4. Farewell to Gregory Bay
AFTER the departure of the " Commodore," the Patagonian chief forgot all his fair promises, and seemed bent upon robbing his" brother," Captain Gardiner, by one pretense or another, of his little store of provisions.
In this strait the missionaries cried to God, and besought Him to show them what His will concerning them was; then, comforted by the thought that they were in the hands of their Father in heaven, without whom not even a sparrow falls to the ground, they began to prepare a feast for the hungry hunting party.
Captain Gardiner was not afraid of the natives; on his former visit he had slept alone on shore, setting up his tent among them, when not a single man from his ship could be induced to bear him company; but he saw plainly that nothing could be done so long as they looked upon the missionaries and their property as fair game, and had no thought but of how they might plunder them with the least risk to themselves; and it became more and more manifest both to him and Mr. Hunt that the time had come for them to leave Gregory Bay.
Scarcely had this become a settled determination with them when an English barque cast anchor in the bay. They at once began to take down the wooden huts, and prepare to go on board. "Thus," writes Captain Gardiner, " we took a final leave of the spot where we had hoped to have been instrumental in making known to these poor ignorant heathen the glad tidings of salvation. Wissale came down to the shore to bid them farewell, and this brief missionary sojourn upon that desolate coast came to an end.
Those days of weariness and painfulness—those nights of watching—might seem to have been spent in vain, but no shadow of doubt rested upon Captain Gardiner's bright spirit. "We can never be wrong"—thus he wrote in his journal, on his homeward way—"we can never be wrong in casting the gospel net on any side or in any place. During many a dark and wearisome night we may appear to have toiled in vain, but it will not always be so. If we will but wait the appointed time, the promise, though long delayed, will assuredly come to pass.”
Gardiner again visited, and again was driven from the coasts of these poor heathen. Still he prayed on in patient hope, and at length set to work to prepare for a new expedition. He had two launches built—one of which was to serve as a mission home, the other as a storehouse, for he intended to take six months' provisions for himself and his companions. Two tiny boats were also built, by means of which the mission party might land where they pleased, and get back to their floating home at night.
And now that all was ready, the question arose, Who will go to Cape Horn? It was soon answered, for many willingly offered themselves. "Let me go with the captain," pleaded Irwin, the Bristol boat-carpenter, who had been with him in his second expedition, "let me go; it is like heaven upon earth to be with him, he is such a man of prayer.”
Irwin's wish was granted, and he sailed once more with his: beloved captain, And from a quiet little Cornish village, where they had spent their days and nights tossing about in our rough seas in their open boats, came three fishermen, Bryant, Pearce, and Bad cock, and they were chosen as boatmen to the expedition. Then from London, where he had been used to work at his occupation all the week, and on Sundays to teach the shrewd little city children in the Sunday-school, came Mr. Maidment. He was not weary of teaching the children in the great city, but his heart yearned over those far-away children, born in dark and desolate homes, to whom the name of Jesus was unknown, and he longed to speak that "name of matchless worth" in ears which had never heard it. It would be sweet, he thought, to speak of Christ, to tell the story of His lowly birth, of His life of love and of sorrow, of His death of shame and anguish, and of His glorious resurrection and ascension, to those to whom it should be no twice-told tale, but the very message from God straight to their hearts.
One other companion Captain Gardiner was to have. Mr. Williams, a Staffordshire doctor, who wrote, earnestly praying to be allowed to join the little band.
He had only just time to bid his friends good-bye and reach Liverpool before the vessel sailed, in the month of September, 1850. "Fairly on board," he wrote in his first letter from the "Ocean Queen," "and standing out for the wide ocean, how varied were the emotions felt! But the one, above all others, was a sense of joy at the certainty of now being actually engaged in the great work of making known the Saviour of the world, and that, too, to a poor, benighted people—a race of savages.”
A few years before, although in a country full of Bibles, and where the light of truth was shining all around him, Mr. Williams had been living as much without God in the world as the poor heathen in the dreary, frozen wastes of Fuegia. At that time the Bible was to him, to use his own words, "a mere lumber book," and science, literature, and his profession his whole delight. During a terrible illness, however, when he believed himself to be at the point of death, he awoke to the realities of life, of death, and of eternity. It is said that drowning men have seen, as in a map, all their past lives unrolled before them. Just so did Mr. Williams see his own history. Fair and blameless enough before his fellow men his life had been, and even well-pleasing in his own eyes, but the thought of standing before God, and giving account to Him of those thirty years, during which he had lived in willful ignorance of Him, now filled him with indescribable awe. A horror of great darkness fell upon him, and the first ray of light which pierced the gloom came when someone standing beside the sufferer bade him "look to Jesus.”
As a drowning man hears the cheer from the lifeboat, borne faintly to him over the fury of the storm, and knows that succor and rescue are at hand, so did this tempest-tossed soul hear in the utterance of that Name the assurance of deliverance. He did "look to Jesus," as he was bidden, and "with the very bidding," he says, "I found an infinite joy in so doing." The darkness was passed, the storm was stilled, and there was a great calm.
Restored to health as by miracle, when he had seemed past all hope of recovery, Mr. Williams went forth into life again. But the face of all the world was changed to him. "Myself and my fellows," he said, when speaking of this time in his history, "I no longer regarded as creatures of a moment's duration, but I saw eternity impressed as a seal upon the whole generation of men. Jesus was most precious to me—my glory and infinite joy. The Bible, hitherto a sealed book, was now a river of water to my thirsty soul. I felt that I would care to live only for the sake of reading it. How it amazed me to know that that precious light had so long shone in my way, and I never had perceived it!”
Mr. Williams was a home missionary before he had any thought of going abroad to preach. A time of great terror and distress came to the place where he lived; numbers of his fellow townsfolk were dying every day of cholera, and, as he went from house to house, the doctor's visit was as that of an angel of God to many a stricken home. When he had done what he could to relieve the pain of the sufferer, kneeling beside the bed, he would speak of the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world; and many an ear, soon to be deaf to earthly sounds, eagerly drank in the message of pardon and peace from his lips. We cannot wonder that his memory was long cherished at Burslem, and that many prayers followed him upon his untried way, as he set out to be a missionary among the Fuegians. P.