named after Gardiner. The street in Durban named in his honour, [7] was later renamed Dorothy Nyembe Street, to honour a South African activist and as part of the city's renaming process.
Allen Gardiner is remembered in the Church of England with a commemoration on 6 September. [8]
His works include: [2]
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HMS Beagle was a Cherokee-class 10-gun brig-sloop of the Royal Navy, one of more than 100 ships of this class. The vessel, constructed at a cost of £7,803, was launched on 11 May 1820 from the Woolwich Dockyard on the River Thames. Later reports say the ship took part in celebrations of the coronation of King George IV of the United Kingdom, passing under the old London Bridge, and was the first rigged man-of-war afloat upriver of the bridge. There was no immediate need for Beagle, so she "lay in ordinary", moored afloat but without masts or rigging. She was then adapted as a survey barque and took part in three survey expeditions.
Tierra del Fuego is an archipelago off the southernmost tip of the South American mainland, across the Strait of Magellan.
Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy was an English officer of the Royal Navy, politician and scientist who served as the second governor of New Zealand between 1843 and 1845. He achieved lasting fame as the captain of HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin's famous voyage, FitzRoy's second expedition to Tierra del Fuego and the Southern Cone.
Tierra del Fuego, officially the Province of Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica and South Atlantic Islands, is the southernmost, smallest, and least populous Argentine province. The provincial capital city is Ushuaia, from a native word meaning "bay towards the end".
Keppel Island is one of the Falkland Islands, lying between Saunders and Pebble islands, and near Golding Island to the north of West Falkland on Keppel Sound. It has an area of 3,626 hectares and its highest point, Mt. Keppel, is 341 metres (1,119 ft) high. There is a wide, flat valley in the centre of the island with several freshwater lakes. The central valley rises steeply to the south-west, west and north. The north-east is low-lying, with a deeply indented coastline.
Orundellico, known as "Jeremy Button" or "Jemmy Button" or "Jimmy Button", was a member of the Yaghan people from islands around Tierra del Fuego in modern Chile and Argentina. He was taken to England by Captain FitzRoy in HMS Beagle and became a celebrity there for a period.
Picton, Lennox and Nueva form a group of three islands at the extreme southern tip of South America, in the Chilean commune of Cabo de Hornos in Antártica Chilena Province, Magallanes and Antártica Chilena Region. Located in the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, they lie east of Navarino Island and are separated from the Argentine part of Isla Grande in the north by the Beagle Channel. They have an area of 170.4 km2 (Lennox), 105.4 km2 (Picton), 120.0 km2 (Nueva).
The Yahgan are a group of indigenous peoples in the Southern Cone of South America. Their traditional territory includes the islands south of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, extending their presence into Cape Horn, making them the world's southernmost indigenous human population.
The second voyage of HMS Beagle, from 27 December 1831 to 2 October 1836, was the second survey expedition of HMS Beagle, made under her newest commander, Robert FitzRoy. FitzRoy had thought of the advantages of having someone onboard who could investigate geology, and sought a naturalist to accompany them as a supernumerary. At the age of 22, the graduate Charles Darwin hoped to see the tropics before becoming a parson, and accepted the opportunity. He was greatly influenced by reading Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology during the voyage. By the end of the expedition, Darwin had made his name as a geologist and fossil collector, and the publication of his journal gave him wide renown as a writer.
Edward Garrard Marsh (1783–1862) was an English poet and Anglican clergyman.
Waite Hockin Stirling was a nineteenth-century missionary with the Patagonian Missionary Society and was the first Anglican Bishop of the Falkland Islands. He was brother-in-law to Thomas Phinn. He was also a grandnephew of Sir Thomas Stirling, 5th Baronet of Ardoch.
The society was founded at Brighton in 1844 as the Patagonian Missionary Society, sometime referred to as the Patagonian Mission. Captain Allen Gardiner, R.N., was the first secretary. The name was retained for twenty years, when South American Mission Society was adopted. The name of the organisation was changed after the death of Captain Gardiner, who died of starvation in 1851 on Picton Island in South America, waiting for a supply ship from England. Gardiner thought that the original mission should be expanded from southern South America (Patagonia) to all of South America. Charles Darwin is reported to have supported the society financially and rhetorically.
Foreign relations between the Argentine Republic and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland have existed for over two centuries.
Bahia Wulaia is a bay on the western shore of Isla Navarino along the Murray Channel in extreme southern Chile. The island and adjacent strait are part of the commune of Cabo de Hornos in the Antártica Chilena Province, which is part of the Magallanes and Antartica Chilena Region.
Robert Clark Morgan was an English sea captain, whaler, diarist, and, in later life, a missionary. He captained the Duke of York, bringing the first settlers to South Australia in 1836. His life in the British whaling industry has been recorded in the book The Man Who Hunted Whales (2011) by Dorothy M. Heinrich. His diaries are held in the State Library of New South Wales.
William Parker Snow was an Arctic explorer, writer and mariner. He wrote several books on his expeditions including the Voyage of the Prince Albert under Sir John Franklin. He served as captain on the Allen Gardiner on its voyage to Patagonia in 1855.
Allen Gardiner was a schooner owned by the South American Mission Society, based in England. Built in 1854, the schooner was named after Captain Allen Gardiner, the founder of the society. He had died of starvation with the rest of his mission party at Spaniard Bay on the SE coast of the main island of Tierra del Fuego in 1852, after resupply was delayed.
Thomas Bridges was an Anglican missionary and linguist, the first to set up a successful mission to the indigenous peoples in Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago shared by Argentina and Chile. Adopted and raised in England by George Pakenham Despard, he accompanied his father to Chile with the Patagonian Missionary Society. After an attack by indigenous people, in 1869 Bridges' father, Despard, left the mission at Keppel Island of the Falkland Islands, to return with his family to England. At the age of 17, Bridges stayed with the mission as its new superintendent. In the late 1860s, he worked to set up a mission at what is now the town of Ushuaia along the southern shore of Tierra del Fuego Island.
Matthew Brisbane was a Scottish mariner, sealer and notable figure in the early history of the Falkland Islands.
The Botany of Fuegia, the Falklands, Kerguelen's Land, Etc. is a description of the plants discovered in these islands during the Ross expedition written by Joseph Dalton Hooker and published by Reeve Brothers in London between 1845 and 1847. Hooker sailed on HMS Erebus as assistant surgeon. It was the second in a series of four Floras in the Flora Antarctica, the others being the Flora of Lord Auckland and Campbell's Islands (1843-1845), the Flora Novae-Zelandiae (1851–1853), and the Flora Tasmaniae (1853–1859). They were "splendidly" illustrated by Walter Hood Fitch.
