Allen Gardiner was born on January 28, 1794, into a Christian family in Berkshire, England. He joined the Royal Navy as a teenager and served for nearly two decades, taking part in naval combat and rising to the rank of commander.
For many years he lived far from the faith of his parents, but a spiritual crisis during voyages around the world and, later, the death of his first wife brought him back to the gospel and to a renewed call to missions. He left active naval service determined to serve in places no Christian society had yet reached.
Between 1834 and 1838, he tried to open a work among the Zulu people in southern Africa. The war between the Boers and the Zulu king Dingane, which followed the massacre of Piet Retief, destroyed the mission stations and forced him to leave the region. He then turned to Chile, where he lived among indigenous peoples from 1838 to 1843, learning their customs and languages.
Convinced that the southern tip of South America needed the gospel, he sought support from the Church Missionary Society and other British agencies, but was turned down for lack of resources for such a remote mission. In 1844, he founded his own agency, the Patagonian Missionary Society.
The following years were marked by repeated failures. In 1845, a first attempt at a mission in Gregory Bay, in the Strait of Magellan, was repelled by the indigenous people themselves. Between 1845 and 1847, he traveled through Bolivia distributing Bibles, but the work was opposed by the local Catholic clergy and made no progress. In 1848, he tried to settle on Picton Island, in Tierra del Fuego, and once again was forced to retreat in the face of hostility from the local inhabitants.
In September 1850, he set sail from Liverpool for a new attempt, with six companions. They landed at Picton in December, but were once again driven off by the indigenous people and sought refuge at Spaniard Harbour (Puerto Español). The planning failed: nearly all the ammunition remained on board the ship, and the group could not hunt for food. The expected resupply did not arrive in time.
Isolated at Spaniard Harbour, the seven men starved to death over the first half of 1851. Gardiner’s journal, recovered weeks later by a British ship that came to resupply them, recorded words of gratitude and hope right up to his last days, not despair.
No indigenous person was converted while he was alive, and the sequence of expeditions, the one in 1845, the one in 1848, and the final one, ended in failure measured against the original plans. But news of his death moved England and brought the society resources and volunteers it had not had before.
Years later, Gardiner’s own son returned to Tierra del Fuego to continue his father’s work. The agency he founded alone would become, decades later, the South American Missionary Society, still active in South America today.
