In the year 1849, Captain Allen Gardiner, an intrepid sailor and a religious enthusiast, formed the plan of converting the natives of Terra del Fuego and of Patagonia. He knew nothing of their language or habits, nothing indeed of their land. He was, however, possessed with the idea that he was called to be an apostle of those bleak and fog-wrapped regions. Of all inhabited spots on the earth, the Terra del Fuego is the most miserable. Cold, whirlwinds and tempests of snow and hail, frozen fogs with but rare glimpses of sunshine, form its climate; and the natives are utterly barbarous, apparently the refugees from the Continent, driven out of the somewhat less desolate peninsula of Patagonia by the giants that now possess it, and in their misery sinking to the lowest depths to which man can descend.

During a year or more Captain Gardiner's efforts to rouse interest in his scheme, sufficient interest to make the money flow, had met with no success. He applied to the Moravian Brethren to take up the mission; they declined. Then he placed the matter before the Scottish Establishment, but the canny Scotchmen would nae think ov it. At last a lady at Cheltenham furnished him with £700, and this, with £300 from his own private purse, formed all the resources on which he acted. As he could not afford to charter a schooner, he had four open boats built for him at Liverpool. Two of these were launches of considerable size, to which he gave the names of the Speedwell and the Pioneer; the other two were small dinghies, to be used as tenders or luggage boats.

Captain Gardiner now looked about him for enthusiasts like himself to share the perils and the possible glories of spreading the gospel over Terra del Fuego, in which not a cross had been planted nor the Word of God proclaimed.

He secured the services of a surgeon, a missionary, and from Mousehole, near Penzance, drew three sturdy Cornish sailors, or fishermen—John Pearce, John Badcock, and John Davy Bryant—who little knew what risks they ran.

The party left England on September 27th, 1850, in the ship Ocean Queen, bound from Liverpool to California, taking with them their boats and six months' provisions. They were landed on the inhospitable foreign shore on the 5th December.

Pinkerton, in his Modern Geography, thus graphically describes the scene of their projected labours:—

"A broken series of wintry islands, called Terra del Fuego, from two or more volcanoes which vomit flames amidst the dreary wastes of ice. Terra del Fuego is divided by narrow straits into eleven islands of considerable size. In their zeal for Natural History, Sir Joseph Banks and Doctor Solander had nearly perished amid the snows of this horrible land; but they found a considerable variety of plants. The natives are of a middle stature, with broad flat faces, high cheeks, and flat noses, and they are clothed in the skins of seals. The villages consist of miserable huts in the form of a sugar loaf, and the only food seems to be shell-fish."

The lack of common prudence, of common sense, exhibited by Captain Gardiner is astounding. Here was he, with a party whom he had beguiled to attend him, dropped in this barren country wrapped in snow and fog, without an interpreter, and consequently without the means of communication with the inhabitants should they come across them. From the moment that the sails of the Ocean Queen disappeared behind the rocks on her way to double Cape Horn, the eye of no civilized man ever saw these brave sailors and missionaries alive. All that is known of them has been gathered from the papers subsequently found.

Seven men in all, with four open boats, were left on the most inhospitable coast that could be found, where there is little food to be got, where vegetation is scarce. Their resolution was heroic, but the whole enterprise was madness.

They soon found that the Pioneer leaked. In several short voyages from island to island and from shore to shore they encountered numberless mishaps. The natives were by no means friendly, and as they approached their villages, brandished their weapons and drove them away. At other times the Fuegians simulated friendship, so as to get at the stores and plunder them. During a storm both of the dinghies were lost with all their contents, on which they relied for support for six months. Next they found that they had no gunpowder; it had been left inadvertently in the Ocean Queen, so that they had no means of shooting birds or other animals. Then their anchors and spare timber were carried away. As far as we can judge, they seem to have been curiously helpless persons. With clubs they might have killed the sea-elephants, whose flesh would have sustained them and their skins clothed them.

Thus wore away the month of January, 1851, and not the first step had been taken towards acquiring the confidence of the natives. All the time had been spent in a struggle for the maintenance of their own lives. On February 1st the Pioneer was shattered in a storm, and now they had only the Speedwell to voyage in, a vessel whose name mocked their misery.

They all saw now, even the enthusiast Gardiner, that they had embarked on an impossible task, and without further thought of spreading a knowledge of Christianity among the dirty, treacherous, flat-nosed and stupid natives, their only consideration was how they might get away.

Arrangements had been made before starting for sending out to them fresh supplies, but by various unfortunate mischances this had not been done. They turned their eyes vainly eastward; not a sail was seen to raise their hopes.

Some of the men became ill with scurvy, and the boats were used as hospitals, the men that were sound retiring to caverns. A few fish and fowl were caught, and eggs were procured. So March and April dragged along; and then the Antarctic winter began, adding snow and ice to their other troubles. What herbs to gather, how the natives protected themselves against scurvy, does not seem to have occurred to these unfortunates. They sat and shivered and lamented their fate and lost all hope. From the middle of May they were all put on short allowance, owing to the rapid disappearance of the supply of food they had brought ashore. At the end of June, Badcock, one of the Mousehole men, died, worn out with scurvy. There is an entry in Gardiner's diary, about the end of June, enumerating the provisions still left, and among them were "six mice," concerning which he wrote: "The mention of this last item in our list of provisions may startle some of our friends should it ever reach their ears; but circumstanced as we are, we partake of them with a relish; they are very tender, and taste like rabbit." A solitary penguin, a dead fox, a half-devoured fish thrown up on the shore—all were welcomed by the half-starved men. When August came, the strength of the entire party was well-nigh at an end. A few garden-seeds were made into a soup, and mussel-broth was served out to the invalids. Captain Gardiner himself lived on mussels for a fortnight, and then, as this disagreed with him, was compelled to give up the diet. He would have lain down and died of starvation had he not found a vegetable that he could eat, and on this he rallied for a while.

On the 23rd, Erwin, a boatman, died, exhausted by hunger and disease. On the 26th, Bryant, the second Mousehole man, expired. Pearce, the remaining boatman, went nearly mad at the loss of his companions and the hopelessness of the outlook. Mr. Maidment, the missionary, had just strength sufficient to dig a grave in which to bury the two poor fellows. He then made a pair of crutches with two sticks, on which Captain Gardiner might lean when walking. He lived in the cavern, and tried to hobble down to those who were in the Speedwell, but his strength was not equal to the task, and he had to retire to his cave.

Maidment was the next to succumb, on September 2nd. Pearce, and Williams the surgeon, were in the Speedwell, and it was as much as they could do to obtain a few shell-fish for themselves; but they soon lay down and died. When Gardiner also yielded up the ghost is not known, but he had strength to make an entry in his diary on the 6th; there is none on the 7th.

On the 21st January, 1852, H.M.S. Dido arrived at Terra del Fuego and found the remains of this unhappy party of religious enthusiasts. The first thing seen was a direction scrawled on a rock; then a boat lying on the beach of a small river; then the unburied bodies of Captain Gardiner and the missionary Maidment; then a packet of papers and books; then the scattered remains of another boat, with part of her gear and various articles of clothing; then two more corpses; and lastly the graves of the rest of the party.

"Their remains," wrote Captain Morshead, of the Dido, "were collected together and buried close to the spot, and the funeral service read by Lieutenant Underwood. A short inscription was placed on the rock near his own text; the colours of the boats and ships were struck half-mast, and three volleys of musketry were the only tribute of respect I could pay to the lofty-minded man and his devoted companions."