Allen Gardiner

Allen Francis Gardiner was born on January 28, 1794, in Basildon, Berkshire, England. He entered the Royal Navy as a boy and served as a young officer in the wars of the day. He sailed to many parts of the world and saw the lands of the Pacific, South America and Africa. He was a brave and skilled seaman and rose to the rank of commander. During his naval career he seems to have had little interest in religion. He was a man of action who loved the sea.

In the 1820s he married Julia Reade and began to settle into family life. In those years he was moved by faith and came to know Christ in a living way. Then in 1834 his wife died after a short illness. He was heartbroken. He left the navy and gave the rest of his life to carrying the gospel to people who had never heard it. He first went to southern Africa to try to reach the Zulu people, and he started a small mission in Natal. But the work met with political troubles, and he was forced to leave.

He next turned to South America. He had heard of the people at the southern tip of the continent, the natives of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, who were thought to be savage and cut off from all outside contact. Many considered the place hopeless. Gardiner believed that they too were within the reach of the gospel. In the 1840s he made several trips to the region and tried to make contact with the people. He faced hardship, hunger and hostility. He returned to England and tried to raise support for a mission, but few were willing to help. In 1844 he helped to found the Patagonian Missionary Society, which later became the South American Missionary Society.

In 1850 he sailed with a small party of six men, including a surgeon and a carpenter, to Tierra del Fuego. They carried supplies for six months, but the ship that was to resupply them did not arrive. They were landed on the shore of a remote bay, and the weather turned fierce. Their boats were wrecked by storms and by the surf, and they were left with little food. The local people were wary and drove them off. One by one the men weakened from hunger and cold.

Gardiner kept a journal until the end. He wrote of his faith and his trust in God, even as his friends died around him. He wrote that he was not afraid and that he was cast on the mercy of the Lord. He died in September 1851, probably on the sixth, of starvation. When a relief ship found the bodies months later, his journal was found beside him, and its entries were read in England. They moved many people to give.

His life was marked by stubbornness and by planning that was not careful enough. He was criticized for taking his party into such a place with so few supplies, and his critics were not wrong. He pushed ahead because he could not bear the thought of leaving a people untouched by the gospel. Yet his death was not the end. The mission he founded went on and, in time, a work was established among the people of Tierra del Fuego. His story stirred many to take up the cause of the unreached. His journal ends on a note of trust, and his death became the seed of a lasting work.