28
July 1765 A.D. Birth
of Rev. Samuel Marsden—Anglican Missionary to New Wales, New Zealand and
Australia
Yarwood,
A.T. “Marsden, Samuel (1765-1838).” Australian Dictionary of Biography. 1967. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/marsden-samuel-2433. Accessed 14 May 2014.
Marsden, Samuel (1765–1838)
Samuel Marsden (1765-1838), by Joseph
Backler
Samuel
Marsden (1765-1838), chaplain, missionary and farmer, was born on 24 June 1765 at Farsley, Yorkshire,
England, the son of Thomas Marsden, a blacksmith. He attended the village
school, was then apprenticed to his father and grew up in an area and amongst a
class much influenced by the Methodist religious revival. Well known locally as
a lay preacher, Samuel gained the interest of the Elland Society, an
Evangelical group within the Church of England which sponsored the education
for the ministry of promising but ill connected youths. Aged about 24, he went
to Hull Grammar School, where he met the Milners, members of the Clapham sect,
and through them William Wilberforce, doyen of humanitarian and missionary
projects, who was to influence decisively the course of Marsden's life. In
December 1790 the society sent him to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he
was admitted a discipulus. This career was cut short, for on 1 January
1793, after much persuasion, he accepted the appointment to which Wilberforce
had recommended him as assistant to the chaplain of New South Wales. A proposal
in March 1793 invited Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Fristan of Hull, to take up
the cross and share life's travails and pleasures with him across the seas. The
couple were wed on 21 April; Samuel was ordained deacon on 17 March at Bristol
and priest in May; on 1 July they left for New South Wales in the William.
After a journey made memorable by Samuel's clashes with the captain and by the
accouchement of Elizabeth as the ship was buffeted by a storm off Van Diemen's
Land, they arrived in Sydney Cove on 10 March 1794.
In
some significant ways the pattern of Marsden's life was set during his first
year in New South Wales. As assistant to Rev. Richard Johnson, after a brief visit
to Norfolk Island in 1795, he was stationed at Parramatta. It was an important
centre in the colony and Marsden remained there after Johnson's departure,
although for some years he was the only Anglican clergyman on the mainland. He
was promised the position of senior chaplain in 1802, but was much vexed at
receiving only part of its stipend, and was not formally promoted until after
his return from England in 1810. Governor Lachlan Macquarie allowed him to live at
Parramatta 'as being more convenient and centrical for the execution of his
general superintending duties', and in September directed that Marsden should
be regarded 'as the resident chaplain in that district'.
Marsden
had quickly and deeply committed himself to farming, although he was
inexperienced in it. By 1802 he had received 201 acres (81 ha) in grants, and
had purchased 239 (97 ha) from other settlers; he had 200 acres (81 ha) cleared
and grazed 480 sheep. Three years later he had over 1000 sheep, 44 cattle and
100 pigs on his farm which by then had increased to 1730 acres (700 ha) seven
miles (11 km) from Parramatta. In 1798, with Surgeon Thomas Arndell, he had made a valuable report on the colony's
agriculture; in 1803-05 he made several reports to Governor Philip Gidley King and to Sir Joseph Banks on the prospects of
sheep-breeding and wool-growing. King thought Marsden 'the best practical
farmer in the colony', and when he visited England on leave in February 1807 he
was recommended by Governor William Bligh as one who had made the 'nature and soil' of
the colony 'his particular study'. He concentrated on the development of strong
heavy-framed sheep such as the Suffolk breed, which had a more immediate value
in the colony than the fine-fleeced Spanish merinos imported by John Macarthur. In 1808 he had his own wool made up into a
suit by the Thompsons of Horsforth in Yorkshire, and so impressed George III
that he was given a present of merinos from the Windsor stud. Four years later
more than 4000 lbs (1814 kg) of his wool was sold in England at 45d. a lb.
Marsden was an important promoter of the wool staple, even though his
contribution to technology, breeding and marketing was far eclipsed by that of
Macarthur.
Marsden
satisfied his English correspondents that 'it was not from inclination' that he
and Johnson first accepted Lieutenant-Governor Francis Grose's offer of land, but from the duty to assist
the colony to avert the threat of recurring famine. This explanation was
wilfully misleading when published in An Answer to Certain Calumnies in the
Late Governor Macquarie's Pamphlet, and the Third Edition of Mr. Wentworth's
Account of Australasia (Lond, 1826), for in 1827, when his holdings
totalled 3631 acres (1469 ha) by grant and 1600 (647 ha) by purchase, his
inclinations took him to Governor (Sir) Ralph Darling with an unsuccessful
request for permission to buy another 5000 acres (2024 ha) of crown land. Undoubtedly
the offer of land and convict servants to work it appealed enormously to
Marsden, with his ox-like strength and restlessly active disposition. It
brought financial security for a large family, and social acceptability and
power to which he could not have aspired in England. Contemporary pietists
placed great emphasis on an individual's own efforts, and Marsden, an apostle
of personal conversion, believed that material advance was a proof of the
genuineness of his personal sense of salvation. At the same time he was spurred
by the temper of the colony on his arrival. The officers had begun their
single-minded pursuit of wealth. Grose and Johnson were completely estranged
and Marsden was soon complaining that Macarthur, the senior officer at Parramatta,
frustrated his attempts to secure Sabbath observance by the convicts. The eager
materialism of this frontier society, the crude irreligion of his convict
charges and their tendency to associate the chaplain with their other
scourgers, helped to confirm Marsden's drift into worldly undertakings.
The
advent of the more religiously inclined Governor John Hunter in 1795 recognized the chaplain's efforts to
reclaim the convicts' souls or at least to achieve an outward observance of
moral and religious injunctions; but this effect was counterbalanced by
Marsden's appointment as a magistrate and superintendent of government affairs
at Parramatta. Clerical justices were common in England at the time but his
magisterial posts kept him occupied with heavy temporal duties, and they also
further estranged him as a clergyman from the convicts to whom he dispensed
justice. No aspects of Marsden's activities did more harm to his pastoral work
or to his historical character in Australia than his reputation for extreme
severity as a magistrate. This was firmly set by September 1800 when, in the
course of an inquiry into a suspected Irish uprising, Judge Advocate Richard Atkins and Marsden had a suspect flogged mercilessly
in the hope of securing information about hidden weapons. This particular
action was scarcely defensible, but Marsden was not the only magistrate who
ordered the infliction of illegal punishments. His general severity can be
attributed to his high-mindedness, his passionate detestation of sin and his
conviction that Parramatta was such a sink of iniquity that morality could be
preserved only by the most rigorous disciplinary measures. For all that, the
flogging parson, like the hanging judge, is commonly regarded as an
unattractive character.
Meanwhile
he continued to carry out his professional duties. He wrote to friends in
England in 1799 of his exertions in opening a Sunday school and forwarding the
building of a new church, St John's, Parramatta, which was opened in April
1803. He took an active and well-publicized interest in the establishment and
administration of an orphan home and school, and declined to accept the fees
due to him as treasurer. When in England in 1807-09 he was busy in drawing the
attention of the authorities in church and state to the shortcomings of the
colony's religious establishment, and was able to recruit additional assistant
chaplains. Later he attracted the attention of Mrs Elizabeth Fry by his zeal
for improving the lot of female convicts on the transport ships and in the
colony, and he startled respectable people in England with his account of the
immorality and crime that prevailed in Parramatta, which he thought largely due
to the dilapidated condition of the female 'factory', though he did not mention
his own prolonged lack of interest in its inmates. But it seems probable that
his years as chaplain and magistrate confirmed his early doubts of the
possibility of reclaiming the souls of the convicts, so steeped were they in
vice and idleness, defeating the best of regulations with their 'invincible
depravity'.
Feeling
thus frustrated in evangelizing the convicts, Marsden looked elsewhere for
professional fulfilment. He tried to civilize and convert the Aboriginals but
his efforts were unsuccessful and, by the time Governor Macquarie founded the
Native Institution, Marsden had abandoned all hopes of success with these
people; by rejecting the material civilization of the European they baulked at
what Marsden saw as the necessary first step towards conversion. 'The natives
have no Reflection — they have no attachments, and they have no wants', he
wrote. He had far more confidence in missions aimed at the people of the
Pacific Islands, in whom he had become interested even before he was stimulated
by the arrival in Sydney in 1798 of Rowland Hassall and a party of
fugitives from Tahiti. He was able to combine evangelization with the promotion
of trade with the islands, which he saw as a civilizing if also profitable
activity. He had a chief's sons brought to live with him at Parramatta. After
1801 he had the local superintendence and financial management of the London
Missionary Society, and was constantly concerned with the affairs of the Church
Missionary Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society.
Marsden's
absorbing interest as a missioner was in the Maoris of New Zealand, whom he
described to Rev. Josiah Pratt during his visit to London in 1808 as 'a very
superior people in point of mental capacity, requiring but the introduction of
Commerce and the Arts, [which] having a natural tendency to inculcate
industrious and moral habits, open a way for the introduction of the Gospel'.
This English sojourn from early 1807 to May 1809 prepared the way for
establishing the mission to the Maoris, in which enterprise Marsden displayed
the qualities of courage, tenacity and resourcefulness that have made his name
revered in New Zealand. Convinced from the first of the need to introduce
industrious habits, Marsden engaged at his own initial expense craftsmen who
were to return with him and teach the Maoris carpentry, shoemaking and
ropemaking. His plans were interrupted by news of the massacre of the crew of
the whaler Boyd at the Bay of Islands in 1809, but in 1813 he formed the
New South Wales Society for Affording Protection to the Natives of the South
Sea Islands and Promoting their Civilisation, and on 28 November 1814 set out
with a party in the brig Active, which he had bought for £1400, to
maintain the Maoris' contact with civilization.
This
was the first of Marsden's seven voyages to New Zealand between 1814 and 1837.
They yielded much in terms of self-realization but brought weighty problems of
management, finance and discipline. Marsden found that the subordinates he left
in New Zealand, no less than the missionaries he superintended in the South
Seas, were very human men and women, peculiarly exposed in their tiny groups to
rivalries, quarrels, pecuniary temptations and carnal desires that hindered
their higher objectives. In April 1820 he reported that the missionaries at the
Bay of Islands, heedless of warnings, had bartered muskets and powder for hogs
and potatoes. Even the newly appointed superintendent, John Butler, and John
Kendall had taken part in this traffic, so disturbing to the equilibrium of
Maori society. Yet for all the abuses and the slow pace of conversion the
missionaries 'stood between the Maori and the dregs of the oceans that
congregated in the Bay of Islands'. Though Marsden regarded the establishment
of an official settlement as most improbable, and even undesirable, 'as the
Soldiers would be too much exposed to temptation from the Native Women', he
suggested in 1830 that the posting of a naval vessel in New Zealand waters
would 'prevent much mischief'. Certainly the missionary activities which he
promoted paved the way for established government and organized European
settlement soon after his death.
In
the ten years before Marsden went to England in 1807 he enjoyed fairly cordial
relations with the governors, his tranquillity being broken only by enmity
towards John Macarthur and by such petty quarrels as that with George Caley, whose dog worried the chaplain's pet rabbits.
He was absent at the time of the Rum Rebellion, though in England he clearly
showed his antipathy to the rebels and according to Macarthur did great
mischief to their cause. But soon after his return to Sydney on 27 February
1810, signs of trouble appeared. The Sydney Gazette, 31 March 1810,
informed Marsden of his appointment to the board of trustees of the Parramatta
turnpike road, in company with two well-to-do ex-convicts. Considering this
association derogatory to his sacred functions, Marsden declined, arousing
Governor Macquarie to a fury which indicated that the latter's military
training caused him to view an opposing opinion as insubordination. This was
intensified when Marsden refused to read from the pulpit, as was customary, a
proclamation directed against food speculators in the drought of 1814, a
refusal which earned the chaplain a reprimand from the Colonial Office and the
archbishop of Canterbury. Marsden, like Commissioner John Thomas Bigge later and many other
influential colonists, strongly opposed Macquarie's sympathy with emancipists,
despite the attempts of his patron Wilberforce to mediate between the two and
to modify the chaplain's apparent intolerance. In turn Macquarie developed an
inveterate suspicion of Marsden that betrayed him into judgments which were
sometimes illiberal and unfair. He suppressed Marsden's tentative use of an
unauthorized version of the Psalms. He interpreted Marsden's well-justified
demand for convict barracks at Parramatta as a criticism designed to discredit
his administration. In November 1815 Marsden preached a funeral panegyric of Ellis Bent which seemed to many to be a criticism of the
governor, who in turn blamed the chaplain for a further criticism sent to the
Colonial Office early next year, though in fact its author was Nicholas Bayly. Soon after Macquarie received the dispatch
asking for his comments on these allegations, he learned that Marsden had taken
a deposition concerning his action more than a year before in ordering three
men to be flogged for trespassing in the Domain. He summoned the parson to
Government House and there in front of witnesses described him as 'the Head
of a seditious low Cabal and consequently unworthy of mixing in Private
society' and commanded him to avoid his presence except upon public duty. Five
months later, in May 1818, Marsden applied for leave to visit England for
personal reasons and to recruit clergy for the colony. He had had considerable
success in this on his previous visit in 1807-09, but Macquarie refused to
allow him to go on the grounds that his services could not be spared. The
governor probably feared, with some justification, that Marsden, through his
many influential friends and patrons in London, would increase the growing
opposition to Macquarie's policies; but it was quite untrue for him to add that
Marsden 'had repeatedly visited his Native Country', when he had gone only once
in twenty-four years. The antipathy between the two men sprang in part from
different policies on various matters of public concern, especially the place
of the emancipists in the community; it was intensified by the chaplain's wish
that the separate character of the church in the official establishment should
be recognized, as the colony was ceasing to be purely a penal settlement. This
inevitably drove him to oppose the authoritarian governor, just as the law
officers had shown a similar desire to assert the independence of the
judiciary.
Equally
disturbing to Marsden's peace were the attacks he suffered from the Sydney
Gazette, which showed how much less saintly a figure he was in colonial
than in English eyes. In March 1814 in a series of sarcastic letters he was
taken to task for his failure to carry out what was said to be a promise he had
made to donors in England that he was collecting books to establish a
circulating library for adult education in the colony. Again, on 4 January
1817, an attacker, sheltering behind the nom de plume Philo Free,
suggested inter alia that the chaplain's interest in the Pacific
missions was aroused by hopes of material profits. In this case Marsden
instituted libel actions which resulted in the conviction of the governor's
secretary and official censor of the Gazette, John Thomas Campbell, who could only
attempt to excuse his conduct as a natural reaction to the chaplain's snub to
Macquarie's efforts to civilize the Aboriginals.
Public
dispute and official disapproval continued to be Marsden's lot under
Macquarie's successor. In 1822 Governor Sir Thomas Brisbane suspended him, with
other magistrates of the Parramatta bench, for refusing to sit with a
colleague, Dr Henry Grattan Douglass, against whom they had
brought a variety of charges, and in the next four years Marsden tasted
humiliation many times. He was passed over when Thomas Scott was appointed archdeacon. His
allegations against Douglass were unanimously rejected by a committee of
inquiry, comprising the governor, Archdeacon Scott and Chief Justice (Sir) Francis Forbes. He was rebuked for
his part in convicting a female convict, Ann Rumsby, against all the evidence
brought forward and sentencing her to be transported to Port Macquarie. His
name was publicly linked with the colonial practice of judicial torture of
convicted prisoners; and Bathurst told him that he was
unconvinced by his apologia on the matter. He was convicted of improperly
allowing one of his assigned servants, James Ring, who sang in his choir, to
'be on his own hands', and was accused of intentionally not recapturing Ring
when he later absconded to New Zealand and ran into Marsden there. In August
1826 Bathurst told Governor Darling that in the Douglass affair Marsden's
behaviour was 'little becoming the character which he ought to maintain in the
colony', and that in future Marsden was to 'repress that vehemence of temper
which has too frequently marked his conduct of late, and which is as little
suited to his Age, as it is to the profession to which he belongs'. Nothing
daunted, Marsden published a Statement, Including a Correspondence Between
the Commissioners of the Court of Enquiry, and the Rev. Samuel Marsden …
(Sydney, 1828). This, wrote Forbes, was 'a very incorrect account of the
proceedings … Mr. Marsden seems to think that all who may happen to differ in
opinion with him, must be influenced by impure motives'.
In
1826 Darling appointed him to the board of management of the Female Factory and
made him one of the trustees of the Clergy and School Lands. He was one of the
small superintending committee of the Church and School Corporation and of the
committee which considered the plan of Archdeacon William Grant Broughton for the formation of
an Anglican grammar school. He continued 'in the sole charge of a very
extensive Parish' until 1831 when a regular assistant was first appointed. In
1834-36 he took charge of Church of England affairs during Broughton's visit to
England, and in 1836 Broughton appointed him one of the three commissioners in
the Consistorial Court he was then establishing. His early evangelicalism seems
to have mellowed, and he did not oppose the anti-evangelical Broughton; but he
did not shrink from controversy, publishing A Letter from the Rev. Samuel
Marsden to Mr. William Crook … (Sydney, 1835) in answer to charges which John Dunmore Lang had made in his An
historical and statistical Account of New South Wales … (London) the
previous year, and in 1836, in keeping with the bitter anti-Roman Catholicism
which had marked his whole career, taking a leading part in the opposition to
Governor Sir Richard Bourke's proposal to
establish National schools in New South Wales.
Three
years after the death of his wife Marsden died on 12 May 1838 at St Matthew's
Parsonage, Windsor, where he had gone in ill health for a rest. He was buried
at St John's, Parramatta. Posterity has tended to judge him adversely on three
counts: illiberality towards the emancipists, cruelty as a magistrate and undue
materialism. On the first count he may be shown to have been more in touch with
contemporary feeling than Macquarie. On the second, his colonial reputation was
confirmed by Commissioner Bigge, who wrote that his character as a magistrate
was 'stamped with severity'. Third, as Bigge pointed out, the variety of
Marsden's activities and his temporal interests resulted inevitably in his
ministry in the colony being somewhat overshadowed by that of some of his
subordinates, like William Cowper and Robert Cartwright. But other historians
have laid greater stress on Marsden's Evangelical piety, though this caused
some contemporaries to criticize him as 'methodistical'; his life, though often
embittered by controversy, was relieved by substantial achievement and
sustained by a confidence in the future of his adopted country. A son, Charles,
and five daughters survived him.
Select Bibliography
- Historical Records of New South Wales, vols 2-7
- Historical Records of Australia, series 1, vols 1-18
- O. Gregory, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Character, Literary, Professional, and Religious, of the Late J. M. Good (Lond, 1828)
- J. B. Marsden, Life and Work of Samuel Marsden, ed J. Drummond (Christchurch, 1913)
- J. R. Elder (ed), The Letters and Journals of Samuel Marsden (Dunedin, 1932)
- S. M. Johnstone, Samuel Marsden (Syd, 1932)
- E. Ramsden, Marsden and the Missions: Prelude to Waitangi (Syd, 1936)
- M. H. Ellis, Lachlan Macquarie (Syd, 1952)
- M. H. Ellis, John Macarthur (Syd, 1955)
- C. M. H. Clark, A History of Australia, vol 1 (Melb, 1962)
- M. Saclier, ‘Sam Marsden's Colony: Notes on a Manuscript in the Mitchell Library, Sydney’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol 52, part 2, June 1966, pp 94-114
- manuscript catalogue under Samuel Marsden (State Library of New South Wales).
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