e fifth son of a Berkshire squire, was born in
1794. He was a born sailor, and became a midshipman before the end of
the great war of the French revolution; but the only naval action in
which he was engaged was against the American vessel _Essex_, which was
captured by his ship, the _Phoebe_, off Valparaiso. Allen Gardiner had
been carefully brought up by a good mother, but her death in his early
youth cast him loose and left him without any influence to keep up
serious impressions. He drifted into carelessness and godlessness,
though at times some old remembrance, roused by danger or by a comrade's
death, would sting him sharply. Once, feeling ashamed of having
forgotten the very words of Scripture, he made up his mind to buy a
Bible, and then was so full of false shame that he waited about in the
street till the shop should be empty, and then only thought how odd his
demand must seem to the bookseller.

Most likely this was at Portsmouth, for he had there met a lady who had
been with his mother at her death, and had given him a narrative of her
last days, which his father had written, but from some sense of want of
sympathy had withheld from the son. The friend judged him better. The
copy in his own handwriting bears the date, "Portsmouth, November 18,
1818," and therewith was a little Bible with the same date written in it.
For two years, however, this produced no effect; but in 1820, when at
Penang, as a lieutenant in the _Dauntless_, Allen received a letter of
grave reproof from his father, and one of warm kindness and expostulation
from the same lady, his mother's friend, together with some books.
Nothing would have seemed more hopeless than the chance that a letter
from a religious old lady would make an impression on a dashing young
naval officer, and yet Allen Gardiner always considered this as the
turning-point of his life, and connected it with his mother's prayers.

It was when his thoughts were directed to religious subjects, and his
intelligence freshly excited, that he visited the coasts of South
America, the region above all others where the Roman Catholic Church is
seen to the most disadvantage. Two things most especially struck him,
the remnants of the Inquisition at Lima, and the discovery that the poor
were buried without prayer or mass. Such scenes as these gave him an
extreme horror of Romanism and all that he supposed to be connected
therewith, and his next station at Tahiti, in all the fr