Pioneers and Founders

His farming education served him well when he received a grant of land, and of thirteen convicts to bring it into order.  It was part of his payment, almost indispensable for procuring to his family the necessaries of life, and it gave him, besides, the means of imparting instruction in honest labour.  His property became the model farm of New South Wales, and the profits afforded him the means of establishing the schools, benevolent institutions, and missions, for which there were few, if any purses to draw upon.  He won himself respect on all sides, especially from the Governor of the colony, Captain King, a hasty, violent, but good-hearted man, with whom more than once he had misunderstandings, but such as were made up again.  On one of these occasions, the chaplain’s advice was asked by the Governor, and promised on condition that he might speak as to a private individual.  So, when they met, Mr. Marsden locked the door, and, in plain and forcible terms, gave Captain King a thoroughgoing remonstrance on the faults of Governor King, which was taken in perfect good part.

Nevertheless, the whole construction of Society was so atrocious, that nothing could effect any improvement but interference from higher authority.  The Court of Judicature in New South Wales was the most shamelessly corrupt and abandoned in existence, and a rebellious spirit broke out which imperilled the military authority of the Governor.  Mr. Marsden saw no hope, except in laying a full statement in person before the home Government; and therefore, at the end of fourteen years, when Governor King was about to return home, he resolved to go himself, and make a strong personal representation to Government.  The two families sailed in the same ship, the Buffalo, which proved to be leaky; and, when a heavy gale was expected, it was proposed that the passengers should quit her, and take refuge in a stronger vessel; but Mrs. King was too unwell to be moved, and Mrs. Marsden would not leave her, so that the proposal was abandoned, and most providentially, for the ship that had been thought secure was lost in the night and never seen more!

The voyage was a slow one; and the first thing Mr. Marsden heard on arriving was, that the insurrection he had expected had actually broken out.  This rendered Lord Castlereagh, then Colonial Secretary, the more anxious to obtain the advice of a sensible, clear-headed man like Samuel Marsden, and he was encouraged to explain his views.  First, he was anxious for whatever would tend to reform the convicts; and having observed that the most respectable of these were such as had married, or whose wives had come out to them, he begged that, for the future, the families of the married men might be sent out with them.  This was refused; but his representation that the convicts ought to be instructed in trades was attended to, when he showed that, by this means, the whole expense of their clothing might be saved.  He had discerned the wonderful capacities of Australia for sheep farming, and having brought home some wool, and found it much approved by the manufacturers, he thereupon ventured to petition the King for a couple of merino5 sheep from the royal farm at Windsor, to improve the breed.  The request was after “Farmer George’s” own heart; he gave five, and thus Mr. Marsden did the work of agricultural improvement of the Benedictines of old.  He also obtained that three more clergymen and three schoolmasters should be sent out; and he strove hard for other institutions, chiefly for the reformation of the female convicts, which he could not at the time get carried out.  He likewise conducted an immense correspondence on behalf of persons who had not found any other means of communicating with their homes; and, at the same time, he became personally acquainted with Wilberforce, and many others of the supporters of the cause of religion.

Above all, it was in this visit to England that Mr. Marsden laid the foundations of the missions to New Zealand, and prepared to become the apostle of the Maori race.  These great islands of New Zealand had been discovered and named by Tasman in 1642, and first visited by Captain Cook in 1769.  He found them inhabited by a brave, high-spirited, and quick-witted set of natives, with as large a proportion of the fine qualities sometimes found in a wild race as ever savages possessed, but their tribes continually at war, and the custom of cannibalism prevailing: he had been on friendly terms with them, and presented them with pigs, fowls, and potatoes—no small boon in a land where there was no quadruped bigger than a rat, and very few esculent vegetables.  From this time, whalers occasionally stopped to take in water, &c., and kept up a sort of intercourse with the Maori, sometimes amiable, and resulting in the natives taking voyages on board the vessels, but sometimes quarrelsome, and characterized by mutual outrages, when, if a white man were made prisoner, he was sure to be killed and eaten, to serve as a sort of triumphal and sacrificial banquet.

Nevertheless, it was plain that these Maories were of a much higher type of humanity than the Australian natives, whom Mr. Marsden had found so far entirely unteachable and untameable, but for whom he was trying to establish some plan of training and protection.  Such a spirit of curiosity and enterprise possessed some of the New Zealand chieftains, that they would come on visits to Australia, and on these occasions Mr. Marsden always gave them a welcome at his parsonage at Paramatta.  At one time there were thirty staying there, over whom he had great influence.  Once, when he was absent from home, the nephew of one of the chiefs died, and his uncle immediately prepared to sacrifice a slave; nor could Mrs. Marsden prevent it, otherwise than by hiding the intended victim till her husband came home, who made the chief understand that it was not to be done, though the man continued to lament that his nephew was deprived of his proper attendant in the other world, and seemed afraid to return home, lest the father of the youth should reproach him with the omission.

Mr. Marsden made known all that he had been able to gather of the promising nature of the field of labour in New Zealand, and sought aid from the Church Missionary Society, since the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was then unable to reach beyond the colonies.  The almost universal indifference of the upper classes to missionary labour was terribly crippling in the matter of means; and perhaps the fact was that the underbred class of agents of the Societies stirred up by the example of Marshman and Carey, together with the vulgarly-sensational appeals against which Ward’s good taste so strongly protested, greatly tended to make them incredulous.  It was not till the statements of scholars and gentlemen, like Henry Martyn and Bishop Heber, became generally known, that the work was looked on without sarcasm, provoked by vulgarity, even where there was great devotion.

No clergyman could be found to undertake the mission to New Zealand; but William Hall and John King, two laymen, undertook to act as pioneers, with instructions to establish family worship, converse on religion with the natives, and instruct their children; trying, at the same time, to show the benefits of civilization, but to take care it was not confounded with Christianity.

These two good men, who were presently followed by Thomas Kendall, sailed in the same ship with Mr. Marsden, when, in August 1809, he paid his last farewell to his native land, and sailed in the Ann for New South Wales.  Strange to say, this very ship contained a Maori, on his return home!  He was a young chief named Duaterra, who had, in a spirit of adventure, embarked on board a whaler named the Argo, and worked as a sailor for six months, till the captain, having no further occasion for his services, put him ashore at Port Jackson, without payment or friends.  However, he embarked in another whaler, and worked his way home, but soon was on board of a third English ship, the Santa Anna, in search of seal-skins, and having conceived a great desire to see the country whence these vessels came forth, and to know its chief, he engaged to come to England in it, the captain and sailors not scrupling to promise him an introduction to King George.  When the Santa Anna reached England, the crew had grown tired of him, used him roughly and harshly, and tried to put him off his pertinacious recollection of the promise of seeing the king, by telling him that King George’s house could not be found; while he was worked beyond his strength, and scarcely ever suffered to go on shore.  When, in fifteen days, the cargo was all discharged, the captain put him on board the Ann, to be taken back to Australia, and when he asked for his wages, to provide some clothing, told him that the owner of the ship would give him two muskets when he should reach Port Jackson.

The poor fellow was little likely to reach it, for lung disease, the great foe of the Maori, had set in; and he was in a pitiable condition when Mr. Marsden, by chance, remarked his brown face on the forecastle, and inquired into his history, which was confirmed by the master of the Ann, and was really only a specimen of a sailor’s vague promises, and incapacity to understand that a dark skin ought to be treated with the same justice as a white one.  Duaterra was a man of much intelligence, and even under these most unfavourable circumstances had been greatly impressed with the civilization of England, and was so desirous of improvement that, on arriving at Port Jackson, Mr. Marsden took him to his farm, where he applied eagerly to the learning of husbandry.

Duaterra was not the only Maori ill-treated by British sailors.  Another chief having been used in like manner, or worse, on board the Boyd, bided his time till the ship was in the Bay of Islands, and then brought his tribe, armed with clubs and hatchets, to revenge his sufferings.  They overpowered the crew, slaughtered and feasted upon them, burning the ship, and only retaining as captives two women and a boy.  Nevertheless, Hall and King were ready to take the missionaries to this dangerous spot, but Mr. Marsden thought it best to give time for the passions thus excited to cool down.

Meantime Governor Macquarie had come out to take charge of New South Wales.  He was a man of great determination and despotic will, and carried out many regulations that were of exceeding benefit to the colony, but he did not know the limits of his authority, dealt with the chaplains as with subordinate officials, and sometimes met with staunch opposition from the sturdy Yorkshireman, his senior chaplain, so that they were in a state of almost constant feud throughout his government, although at the end of his career he bore the strongest testimony to the merits of the only man who durst resist him.  The old game of Ambrose and Theodosius, Hildebrand and Henry, Becket and Plantagenet, has to be played over and over again, wherever the State refuses to understand that spiritual matters lie beyond its grasp; and when Governor Macquarie prescribed the doctrines to be preached and the hymns to be used in the churches, and commanded the most unsuitable secular notices to be promulgated by the clergy, if Mr. Marsden had not resisted the Church would have been absolutely degraded.  When convicts of wealth and station, but still leading most vicious lives, were raised to the magistrates’ bench, Mr. Marsden could not but refuse to associate or act with them, and even tendered his resignation of the magistracy, but Macquarie would not accept it.  How uncompromising these sermons were is evidenced by an anecdote of a man, who, being stung to the quick, fancied that the words had been individually aimed at him, and determined to be revenged.  Accordingly, as soon as he saw the chaplain riding near a piece of water he jumped in, and when Mr. Marsden at once sprung after him, did his utmost to drown his intended deliverer; but after a violent struggle the Yorkshire muscles prevailed, and the man was dragged out, so startled by the shock that he confessed his intention, and, under the counsel he had so fiercely spurned at first, became truly penitent, and warmly attached to Mr. Marsden, whose service he ultimately entered.

The square short face and sturdy form of Samuel Marsden show the force, vigour, and determination of his nature, which told on beast as well as man.  On the road between Sydney and Paramatta, he used to let the reins lie loose on the splash-board of his gig and read, saying that “the horse that could not keep itself up was not worth driving,” and though one of the pair he usually drove was unmanageable in other hands, nothing ever went amiss with it when it went out with its master.  Such a spirit of determination produced an impress even on those who opposed him most, and many works were carried out in the teeth of the difficulties thrown in their way; such as the erection of schools, of a factory for the reception of the female convicts, and of a sort of model farm, where it was intended to collect, tame, and civilize the aborigines.  This was at first planned between the governor and chaplain, but when it was ready Marsden was under Colonel Macquarie’s displeasure, and was therefore excluded from all share in the management, though the site was actually in his own parish of Paramatta.  The experiment was a failure, probably not on this account, but from the restless character of the blacks, whose intellect was too small, and their wants too few, to feel any comfort a compensation for their freedom and wandering life.  Mr. Marsden and the other chaplains repeatedly tried bringing up children,—some too young to retain any memory of their native habits, but they always relapsed into savage life on the first opportunity, and though here and there individuals may have better come up to the hopes of their devoted friends, yet as a race they seem too little above the animal to be susceptible of being raised.

Governor Macquarie was an iron-handed man, who could not brook opposition, or endure any scheme that did not originate with himself.  So when Mr. Marsden laid before him a project for diminishing the appalling misery and vice in which the utter neglect of Government left the female convicts, he acknowledged the letter, but did not act upon it.  After waiting eighteen months for him to take some measure, the chaplain sent a statement of the condition of these poor creatures to the Colonial Office; it was laid before Parliament, and Lord Bathurst, the Colonial Secretary, sent a letter of inquiry to the Governor.  Macquarie’s fury was intense on finding that the chaplain had dared to look above and beyond him; and he gave a willing encouragement to whatever resisted the attempts of Marsden at establishing some sense of religion and morality.  After refusing to accept his resignation of his post as a magistrate, he dismissed him ignominiously, and all the underlings of Government knew that any attack from them would be regarded with favour.  A vile and slanderous letter, full of infamous libels, not only against Samuel Marsden, as a man and a Christian priest, but against the missionaries, and signed “Philo-free,” appeared in the Sydney Herald, the Government paper, and was traced to Macquarie’s own secretary!  The libel was such that Mr. Marsden felt it due to his cause to bring an action against the publisher, and in spite of the prejudice against him, after a trial of three days, he gained a complete victory and damages of £200; but the newspaper published such a false and scandalous report of the trial that he was obliged a second time to prosecute, and again obtained a verdict in his favour.

The officers of the 46th Regiment, on leaving the colony, presented him with a testimonial, and an address most gratifying, amid the general obloquy, and showing a feeling most honourable to themselves.  Every one who cared for the cause of virtue at home, especially Wilberforce, Simeon, and Mrs. Fry, wrote encouraging letters to him; and Lord Bathurst, on receiving a despatch from Macquarie, full of charges against the chaplain as man, magistrate, and minister, sent out a commission of inquiry, which, coming with fresh eyes from England, was horrified at the abuses to which the Australian world was accustomed, found every word of Mr. Marsden’s perfectly justified, and at last extracted the following confession from Colonel Macquarie: “The Governor admits that Mr. Marsden’s manner to him has been constantly civil and accommodating, and that nothing in his manner could provoke the Governor’s warmth.  The Governor admits his qualifications, his activity, and his unremitting vigilance as a magistrate, and in society his cheerful disposition and readiness to please.”  The report of this commission resulted, among other more important consequences, in the unsolicited grant of £400 a year additional stipend to Mr. Marsden, “in consideration of his long, laborious, and praiseworthy exertions in behalf of religion and morality.”  This was only fitting compensation on the part of Government, for the accusation of avarice had brought to light how many schools and asylums, the proper work of the Government, had been built, and were being maintained, out of the proceeds of the farm which had prospered so excellently.

As long as Macquarie continued in office, Mr. Marsden was out of favour, but Sir Thomas Brisbane, who came out in 1821, was friendly with him, and knew his value, insisting on his returning to the bench of magistrates.  He did all he could to avoid it, till the judges and almost every one in the colony so urged him to accept that he yielded; but in 1824 a case occurred in which a rich and insolent culprit was severely punished by the Paramatta bench, and contrived to raise such an outrageous storm that Sir Thomas Brisbane, who, if better disposed, was more timid than his predecessor, dismissed the whole five magistrates.  The offender’s wish had been merely to overthrow Mr. Marsden, but this was found impossible.  The whole fury of the colony again rose against this fearless man, and accusations absolutely absurd were trumped up.  One was that he allowed his windmill to work on Sunday!  The fact turned out to be, when investigated, that somebody had once seen the sails turning on a Sunday, some time before Mr. Marsden had purchased the land on which the mill stood.  A real act of persecution affected him more seriously, as it was the ruin of another person in whom he was interested.  There was an old regulation forbidding the hiring out of convicts who were assigned to residents as domestic servants, but this had been virtually repealed by another under Macquarie, permitting such hiring out on the owners complying with certain rules.  These had been duly attended to by Mr. Marsden in the case of one James Ring, a plumber and glazier, who, as a reward for good conduct, was allowed to go out to work in Paramatta for his own profit.  Being ill-used and beaten by another servant, he summoned the man before the bench of magistrates, but these, who had been put in when Mr. Marsden and his colleagues were dismissed, immediately committed Ring to jail for being at large.  His master went to demand his release, showing that the rules had been observed, but the magistrates replied by levying a fine of two-and-sixpence for every day that Ring had been at work, and as Marsden did not offer to pay, they sent a convict constable to his house to seize property to that amount, while poor Ring himself was sent to work in irons with the penal gang; though at that very moment one of the magistrates had a servant, a tailor, at work in Mr. Marsden’s house; and another person had two hired convicts of another of these justices employed at his home.  In fact, it was the only sentence of the kind ever inflicted, yet Sir Thomas Brisbane was afraid to interfere; whereupon Mr. Marsden caused his case to be tried before the Supreme Court, and so completely proved it, that restitution of the illegal fine was commanded, though the spirit of persecution was still shown in the absurdly small sum of damages allotted to him.  What was worse was that he could not procure the release of Ring, for while he was sending an appeal to England the unhappy man lost patience, ran away from the gang where he was working in irons on the roads, and escaped to New Zealand, but was never heard of more.  Had he but borne with his misery a little longer he would have been restored to his kind master, for a commission came out which a second time resulted in the complete triumph of Mr. Marsden, and the entire discomfiture of his persecutors.

We have gone through the history of his home troubles before entering on the part that concerned his missionary labours.  It is a painful picture, but the staunch firmness that never failed to “boldly rebuke vice,” is too essential a part of the picture to be passed over.  The Apostle of New Zealand was the Baptist of the Herods of Australia.  We return to the year 1816, when, after some months’ training in agriculture at Mr. Marsden’s farm, Duaterra had sailed for his home, but only again to suffer from the perfidy of the master of the ship.  The ordinary English mind seemed incapable of perceiving that any faith need be kept with a dark-coloured man, and Duaterra was defrauded of his share of the oil procured from the whales he had helped to catch, carried past his own shores, only two miles from the pah where the master had engaged to land him, and turned adrift in the then uninhabited Norfolk Island, where a whaler picked him up almost starved, and brought him back to Australia.  However, Mr. Marsden found another ship, which did fulfil its engagements, and Duaterra was at last set ashore in the Bay of Islands, close to the northern point of New Zealand, with a supply of wheat which Mr. Marsden had given him.

Two years had passed, and Mr. Marsden had been trying to procure from the Society at home a mission ship to carry teachers to the islands, visit them, and supply their wants there, but he had not as yet succeeded, and he therefore decided on purchasing a small one from Australia at his own expense.  This was the Active, the first of the mission vessels that now bear the Cross in several quarters of the globe.  In her Hall and King sailed, and Mr. Marsden would have accompanied them but for the express prohibition of Governor Macquarie, who, little as he loved his senior chaplain, did not choose to lose him on what he regarded as a scheme of almost fanatic folly.  The two teachers were not to settle on shore, nor even to sleep there, but they were to visit Duaterra, reconnoitre the ground, and see whether it would be possible to settle there as they had at first proposed.

To their delight, Duaterra came eagerly to meet them, very anxious for their assistance with his corn.  He had shown it to his tribe, telling them that hence came the bread and biscuit they had eaten in English ships, and great had been their disappointment when neither the ear nor the root of the wheat proved at all like these articles.  However, he had been successful in his farmer operations, but was entirely puzzled by those of the miller, only knowing that the grain ought to be ground, and unable to contrive it, though he had borrowed a coffee-mill from a trading vessel.  When the new comers produced a hand-mill he was delighted.  His kindred, to whom he had been a laughing-stock for averring that biscuit had any connection with his new grass, crowded round incredulously to watch the mill, showed unbounded amazement as the white flour streamed forth, and when a cake was hastily made and baked in a frying-pan they leapt about shouting and dancing for joy.  Duaterra, his uncle Hunghi, a very powerful chief, and five more, accepted an invitation to come and confer with Mr. Marsden, and the Active brought them back to New South Wales.  They were very anxious for the benefits which they hoped to derive from intercourse with the whites, and readily undertook to secure Hall and King from all danger.  Even Governor Macquarie was so far satisfied that he consented to let Mr. Marsden go out and arrange the new settlement, to which he presented two cows and a bull.  These, with three horses, and some sheep and poultry, were embarked on board the Active, with a motley collection of passengers, the eight Maories, the three missionaries with their wives and children, a sawyer, a smith, Mr. Marsden, and another gentleman named John Lydiard Nicholas, the master of the vessel, his wife, son, and crew, which included two Tahitians, and lastly a runaway convict who had secreted himself on board.  Their arrival might have been rendered dangerous by the conduct of a whaling crew at Wangaroa, in the northern island of New Zealand, who, by way of retaliation for the massacre of the Boyd’s ship-company, had murdered a chief named Tippahee with all his family, without waiting to find out whether he had been concerned in the slaughter.  Nevertheless, these brave men were ready to dare to the utmost, and the fame of Mr. Marsden, “the friend of the Maori,” had preceded him, and the Active was welcomed with presents of fish and visits from the natives.