The trouble with the Indians, it appears, was that they looked with covetous eyes on the outfit of the missionaries. The record says they were robbers, but it now appears that this term is much too harsh. They did, indeed, strive to take valuables from the missionaries without making any return whatever for them, but it must not be forgotten that the Yahgans held practically all property in common. They naturally resented what seemed to them to be the selfishness of these white intruders just as they ostracized one of their own tribe who did anything contrary to Yahgan custom.
Finding, as he supposed, his life in danger when he tried to make a home among the Yahgans, Captain Gardiner returned home to try to raise money for a ship in which he could live in a Yahgan harbor. He believed he could repel any Yahgan boarders that might attack him, and eventually make friends with the repulsed. But he failed to get the money, because the English were skeptical as to the success of even a mission ship.
Thereat the determined captain bought instead two launches twenty-six feet long and decked them over. The sum of £1000 was deemed necessary for this enterprise, of which "a generous Christian lady of Cheltenham gave £700." Gardiner himself gave £300.
"Captain Gardiner, with three Cornish sailors, Christian men accustomed to stormy seas," "the ship carpenter who had gone with Captain Gardiner before," "two men as catechists, Mr. Maidment, and Mr. Richard Williams, the latter a surgeon in good practice,"—these seven sailed from Liverpool on September 7, 1850, in the ship Ocean Queen, which was bound to the booming town of San Francisco, but agreed to land them and their outfit in Tierra del Fuego. They carried stores for six months, and arranged for more to come before these should be exhausted. On December 5th their ship anchored in a bay called Banner Cove, in the west end of Picton Island. The missionaries landed, and then natives came. Fearing violence the missionaries took refuge on the Ocean Queen for a few days, and then, on December 18th, landed again, built a wigwam near the beach, moored their boats handy by, and let the big ship sail away.
Then came what the record calls "a terrible discovery." In taking their outfit from the Ocean Queen the missionaries had left on board about all the powder and lead with which to kill the Indians. "They were now alike without the means of self-defence and of obtaining food," is the way the story of Captain Gardiner's life puts it, but the plain English of the matter is that they had come relying on guns to protect them. They meant to shoot the Indians under certain circumstances. Their motto was, so to speak: "Trust in God, but keep your powder dry." Now, however, they had no powder and "they were left almost wholly dependent on meal, rice, and such things."
Thereafter they "went beating about among the islands, alarmed by every indication of the people for whose sake all this misery was encountered." In a diary, written by one of the party, one may read that "I applied the golden key to heaven's treasury, and with it opened the storehouse of God's exceeding great and precious promises. What I saw and felt of Christ's love no tongue can tell," but their faith in Divine protection was not strong enough to make them risk a visit to the Indians, and so, at last, they actually died of starvation, although the region produced and produces a prodigious supply of mussels and limpets, wild celery and other edible vegetables, not to mention fish and mammals easily snared by one not afraid to venture away from his boat.
"It does seem remarkable that Gardiner should have apparently erred from timidity and over-caution," says the writer of the life of that missionary, and then he piously adds: "We must look to the will of God in the whole affair."
The death of Gardiner through his own cowardice, to put the matter bluntly, is only one—the first of a long list of doings that "seem remarkable" in this story.