Allen Gardiner

Life and Ministry

Allen Gardiner was born in Berkshire in 1794, joined the Royal Navy as a midshipman at fourteen, fought in the Napoleonic Wars, and rose to the rank of commander by 1830. Converted in his twenties, he resigned his commission in 1834 to give the rest of his life to missions among unreached peoples — first attempting work in Zululand under King Dingane (where he founded the Natal port that bears his name as Durban), then in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego among the Yaghan and Selk'nam peoples whom Charles Darwin had described as the most degraded human beings he had ever seen. Gardiner founded the Patagonian Missionary Society in 1844 to support the work and made multiple unsuccessful preliminary expeditions over the next seven years.

Circumstances of Death

In September 1850 Gardiner sailed from Liverpool with six companions — three Cornish fishermen and three doctors — on the Ocean Queen, bound for Picton Island in the Beagle Channel of Tierra del Fuego. They were landed with six months of provisions. The supply ship that was to relieve them was sent late and missed them. Stranded on the most exposed coast in the southern hemisphere with the Antarctic winter coming on, the seven men spent ten months in declining health, building shelter from a beached longboat, recording the Yaghan vocabulary by candlelight in journal entries that became increasingly weak. They died of scurvy and starvation one by one between June and September 1851. Gardiner, the last to die, was found in October 1851 by a search party from HMS Dido, propped against the boat-shelter he had built, his journal closed in his hand. His last entry, dated September 6, read in part: "I am overwhelmed with a sense of the goodness of God."

Legacy

Gardiner's death electrified the British missionary public in a way that even his life had not. The Patagonian Missionary Society — soon renamed the South American Missionary Society — was reorganized within months and a permanent mission was established at Keppel Island in the Falklands, with Yaghan-language work that did, over decades, produce an indigenous Yaghan church. Charles Darwin himself, who had mocked the missionary effort to the Yaghan in his Beagle journals, donated to the Society in his old age and wrote in 1881 that he had been entirely wrong. Gardiner's body and those of his companions are buried at Spaniard Harbor on Tierra del Fuego under cairns built by the Royal Navy.