A watercolour of the battered shell of the Allen Gardiner, a schooner named after the missionary Allen Francis Gardiner.

Gardiner’s proselytizing took him to Port Natal in the 1830s and then to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego in the 1840s. His tragic death of starvation, alongside his missionary colleagues on Picton Island off Tierra del Fuego in 1851, prompted his former naval colleagues including Captain Bartholomew James Sulivan (see RCMS 273/4) to raise funds to revive the Patagonian mission and provide it with a schooner, the Allen Gardiner. Tragedy repeated itself and in 1859 the crew of the Allen Gardiner was massacred at Wulaia on Navarin Island.

The Allen Gardiner was apparently repaired and used on other missionary voyages, so it is not clear when this picture was painted or by whom, though it is likely to be by a member of the Hamond family.