In the year 1849, Captain Allen Gardiner, an intrepid sailor and a religious enthusiast, formed the plan of converting the natives of Terra del Fuego and of Patagonia. He knew nothing of their language or habits, nothing indeed of their land. He was, however, possessed with the idea that he was called to be an apostle of those bleak and fog-wrapped regions. Of all inhabited spots on the earth, the Terra del Fuego is the most miserable. Cold, whirlwinds and tempests of snow and hail, frozen fogs with but rare glimpses of sunshine, form its climate; and the natives are utterly barbarous, apparently the refugees from the Continent, driven out of the somewhat less desolate peninsula of Patagonia by the giants that now possess it, and in their misery sinking to the lowest depths to which man can descend. During a year or more Captain Gardiner's efforts to rouse interest in his scheme, sufficient interest to make the money flow, had met with no success. He applied to the Moravian Brethren to take up the mission; they declined. Then he placed the matter before the Scottish Establishment, but the canny Scotchmen would nae think ov it. At last a lady at Cheltenham furnished him with £700, and this, with £300 from his own private purse, formed all the resources on which he acted. As he could not afford to charter a schooner, he had four open boats built for him at Liverpool. Two of these were launches of considerable size, to which he gave the names of the _Speedwell_ and the _Pioneer_; the other two were small dinghies, to be used as tenders or luggage boats. [Illustration: DOROTHY PENTREATH of MOUSEHOLE in CORNWALL _the last Person who could converse in the Cornish language?_] Captain Gardiner now looked about him for enthusiasts like himself to share the perils and the possible glories of spreading the gospel over Terra del Fuego, in which not a cross had been planted nor the Word of God proclaimed. He secured the services of a surgeon, a missionary, and from Mousehole, near Penzance, drew three sturdy Cornish sailors, or fishermen--John Pearce, John Badcock, and John Davy Bryant--who little knew what risks they ran. The party left England on September 27th, 1850, in the ship _Ocean Queen_, bound from Liverpool to California, taking with them their boats and six months' provisions. They were landed on the inhospitable foreign shore on the 5th December. Pinkerton, in his _Modern Geography_, thus graphically describes the scene of their projected labours:--