Savage (21 page)

Snow also claimed that Schmidt was unaware of the line of work he had come to, and that when he found he was to live on Keppel Island with Despard his distress was shocking. According to Snow, the cook of the
Allen Gardiner
found him ‘in the cabin on his knees, praying for some one to come and help him, – to save him! and, with bitter cries and tears streaming down his face, extravagantly regretting that he had not taken the advice of his parents and remained at home'.

*   *   *

The
Hydaspes
arrived at Port Stanley on 30 August 1856. On the way over Emma Bartlett had given birth to a baby girl, and Frank Jones and Miss Hanlon, the governess, had suffered badly from sea-sickness, but all in all it had been a good passage. At just after 5 p.m. Snow came on board and shook hands with Despard. They met with a warmth that betrayed little of the tension that lay just below the surface. The arriving preacher noted in his journal, ‘Seldom have I shaken the hands of man with more hearty good-will than his. He had been expecting us about four weeks … and was on the eve of a start to look for us stranded and shattered on some one of the many dangerous points in these parts.'

Despard and his family were given a house in Port Stanley and the next few days were spent in unloading the
Hydaspes.
The young Allen Gardiner remembered the chaos at the quayside:

Perhaps the most amusing incident that I can remember was the landing of the livestock – Mr Turpin and I borrowed a boat … The pigs were put in the bows, the sheep in the centre and the goats I had in the stern so that I could look after them – Then came the geese, ducks, goats and hens till the boat looked all alive – As soon as we pushed off with this our last load the crew on board gave us three cheers which we returned and soon reached the shore safely … The poor cow died the day we anchored so her house was sent on shore and converted into a temporary shelter for the poultry. The Governor kindly allowed us to put the sheep and goats into his paddock. The goats followed me very nicely … The pigs were most horrible fellows to manage. It took us an age to get them up into the sty which was at a little distance.

Dockside goings-on aside, under the surface the mission was continuing to fray. If Snow had held out any hope that the arrival of Despard would herald a new clarity and unity, then he was sadly mistaken. Besides, his months of pent-up frustration and seething anger meant that Snow was spoiling for a fight.

Two days after the
Hydaspes
arrived, he received an unexpected visitor. John Furniss Ogle had paid £500 towards his own passage, but now he was looking for a sympathetic ear to bend. In a state of uncontrolled agitation he told Snow how Despard had verbally abused him during the passage: ‘“A shoe-black would be better than he.” “He was not fit to preach to pigs,” and many other similar expressions did the “Missionary Superintendent” apply to him.' Furthermore, Despard had stolen part of a wooden house Ogle had brought for himself, and had decreed that when the party went to Cranmer, Ogle must stay at Port Stanley where food was scarce and prices were rocketing.

What followed was a fit of pique on Snow's part, an act of suicidal petulance. Despard requested a lift in the
Allen Gardiner
to Keppel Island. He was naturally anxious to see what had been achieved there and to check on the well-being of his colleagues. Snow refused to take him. Giving Despard a literal interpretation of the Alien Ordinance, Snow said that to take him to Cranmer would leave him responsible for his safety and, should anything go awry, he might be hauled up on a charge as serious as manslaughter. Besides, he added, the crew was due to be paid off, and some had a guaranteed passage back to England.

Despard was furious. On 18 September he chartered a ship, the
Victoria,
and set sail for Keppel Island. A day later Snow made the
Allen Gardiner
ready to sail. He said later that he was simply intending to follow the
Victoria
and make sure that, in the dangerous conditions that prevailed, the missionary arrived safely at his destination. The Patagonian Missionary Society insisted that Snow was about to abscond to England in the mission ship. However, before the ship could go anywhere the port authorities impounded her, under threat of being fired on by guns now pointing at her from Port Stanley's fortress. Snow ordered the crew to stop hauling the anchor and to stand down.

Ten days passed before Despard returned. On his arrival he delivered a letter to the
Allen Gardiner,
giving the captain three hours to get off the ship. Snow protested that he had all his effects on board and would need longer. Despard granted him three days. Snow asked for compensation – money for lodgings and a passage home for him and his wife. Despard refused.

This was harsh treatment indeed. Port Stanley was facing famine, there was no cheap accommodation, and no ship bound for England. Standing on the quayside Mrs Snow started what eventually became a full-scale nervous breakdown. Nearly destitute, Snow bargained with Despard for whatever he could get: he bought two old mattresses, pillows and blankets for £2, thirty pounds of hard biscuit for 10 shillings, and eight pounds of ship's pork for a further four shillings. With his wife's health deteriorating, he rented a house from the Falkland Islands Company for £2 10 shillings. In order to pay for it he sold off books and instruments at knockdown prices. Four weeks later he obtained a passage for them both on a ship bound for England at a cost of £47. On 30 December 1856 he arrived at Ramsgate.

Next month the
Voice of Pity
announced, ‘The peculiarly distressing duty devolves to us of announcing to the friends of the Patagonian Mission, that Captain Snow and the Reverend J.F. Ogle are no longer connected to the Society.' Snow, it declared, had expressed views on the way that the mission should be run that were at variance with those adopted by the organisation. All they could now do was offer him their prayers. In respect of Ogle they were vicious: ‘Indeed some strange hallucination of mind seems to have seized him, almost from the moment of the arrival of the Missionary party at Stanley, to be accounted for only on the ground of ill health, or some sinister representations made to him by certain parties there.' It was part of a new ruthlessness that characterised the Society over the coming years.

Chapter 17

The clash between William Parker Snow and the Society had become a highly personal, spiteful affair in which it was difficult to establish who was right. In his more coherent moments, though, Snow had challenged the fundamental philosophy and operation of the endeavour. He came to realise that it was immoral to transport uncomprehending Fuegians several hundred miles from their homeland to a new way of life. In his account, published in 1857, he wrote that missionary work should be about good deeds, poor relief, spreading knowledge and understanding, and taking God to the heathen. It should not be about going among the natives to ‘plant an idol in their hearts – disturb the economy of their nature by sudden change; by an irruption of mystic ideas, which they can only understand as you may choose to make them understood, and which is done by various methods not always the most straightforward and truthful'.

However, Despard, the missionary, was now free to assess the achievements of the project and take the enterprise into a period of much-needed consolidation. Over the next two years much lost time needed to be made up. Mrs Despard remained with the children at Port Stanley while her husband transplanted the rest of the mission party to Cranmer. Homes, storehouses and roads had to be built; cattle, sheep and pigs had to be purchased, timber fetched, and short exploratory trips made to Patagonia and the fringes of Tierra del Fuego, where the graves of the original Allen Gardiner expedition were visited.

Conditions at Cranmer became cramped. James Ellis and Garland Phillips, who had spent eight months living alone on the island, had to adjust to a new overcrowding. The Bartletts with their baby, Annie Jemima, took over Phillips's room in Mission House, while he moved into a small room with Despard's two adopted sons, Thomas Bridges and Frank Jones. Schmidt, Ellis and Turpin occupied the large room in the house, the new carpenter lived above them and Despard spent most of his time on the
Allen Gardiner.

They quickly fell into a routine. Schmidt, Phillips and Jones handled most of the indoor activities, cooking and cleaning, while the rest of the party dealt with the larger construction tasks of building a settlement. The day's work began at six thirty in the morning, with breakfast at eight, prayers at nine and then, after another three and a half hours' work, it was time for dinner. By two in the afternoon they were beginning their third work session, taking tea at half past five and evening prayers at seven. On Thursdays the week's supplies were fetched up from the storehouse. Friday was spent cooking for Sunday, Saturday was a half-holiday, set aside for bathing, walking and shooting, and Sunday was a day of prayers, hymns, readings and conversation. The accommodation was cold and the food bland, consisting of vegetables, penguin eggs, anything that had been hunted or fished and, once every three months, a piece of beef.

Despard spent much of his time away at sea. Between June 1856 and December 1857, he made twenty-five voyages in the ship, commuting between the mission station at Keppel Island, his family at Port Stanley and mainland South America, where he went to raise funds and collect provisions. In Rio de Janeiro in 1857, he learned that HMS
Madagascar
was in port and that Benjamin Bynoe, former surgeon of the
Beagle,
was on board. In his journal Despard recorded that he went on board the ship ‘and saw and had long and interesting conversation with Mr B, who was surgeon in the
Beagle
on both surveys; and was well acquainted with our three Fuegian hopefuls. He says Boat Memory, who died at Plymouth, was far the best of them.'

Despard comes across as an abrasive character, who would not tolerate fools or anybody else. He was forty-five and had been acclimatised to the bleak colonial life by a childhood spent in Nova Scotia. For the last sixteen years he had been chaplain of the Clifton Poor Law Union in Bristol and the master of a successful private school for the sons of rich gentlemen. Snow clearly detested him, and claimed that others – Ogle and Schmidt, for example – shared his opinion. To Snow, Despard was a megalomaniac, a tyrant bent on a course of self-advancement clad in the garb of a missionary. A sense of this emerges in the
Voice of Pity:
he is seen admonishing a workman for swearing, or found threatening others for not working hard enough. One Sunday he learned that the crew of the
Allen Gardiner
were not intending to attend church because they were going to wash their clothes. ‘Not on Sunday in this vessel,' he roared. ‘It has been built, launched and sailed in God's service, and His holy day is not to be profaned in it with impunity. If you wash it will be at your cost … The time is coming when you must repent, but it may be too late…' The crew were then ordered ashore with their jackets and told they had to stay off the ship for the whole day. ‘Sailors are like children; the better they are treated, the more they want…' he concluded.

In November 1857, Garland Phillips set off for England. He had been away from home for over three years and wanted to press his case for ordination. What he found on his arrival two months later was a besieged Society, taking a battering from the wrath of their vengeful former captain, William Parker Snow.

In 1857 Snow had released a sixpenny pamphlet entitled
The Patagonian Missionary Society and some truths associated with it,
which asserted that ‘a mission to Tierra del Fuego could be carried on for an eighth of what it is costing you now. What is it you are doing now? Merely establishing a colony at Keppel Island for monks and hermits…' Later that year his two-volume account of his time as captain of the missionary schooner was published to great critical acclaim and public interest. He had also relentlessly lobbied the Secretary of State for the Colonies and launched a major lawsuit against the Society. The charges were largely familiar, though there were a few extra thrown in for good measure. He claimed that the Patagonian Missionary Society had unfairly dismissed him, leaving him and his wife impoverished thousands of miles from home. He had never been paid and the Snows had been forced to find their own way home. He further alleged that the Society was, in fact, a cover for cattle ranching and financial speculation, that it was proposing to kidnap natives and drag them off to Keppel Island where they would be used to tend the cattle. This, he added, was slavery. His attacks did not finish there. Others, too, felt the lash of his tongue: the authorities on the Falklands were corrupt and the local agent for the shipbrokers Lloyd's was profiting from the deliberate wrecking of ships. Unless something was done, Snow warned, there was grave trouble ahead.

The Society attempted to counter Snow's accusations in
A brief reply to certain charges made against the Patagonian Missionary Society, or South American Missionary Society, by William Parker Snow,
but the captain had stolen a march on them. The arrival of Garland Phillips in England was, therefore, a godsend to them, for they were able to publish first-hand accounts of their achievements, progress and hopes for the future. Phillips said he had thought that he would have carried out more missionary work than he had in his first two years, but there had been a great deal more to do than had been initially realised. Everything was working now, he was pleased to report: the road had been macadamised, stone buildings were going up and visits had been made to Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia. A big hope was that ‘two or three of the Mission party will, for a short time, make a trial of remaining among the natives and endeavour by all means to persuade some to return with them to Keppel'.