Samuel MARSDEN

MARSDEN, SAMUEL (b. Bagly, near Farsley, Yorkshire, England, 25 June 1765; d. Windsor, NSW, 12 May 1838). Chaplain, farmer and missionary administrator.

Marsden's life exemplifies the impact of opportunity and propinquity on the shaping of character and expectations. Attending the village school at Farsley and apprenticed to his blacksmith father he grew up in an area and among a class much influenced by the Methodist religious revival. But he was kept on Anglican lines by his early association with the Yorkshire-based Elland Clerical Society, an evangelical group within the Church of England which aimed at arranging careers in the ministry for poorer young men as a counterblast to Methodism, though the latter influence remained strong in some aspects of Marsden's churchmanship, as in his approach to church music.

The Elland Society sent Marsden at twentyone to study with Samuel Stones at Rawdon then to Joseph Milner at Hull Grammar School where he came within the ambit of some of the leaders of the evangelical revival. Miles Atkinson saw much of Marsden as he disbursed the Elland Society's bounty to the young scholar; its archives enable us to follow Marsden's progress as he left Milner's bachelor establishment at Hull in 1790 and journeyed south across the Humber to Cambridge, intending to take holy orders. Magdalene College, where he was admitted as a sizar, was part of the evangelical scene during Peter Peckard's mastership, when the young men became more famous for evangelism and tea drinking than booze.

One of the great names in the Elland Society was that of William Wilberforce, a wealthy young gentleman whose career had been shaped by a continental journey with Isaac Milner, later to become vice-chancellor of Cambridge, who converted Wilberforce, once the doyen of fashionable clubs and gambling houses, to serious religion. He soon involved himself in a range of evangelical and humanitarian projects including the campaign against slavery. In religious matters Wilberforce performed for NSW much the same function as Banks did in the natural sciences. It was he who convinced Pitt of the need of a chaplaincy for the convict colony, proposed Richard Johnson (q.v.) as first chaplain and then secured for Marsden the post of assistant to Johnson in 1793 and who later exerted decisive influence in his battles with J T Campbell, Macquarie and Brisbane. Wilberforce, along with other leading evangelicals such as Henry Venn of Clapham encouraged the chaplains to use Sydney as a base for evangelising the South Seas, an effort that thoroughly engaged Marsden when, with the help of Charles Simeon, the Elland and Eclectic societies combined in 1799 to form what became known as the Church Missionary Society. Even before this happened LMS had sent out the Duff to Tahiti and it was not long before refugees from that voyage were befriended by Marsden, leading him rapidly into a major role in the society's work.

On accepting appointment as assistant chaplain Marsden proposed marriage to the religiously inclined Elizabeth Fristan of Hull and cut short his studies at Cambridge so as to he ordained before they sailed from Spithead in the transport William on 27 July 1793. On quitting England Marsden confided to his diary the hope that 'the end of my going may be answered in the Conversion of many poor Souls'. But the sailors on the William showed no desire to attend religious services and it was not long before he was suffering from a sense of alienation and an anxiety that the failure was a result of his own lukewarmness in proclaiming the Gospel. 'Oh! that my Soul was more alive to [the] Lord that I were more earnest to obtain the Land of Canaan'.

Shortly before Marsden sailed Wilberforce pressed upon the secretary of state the need for adequate places of worship to be built in the colony, urging Chaplain Johnson's argument that the neglect of such matters undermined the status of the clergy and made it difficult for men of God to win the attention of an intensely secular community. In Australia's pioneering age, when the foundation values were so different from those espoused by the Pilgrim Fathers, it was difficult to justify any building that lacked immediate practical utility. Both Johnson and Marsden fell foul of the military lieutenant-governors who replaced Phillip, and when Marsden sought to have Captain Macarthur punish a convict for disturbing the Sabbath, he found that he had embarked on a quarrel that lasted to the grave.

From July 1794 Marsden, Elizabeth and a baby (q.v. Ann Marsden) born in a storm off Van Diemen's Land were stationed at Parramatta where Marsden was offered by Major Grose, like Richard Johnson, a grant of land and convict labour to work it, so contributing to the defeat of famine and reducing the need for expensive imported food. Marsden submitted his farming plans to Miles Atkinson of the Elland Society and was pleased to receive their approval because he loved farming and welcomed the power it gave him to shape colonial society. Not the least of his evangelical impulses was a desire to demonstrate that the creation of wealth and full employment offered more durable prospects in the fight against poverty and crime than the invocation of the criminal law. At the same time he laid the foundations of personal wealth, using as did John Macarthur, a winning combination of cheap land, convict labour and access to an official salary.

With the arrival of Governor Hunter in 1795 Marsden, like Johnson, was made a justice of the peace, confirming his drift into wealth and power that placed him all too plainly in the minds of the convict and ex-convict majority as a member of a hostile establishment of judges, gaolers, floggers and moralisers. In examining Paddy Galvin at the time of the suspected rising by Irish convicts in September 1800 he showed how deeply he had been corrupted by the values of the age, using torture to elicit confession and abandoning the quality of compassion which, as Commissioner Bigge later affirmed, was crucial to the appeal of a Christian minister. As late as 1821 a newcomer from India, comparing the appeal made by Anglicans and Wesleyans to the common folk of New South Wales, emphasised the greater ability of the latter to overcome the repulsion about former criminal status which posed a special obstacle for the Anglican clergy.

Hindered in this way in the exercise of ministry among the convicts, Marsden looked for alternative auditors of the Gospel. On the face of it Aborigines were an obvious target but Marsden was convinced by 1810 that 'humanly speaking' nothing could be done to bring them to a knowledge of his God. Crucial to his adverse finding was his own experience with Tristram, an Aboriginal foundling who lived for many years with the Marsdens but eventually rejected, at puberty, the prospect that seemed to be available. Later, when Governor Macquarie sought his advice on the formation of a Native Institution at Parramatta to which young Aborigines could be removed from the influence of their parents Marsden showed all too clearly his awareness of the obstacles. As he saw it 'The natives have no Reflection—they have no attachments, and they have no wants', by rejecting the material civilisation of the European they baulked at what he saw as the necessary first step towards conversion.

Yet across the Tasman in New Zealand and in the Society Islands the Polynesian people seemed to have qualities that made them receptive to a simultaneous thrust towards civilisation and conversion. Unlike the Aborigines the Maoris had towns and farms and a system of chiefs through which the white man could operate, taking advantage of a single unified language to teach the skills and values of the Pakeha. Marsden used his period of leave in England (1806-09) to promote the idea of a mission to the Maoris financed by CMS. In selecting people for the work he chose artisans who could teach practical skills as well as giving linguistic and religious training. Maoris were brought to Parramatta to observe the working of the white man's ways and, more subtly, to act as hostages for the safety of missionaries in New Zealand.

In making his first voyage to the Bay of Islands Marsden embarked on a commitment that took him seven times to New Zealand and gave him lasting fame as the founder of a multiracial society. On setting out in November 1814 he sent a scribbled note ashore with the pilot which marks him as a person of extraordinary foresight and sensitivity in managing race relations. Referring to the seven Polynesians who comprised half of the Active's crew he wrote: 'I told all those New Zealanders who acted as Sailors, that I would pay them for their Services, the same as I paid the Europeans according to the work they did—at this they were astonished and much gratified.' Though the New Zealand mission yielded much to the chaplain in terms of self-realisation and gave the Maoris many important benefits, breaking down the widespread practice of slavery and infanticide and imparting a high level of literacy in their own language, it brought intractable problems. Marsden found that the missionaries he left behind were 'very human men and women, exposed in their tiny groups to rivalries, quarrels, pecuniary temptations and carnal desires that hindered their higher objectives'. He treated both Kendall and Butler with great severity when they broke his regulations, little appreciating the pressures they were subject to from the warlike Maoris, whose greatest desire was to gain access to firearms rather than the Gospel.

From the time of his return journey from England to Sydney in 1809 Marsden was deeply aware of the cruelties suffered by the Polynesian people at the hands of the whalers, sealers and runaway convicts who made the Bay of Islands a 'refreshment port'. Ruatara was a young chief whom he met on the Ann after being abandoned in an English winter, nursing him back to health and learning much of Maori language and culture. In 1813 he formed the Philanthropic Society with Macquarie's help which was designed to stand between the Polynesian people and the impositions of white adventurers, but in its first test, on looking into the cruise of the Cumberland under Goodenough and Wentworth, he found that powerful men in NSW insisted on being left undisturbed in their frauds.

In spite of this reversal, which led in 1817 to an anonymous and libellous attack (the 'Philo Free' case) on Marsden by J T Campbell, the official censor of the Sydney Gazette, the chaplain continued for more than two decades to press the British government, through Wilberforce, to protect the Polynesians from white abuses. Eventually there seemed little that could be done short of annexation, though Marsden was reluctant to concede the need for such intervention in Maori affairs. Not the least of his anxieties was the realisation, just before his death in May 1838, that 'A Catholic Bishop and several Priests have landed on the Island and [are] doing what they can to promote the Catholic Religion among the Natives, and [he added with unconscious irony] they will be assisted by the runaway Convicts from N. South Wales.'

Reinforcing Marsden's problem in reaching the common folk of NSW was the growing antagonism between himself and the popular Governor Macquarie, whose liberal approach to the social and official recognition of emancipists offended Marsden and a number of the 'Pure Merinos'. As Ellis Bent (judge advocate 1809-15) recognised, the governor's reluctance to take account of the natural prejudices of the free population in relating to ex-convicts caused much concern; for Marsden there were special objections to the favours he gave to Andrew Thompson and Simeon Lord, both of whom broke Macquarie's own rules about living with women to whom they were not married. As the father of a large family Marsden was at special pains to draw the line between free and bond. Like the Bent brothers, who attempted to invoke English traditions about the independence of the judiciary, Marsden sought a similar standing for the colonial church.

The Philo Free libel of 1817 expressed Secretary Campbell's resentment of Marsden's leadership to the exclusive faction; it also made much of the contrast between his enthusiasm for the New Zealand mission and his apparent indifference to the fate of the Australian Aborigines, and suggested that the parson's real interest was in making private profits from trade, an allegation that Campbell knew well to be untrue.

From about this point Marsden took on an embattled air in relation to his opponents in the colony and showed a readiness to subordinate means to the pursuit of evangelical and political ends. When Henry Douglass became an intimate advisor of Governor Brisbane he used most reprehensible efforts to discredit the doctor and showed a callousness in sentencing Ann Rumsby that brought on him the just condemnation of James Stephen and the Colonial Office. By the mid-1820s even Wilberforce had come to see that Marsden had been corrupted by his overwhelming concern to carry his point of view.

His visit to New Zealand in 1837 was seen as a final benediction by the man who had made possible great advances in civilising and converting Maoris from the county north of the Waikato. When he was buried at Parramatta Henry Stiles said that Marsden's 'energy and firmness' had made him a great survivor, able at the risk of unpopularity and persecution to take a stand for respectability and morality. His sense of destiny 'not only sustained him in physical danger and political controversy but drove him on to the zealot's great error of believing that ends justified the means'.

ADB 2; J R Elder (ed) The letters and journals of Samuel Marsden (Dunedin, 1932); S M Johnstone, Samuel Marsden (Sydney, 1932); A T Yarwood, Samuel Marsden: The Great Survivor (Melbourne, 1996).

A T YARWOOD