1 December: Boreham on Allen Gardiner

A Sailor's Centenary
A hundred years ago this week, on Thursday, December 5, 1850, Capt. Allen Gardiner and his companions were landed on the inhospitable shores of Tierra del Fuego on an expedition, the movements of which were involved in inscrutable mystery until the bones of its members were discovered more than a year later by the crew of H.M.S. Dido.[1] Since the world began, no man ever drew up for himself so novel and hazardous a programme, or paid so cruel a price for carrying his scheme into effect, as did Gardiner. If he could not be the screw that would hold a broken world together, he determined to be the gimlet that should prepare the way for the screw.

The fifth son of a Berkshire squire, Allen Gardiner never hesitated for a moment as to the choice of a profession. As a small boy he heard one name mentioned every day in accents of reverential affection. With the country threatened by the horrors of a Napoleonic invasion, Lord Nelson was the idol and hope of the nation. At that great sailor's shrine, Allen offered the boyish hero-worship of an intense and passionate nature. He was only 11 when England was stirred, as she had never been stirred before, by the news of Trafalgar. The dramatic victory of the fleet, the deliverance of the nation, and the hero's glorious death made an impression on the lad's sensitive mind that he vividly remembered to his dying day. Every chord in his soul vibrated with the tense emotion of that tremendous hour; and, within three years, he himself strutted proudly before his school fellows in a naval uniform.

Blazing A Trail For Civilisation
Readers of Smollett know what the navy was like in those days. In clambering up the side of a man-of-war, Allen was entering a school of hard knocks; and, for a few years, it seemed as if the finer susceptibilities of his dawning manhood were being blunted by the kind of life he was compelled to live. At this critical stage, a variety of circumstances shaped his destiny. To begin with, he distinguished himself in action on several occasions and won swift promotion. Then, in 1820, whilst his ship, the Leader, was lying at anchor in the Straits of Malacca, he received a letter that changed the whole course of his life. Allen's mother having died, her most intimate friend felt moved to write to the young officer urging him to maintain in his own life the gracious tradition that had made his mother's so beautiful. The letter, couched in terms as tactful as they were persuasive, made a profound impression. The emotions that it awakened led to faith and to a passionate desire to devote his days to some lofty enterprise.

Consecrating his nautical skill to the most sublime ends, he determined to penetrate earth's darkest continents—Africa and South America—in order to open a way for the Cross. He would be a harbinger and a pathfinder among the most barbarous and degraded races of mankind. Taking the entire world as the sphere of his activities, he pierced the interior of Africa, daring a thousand deaths among Hottentots, Kaffirs, and Zulus. We catch fitful glimpses of him, now intervening between hostile tribes; now undertaking a perilous march among mountains reputed to be impassable; and anon lying at the point of starvation among the reeds of the swampy river-bed, listening to the snorting and grunting of the hippopotami around him. At different stages of his colourful career, we find him at Tahiti, at Borneo, at Papua, at the most outlandish places; but ever with one end in view. He will carve a path through the jungle for the missionary.

The Scientist Points The Way To The Sailor
In due course, he made his way to the Falkland Islands, and, from that chilly outpost, looked wistfully across the intervening seas at the snow-capped and storm-swept coasts of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Darwin thought the Fuegians the least human and most debased inhabitants of the planet. That being so, they had a special fascination for Allen Gardiner. They were the very people for whom he was searching. He sailed into the blizzard; crossed the narrow stretch of snow-swept sea; and, with a smile on his fine face, went cheerfully to his death. The annals of human adventure contain few records more moving than the story of those last dreadful weeks on that frozen coast.

It was on January 21, 1852, that the captain of H.M.S. Dido found the remains. He discovered first some directions crudely painted upon a rock; then a boat; then the bodies; and, last of all, the records. It is amazing, as Gardiner's biographer points out, that these documents survived. "The tide had ebbed and flowed without doing serious injury to these fragmentary memorials," he says. "The spray, the wind, and the rain had done their worst; but the handwriting remained clear." In those tragic sentences, there is no syllable of complaint; with a gaiety that seems incredible, Gardiner and his comrades awaited, in the bleakest of environments, the inevitable end. In all these letters, he begs, with pathetic reiteration, that the missionary societies will enter Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego without a moment's delay. His wish was respected. Years afterwards, Charles Darwin declared that the transformation effected in Tierra del Fuego was one of the most astounding achievements of which he had ever heard or read; and, although the activities of Christian missions were not quite in his line, he liberally supported the prosecution of the work that had been initiated in response to Capt. Allen Gardiner's dying challenge. On the bleak, forbidding territories that taper down to Cape Horn, the gallant captain's name is still held in honour and a mission ship, bearing that name, is among the monuments that perpetuate his memory.

F W Boreham

Image: Allen Gardiner

[1] This editorial appears in the Hobart Mercury on December 2, 1950.