Pioneers and Founders

A subscription was raised for the purchase of a mission ship, exceeding in size and suitability such craft as could be purchased or hired in Australia; and the Camden, a vessel admirably fitted for the purpose, was obtained and equipped at a cost of 2,600l., the command of her given to Captain Morgan, who was well experienced in the navigation of the Polynesian seas, and had, moreover, such a reputation for piety, that the natives termed his vessel “the praying ship.”

In this vessel a large reinforcement of missionaries was taken out, including a married pair for Samoa, and likewise young John Williams, who had found himself an English wife; but his little brother was left at home for education.  The intention of Williams was to station the missionaries upon the friendly isles, and himself circulate among them in the Camden, breaking fresh ground in yet unvisited isles, and stationing first native and then English teachers, as they were prepared for them.

Among the Samoans he remained a good while.  He estimated the population at 60,000, of whom nearly 50,000 were under instruction.  Several places of worship were opened with feasts, at which huge hecatombs of swine were consumed—1,370 at one festival.  One young chief under instruction became so good a preacher, that Williams called him the Whitfield of Samoa; and these islands have, under the training then set on foot, furnished many a missionary and even martyr to the isles around, and are, to the present day, one of the happiest specimens of the effects of missionary labour.

The want of extended views in good Mr. Williams was shown in his manner of regarding the expected arrival of some Roman Catholic priests in the Polynesian seas.  He set to work to translate Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs,” and begged that a present offered him for his people might be expended in slides illustrating it for a beautiful magic lantern which he already possessed, and whose Scripture scenes drew tears from the natives.  He had not Church knowledge enough to rise above the ordinary popular view of “Popery,” and did not understand its Christianity enough to see the evils of sowing the bitterest seeds of the Protestant controversy among scarcely reclaimed heathens.

On their side, the Roman Catholics would have done better to enter on untrodden ground, of which there was such an infinity, than to force themselves where, if they did not find their Church, at least they found faith in the Saviour.  But the Society Isles were coveted, for political reasons, by the existing French Government, and the struggle was there beginning, of which Mr. Williams was not destined to see the unfortunate conclusion.

Raiatea he found much improving; and at Rarotonga civilization had made such progress, that the chiefs house was two storeys high, with ten bedrooms, and good furniture made in imitation of English, and any linen Mr. Williams left in his room was immediately washed, ironed, and laid ready for use.  Much of the lurking heathenism was giving way, and fair progress being made in religious feeling, when, after a stay in Samoa, where Mrs. Williams now chiefly resided, John Williams set out on an exploring voyage in the Camden.

Strangely enough, his last text in preaching to the Samoans was, “Sorrowing most of all for the words which he spake, that they should see his face no more;” and the people, who always grieved whenever he left them, wept as bitterly at the words as if they had known them to be an omen.  He was bent on an attempt on the heathen isle of Erromango, which his wife viewed with a foreboding terror, that made her in vain try to extract a promise from him not to land there.

But he viewed the New Hebrides as an important link, leading perhaps to reaching the Papuan race in New Guinea.  He hoped to gain a footing there, and make the spot such a centre as Tahiti, Raiatea, Rarotonga, and Samoa had successively been; and, as the Camden glided along the shores of the island, he talked of his schemes, and of a certain sense of fear that they gave him, lest they were too vast to be accomplished by his means and in his lifetime, but with the sanguine buoyancy of a man still in full vigour, and who had met with almost unmixed success.

On the 20th of November, 1839, the vessel entered Dillon’s Bay, and a canoe with three men paddled up to her.  A boat was lowered, in which Mr. Williams, two other missionaries named Harris and Cunningham, Captain Morgan, and four sailors seated themselves.  They tried to converse with the natives, but the language proved to be unlike any in use in Polynesia (it is, in fact, one of the Melanesian dialects), and not a word could be made out.

Pulling into a creek, some beads and a small looking-glass were thrown to the natives, and water asked for by signs.  It was brought, and this gave more confidence.  Harris then waded ashore.  At first the people ran away, but Mr. Williams called to him to sit down, and, on his doing so, they came nearer, and offered him some cocoa-nut milk.  Mr. Williams observed little boys at play, and thought it a good sign.  Captain Morgan wished they had been women, because the natives always send their wives out of the way when they mean violence.  However, Williams landed, and divided some cloth among those who stood nearest.  Then Harris began to walk forward into the bush, Williams following, and, with a crowd of natives round him, was counting in Samoan, trying whether the boys around would recognize the names of the figures.  Cunningham did not like the countenances of the natives, and remarked it to him, but was not heard.  Stooping to pick up a shell, Cunningham was startled by a yell, and Harris came rushing along, pursued by a native.  Williams turned and looked, a blast on a shell was heard, and he too fled.  Cunningham reached the boat in safety, but Harris fell in crossing a small brook, and the natives were at once upon him with their clubs.  Williams had made for the sea, apparently intending to swim off and let the boat pick him up, but the beach was stony; he fell as he reached the water, and the natives with their clubs and arrows had fallen upon him before Morgan could turn his boat’s head to the spot, under a shower of arrows, which forced him to put off.

He saw the body lying on the beach, and fired a gun, loaded with powder, in hopes of driving away the natives and rescuing it; but they dragged it away into the bush, and all that was left for him to do was to sail for Sydney, whence a Queen’s ship, the Favourite, was despatched to endeavour to recover the remains, and to convey the tidings to Samoa.

By the 26th of February the vessel arrived.  The war-conch was heard, and the savages were seen flying in all directions; but, as there was no intention of exacting a revenge, means of communication were at last arranged, and it was discovered that these two good men had furnished a cannibal feast, but that their skulls and many of their bones had been preserved, and these were recovered and carried on board ship.  The Erromangans have always been an exceptionally treacherous and savage race, and, even to the present day, are more hostile to white men, and more addicted to cannibalism, than any of the other islanders.

The Favourite then proceeded to Samoa, where the weeping and wailing of the tender-hearted race was overwhelming.  Mrs. Williams, in her silent English sorrow, was made the centre of a multitude of frantic mourners.  “Aue kriamu, aue Viriamu, our father, our father!  He has turned his face from us!  We shall never see him more!  He that brought us the good word of salvation is gone!  Oh, cruel heathen, they knew not what they did.  How great a man they have destroyed!”

Such laments went on round the widow in the wild poetic language of the poor Samoans, till the other teachers, by their prayers and sermons, had produced a somewhat calmer tone; and the funeral took place beside the chapel, attended by the officers and crew of the Favourite, and a great concourse of natives.

“Alas, Viriamu!” was the cry in every Christian Polynesian island for many a day; and well it might be, for, in spite of the shortcomings of a poorly-educated ministry and a tropical and feeble race, there are few who ever turned more men from darkness to light, from cannibal fury to Christian love, than the Martyr of Erromango,—John Williams,—one of the happiest of missionaries, in that to him was given the martyr’s crown, in the full tide of his success and hope.

CHAPTER X.  ALLEN GARDINER, THE SAILOR MARTYR

The biography we next have to turn to is not that of a founder, scarcely that of a pioneer, but rather of a brave guerilla, whose efforts were little availing because wanting in combination, and undirected, but who, nevertheless, has left behind him a heart-thrilling name won by unflinching self-devotion even unto death.

Allen Francis Gardiner, the fifth son of a Berkshire squire, was born in 1794.  He was a born sailor, and became a midshipman before the end of the great war of the French revolution; but the only naval action in which he was engaged was against the American vessel Essex, which was captured by his ship, the Phœbe, off Valparaiso.  Allen Gardiner had been carefully brought up by a good mother, but her death in his early youth cast him loose and left him without any influence to keep up serious impressions.  He drifted into carelessness and godlessness, though at times some old remembrance, roused by danger or by a comrade’s death, would sting him sharply.  Once, feeling ashamed of having forgotten the very words of Scripture, he made up his mind to buy a Bible, and then was so full of false shame that he waited about in the street till the shop should be empty, and then only thought how odd his demand must seem to the bookseller.

Most likely this was at Portsmouth, for he had there met a lady who had been with his mother at her death, and had given him a narrative of her last days, which his father had written, but from some sense of want of sympathy had withheld from the son.  The friend judged him better.  The copy in his own handwriting bears the date, “Portsmouth, November 18, 1818,” and therewith was a little Bible with the same date written in it.  For two years, however, this produced no effect; but in 1820, when at Penang, as a lieutenant in the Dauntless, Allen received a letter of grave reproof from his father, and one of warm kindness and expostulation from the same lady, his mother’s friend, together with some books.  Nothing would have seemed more hopeless than the chance that a letter from a religious old lady would make an impression on a dashing young naval officer, and yet Allen Gardiner always considered this as the turning-point of his life, and connected it with his mother’s prayers.

It was when his thoughts were directed to religious subjects, and his intelligence freshly excited, that he visited the coasts of South America, the region above all others where the Roman Catholic Church is seen to the most disadvantage.  Two things most especially struck him, the remnants of the Inquisition at Lima, and the discovery that the poor were buried without prayer or mass.  Such scenes as these gave him an extreme horror of Romanism and all that he supposed to be connected therewith, and his next station at Tahiti, in all the freshness of the newly established mission, full of devout people, filled him with strong enthusiasm for the good men who were carrying out the work.  Shortly after he was invalided home, and as soon as he was fit for employment he offered himself to the London Missionary Society, begging them to send him to the neglected Indians of South America; but this did not suit their plans, and his ardour was slackened by the more common affairs of life.  He fell in love and married a young lady named Julia Reade, and his only voyage was in his naval, not his missionary capacity.  But his wife’s health was exceedingly frail, and after eleven years of marriage she died, leaving four children, a fifth having preceded her to the grave.  Beside her death-bed Allen Gardiner made a solemn dedication of himself to act as a pioneer in one or other of the most neglected parts of the earth, not so much to establish missions himself as to reconnoitre the ground and prepare the way for their establishment.

Africa was the country to which his attention was first called.  His wife died in May 1834, and the 24th of August was the last Sunday he spent in England, at Calbourne, the native parish of Charles Simeon.  He sailed at once for Cape Colony, where the English, who had in the course of the Revolutionary war obtained possession of the ground from the original settlers, the Dutch, were making progress in every direction, and coming into collision, not with the spiritless Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope itself, but with that far more spirited and intellectual race, the Kaffirs—unbelievers, as the name meant—they being in fact of Arab descent, though Africanized by their transition through tropical latitudes, and not Mahometans.  Such traditional religion as they possessed seemed to be vanishing, since only a few of the elders retained a curious legend of a supreme Deity who sent another Divine being to “publish the news,” and divide the sexes.  A message was sent to him from the Power in heaven to announce that man should not die, but this was committed to that tardy reptile the chameleon; then another message that man should die was given to the lizard, who outran the chameleon, and thus brought death into the world.

Sir Benjamin D’Urban had just been appointed Governor, and it was apprehended that a war must take place, since the settlers were continually liable to sudden attacks by these wild Kaffirs, who burnt, slew, and robbed any homestead they fell upon.  Captain Gardiner thought, and justly, that it would be better to begin by proclaiming the glad tidings of peace to these wild and ignorant people rather than to meet them with the strong hand of war.  The colony was lamentably deficient in clergy, and the missions that existed were chiefly to the Hottentots and Bushmen.  The Moravians, whose work we have not mentioned because it is a history in itself, had some excellent establishments, but no one had yet attempted to penetrate into the home of the Kaffirs themselves, the Zulu country, to endeavour to deal with their chieftains.  This was Allen Gardiner’s intention, and on his outward voyage he met with a Polish refugee named Berken, who had intended to settle in Australia, but was induced to become his companion in his explorations in South Africa.

They rode together from Capetown to Grahamstown, where they obtained an interpreter named George Cyrus, and began to travel in the regular South African fashion, namely, with waggons fitted for sleeping in, and drawn by huge teams of oxen, and taking seven horses with them.  Their first adventure during a halt at the Buffalo river was the loss of all their oxen, who were driven off by some natives.  They applied to the chief of the tribe, named Tzatzoe, who recovered the cattle for them, but showed himself an insatiable beggar, even asking why, as Mr. Berken had two shoes, he could not spare him one of them.  However, he was honest enough, when Mr. Berken chanced to leave his umbrella behind him, to send after him to ask whether he knew that he had left his house.

The next anxiety was at a spot called the Yellow-wood River, where the mid-day halt was disturbed by an assembly of natives with a hostile appearance.  Captain Gardiner sent orders to collect the oxen, and in-span (i.e. harness) them as soon as possible, but without appearance of alarm, and in the meantime he tried to keep the natives occupied.  To one he lent his penknife, and after the man had vainly tried to cut off his own beard with it, he offered to shave him, lathered him well, and performed the operation like a true barber, then showed him his face in a glass.  His only disappointment was that the moustache had not been removed, and as by this time the razor was past work, Captain Gardiner had to pacify him by assuring him that such was the appearance of many English warriors (for these were the days when moustaches were confined to the cavalry).  The amusement this excited occupied them nearly long enough, but hostile murmurs then began to be heard—“One of our chiefs has been killed by the white men, no more shall enter our country!”  Fearing that an angry word would be fatal, Captain Gardiner asked for a war-song, promising some tobacco at the conclusion.  Accordingly they danced madly, and shouted at the top of their voices,

“No white man shall drink our milk,No white man shall eat our children’s bread.Ho-how! ho-how! ho-how!”

But this couplet often repeated seemed to work off their rage; they accepted the tobacco, and sullenly said the travellers might pass, but they were the last who should.  This was in the Amakosa country, lying between the Grahamstown settlement and Port Natal, and to the present day unannexed, though even then there were traders’ stations at intervals, so filthy and wretched as to be little above the huts of the natives.  These Amakosa tribes were such thieves that great vigilance was needed to prevent property being stolen; but the next tribes, the Amapondas, were scrupulously honest and friendly to the English.  Their chief was found by Gardiner and Berken dressed in a leopard’s skin, sitting in state under a canopy of shields, trying a rain-maker, who had failed to bring showers in consequence of not having his dues of cattle delivered to him!  The chief advised them not to proceed, as he said the Zulus were angry people who would kill them; but they pushed on, though finding that the journey occupied much longer than they expected, so that provisions became a difficulty.

A full month had passed since leaving Grahamstown, and Gardiner decided on pressing on upon horseback, leaving Mr. Berken to bring up the waggons, and taking with him the interpreter and two natives.  The distance was 180 miles, and a terrible journey it was.  A few waggon tracks had made a sort of road, but this was not always to be distinguished from hippopotamus paths, which led into horrible morasses, where the horses almost entirely disappeared, and had to be scooped out as it were by the hands; moreover, scarcely any food was to be had.  In crossing one river one of the horses was so irretrievably stuck in a quicksand that humanity required it to be shot, and at the next, the Umkamas, the stream was so swollen that the Captain had to devise a canoe by sewing two cowskins together with sinews and stretching it upon branches, in which, as no one save himself had any notion of boating, he shoved off alone.  The stream was too strong for him, and he had to return and obtain the help of the only good swimmer among his party.  With him he crossed, but with no food save a canister of sugar!  However, the native swam back and fetched a loaf of bread, while Captain Gardiner waited among the reeds, hearing the snorting and grunting of hippopotami all round.  The transit of the natives was secured by the holding a sort of float made of a bundle of reeds, and in the morning, as the river was too high for the rest of the party to cross, he brought over a few necessaries, and a horse, with which the Captain was able to proceed to Port Natal, where he found English traders, and sent back supplies to those in the rear.

The Zulus, on whom his attention was fixed, inhabit a fine country to the north of the Tugela, which is considered as the boundary of the British territory.  The nation is full of intelligence and spirit, and by no means incapable of improvement, and their princes have been for generations past men of considerable natural ability, and of iron will, but often savagely cruel.  The first known to Englishmen was named Charka, a great warrior, who kept his armies in a rude but thorough discipline, and had made considerable conquests.  About the year 1829, Charka had been murdered by his brother Dingarn, who had reigned ever since, and was the terror of the English settlers, who were beginning to immigrate into the fertile terraced country of Natal.  His forays might at any time sweep away farms and homesteads; and his subjects were continually fleeing from his violence across the Tugela, and thus might bring him down as a pursuer.

Allen Gardiner’s plan was to go to the fountain head and endeavour to deal with the chief himself, so as to make him a Christian instead of an enemy.  With this end he set out absolutely unaccompanied, except by Cyrus the interpreter, and a Zulu servant whom he had hired named Umpondombeni, and this with the knowledge that an English officer had shortly before been treacherously murdered, and that Dingarn was a blood-stained savage.

The king had been informed of his coming, and had pronounced that he was his white man, and should make haste to Umkingoglove, his present abode.  The first view of this place, with a double circular fence around it, resembled a race-course, the huts being ranged along the ring of the enclosure so as to leave the centre free for the reviews and war dances of the Kaffirs.  Gardiner was very near entering by the wrong gate, in which case all his escort would have been put to death.  A hut was assigned to him, a sort of beehive of grass and mud, with a hole to enter by.  His own lines, strung together in his many unoccupied moments for his children’s benefit, are so good a description of the Kaffir huts that form a kraal or village, as to be worth inserting:—

“I see them now, those four low props   That held the haystack o’er my head,The dusky framework from their tops   Like a large mouse-trap round me spread.To stand erect I never tried,   For reasons you may guess:Full fourteen feet my hut was wide,   Its height was nine feet less.My furniture, a scanty store,   On saddle-bags beside me laid,A hurdle, used to close the door,   Raised upon stones, my table made.”

There he received a bundle of the native sugar-cane, a bowl of maize beer from Dingarn, and was invited to his palace.

This was surrounded by a fence, outside which the Captain was desired to sit down.  Presently a black head and very stout pair of shoulders appeared above it, and a keen sable visage eyed the visitor fixedly for some time, in silence, which was only broken by these words, while indicating an ox, “There is the beast I give you to slaughter.”  His black majesty then vanished, but presently to reappear from beneath the gateway dressed in a long blue cloak, with a white collar, and devices at the back.  After directing the distribution of some heaps of freshly slain oxen that lay around, he stood like a statue till a seat was brought him, and then entered into conversation.  Captain Gardiner made him understand that trade was not the object of the visit; but the real purpose was quite beyond him; he seemed to regard what was proposed to him as an impossibility, and began to inquire after the presents, which, unfortunately, were still on the road.

The delay exposed the Captain to some inconvenience and danger, and two indunas, or chiefs, a sort of prime ministers, who were offended with him for not having applied to the king through them, treated him with increasing insolence.  At last he persuaded them that he had better send a note to hasten the coming of the presents, and he also managed to write a letter for England, on his last half-sheet of paper, by the light of a lamp made of a rag wick floating in native butter in a calabash.  From time to time he was called upon to witness the wonderful evolutions, manœuvres, and mock fights in the camp.  The men were solely soldiers; the women did all the work, planting maize, weeding corn, and herding cattle, and thus the more wives a man had the more slaves he could employ.  Every wife had a value, and could only be obtained from her father for a certain price in cattle, varying according to his rank.  If the full rate were not paid, she remained, as well as her children, the property of her father or the head of her family.  The king, having the power to help himself, had an establishment of ninety women, who on gala-days, or when his army was going to take the field, were drawn up in a regiment, all wearing two long feathers on the top of their heads, a veil of strings of coloured beads over their faces, bead skirts, and brass rings over their throats and arms; these beads being the current coin of the traders.  They approached and retreated in files, flourishing their arms like bell-ringers, while they sang:—