ns, and the Dutch clergy gave him very little encouragement. He
remained in these strange and beautiful islands for several months,
trying one Dutch governor after another, and always finding them civil
but impenetrable; for, in fact, they could not believe that an officer in
her Britannic Majesty's Navy could be purely actuated by missionary zeal,
but thought that it concealed some political object. They were not more
gracious even to clergy of other nations. He found an American
missionary at Macassar, whom they had detained, and some Germans, who
were vainly entreating to be allowed to proceed to Borneo; and his
efforts met only with the most baffling, passive, but systematic denial.
It was reserved for the enterprise and prudence of Sir James Brooke to
open a way in this quarter.

The health of the Gardiner family had been much injured by their
residence in those lovely but unwholesome countries, but the voyage to
Capetown restored it; and immediately after they sailed again for South
America, where the Captain had heard of an Indian tribe in the passes of
the Cordilleras, who seemed more possible of access. Here again he was
baffled in his dealings with the local government by the suspicions of
the priests, and never could obtain the means of penetrating beyond the
city of San Carlos, so that he decided at last to repair to the Falkland
Islands, and make an endeavour thence to reach the people of Patagonia
and Tierra del Fuego, where no hostile Church should put stumbling-blocks
in his way.

A doleful region he found those Falkland Isles, covered only with their
peculiar grass and short heather, and without a tree. A little wooden
cottage, brought from Valparaiso, sheltered the much-enduring Mrs.
Gardiner and the two children, while the Captain looked out for a vessel
to take him to Patagonia; but he found that no one ever went there, and
the whalers who made these dismal islands their station did not wish to
go out of their course. Captain Gardiner offered 200_l._, the probable
value of a whole whale, as the price of his passage; but the skippers
told him that, though they would willingly take him anywhere for nothing,
they could not go out of their course.

To seek the most hopeless and uncultivated was always this good man's
object. The Falkland Isles were dreary enough, but they were a paradise
compared to the desolate fag-end of the American world,--a cluster of
barren rocks, intersected by arms of th