The World, The Flesh and the Devil: The Life and Opinions of Samuel Marsden in England and the Antipodes, 1765–1838

By Andrew Sharp

New Zealanders know Samuel Marsden as the founder of the CMS missions that brought Christianity (and perhaps sheep) to New Zealand. Australians know him as the flogging parson' who established large landholdings and was dismissed from his position as magistrate for exceeding his jurisdiction. English readers know of Marsden for his key role in the history of missions and empire. In this major biography spanning research, and the subject's life, across England, New South Wales and New Zealand, Andrew Sharp tells the story of Marsden's life from the inside. Sharp focuses on revealing to modern readers the powerful evangelical lens through which Marsden understood the world. By diving deeply into key moments the voyage out, the disputes with Macquarie, the founding of missions Sharp gets us to reimagine the world as Marsden saw it: always under threat from the Prince of Darkness, in need of a bold reprover of vice', a world written in the words of the King James Bible. Andrew Sharp takes us back into the nineteenth-century world, and an evangelical mind, to reveal the past as truly a foreign country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Oct 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781775587088

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Andrew Sharp is an Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at the University of Auckland. Since 2006 he has lived in London, and is the author or editor of books including Political Ideas of the English Civil Wars 1641–1649 (1983), Justice and the Māori: The Philosophy and Practice of Māori Claims in New Zealand since the 1970s (1990, expanded 1997), Leap into the Dark: The Changing Role of the State in New Zealand since 1984 (1994), The English Levellers (1998), Histories, Power and Loss: Uses of the Past – A New Zealand Commentary (2001, with P. G. McHugh), and Bruce Jesson’s To Build a Nation: Collected Writings 1975–1999 (2005).

The World, the Flesh & the Devil

The life and opinions of Samuel Marsden in England and the Antipodes, 1765–1838

Andrew Sharp

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction The life and opinions of Samuel Marsden

Freight from England, 1765–1793

Chapter 1 A West Riding man’s place in the social and economic world of England

Chapter 2 The gospel, c. 1780–93

Chapter 3 The callings, duties, trials and mission of an evangelical minister, c. 1780–93

Chapter 4 The voyage to Botany Bay, 1793–94

A Rising Man in New South Wales, 1794–1807

Chapter 5 A clergyman’s role in New South Wales: Richard Johnson’s example, 1788–1800

Chapter 6 Living in an unregenerate Colony, 1794–1800

Chapter 7 Churches and schools, 1800–07

Chapter 8 Magistrate, 1800–07

Chapter 9 Farmer, 1800–07

Chapter 10 Missionary beginnings, 1800–07

Chapter 11 ‘The flogging parson’ and the Irish troubles, 1800–07

Chapter 12 Family and ambitions: order, civilisation and evangelism in the antipodes and South Seas

At Work in England, 1807–1809

Chapter 13 The social reformer and mission advocate abroad, 1807–09

Tribulations and Triumphs in the Antipodes, 1810–c. 1828

Chapter 14 Jealousy of office: a narrative of disputes between Marsden and Macquarie until the Philo Free libel, 1810–17

Chapter 15 The mission in the Society Islands until the publication of Philo Free in 1817

Chapter 16 The mission to the New Zealanders planned and delayed, 1808–c. 1817

Chapter 17 Intentions revealed and troubles emerging in the Bay of Islands, c. 1814–17

Chapter 18 Marsden’s ‘character’: amour-propre and the works of the devil in New South Wales, 1817–21

Chapter 19 Marsden, Macquarie and their fight to the reputational death, 1817–26

Chapter 20 Weakness and disunity in the Bay of Islands, 1817–23

Chapter 21 Moses and the twelve spies: expulsions from the Promised Land, 1821–23

Chapter 22 Missionaries abroad and at home, and a gentleman sinner: New South Wales, 1821–c. 1830

Towards a More Peaceful End, Until 1838

Chapter 23 The routines of colonial life, c. 1821–30

Chapter 24 Civilisation and the Prince of Darkness: New Zealanders, their civilisation and evangelisation, 1814–30

Chapter 25 Law, government, settlement and empire in New Zealand, 1814–38

Chapter 26 Final years, c. 1830–38

Chapter 27 The last judgment

Appendix Marsden’s character in the hands of others, 1838–2014

Notes

Selected Sources

List of Figures

Index

Plates

INTRODUCTION

The life and opinions of Samuel Marsden

In the Book of Common Prayer, which in its 1662 edition laid down the order of church services for the Church of England, the priest and congregation were ordered to pray to their God each day to protect them from the ‘three enemies of the soul’: ‘the world, the flesh and the devil’. Samuel Marsden, an ordained priest of the Church, went further than the Litany. He not only prayed for protection from that evil trinity but assailed them as often as he came across them – sometimes subtly, sometimes in his blunt country Yorkshire way, sometimes alone, sometimes in concert with like-minded activists. Whenever he found men or women too much attached to the power and pride of life in the world he criticised them for not attending to their spiritual duties of seeking and loving God. Whenever he found them indulging in the pleasures of the flesh such as fornication, adultery, and drunkenness, he excoriated them. Wherever he uncovered crimes against the laws of man (like theft or murder or adultery or disobedience to superiors) or sins against the laws of God (like theft or murder or adultery or disobedience to superiors), there he saw the presence of Satan: he who was otherwise called the devil, the ‘Prince of the Air’, the ‘Prince of this World’ or the ‘Prince of Darkness’. Satan would have mankind sin and suffer, in the biblical phrase, the wages of sin (Romans 6:23), namely death. Christianity, the religion binding mankind to God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit – the Holy Trinity – would have them obey God and live eternally.

Marsden was a Christian evangelist. He would ‘convert’ as many men and women as he could; he would cause them to be ‘reborn’ and live. For him, St Paul, ‘the Apostle to the Gentiles’, was the most authoritative of Christ’s Apostles. In one of his many sermons as a chaplain in the British convict colony of New South Wales – usually simply called by its inhabitants ‘the Colony’ – he spoke to the few who were reborn of what it was to be unregenerate. He used Paul’s own words:

In time past ye walked according to the course of this world according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience [Ephesians 2:1–3]. The Apostle declares here that they were wholly under the government of Satan, who is called the prince of the power of the air. The same is the awful state of all unconverted men tho’ they know it not, and when this solemn truth is told them they will not believe it, but spurn the idea.

It was too easy for the unconverted to reject the gospel of salvation. There was hope, however. They could be redeemed if they repented of their sins and came to believe that Christ was the Son of God come to earth in the flesh to save them. Then they would not be among those punished with death and hell by an avenging God. They would join the blessed in heaven and live eternally.¹ Thus said St Paul; thus thought Samuel Marsden.

But he saw himself not only as a Christian evangelist preaching salvation through Christ. He also saw himself as a minister of the Church of England; and so besides often irritating – even enraging – non-believing sinners by admonishing them and making evident his disgust at their behaviour, he found enemies in other Christian churches. He was a dedicated Protestant, opposed to the idolatry of the ‘Papist’ Roman Catholic Church. He thought Rome’s dedication to representations of spiritual realities in idols constructed from mere earthly materials was straightforwardly sinful because it was prohibited in the Word of God. The Second of the Ten Commandments in the Holy Bible forbad it. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow thyself down and serve them (Exodus 20:4–5). He thought too, that Rome’s overmuch dedication to worldly ceremony and formality discouraged ‘vital’ religion, the product of the immediate experience of the believer. The rites of Rome, unlike those of England, were not ‘helps’ to salvation but impediments. On the other hand, as a priest of the Church of England, though he often worked wholeheartedly with Presbyterians, Methodists of various kinds, Congregationalists and Quakers for the salvation of unbelievers, he could not enter into all their beliefs. He did not mind much about abstruse theological differences among the Protestant denominations, but he could not admire their ‘discipline’ (i.e. their organisations) or certain of their more egalitarian and antiauthoritarian doctrines. For instance, he could not stomach any idea of the social and political equality of all believers or the idea that the Holy Spirit might speak direct to one’s conscience against the teaching of the Bible. If either of these doctrines were true, then – a most horrible prospect – no man or woman need obey any other. Dangerous ‘enthusiasm’ was to be distinguished from a ‘lively faith’ derived from the Bible.

And so Marsden ran into continual opposition when he took up his pastoral duties in the Colony in 1794. He ran into opposition in the South Seas too. Though he was not a missionary himself except at times during his seven visits to New Zealand, he was a leader of Protestant missionaries to the heathen ‘savages’ and ‘barbarians’ among scattered islands of the vast South Pacific Ocean. During the first years of the nineteenth century he became the New Holland agent of the interdenominational Missionary Society and of its missionaries in the Society Islands centring on Tahiti: the supreme example of his willingness to work with ‘nonconformists’ and ‘dissenters’ for the salvation of souls. As he saw it, it was not essential that the Society should be made up exclusively of members of the Church of England, or its members precisely conform to its doctrine and discipline if they were to save the souls of the heathen. Salvation came with membership of the ‘true’, eternal, church, not with adherence to any particular gathering of believers in the world. Later, though, from 1808–10, he took the lead in planting a Church of England mission in New Zealand, and was appointed the agent of the Missionary Society for Africa and the East. He felt more at home working with that society, though he never deserted the other.

By about 1806 the Missionary Society, gradually shedding its Church of England members, took on the informal – and then in 1818 the formal – title of the London Missionary Society (LMS); in 1812 his own church’s society took on the name of the ‘Church’ Missionary Society (CMS), though it, too, had informally used its later title rather earlier than that. Marsden’s name became prominent in the annals of both societies.² As their agent he suffered minor clashes with the missionaries of the Missionary Society over their extravagance, and their misbehaviour gave ammunition to the enemies of missions in New South Wales. But his problems with the New Zealand mission were far greater. He was much more central in planning and executing its operations than he was to the Missionary Society, and was more authoritarian a leader out of necessity. Like any man, he was inevitably imperfect in formulating and executing plans, but those who disagreed with him easily converted their disagreements about policy into challenges to his authority over them and aspersions on his character.

In conditions of extreme uncertainty and material difficulty – especially after the first station was settled in 1814 – he and his missionaries were often at odds until the mid-1820s, after which their relationships became more bureaucratised, more stable, mutually more tolerant and often affectionate. In the meantime, there was also significant opposition in New South Wales to both missions. Some objected to them as an impediment to their trading with, and exploiting of, the islanders; others – seamen and their masters – resented Marsden’s attempts to bring them to justice for their cruelty, theft and fornication; others thought that a mission to the native New Hollanders was more pressing than any to the South Seas; still others that the missions were simply camouflage for the pursuit of the missionaries’ own self-interest; many could not stomach their sanctimonious piety, and found Marsden’s own busy piety unbearable.

In brief, Marsden was a Christian preacher, pastor, and administrator, and was heir to the unpleasant conflicts those roles entailed. His activity was also as often secular and practical as it was spiritual and principled – if the distinction may be thought to mark a difference in the real world. For instance, he attempted the building and staffing of churches and schools in New South Wales, fought to provide protection for South Sea islanders, and grappled with the problems of supplying missionaries far over the sea. In 1814 he even bought a bark, the Active, which engaged in trading and whaling as well as supplying the missionaries in the islands. In each of these activities, bent to a spiritual end, he became enmeshed in the worlds of commerce, politics, and interdenominational strife. But he was also a man of the world in other ways more easily – perhaps too easily – distinguishable. By 1807, when he left to take his only leave in England, he owned the second-largest landed estate in New South Wales and farmed its scattered elements more efficiently perhaps than any other man in the Colony. He was the friend to political power too: intimate with the governor, Captain Philip Gidley King, RN. He had served for many years as a magistrate or Justice of the Peace (JP), administering rough justice to a predominantly convict population, infamously featuring the lash of the cat-o’-nine-tails and exile to still more isolated settlements in Norfolk Island, Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), and up the northern coast of New South Wales. These magisterial concerns as well as his determination to protect the islanders from European traders, sealers and whalers – greatly given up to the world, the flesh and the devil – further enmeshed him in worldly cares, including matters of internal trade, external commerce and the question of the colonisation of New Zealand.

Marsden was a conservative in the politics of New South Wales. Though he welcomed the control of governors by law and by advisors set alongside him – not attained until well into the 1820s – he was opposed to the too-rapid assimilation of the ‘emancipists’ (ex-convicts) into the society of free immigrants. He was a believer in social hierarchy and discipline, and in good morals as defined by the more puritan elements of his church. He was a patriarch in his family and patriarchal in his attitudes to women – as all men and most women were – and to convicts. He was the same with ‘servants’, among whom he included many of the free men and women of the lower classes in New South Wales, the great bulk of the missionaries, and the South Sea islanders. He would govern them and do them good because of his duties as a minister, apostle to the heathen, and magistrate. Like Christ, he should go about doing good (Acts 10:38). But the subjects of his concern would deserve the good he did them only so far as they observed the duties attached to their stations in society and in the institutions they served.

He did not think that men and women had ‘natural’ rights of any kind, only the God-given duties that defined their lawful places in society and expectations of the good that might – but might not – follow from their discharging them. Current ideas of liberalism and democracy as espoused by the American and French revolutionaries from 1776 into the 1790s revolted him. On the other hand, while he thought the missionaries had a duty to civilise and evangelise the South Sea islanders and so transform their lives without their consent, he thought the New Zealanders (and other islanders so far as he was in a position to speak of them) should, having attained a measure of civilisation, govern themselves, imitating the society and structures of authority he found at their best in his own native land. His social and political ideals were those into which he was born and bred in Yorkshire. They were Christian naturally, but (as he put it late in life) steeped ‘in the spirit of those ancient simple times, when agriculture was everything, and manufactures merely a household occupation, now usurped by towns and cities’.³ Somewhat of an enlightenment figure, he believed in the ‘improvement’ of human lives on earth through the application of the lessons of civilised men to current conditions, but he did not feel the impact or the attraction of the industrialisation and urban growth that he partly lived through in his youth.

Because of his prominence, power, and energetic pursuit of his commitments, it is not surprising that Marsden’s character should have greatly interested his contemporaries, or that his reputation differed markedly among those he dealt with or who had to deal with him. For better and for worse he was a celebrity in his own time in the United Kingdom, New South Wales, New Zealand, and even among Protestant Christians in continental Europe and the United States of America. He was – as this book will amply suggest and an appendix to it shows a little more fully – the object both of profound veneration and scornful derision and disgust. But while his character and reputation are undoubtedly of great interest and must figure in a book about his life, they will not be the main object of my enquiries here. To evoke his character is more difficult than might be thought;⁴ and it is in any case more interesting to ask why his character and reputation should have been matters of such consuming interest than to ask what he was really like and what his reputation should really be. I think, for instance, that by far the fullest biography of Marsden, A. T. Yarwood’s Samuel Marsden: The Great Survivor – which I often follow with thankful respect – is at times rather too enmeshed in judging, usually to exonerate, the man against his critics. There is a slight air of his being brought to the bar of history and interrogated as to his virtues and vices.⁵ Partly to avoid such a proceeding, although what follows will contain a good deal of evidence about Marsden’s character and reputation, it is not so much concentrated on them as on the opinions he held on the widest possible range of topics. It is more particularly about the opinions he stated about the very different worlds he lived and moved in. Only when it seems unavoidable, and then directly in the last chapter, do I enter the bloodied arena and judge the man as a whole; but that chapter does not read like a conventional history book in which the judgments are secreted in the narrative; it is more like an essay in the philosophy of judging others.

My concentrating in this way on Marsden’s opinions is an attempt at once to understand what drove the man, what he thought he was doing, how he thought his actions justified, and how he judged other men, women, situations, societies and institutions. Of course it is true to say of Marsden’s worlds – as it is of ours – that not all opinions people hold are stated and that not all those that are stated are truly believed in. To state an opinion is an action in the world, and may be tailored to produce an effect on others rather than express true belief. It is also the case that of those opinions that are stated and truly felt, not all are believed in for long or vehemently: some may simply be expressions of belief in some policy worth pursuing in certain, changeable, circumstances. Not all authentic opinions, that is, constitute, together with our visceral emotions, feelings so powerful as to motivate the lives and actions of the human animal. Some do not matter much. Finally, and classically, not all opinions are true.

In his analogy of a cave as defining the boundaries of knowledge, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato once wonderfully invoked the sad condition of humanity where humans live trapped in their opinions which are only the distorted and unconnected shadows of the full and clear reality they might dream of knowing but never will.⁶ Christianity in Marsden’s day inherited that tradition of understanding the matter. But the sceptical Scot David Hume, the end of whose life coincided with the beginnings of Marsden’s, thought more optimistically that opinion governed mankind and that all thinking about humanity should begin with that proposition – not to lament the fact but to follow its implications.⁷ Hume’s is the faith in which this book is written: Plato’s doubts and faith are left unexplored. It remains to add that even opinions that do matter and are put forward as truths cannot be expected to cohere in a complete and satisfying intellectual order: the history of opinions is as messy as the real life they partly cause and as the experiences they both colour and express.

That I should write of Marsden in this light will no doubt lead me to be seen as his defender and promoter because it is to echo as far as possible his own views of himself and his proceedings. I certainly did not intend to be his champion when I started to write ten years ago, interested narrowly in his idea that passions might be controlled not by an enlightened intellect but by conversion to Christianity. I rather expected to be repelled by a man of a kind I have not associated with much in my own life and whose Christian beliefs I do not share. But I have ended up more respectful of him,⁸ and more importantly, more of a historian than a moralist or philosopher, and I hope that those who read what I say will be converted into historians even if they were present-minded moralists before. I intend a history that sticks as closely as it can to Marsden’s own times and places – times and places that, it will emerge, are far different from mine or my readers’. I intend a history that takes sides only when it must on the truth or falsity, or rightness or wrongness, of Marsden’s Christian beliefs, or his beliefs about (say) crime, convicts and punishments, governors and law, education and missions, missionaries, New Zealanders and Tahitians, women and servants. As to his character and reputation, what I intend (when they matter) is an account of what they meant to him and why, and what they meant to others and why. What I hope to evoke is a feeling of the real worlds he lived in, full of contradiction, strife and uncertainty; worlds within which and across which standards of judgment and institutional propriety were contested and unsettled.⁹ I do not mean these words as a fashionable rhetorical post-modernist flourish either.¹⁰ I will argue that in just such conditions of unsettled judgment and unsettled institutions, individual character and reputation were important in ways that, until very recently in a digital world, it would have taken a considerable effort of the historical imagination to grasp. Marsden lived, moreover, in two ‘worlds we have lost’: not just the old Anglo-world of the United Kingdom that Marsden and his contemporaries attempted to transpose to Australasia.¹¹ Among the islands in the great Pacific Ocean, Te Moana Nui, there was another world that Europeans, from whose perspective I determinedly write, never knew. One example is that of Te Ika a Maui (‘the fish of Maui’, the north island of what is now Aotearoa-New Zealand). As a historian of that place has said, the stories that can be told of it have long been unknown to Europeans, are ‘without end’, and have not yet been much recounted.¹² There is much that remains to say about Māori understandings of that world and the way they shaped it for themselves with the coming of Europeans to their shores.¹³ But I will not have much to say about that world from the point of view of the ‘New Zealanders’ – as Marsden and his contemporaries called the locals – though a good deal to say about what Marsden, his missionaries, and other Europeans made of it. European relationships were profoundly unsettled in that new land, and so the nature of the individuals who made up the mission loomed large in their understanding of things.

The present-minded moralist may well object to my attempt to understand Marsden and his worlds in their own terms. To approach them that way could be seen as avoiding the duty that each generation might be thought to have to learn the lessons of the past. But even if Marsden is to be judged, to be praised and condemned, and used to embellish a moral other than thoughtlessly, he must first be understood in his own terms. Imperfection in acting according to professed ideals is to be expected in any human being, and so it is worth asking, in the first place, what his ideals were, and then, secondly, why his imperfections as well as his achievements have seemed to matter so much from so many points of view, and have been described so differently.

For moralists not to take Marsden’s mindset seriously means they must dispense with the idea of equal respect for cultures and for other ways of thinking, spread as they are over different times and places. His evangelical Church culture must be relegated down the scale of value as one of those ways of thinking and being that has lost the battle for the hearts and minds of current generations. So too must his obsession with preserving social hierarchy, and within that hierarchy, his own character and reputation. More fundamentally, the moralist will not be able to see that Marsden was a man who lived in the material world with considerable enjoyment at the same time as he tried to transcend its limitations, and that this could seem a reasonable way to live. Finally, if Marsden is to be accused of hypocrisy masking a disbelieving disposition, then not only will the moralist fail to understand what drove him, but (if, against all the evidence, he was a hypocrite) underestimate the truth that ‘hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue’,¹⁴ and so fail in the decent respect due to him as living among the opinions, not of mankind, but of his own times.

It may be evident that I share the opinion of the New Zealand historian John Stenhouse that historians and other commentators who denigrate Marsden (and other religious influences) in New Zealand’s history have taken over the moralising functions once largely reserved for clergy and other ministers of religion. Australian historians like Michael Gladwin and Patrick O’Farrell have thought much the same of moralising historiography applied by both secular and Catholic writers there. Feelings of even mild contempt are not the best approaches to understanding.¹⁵ Of course, to ask why Marsden was as he was, and did as he did in the times and places he lived in, is to forgo the pleasures of censure and praise and to divorce current moral and political concerns as much as possible from questions about the past. I intend that Marsden’s life and opinions should as much as possible speak for themselves through his letters, books, and public statements, and be discerned in his actions. In this way an image of the times and places in which he lived will emerge, shaped by his concerns and not ours. This is why I – a non-Christian and a New Zealander of Irish and Yorkshire descent who does not rejoice overmuch in social hierarchy – must nevertheless make sympathetic and plausible sense of Marsden’s opinions and of the fact that such diverse judgments have been made of his character.

One of my theses will already be evident: that there is no understanding him except as a deeply committed Christian moralist and preacher of salvation, and that much that has been thought about his character is explicable as a consequence of his following the dictates of those callings. My other thesis is that where his reputation mattered and has continued to matter – in Australia and New Zealand – ‘character’ and ‘Christian character’ mattered more in Marsden’s lifetime there than in most times and places. They certainly mattered more than they do now in the Anglo-world countries where he once operated. Their mattering so much is (in my opinion) a result of the operations of British understandings of the social world transposed to very different milieux of existence in the antipodes. There were vast differences between the convict settlement in New South Wales and the missionary stations in New Zealand, but they had this in common: that when Marsden started out in each of them they were both extremely small societies. New South Wales grew from a mere 3000 souls in 1793 and still contained only 10,000 when Marsden returned from his leave in England in 1810. It grew from 24,000 in 1820 when he was in his active prime to 97,000 at his death, so that for much of his life he knew a great proportion of the inhabitants face-to-face – certainly the convicts at the beginning, and the directive minority and socially eminent always.¹⁶ The New Zealand European settlements began and remained small. Marsden settled three families in the Bay of Islands in the north of the North Island in 1814. When he last visited there in 1837, about twenty missionary families lived within 200 miles of the Bay, having spread southwards especially,¹⁷ and there were perhaps 600 other Europeans in that region, not counting the much larger numbers (at times up to a thousand men) in visiting ships. By 1839, as the population continued an explosive increase begun in the 1830s, both the missionaries and the Colonial Office in Westminster thought there were about 2000 Europeans spread through the archipelago.¹⁸ Individuals played more prominent and more various roles in such small societies, modelled though they were on British understandings forged in a much larger one. They were, in addition, unsettled, both socially and politically.

The British understanding of good character in its dominant meaning was that of having an eminent role in the world and fulfilling the duties of that role. A man might, for instance, flourish and find fame in the ‘character’ of a governor, a clergyman, a gentleman, a military officer or a merchant. He had his ‘station and its duties’ – an idea to find its systematic English philosopher, F. H. Bradley, a generation after Marsden died.¹⁹ Women, artisans, labourers and other servants had far less public roles and so, though they featured as examples of Christian virtue in religious periodicals, they lived lives where public reputation mattered far less. Their virtues were the domestic ones of industry, chastity and obedience. This was the dominant understanding of the matter among the leading citizens of New South Wales. But even so, the characters of protagonists in quarrels were always at issue among the directive minority and the socially eminent. The small population of the settlement was one reason for this, but in addition it was also partly for lack of a settled constitution that separated the various powers of officials, and partly because an embryonic social hierarchy was continually modified by the rise and fall of individuals and continuously destabilised by the critical scrutiny it endured at the hands of eminent emancipists who were not unambiguously able to become part of it.

In New Zealand, character was also very much at issue in conditions where the roles that Marsden and the missionaries could pursue so as to affirm their good characters were simply not agreed upon; and so the face-to-face politics of personality and voluntary association were imposed on the politics of status they inherited in an even more pronounced way than in the Colony. In New Zealand and to a lesser degree in the Society Islands, he had to deal with men who were liable simply to deny the importance of the hierarchy and what others saw as their places in it. They could turn to ideas of Christian brotherhood and equality to deny the gradations of status and authority that they were normally subject to and so competitive about; and even if they recognised hierarchy they could appeal to their individual consciences against the stifling or mistaken policies imposed upon them by others. The difficulties and hindrances that Marsden had to face were the product of the luxuriant missionary world of what Jeremy Bentham once called ‘vituperative personalities’²⁰ – a world created by men, who though reluctant to recognise human masters themselves, struggled to impose their own opinions on others. Marsden was not alone in thinking missionaries among the most difficult people in the world to advise and govern.

The structure of the book that follows is simple. It follows Marsden’s life in chronological order as far as that is possible while also explicating (in Chapters 1 to 3) the nature and formation of the opinions he took with him to the antipodes. Although his opinions emerge most clearly into the light as his own only in Chapter 4 in a diary he wrote as he sailed to the notorious ‘Botany Bay’, it must be remembered that he spent the first 28 years of his life in England, and that the formative influences on the young man must be taken seriously if he is to be understood when he acted on his opinions during his antipodean years. Though, too, Chapters 1 to 3 suggest a social and political morality seldom heard except from the mouths of long-dead patriarchs and a theology only from pulpits of an ever-rarer kind in the lands concerned, it is just those messages that must be absorbed if Marsden is to be understood. Most of the rest of the book from Chapters 5 to 26 is set in New South Wales, in the town of Parramatta where he settled and in Sydney which was the centre of power. But he did spend an industrious leave in England from 1807–09, propagating his ideas (Chapter 13), and several chapters and sections of chapters are devoted to his understandings of the doings of the LMS missionaries in the South Seas and to his acts of leadership among them there (Chapters 10 and 15 especially). Even more space is devoted to his leadership of the CMS missions in New Zealand (Chapters 10, 16, 17, 21, 24 and 25 especially) and there are substantial recurrent references to his business with both missionary societies in the midst of chapters on England and New South Wales. This is largely because Marsden’s life in the politics and society of England and New South Wales cannot be understood without knowing of his concerns in the islands of the Pacific, and because he learned from the experiences of the missionaries in the Society Islands and applied what he learned to New Zealand. He constantly had more than one world in mind. But the chapters in question are also an attempt to give his concerns something like the weight of attention he himself gave to his missions and in that way capture the balance of his interests. Australian historians have largely forgotten that balance to the detriment of their understanding of him; New Zealanders have followed that lead in largely forgetting his dealings in the Society Islands, or, when they remember, have not connected them much with Australia or New Zealand.²¹ This book is an attempt to capture Marsden’s antipodean concerns as a whole. Like this introduction, each chapter that follows may be regarded as an essay in itself on the topic indicated in its title. Some are much longer than others and probably ought to be digested in parts rather than swallowed whole. For that reason they are divided into topical sections.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The World, the Flesh and the Devil took shape under my hands over eight years. Another two years passed in preparing it for publication. During those years I have been helped, encouraged, and financially sustained by many institutions and people in New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom. All are due – and all have – my gratitude.

In a digital age real libraries are still essential scholarly resources. Although I used internet resources more extensively than I could show in the bibliography, I am very glad real libraries continue to exist and grateful to those who continue to sustain them. In New Zealand I worked in the libraries of the Universities of Auckland, Waikato and Otago (in the Hocken Library), in the Auckland City Central Library, and in the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington. In Sydney, I worked in the Mitchell Library (Library of New South Wales). In London, I worked in the British Library together with the libraries of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Birkbeck, the Institute of Historical Research, the University of London, and Lambeth Palace. I also worked long hours in the Cadbury Library of the University of Birmingham, and much more briefly in the University of Cambridge Library, and the Rhodes House and Bodleian libraries in Oxford. I thank all the staff concerned for their professional and invariably friendly advice and service.

Academic publishing does not pay anyone much, and so, besides appreciating the support of the University of Auckland Press in deciding to publish and seeing the job through, I am grateful for the financial and logistical support the book and I have had over the years. Living as I do in London, I was at different times from 2006 to 2013 a Professorial Research Fellow at SOAS and an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck. In 2013, I was the writer in residence at the University of Waikato, sponsored by that university and by Creative New Zealand. I was also helped by a travel grant to deliver a keynote address to the New Zealand Legal Research Foundation’s conference on the New Zealand constitution. In 2014, the Hood Fellowship Fund of Auckland University met my expenses for a Winter Lecture there. Without that institutional support, especially from Waikato and Creative New Zealand, I would be much poorer and would have felt much more isolated in my work.

There are people I have to thank too. Some of them read parts of the manuscript; some were caught up in long discussions; others had me stay with them on my travels; others organised institutional support. Some were there at the beginning but are now no longer with us and I greatly miss them. I can only pick out a few to acknowledge here: Roshan Allpress, Steve and Marilyn August, Peter Beatson, James Belich, the late Judith Binney, Stephen Chan, Philip Dewe, Shaunnagh Dorsett, Alex Frame, Donald Gifford, Michael Gladwin, Mary and the late Maxwell Hickey, Alison Jones, Paul McHugh, Malcolm and Rosemary McLennan, Erik Olssen, Gordon Parsonson, the late Bill Pearson, John and the late Felicity Pocock, Pepe Ragoni and the late Diego Panizza, David Roberts, Tom Ryan, Harry Sharp, Tom Sharp, Sarah Shieff, Robert Smellie, the late Robert C. Solomon, Philip Thwaites, David Williams, and Doug and Sue Wright. I benefitted greatly from the talents of the staff and associates of the Auckland University Press, especially from the cheering confidence of Sam Elworthy its director, and – in preparing the text for the attentions of the press – the reassuring expertise of Mike Wagg. Nevertheless, the book could not then have reached its final form without the meticulous work of Anna Hodge its editor, Fiona Kirkcaldie its proofreader, and Diane Lowther its indexer. My thanks also go to James Walden for preparing the maps and to Katrina Duncan for her work on the illustrations. Elisabeth Powell, my wife, deserves my profoundest thanks for reasons every writer will appreciate.

A note on the text

In preparing the text I have taken some liberties with convention. Firstly: because Marsden and other Christians quoted so often from the Bible or consciously echoed its words, and because contemporary readers cannot always be expected to catch the references, I have italicised quotations and clear references to it. I have also supplied book, chapter and verse in square brackets where the original author did not. I hope that the italics will not be out of place if they additionally suggest to the reader the great weight and authority men and women like Marsden gave to those words above all others. Just occasionally they use italics themselves for emphasis when they are not quoting scripture, but not enough to confuse the issue.

Secondly: while I have tried to render the spelling and punctuation of published works faithfully, I have silently corrected insignificant but distracting orthography, and I have done the same even more extensively in the manuscript sources except where I have thought it worth showing the idiosyncrasy of certain writers. I should also note that I have used two main sources for missionary letters and reports to the Church Missionary Society in manuscript: those at the Hocken Library of the University of Otago in Dunedin, and those (mostly copies) at the Cadbury Library of the University of Birmingham. Because of the expense of travel between England and New Zealand I cannot therefore vouch for the absolute accuracy of my rendering of the original, Hocken, sources. J. R. Elder, in the transcriptions in his Letters and Journals of Samuel Marsden, and Marsden’s Lieutenants, does not adhere to original orthography either, and for me to correct him in public as the late Judith Binney did (in pencil) in the private copies I inherited from her, would have been taking accuracy to confusing excess. Fortunately, those who wish to read the missionaries’ original letters and journals can now consult the valuable and growing body of manuscripts put online by the Hocken since 2014: http://marsdenarchive.otago.ac.nz/. Many of the manuscripts have been usefully transcribed in their original orthography over many years by Gordon Parsonson, my friend and informative companion during my visits to Dunedin.

Andrew Sharp

Balham, 26 May 2016

Freight from England, 1765–1793

CHAPTER 1

A West Riding man’s place in the social and economic world of England

I Marsden’s rise and Edward Eagar’s contempt

In 1822, Edward Eagar, a convicted, transported, but freed Irish forger living in New South Wales,¹ wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in Downing Street that Marsden was ‘a man descended from the lowest ranks of life, brought up in the trade of a blacksmith, of coarse, vulgar habits and manners, accustomed to no better society than the original unimproved society of New South Wales, and to whom no one feature of good feeling or respectability belonged, other than what he acquired by the mere circumstance of being Chaplain to the Colony’.² Eagar obviously considered that he outranked Marsden and was entitled to speak disparagingly of him. Before he uttered a forged bill and was convicted to transportation he had been brought up among Irish gentry of Killarney and had been admitted as a solicitor and attorney in Dublin. He was a gentleman, Marsden was not.

For his part, Marsden shared Eagar’s view of the worldly importance of rank, status, office and wealth even though he did not share Eagar’s view of Eagar’s own position in the world – he thought the forger and fraudster had lost that forever. Nor did he think polished manners and appearance were the marks of true eminence. He had been formed in obscure working families in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Others could see in his manners and hear in his voice where he had come from and at times sneered at him. Yet though he was never ashamed of his origins he delighted in his eminence in New South Wales. In 1796, two years into his life in the Colony, he wrote to Rev. Miles Atkinson, an English clerical mentor and friend of his living in Leeds, also in the West Riding. In the course of asking whether he should take on the additional task of being a magistrate or JP as well as a clergyman, he marvelled at his worldly ascent in life:

When I take a retrospective view of the various changes through which a kind Providence hath led me for some years past I am lost in wonder and astonishment. I am not born of noble birth, nor heir to any great inheritance, but with only the prospect of hard labour and toil before me. I cannot without being guilty of the greatest ingratitude complain of any hardship in my former humble situation. . . . God hath highly exalted me from my low situation and rank to minister before Him in holy things. This is so great an honour and favour conferred on me, so mean and bare, as I hope will always reconcile my mind to bear patiently whatever trials I may meet with in line of my duty.³

God’s providence had raised him; he was not about to deny that providence; he would live a life among the eminent of the new land.

Though his worldly status and wealth were very welcome to him, he knew they were gifts of God which might be withdrawn at any time. In 1812 he wrote to that effect to Mrs Mary Stokes, the matriarch of an evangelical family in London and an intimate friend of his and of Elizabeth, his wife: ‘I have no cause to complain of the Divine Goodness. He has blessed me in my going out and my coming in, in my basket and in my store we have all good things now to enjoy [Psalms 121:8; Deuteronomy 28: 5; 1 Timothy 6:17]’.⁴ As Mrs Stokes knew, this was no simple rejoicing on his part in his good fortune. He had already deferred to the greater wisdom of his creator when two of his children had died in accidents when they were toddlers in 1801 and 1803. He had written to her that they were ‘not lost, in that glorious morning of the Resurrection of the just [Luke 14:14], we shall all meet again – Parents & Children shall see each other if numbered amongst the Saints they part no more for ever’.⁵ Worldly adversities as well as prosperity were the Lord’s will, and she would have known that this was how to understand her younger friend’s sentiments. In the passage from 1 Timothy to which he referred, the Apostle Paul had enjoined his followers to Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy (Deuteronomy 28:5; 1 Timothy 6:17).

But if Marsden thought he could live in the light of that injunction, not everyone looked on his rise and professed otherworldliness so kindly or in so biblical a way, and it is not to be denied that he rejoiced in his rise in the social world, or that there was often in his mind a tension between his enjoyment and his indifference to it. The object of this chapter is to evoke something of his life in the social and economic system in England before he went to Botany Bay: ‘the world’ which had plenty of the flesh and the devil in it, whose values he was to learn and largely digest, and in a version of which he was, slightly uneasily, to thrive on the far side of the world.

II Early years, 1765–93

Samuel was born to Thomas and Bathsheba Marsden, on 25 June 1765 in the tiny hamlet of Bagley, six miles west of Leeds, and baptised at St Wilfred’s parish church at nearby Calverley, on 21 July.⁶ According to the meagre records and to family tradition, Thomas was a butcher who also worked either as a farm labourer or else was tenant of a small farm, perhaps both; but as was typical of an area labelled ‘manufacturing’ in a contemporary map,⁷ he and Bathsheba were predominantly engaged in weaving wool for the merchants of Leeds. They were poor but could sign their names and could probably read what they would most want to read as devout Wesleyan ‘Methodists’:⁸ the Holy Bible. Before Samuel turned three the family moved from Bagley to Farsley, a few minutes’ walk up a hill.

Marsden’s West Riding, 1765–c.1788

Farsley was the eastern section of the twin village of Farsley-with-Calverley. The two settlements were scarcely a mile apart but (as a local historian was to put it 100 years later) ‘in many respects they might have been unconnected and at a great distance from each other’. Many of the inhabitants of Farsley, though they were Protestant Christians, did not eagerly conform with the rites of the Church of England or wish to subject themselves unthinkingly to its discipline: to the traditional system whereby the country was divided into parishes, tended to by vicars or their curates appointed by the higher reaches in a hierarchy of churchmen, and often only tenuously concerned with the eternal souls of their congregations. Thomas and Bathsheba may probably be counted among those of such opinions – common fame two generations later had them to be ‘Methodists’ – though they retained their Church connections at the very least to the extent of having their children baptised into the Church.⁹ Nor was the common connection between Church and landed or mercantile gentlemen to be found in Farsley as in Calverley. There was certainly no ‘squarson’: no parson who lived rather more the life of a country gentleman and JP than a poor cleric devoted solely to his pastoral duties.¹⁰ ‘Unlike Calverley’, Farsley had ‘long contained many small freeholders, who, not being tied to the skirts of some lord of the village, territorial or commercial, have in past times somewhat demonstratively exercised the privileges their holdings gave them’. The villagers shared certain characteristics though. In both settlements there was much talk of the preparation of wool for the market; thrift was a greatly prized virtue; banks were so distrusted that savings went into teapots and not into the coffers of financiers.¹¹

From the straggling main street of Farsley where they lived in a cottage in Turner Fold, the Marsdens could see north over the fields to the tree-lined River Aire running below them down its broad glacial valley. Beneath them and slightly to their right on their own side of Airedale was Bagley where they had come from. Over the far side of the valley on the rounded hillcrest a mile or so away sat Rawdon and Horsforth, the two villages where Samuel was later to live. Deep in Airedale the river moved swiftly under a stone bridge. Close to and in parallel with it lay the sedate, uncompleted Leeds–Liverpool canal, awaiting its final push into Lancashire and so to the Irish Sea.¹² Leeds was downstream, and there the Aire flowed sedately enough to be a navigable part of a larger canal system. Still further east the river was joined by the Calder at Castleford. The Aire-Calder Navigation then took its slow course across the alluvial flats of the Humberhead Levels into the East Riding to merge with the Ouse and Humber. The wide and muddy river finally joined the German Ocean near the town of Kingston-Upon-Hull, where Marsden was later to be schooled, and where Elizabeth Fristan, his future wife, was brought up.¹³

Samuel was the first of six children.¹⁴ His mother died at 36 in 1779 when he was twelve, leaving her husband with the responsibility of caring for the family. This was not the end of the family’s trials. Two of his siblings died within two weeks of one another in the winter of 1782, probably of some infectious disease. Seven years later, in 1789, Thomas followed Bathsheba and his dead children to the grave, probably after returning to his home town of Rawdon where his then 69-year-old mother was to continue to live until well into her nineties.¹⁵ Samuel and his three remaining siblings may have lived with their father and grandmother at Rawdon for some time, but not much is known of his early life except that despite the deaths in his family he called himself ‘happy’ in his youth.¹⁶ A memorialist and family member who tried to prepare a publication on him soon after his death remarked with regret that he ‘seldom or ever dwelt upon his family or early life’.¹⁷ It is more certain, though, that he worked in his uncle John Marsden’s blacksmith shop at Horsforth, perhaps as an apprentice and very possibly from the time of his mother’s death.¹⁸

But, whatever the precise rhythm and shape of his early life and how it was with his uncle John and aunt Hannah, its course was to change radically. Following the example of his parents Samuel had been ‘religious’ from an early age; he neglected no opportunity to hear and spread the gospel when he could. Though his parents (and probably he himself) had Methodist sympathies¹⁹ – more interested in the pure message of the Bible than in deferring to the constraints of hearing it only within the confines and according to the rules of the established Church – in 1786, aged about 21, he began to think of undertaking ‘ministry’ in that very Church. In 1787 he was plucked from the forge and groomed by a group of evangelical clergymen for a higher calling than that of a blacksmith.²⁰ He was to be a clergyman of the Church of England. He was to be educated at a parish school at Rawdon, at Hull Grammar School, and finally at the University of Cambridge. By 1793, vastly more educated in men and manners, he would become a priest who mediated between God and the laity, a pastor to the congregation of his parish, and a professional preacher of the Word of God. He would come to be known as ‘Reverend’ and in virtue of that title and those tasks be admitted to the rank and status of a gentleman.

III The West Riding

The Yorkshire that Marsden left behind him in 1793, having risen in status and having learned some of both the simple and more complex arts of civil life, was the largest and most populated county in England, divided because of its size and population into three thirds or ‘Ridings’. The two Marsden families lived in the West Riding. The first census of Great Britain, taken in 1801, showed that the West Riding alone had a population third only to that of two great undivided counties, Middlesex and Lancaster – and those two contained the great and growing urban agglomerations of London and Manchester. The West Riding had grown from about 300,000 in 1751 to 460,000 in 1781, to 580,000 in 1801.²¹ As it was throughout Great Britain, the population was predominantly rural and Marsden would have known a significant group of its inhabitants face-to-face. Until he was 23 years old he lived within the limited compass of four villages, none more than two and a half miles from any other. In 1801 Calverley had 1127 inhabitants, Farsley 954, Horsforth 2099, and Rawdon 1115. Conjecture, based on the fact of his being a prodigious traveller in the antipodes and a young man greatly interested in religion, suggests that he probably travelled around the Riding following revivalist preachers, free from the discipline of having to attend to a settled parish. Within an easy day’s return journey on foot there were Leeds (53,000), Bradford (8500), Halifax (8500), Wakefield (8000) and Huddersfield (7000). He may even have visited the tiny Moravian settlement at Fulneck, famous for sending its missionaries to Greenland; it was only an hour and a half’s walk from Horsforth. From the late 1780s, though, he certainly came to know Leeds well, together with the major North Sea port of Hull (29,500). He would have seen the wool business in Leeds, Bradford and Halifax, and in Hull observed the workings of the Baltic trade in timber and furs, the operations of arctic whalers from their home port, and the multifarious business of a thriving coastal trade. In his last years in England he also came to know the university town of Cambridge (10,000) and the great metropolis of London (1,000,000) which had been connected with Leeds by Royal Mail coach the year after he was born.²²

Yorkshire and its surrounds, 1790

Samuel’s life before his education for the ministry was that of the son of a small farmer, weaver and butcher, moving a little higher within the ranks of artisans by way of his uncle’s blacksmith’s shop. His earliest impressions of life would have been those derived from a growing and ‘improving’ agricultural and manufacturing economy. In 1800 an English guidebook spoke of Leeds as ‘the little metropolis of the woollen trade’. It also spoke of how ‘the dispersed state of the manufactures in villages and single houses’ was ‘highly favourable’ to the ‘morals and the happiness’ of the locals. The merchants who bought and sold the untreated wool at source and the finished cloth at the end of the long production process in cottages and water mills could find working families in villages like Farsley: settled, housed, and well set up for spinning and weaving. The heads of households were ‘generally men of small capitals, and often annexed a farm to their other business. Great numbers of the rest have a field or two, to support a horse and a cow; and are, for the most part, blessed with the comforts, without the superfluities of life.’²³ Thomas, Samuel’s father, was probably one of ‘the rest’.

‘Industrialisation’ – that is, the mechanisation of production using coal power and the concentration of the workforce in imposingly large ‘manufactories’ (later called factories) – did not occur during Marsden’s early years in Yorkshire. Cottage industry together with small shops in the towns and mills on streams were the norm; the occupational structure of Leeds and its surroundings was remarkably stable until the 1820s.²⁴ In the four villages the first coal-powered flax mill was not opened until 1791; the first woollen mill in 1792. The young Samuel knew water mills much better; there was one on the stream near their house at Bagley. But social disruption and change were sometimes evident within the Arcadian scene. In 1786, three years after the end of Great Britain’s unsuccessful war with the Thirteen Colonies in North America, a West Riding JP spoke of ‘all the different kinds of vagrants . . . idle, and wandering soldiers, and mariners’ as ‘most troublesome to deal with’.²⁵ The surgeon Dr William Hey, FRS, Mayor of Leeds in 1787 and 1788, and mentor of Marsden’s for many years, spoke eloquently not of the ‘morals and the happiness’ of the town but of the vices of all classes: the brutality and licentiousness of the poor and the luxurious profligacy of the rich.²⁶

London, soon to be famously baptised the ‘great wen’ (a festering boil) by the journalist William Cobbett, had long been known as a sink of vice.²⁷ The famous philanthropist, anti-slave trader and Christian moralist William Wilberforce, MP for Yorkshire, put his own gloss on the theme in 1800:

London is the gangrene of our body politic, and the bad humours it generates corrupt the whole mass. Through the medium of the great clubs, &c., one set of opinions, manners, modes of living &c. are diffused through the vast mass of the higher orders. Domestic relations, and family economy, and order, are voted bores, while . . . aided by the increasing wealth and the prevailing sentiment of the age, whatever ways of thinking, speaking, and acting become popular in the higher classes, soon spread to every other. Hence respect for our nobility, and even for the king himself, instead of being regarded as a Christian duty, is deemed antiquated prejudice.²⁸

After the American revolutionary war the larger English towns seemed to be following the same path. Vagrancy increased, and was to increase again during the intervals in the wars against revolutionary and imperial France from 1790 to 1815. Concentration of labour continued. Provincial towns like Leeds began to accumulate their share of free-living factory labourers, loosed from the ties of family, village and neighbourhood. In 1806 The Leeds Guide spoke for the first time of the decline of