Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Missionary & Martyr in South America
September 6 · d. 1851
also known as Captain Alan Gardiner, Allen Gardiner
Allen Gardiner was a Royal Navy captain who gave up the sea to carry the gospel to the most unreachable people he could find, the Yámana of Tierra del Fuego at the frozen tip of South America. In 1851 he and six companions, marooned when their supply ship failed to come, slowly starved to death on that bleak coast, praying and singing to the end. His journal, found beside his body, recorded not despair but thanksgiving, and the mission he died for, far from ending, grew from his grave into the South American Missionary Society.
Allen Gardiner was a captain in the Royal Navy, a fighting officer of the age of Nelson with a career and a future, and somewhere in the middle of his life God laid hold of him and would not let go. He came to believe that the gospel mattered more than rank, and he left the service to spend the rest of his days carrying it to peoples no missionary had reached. He tried southern Africa, and the interior of South America, and was turned back again and again, by war, by climate, by closed doors. And the harder it grew, the further out he looked, until his eye fell on the very end of the inhabited world: Tierra del Fuego, the Land of Fire, the storm-lashed islands at the southern tip of the Americas, where the Yámana people lived in one of the coldest and harshest places a human being can live, and where no one had ever brought them Christ.
In 1850 Gardiner and six companions sailed for that coast to begin a mission. The plan was careful and the men were willing, but everything went wrong. The ship that was to bring their supplies did not come, and did not come, and the little party, camped on a freezing shore at a place called Spaniard Harbour, began to run out of food. Through the winter of 1851 they starved by degrees. One by one the men weakened and died. Gardiner, the captain, outlived them all, alone at the last in the cold with his Bible and his journal.
And here is the thing that has kept his name alive. A starving man, watching his friends die and knowing his own death was only days away, did not curse his God or rue his mission. He wrote thanksgiving. His last entry, found afterward beside his body, reads: Great and marvellous are the loving kindnesses of my gracious God. He has preserved me hitherto, and for four days, although without bodily food, without any feelings of hunger or thirst. He had asked God, if the sacrifice of their lives would open Tierra del Fuego to the gospel, to accept it; and he died believing that it would.
He was right. When a passing ship found the bodies and carried home the journal, its quiet, unbroken faith moved the English-speaking world as no living missionary's words had. The little Patagonian Missionary Society he had founded did not collapse with him; it grew, took the name of the South American Missionary Society, and adopted for its motto a line of his own, hope deferred, not lost. Within a generation other missionaries had reached the Yámana that Gardiner himself never met, had learned their language, and had baptized them; and the church that now spans South America counts its beginning, in part, from seven men who starved to death on a beach trusting and singing the praises of the God they believed could fulfill their mission with or without them.. The captain who starved to death inspired others to bring spiritual food for the life of a continent.
Allen Gardiner's story rests on unusually direct evidence: his own journal, kept to the day of his death and recovered with his body, together with the records of the society he founded and the contemporary accounts that his death made famous. He was born in 1794 in Gloucestershire, entered the Royal Navy as a boy, and rose to the rank of commander, serving through the last years of the Napoleonic wars. A conversion in midlife turned him from the sea to mission; after frustrated attempts in southern Africa, in South America, and in New Guinea, he founded the Patagonian Missionary Society in 1844 to reach the peoples of Tierra del Fuego. In December 1850 he and six companions established themselves on the Fuegian coast; cut off when their relief ship failed to arrive, they died of starvation and scurvy through 1851, Gardiner himself last, about 6 September. HMS Dido found and buried the party and carried home the journal in January 1852.
Judged by its immediate results, Gardiner's missionary career was a chain of failures, and some at the time said so. He converted no one in Tierra del Fuego; his planning was flawed, and seven men died for it. But the journal changed everything. Its serene faith in the face of starvation became one of the most widely read missionary documents of the nineteenth century and drew a stream of volunteers and money to the cause he had died for. The renamed South American Missionary Society carried the work on; Waite Stirling, Thomas Bridges, and others reached the Yámana within two decades, and even Charles Darwin, who had once thought the Fuegians beyond the reach of any civilizing power, was impressed enough by the later mission to support it. The pattern Gardiner set, that a mission's apparent failure could be its seed, became part of how the Victorian church understood its own work.
Allen Gardiner is commemorated on 6 September, the day of his death, in the calendars of Anglican churches that honor the missionary tradition he founded; his liturgical color is the red of martyrdom, for though no hand killed him, the church counts him a martyr, dead in faithful witness in a hard land where he had been sent. He is honored above all in the South American Missionary Society and in the Anglican churches of South America, which trace their origin to his sacrifice.
His memorials are scattered along the coasts he tried to reach. A mission ship and a settlement bore his name; his journal has remained in print as a classic of missionary devotion; and the words he left, hope deferred, not lost, became the motto of the work that outlived him. He is remembered as the type of a particular kind of holiness, the disciplined, dogged, self-spending missionary who measures success not by what he sees in his own lifetime but by his faithfulness, and who is willing for his own life to be the seed that falls into the ground and dies.
The Journal of Captain Allen Gardiner, with the Life of him(English, 1851)
Gardiner's own journal, kept to the day of his death and recovered with his body, is the record everything else rests on; the nineteenth-century Life that carries it is freely readable at Project Canterbury.
Public domain: Life of Captain Allen Gardiner (Project Canterbury)
Further reading. Gardiner's own journal, with the early Life of him, is the heart of the record and is freely readable; for the wider story, the histories of the South American Missionary Society follow the work from his death to the mission that at last succeeded.
Online resources. The nineteenth-century Life of Captain Allen Gardiner, with extracts from his journals, is online at Project Canterbury.
British (Received Pronunciation): Gloucestershire /ˈɡlɒs.tər.ʃər/; Yámana /ˈjɑːmənə/
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12
Almighty God, you gave your servant Allen Gardiner boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.