The dispute with Dingarn continuing, the Captain was again sent to negotiate. This time he was received in the royal mansion, a magnified beehive, where the king was lying on a mat with his head on one of the little stools made to act as pillows, with about fifty women ranged round. As to the matter in question, Gardiner was able to declare that, in the white settlement itself, no deserters had found a home since the treaty, and that none should do so; Dingarn said he considered him the chief of the whites there, and should look to him to keep them in order. Gardiner explained that he had no authority. "You must have power," said Dingarn. "I give you all the country of the white people's ford." This was a piece of land extending from the Tugela to the Nouzincoolu, from the Snowy Mountains to the sea-in fact, the present whole colony of Natal. A smaller portion, including the district about Natal, was to be his own immediate property. Dingarn was perfectly in earnest, and thus intended to make him responsible for the conduct of every individual of the motley population of Natal, declaring that he should receive no trader who did not bring credentials from him. It was as curious a situation as ever commander in the navy was placed in. All he could do was to return to Durban, explain matters to Mr. Collis and the other traders, and then set out for the Cape to consult Sir Benjamin Durban.
His journey across the mountains was very perilous and difficult, and took much longer than his sanguine nature had reckoned; but he reached Grahamstown at last, and explained matters to the Governor, who instantly sent off a British officer to assume authority over the settlement at Natal, and try to keep the peace with Dingarn, while Captain Gardiner embarked for England to lay the state of things before Government and the Church Missionary Society, at whose disposal he placed all his own personal grant from Dingarn. When the prospects of the mission were proclaimed, the Rev. Francis Owen volunteered for it, and Captain Gardiner collected all that he thought needful for the great work he hoped to carry out. He married Miss Marsh, of Hampstead, and, with her and his three children, Mr. Owen and his wife and sister, sailed on the 24th of December, 1836; but the arrival was a sorrowful one, for his eldest child, a girl, of twelve years old, was slowly declining. She died just as they entered Durban Bay, and was buried at Berea immediately on their arrival. As soon as the Kaffirs heard of Captain Gardiner's landing, they flocked in to express their willingness to live under his authority. He chose a pleasant spot for his home, and having settled his family there, went up to see Dingarn. The presents this time were indeed ecstatically received, and especially a watch and seals, and a huge pair of gay worsted slippers. "He took my measure before he went," cried Dingarn, who had tried a pair of boots before, but could not get them on. The king was made to understand that his gift of land must be not to the Captain, but to the King of England, and with this he complied. He was also persuaded to modify his demands; as to the fugitives, Gardiner undertook not to encourage or employ them, but would not search them out or return them. Mr. Owen was also favourably received, as the umfundisi or teacher; a hut was allotted to him, and he was allowed to preach. He took up his abode at Umkingoglove, the first town where Captain Gardiner had seen the king, held services and opened a school, often holding conversations with the king. "Has God commanded kings and indunas to learn His word?" demanded Dingarn; and he actually did learn to read the words printed upon a card for the children.
Meantime Captain Gardiner was forming his settlement at a place which he had named in the Kaffir tongue, Hambanati, "Go with us," in allusion to Moses' invitation to Hobab: "Go with us, and we will do thee good." It was half-way between Durban Bay and the Tugela, on a hill-side in the midst of the beautiful undulating ground and rich wood characteristic of the country, and with a river in front. There he had raised a thatched house for himself, and around it Zulu huts were continually multiplying. The English carpenter and labourers whom he had brought out instructed the Kaffirs in various kinds of labour, for which they were quite willing; and as they wore decent garments, they were called the clothed tribe. School was kept for the children in the week; for the grown-up people on Sunday; and on every alternate morning some Scripture fact was read and explained to them, the Captain still being obliged to act as chaplain, until the arrival of Mr. Hewetson, whom the Church Missionary Society were sending out.
Never had the generous toil of a devoted man seemed likely to meet with better success, when a storm came from a most unexpected quarter. The original colonists of the Cape of Good Hope were Dutch, and the whole district was peopled with boers or farmers of that nation, stolid, prosperous, and entirely uncontrolled by public opinion. They had treated the unfortunate Hottentots as slaves, with all the cruelty of stupidity, and imported Malays and Negroes to work in the same manner; and they had shown, even when under their native state, a sort of grim turbulence that made them very hard to deal with. When in 1834 the British Government emancipated their slaves, and made cruelty penal and labour necessarily remunerative, their discontent was immense, and a great number sold their farms, and moved off into the interior to form an independent settlement on the Orange River. A large number of them, however, hearing of Dingarn's liberality to Captain Gardiner, were determined to extort a similar grant to themselves by a display of power. First came a letter, which Mr. Owen had to read and interpret to the chief, and not long after a large deputation arrived, armed and mounted on strong horses. Dingarn showed them a war-dance, and they in return said they would show how the boers danced on horseback, and exhibited a sham-fight, which did indeed alarm the savage, but, so far from daunting him, only excited his treachery and fierceness. He gave a sort of general answer, and the messengers retired. But from that time his interest in Mr. Owen's teaching flagged; he wanted fire-arms instead of religion, and preachings led to cavillings. Indications of evil intentions likewise reached Captain Gardiner, who sent to warn Mr. Owen, and to offer him a refuge at Hambanati in case of need. Still Mr. Owen could gather nothing; he was called from time to time to read the Dutchmen's letters, but was never told how they were to be dealt with. In fact, Dingarn had replied by an offer of the very district he had given Captain Gardiner, on condition that the new-comers would recover some cattle which had been carried off by a hostile tribe. This was done, and the detachment which had been employed on the service arrived at Umkingoglove, where they were welcomed with war-dances, and exhibited their own sham-fights; but in the midst of the ensuing meal they were suddenly surrounded by a huge circle of the Zulus, as if for another war- dance. The black ring came nearer and nearer still, and finally rushed in upon the unhappy boers, and slaughtered every man of them.
Mr. Owen had suspected nothing of what was passing, till he received a message from Dingarn that he need not fear; the boers had been killed for plotting, but the umfundisi should not be hurt. A time of terrible anxiety followed, during which the Owen family saw large bodies of the Kaffir army marching towards the Tugela, and in effect they fell upon the Dutch camp, and upwards of a hundred and fifty white men, women, and children were massacred. This horrible act, showing that no reliance could be placed on Dingarn's promise, made the Owens decide on leaving Umkingoglove, and they arrived at Hambanati, whence they proceeded to Durban. The Gardiner family waited for another week; but, finding the whole of the settlers infuriated, and bent on joining the Dutch in a war of extermination against Dingarn, they were obliged to retreat to the coast. First, however, Captain Gardiner assembled his Kaffirs, and promised to do his utmost to find another tract, where they might settle in peace, if they would abstain from all share in the coming war. They promised; but in his absence the promise was not easy to keep; they joined in the fight, many were killed, and the settlement entirely broken up. The cause seemed to Gardiner hopeless; and, after waiting for a short time in Algoa Bay, he decided on leaving the scene of action, where peaceful teaching could not prevail for some time to come. Whether it would not have been better to have tarried a little while, and then to have availed himself of the confidence and affection he had inspired, so as to gather the r
emnants of his mission again, we cannot say. At any rate, he consoled himself for the disastrous failure at Natal by setting forth on a fresh scheme of Christian knight-errantry on behalf of the Indians of South America.
Long ago, in Brazil, the Jesuits had done their best to Christianize and protect the Indians; but the Portuguese settlers had, as usual, savagely resented any interference with their cruel oppressions, broken up the Jesuit settlement, and sold their unfortunate converts as slaves. After this, the Jesuit Fathers had formed excellent establishments in the more independent country of Paraguay, lying to the south, where they had many churches, and peaceful, prosperous, happy communities of Christian Indians around them. South American Indians are essentially childish beings; and the Jesuits, when providing labour enough to occupy them wholesomely, found themselves obliged to undertake the disposal of the produce, thus not merely rendering their mission self-supporting, but so increasing the wealth of the already powerful Order as to render it a still greater object of jealousy to the European potentates; and when, in the eighteenth century, the tide of opposition set strongly against it, the unecclesiastical traffic of the settlements in Paraguay was one of the accusations. The result was, that the Jesuit Fathers were banished from South America in 1767; and whether it was that they had neglected to train the Indians in self-reliance, or whether it was impossible to do so, their departure led to an immediate collapse into barbarism; nor had anything since been done on behalf of the neglected race. Indeed, the break-up of all Spanish authority had been doubly fatal to the natives, by removing all protection, and leaving them to the self-interested violence of the petty republics, unrestrained by any loftier consideration.
In the Republic of Buenos Ayres, under the dictatorship of General Rosas, the lot of these poor creatures was specially cruel. A war of extermination was carried on against them, and eighty had at one time been shot together in the market-place of the capital. Nothing could be done towards reclaiming them while so savage a warfare lasted; but Gardiner hoped to push on to the more northerly tribes, on the borders of Chili, and he took a journey to reconnoitre across the Pampas, with many strange hardships and adventures; but he found always the same story,-the Indians regarded as wild beasts, and, acting only too much as such, falling by night on solitary ranchos, or on lonely travellers, and murdering them, and, on the other hand, being shot down wherever they were found.
With great difficulty and perseverance he made his way to the Biobio river, leaving his family at Concepcion, the nearest comparatively civilized place. Here he meant to make his way to a village of independent Indians, with whose chief, Corbalan, he had hopes of entering into relations.
To cross the rapid stream of the Biobio, he had to use a primitive raft, formed of four trunks of trees, about eighteen feet long, lashed together by hide-thongs to two poles, one at each end. A horse was fastened to it, by knotting his tail to the tow-rope, and on his back was a boy, holding on by the single lock of the mane that is allowed to remain on Chilian horses, who guided him across with much entreating, urging, and coaxing. On the other side appeared Corbalan, the Indian chief on horseback, and in a dark poncho, a sort of round cloak, with a hole to admit the head, much worn all over South America. He took Captain Gardiner to his house, an oval, with wattled side-walls, about five feet high and thirty-five long, neatly thatched with grass, with a fireplace in the centre, where a sheep was cooked for supper. Corbalan could speak Spanish, and seemed to be pleased with the visit, making an agreement that he should teach Gardiner his Indian tongue, and, in return, be instructed in the way of God and heaven. He had convened forty-five of his people, among whom were five chiefs, each of whom made the visitor the offering of a boiled chicken, while he gave them some coloured cotton handkerchiefs and some brass buttons. It was a beautiful country, and reminded the guest so much of some parts of England, that it needed a glance at the brown skin, flowing hair, and long poncho of Corbalan to dispel the illusion that he was near home. Things looked so favourable, that he had even selected a site for the mission-house, when some change of sentiment came over Corbalan, probably from the remonstrances of his fellow-chiefs: he declared that a warlike tribe near at hand would not suffer him to harbour a stranger, and that he must therefore withdraw his invitation.
So ended this attempt; and the indefatigable Captain turned his attention to the Indians to the southward, but he found that these were on good terms with the Chilian Government, and that no one could come among them without a pass from thence; and, as there was a cautious attempt at Christianizing then going on, by persuading the cacique to be baptized and to admit priests to their villages, there was both the less need and the less opening for him.
So, picking up his wife and children again at Concepcion, he sailed with them for Valdivia, where, as wandering Europeans were always supposed to be in search of objects for museums, and perhaps from some confusion about his name, he was called "El Botanico." Again he plunged among the Indians; but, wherever he came to a peaceable tribe, they were under the influence of Spanish clergy, who were, of course, determined to exclude him, while the warlike and independent Indians could not understand the difference between him and their Spanish enemies; and thus, after two years of effort, he found that no opening existed for reaching these wild people. A proposal was made to him to remain and act as an agent for the Bible and Tract Societies among the South American Roman Catholics, but this he rejected. "No," he said; "I have devoted myself to God, to seek for openings among the heathen, and I cannot go back or modify my vow."
The Malay Archipelago was his next goal. He sailed with his wife and children from Valparaiso for Sydney on the 29th of May, 1839, but the vessel got out of her course, and was forced to put in at Tahiti, where he found things sadly changed by the aggression of Louis Philippe's Government, which had claimed the protectorate. The troubles of Queen Pomare's reign were at their height, and the conflict between French and English, Roman Catholic and Protestant, prevented any efficient struggle against the corruption introduced by the crews of all nations.
The great savage island of New Guinea seemed to Captain Gardiner a field calling for labour, and, on his arrival in Australia, he found that the Roman Catholic Bishop of Sydney was trying to organize a mission. He left Australia, hoping to obtain permission from the Dutch authorities at Timor to proceed to Papua, to take steps for being beforehand with the Australian expedition. He reached the place with great difficulty, and he himself, and all his family, began to suffer severely from fever. The Dutch governor told him that he might as well try to teach the monkeys as the Papuans, and the Dutch clergy gave him very little encouragement. He remained in these strange and beautiful islands for several months, trying one Dutch governor after another, and always finding them civil but impenetrable; for, in fact, they could not believe that an officer in her Britannic Majesty's Navy could be purely actuated by missionary zeal, but thought that it concealed some political object. They were not more gracious even to clergy of other nations. He found an American missionary at Macassar, whom they had detained, and some Germans, who were vainly entreating to be allowed to proceed to Borneo; and his efforts met only with the most baffling, passive, but systematic denial. It was reserved for the enterprise and prudence of Sir James Brooke to open a way in this quarter.
The health of the Gardiner family had been much injured by their residence in those lovely but unwholesome countries, but the voyage to Capetown restored it; and immediately after they sailed again for South America, where the Captain had heard of an Indian tribe in the passes of the Cordilleras, who seemed more possible of access. Here again he was baffled in his dealings with the local government by the suspicions of the priests, and never could obtain the means of penetrating beyond the city of San Carlos, so that he decided at last to repair to the Falkland Islands, and make an endeavour thence to reach the people of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, where no hostile Church should put stumbling-blocks in his way.
A doleful region he found t
hose Falkland Isles, covered only with their peculiar grass and short heather, and without a tree. A little wooden cottage, brought from Valparaiso, sheltered the much-enduring Mrs. Gardiner and the two children, while the Captain looked out for a vessel to take him to Patagonia; but he found that no one ever went there, and the whalers who made these dismal islands their station did not wish to go out of their course. Captain Gardiner offered 200_l., the probable value of a whole whale, as the price of his passage; but the skippers told him that, though they would willingly take him anywhere for nothing, they could not go out of their course.
To seek the most hopeless and uncultivated was always this good man's object. The Falkland Isles were dreary enough, but they were a paradise compared to the desolate fag-end of the American world,-a cluster of barren rocks, intersected by arms of the sea, which divide them into numerous islets, the larger ones bearing stunted forests of beech and birch, on the skirts of hills covered with perpetual snow, and sending down blue glaciers to the water's edge. The narrower channels are very shallow; the wider, rough and storm-tossed; and scarcely anything edible grows on the islands. The Fuegians are as degraded a people as any on the face of the earth, with just intelligence enough to maintain themselves by hunting and fishing, by the help of dogs, which, it is said, they prize so much that they would rather, in time of scarcity, eat up an old mother than a dog; and they are churlishly inhospitable to strangers, although with an unusual facility for imitating their language, nor had any one ever attempted their conversion.
However, the master of the Montgomery, who had brought the Gardiners out to the Falkland Islands, hearing of the offer, undertook such a profitable expedition; but his schooner was utterly frail, had to be caulked and to borrow a sail, and, as he was losing no whales, Captain Gardiner refused to give more than 100_l., a sufficiently exorbitant sum, for the passage of himself and a servant named Johnstone. While the crazy vessel was refitting a Sunday intervened, during which he offered to hold a service, but only two men attended it, the rest were all absent or intoxicated.
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