Published as an HTML document by John Higgins, June 1997
An Aberdeen graduate as pioneer in Fiji
by J Malcolm Bulloch
from the Aberdeen University Review, June 1921
The first white person born in the Fiji Islands was the daughter of an Aberdeen
graduate, the Rev. David Cargill, while his wife was the first white woman to
set foot on the islands (in 1835), and "of all the mission family was the first
that ‘fell asleep in Jesus’ in those distant regions of the earth." That
would be interesting at any time and in any connection, but it is peculiarly
interesting to Aberdeen people, not merely because Cargill was educated there,
but because Aberdeen has long had very close associations with Fiji, both
administratively and, long before its formal cession to us in 1874,
commercially. The late Lord Stanmore, son of "Athenian Aberdeen", was
governor from 1875 to 1880 and has left a record of his rule in his privately
printed "Letters and Notes written during disturbances in the Highlands
(known as ‘Devil Country’) of the Viti Levu, Fiji, 1876", a remarkably
indiscreet polemic on colonial administration running into 860 pages. Then
Sir William Lamond Allardyce, now Governor of Tasmania, spent the first
fifteen years (1889-1904) of his official career in Fiji, and the tradition
was maintained by his brother Kenneth. It was through the latter that I first
came on the track of Cargill, for Mr. Allardyce introduced me to Mr. A.B.
Brewster, for many years connected with Fiji, who on settling down in
Torquay the other year found himself the neighbour of one of Cargill’s
grand-daughters. The lady knew next to nothing of her Cargill ancestors, but
after a great deal of trouble I have been able to piece the story together.
David Cargill was the younger son of James Cargill, banker of Brechin, by his
wife Grace Mary Cameron. The banker sent both his boys to be educated at
Aberdeen. James (1802-1861) became a dominie—he was famous for his handwriting
and a skilled composer—and became the father of Mr. Alexander Cargill J.P.,
actuary of the Edinburgh Savings Bank and author of several books. David, who
was born on the 20th of June 1809, entered King’s College in 1826 and duly
took his degree there in 1830. He seems to have attended St Clement’s Church,
Footdee, and may have had relations there for the parish had several
seafaring men of the name at that time. At any rate, in his Bajan year he
made the acquaintance of one of the parishioners there, Margaret Smith who
was exactly his own age. She was the second daughter of John Smith Esq. of
Aberdeen, who had died leaving a widow of six-and-twenty with three
daughters. Cargill in his biography of his wife tells us that "the circle in
which her parents moved was respectable", and that she was brought up
religiously by her mother who "sat" under the Rev. Dr. John Thomson (1757-1838),
and was still "a sojourner in the vale of tears" in 1841. The eldest daughter,
Ann, "exchanged mortality for life in the eighteenth year of her age".
Margaret also attended Dr. Kidd’s kirk and, during the Methodist revival
conducted by the Rev. Robert Nicholson, joined the Wesleyans at the suggestion,
I believe, of Cargill, who saw in her an ideal helpmate in the mission field
which he had decided to enter. He married her on the 6th of September 1832,
and she was "literally torn from her mother’s arms" a few hours after the
ceremony, for he had to run up to London to be examined by the Wesleyan
Mission Board. He was formally accepted on the 27th of September, and the
young couple sailed from Gravesend, 22nd October 1832, on board the good ship
"Caroline" for Tonga in the Friendly Islands.
After a voyage of twenty-one weeks, they landed at Port Jackson on 19th March
1833, reaching Tonga only on 24th January 1834. Cargill laboured there
until 8th October 1835, collaborating with a fellow-missionary named Cross on
a translation of a portion of the gospel of St Matthew which was published
at Tonga. There is no copy of it in the magnificent collection of the British
and Foreign Bible Society, which, however, possesses Cargill’s translation of
St Mark published at the Mission Press at Lakemba in 1839.
On 12th October 1835 four days after leaving Vavou, Cargill reached the island
of Lakemba, Mrs. Cargill being the first white woman to touch Fijian soil.
A few weeks later, on 5th December 1835, her third child Augusta Cameron
Cargill was born at Lakemba, being the first child born of European parents
on the islands. She was named Lakemba by the king of the islands. The Cargills
had a hard time. Thus when their fifth child Mary was born on 20th July 1838,
Cargill tells us he had to do everything even to "exerting his ingenuity in
adjusting the habiliments of the lovely infant". A sixth child was born, Ann
Smith Cargill, at Zoar, Rewa, on 27th May 1840 and died almost immediately of
convulsions on 1st June. That, on top of an attack of dysentery, finished the
poor lady who died the next day, as an inscription on a stone in the island
still records:
Sacred to the memory of Margaret, the beloved
wife of the Rev.D.Cargill, A.M., Wesleyan missionary. She fell asleep at Zoar,
Rewa, on the 2nd of June 1840 in the 31st year of her age. She was the mother
of six children and possessed in an eminent degree "the ornament of a meek and
quiet spirit". Her life was useful and her death lamented. "The memory of the
just is blessed." The dust of her infant daughter, Ann Smith, is deposited by
her aside. "Novissima autem inimica destruitur mors."
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It is not only, however, to Cargill himself that we have to go for a tribute
to the lady from Fittie. The Rev. James Calvert in his "Fiji and the Fijians",
first published in 1858, tells us that she was "a woman of rare and excellent
spirit, filled with devoted love and warmly attached to the Mission work. Her
memory is blessed in Fiji. In that dark wild land and among those savage people
the winning greatness and piety of the missionary’s wife are yet borne in mind,
and the remembrance still seems to recommend the religion which adorned her
with such loveliness."
Cargill was heart-broken. He left Fiji with his four little girls, arriving
at Hobart on 2nd September 1840. He consoled himself on the voyage by writing
a life of his spouse, convince that while "literary biography is apt to
occasion forgetfulness to God and admiration of man, the design of religious
biography is to instruct us to adore the Creator and to set the affections
on things above and not on things of the earth." The volume, with a preface
date London 13th November 1841, is entitled:
Memoir of Mrs. Margaret Cargill, wife of the Rev. David
Cargill, A.M., Wesleyan missionary; including notices of the progress of
Christianity in Tonga and Feejee. By her husband. (London, John Mason 1841)
Printed in Hoxton: 8vo, pp XIX and 390 & 4 with three illustrations including
one of Mrs. Cargill’s grave.
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The volume, which, I am told, is regarded as a "Methodist Classic", has become
rare, though I have little doubt it was to be found knocking about the book
barrows of Farringdon Street but a few years ago. Intensely pious though it be,
it is written in the curiously inhuman style of the eighteenth century divines,
with passages that reminds one of Blair’s lugubrious "Grave". But it is valuable
for the insight it gives into the native Fijian customs of the time, not of
course because Cargill was in any sense an anthropologist in the modern sense,
but because his tense Christianity was profoundly shocked by the heathenism
which surrounded him and which told severely on the sensibilities of his
consort, who wrote to her mother that Feejee, as they spelt it then, was
"a land of darkness and superstition where men delight in cruelty and
bloodshed". This side of it is naturally more fully set forth in Cargill’s
reports to his society printed in the "Wesleyan Missionary Notices" which,
like much of old missionary literature, foolishly despised by the ordinary
reader, is very interesting. Sir J.G. Frazer does not seem to know Cargill’
work at all, for I find no reference to it in the elaborate bibliography
in "The Golden Bough".
During his much-needed furlough at home, in which he is said to have revisited
Aberdeen, Cargill lived at 6 Myddleton Square, Islington. He was anything but
idle, for he not only delivered a long speech at the annual meeting of the
Wesleyan Missionary Society in Exeter Hall on 3rd May 1841 (it is fully
reported in the Wesleyan Missionary Society Notices for 1841) but he spent
some time in writing a pamphlet entitled:
A refutation of Chevalier Dillon’s
slanderous attacks on the Wesleyan Missionaries in the Friendly Islands
in a letter to the General Secretaries of the Wesleyan Missionary Society.
By the Rev. David Cargill, A.M., for several years one of the Society’s
missionaries in the Friendly Islands and Feejee. (London: printed by James
Nichols, 1842; 8vo. pp. 40). |
Peter Dillon (1795-1849) was a remarkably interesting character, though he
was wholly omitted from the first edition of the "Dictionary of National
Biography" and very inadequately done in the first supplement. An Irishman
by birth though of uncertain descent, he spent several years as a sandalwood
trader in the South Pacific in the days when vessels had to be heavily
armed to guard against attacks by the natives. But famedid not come to him
until 1825 when he sailed under Chilean colours from Valparaiso as captain
and part-owner of the "St Patrick" to New Zealand to load spars for Calcutta.
At the island of Tucopia he met an old shipmate, a Prussian named Martin
Buchert, who had been living among the natives for thirteen years and who
gave him news of native stories that, long years before, two French ships
had been wrecked on the Santa Cruz island of Vanikoro.
Dillon had a bright young sailor with him named George Bayly—his fascinating
"Sea Life Sixty Years Ago" appeared in 1885—who bought from a lascar in
Buchert’s employment a silver sword hilt. It had belonged to the ill-fated
Comte Jean François Galaup de la Perous, the leader of the ill-fated French
expedition to the South Seas (1785-1788). This discovery resulted in
Dillon’s leading the expedition on the H.E.I.C ship "Research" which
definitely ascertained the fate of the Frenchmen. On going to France with
the relics in 1829 he was created a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour and
got an annuity of 4,000 francs from Charles X. Dillon’s "Narrative" of his
voyage of discovery, published in 1829 and afterwards translated into French,
is a very fascinating book. At first Dillon was very favourable to
missionaries. Indeed in 1814 he had charge of an expedition from the
English Church Missionary Society—for he seems to have been a Protestant—to
establish missionaries in New Zealand, which he had first visited in 1809.
But he also had an eye on trade, for in 1832 he wrote a letter "on the
advantages to be derived from the establishment of well-conducted commercial
settlements in New Zealand". Cargill met him in 1837 in Fiji, where Dillon
had been nearly killed by the natives in 1813, by the natives who murdered
his friend Charles Savage, notorious in early Fijian history. I am told that
the natives still recall that fight, and speak of "Pita" as they call him to
this day.
In course of time, however, Dillon changed his point of view about missionaries,
probably, as has been suggested, because they were beginning to teach the
natives not to be fobbed off with the trash which traders gave them for their
merchandise. In any case he issued a pamphlet in December 1841—it is not in
the British Museum and I have not seen it—in which he made a violent attack
on missionaries at Tongatabu, where Cargill had begun his career, and especially
on a Mr. Thomas at Vavou. He declared that massacre was instigated by the
Wesleyan missionaries and that he "could fill a quarto volume with truths
concerning the barbarities resorted to by missionaries in the South Seas
during the last 25 years." Among other things Dillon said that Thomas had been
instrumental in packing off Cargill to Fiji. Dillon’s attack must have been a
godsend to Cargill, if only by way of diverting his attention from his grief
over his wife, for hardly was the ink dry on his preface to her memoirs when
he sat down in his rooms in Myddleton Square and dashed off his spirited reply
to the Chevalier in the pamphlet just described.
But Cargill sought other distractions. He dated his preface to the memoirs of
his Margaret on 13th November 1841. But with four little children on his hands
and the mision field ahead of him again, he felt he must have a helpmate and
so on 27th November 1841 he married Miss Augusta Bicknell, with whose origins
I am unacquainted. He was, however, far from forgetting Margaret, for on the
second anniversary of her death, 2nd June 1842, when he was at sea, he wrote
in his diary, "Two years have elapsed since my M. became an inhabitant of
another world. May the mantle of her meek and quiet spirit fall on me and on
our children." And the next day he enters: "The anniversary of the funeral of
M. and Ann Smith (her infant child). Are they among the number of my guardian
angels? May I live to meet them in the Paradise of God."
Cargill had not long to wait. In 1842 he was appointed to superintend a
training institute at Tonga and sailed from Blackwall on 1st May 1842 on
board the "Haidee" with his wife and three of his little girls, Jane,
Margaret and Mary—I do not know what happened to the fourth, Augusta. He
kept a diary of this voyage, now in the possession of his grand-daughter,
Mrs. Marshall of Jersey. It is written in the same solemn style as his memoirs
of his wife and is therefore curiously interesting in its intense seriousness.
It was not a happy voyage for he had no peace to read or write. He tried to
read Lady Huntingdon’s biography, but found it "a heterogeneous mass of
erroneous statements, wilful misrepresentations, bad grammar, equally bad
composition, and strange typographical errors." Not only did it get on his
nerves, but so did his fellow-passengers, and it is clear he got badly on
theirs, and he took no trouble to conceal the fact. Thus when "Haidee" was
crossing the line a bucket of water was surreptitiously emptied one evening
from the mizzen mast on the back of Cargill, who solemnly writes: "That the
captain (Marshall) and his officers knew nothing of such gross impudence, I
fully believe, and that the person who poured the water may have mistaken me
for another individual, possible though by no means probable. But such conduct
is not to be wondered at when we reflect that several persons who sail with us
on this vessel appear not to know how to value or treat a minister of the
Gospel. The conduct of any person towards a minister of Christ is a species of
spiritual thermometer by which his knowledge and experience may be ascertained
with tolerable accuracy. The heathen Feejeeans are capable of teaching
politeness to many British Christians, who emulate practical heathens in
indifference about sacred things and in rudeness of manners.
But even the Captain got tired of the prayer meetings and sermons—Cargill
preached no fewer than twelve written discourses on the voyage—and stopped
attending these services. One Sunday in July when the "Haidee" had been nearly
three months out, the skipper bluntly told Cargill that "to preach the
necessity of coming to God though it may be applicable to the Feejeeans or
very bad people was quite unnecessary on his ship, for that he and his sailors
are all very good, and that he has as good a chance to get to heaven as any
person in the vessel." On the following Sunday the Captain and his friends
were not present. During part of the service they were talking and laughing
on deck "with most irreverent thoughtlessness". On Saturday night he and
his associates "were singing songs, stamping, hurrying, and making such
noises, although they would perhaps call them shouting, yet resembled no
earthly sound I ever heard. Can the Author of Evil assist his votaries in
giving vent to these feelings which are earthly, sensual, devilish? They
continued this amusement until within a few minutes of twelve o’clock, and
then adjourned to stamp on the deck over the heads of some of the more sedate
passengers. In the afternoon I reached in our own cabin on these words, ‘If
you love me, keep my commandments’."
On the evening of 11th August in Lat. 38°20' S. and Long. 93°12' E. Mrs
Cargill was prematurely delivered of a son. "I should esteem it one of the
greatest honours that could be conferred on him and me," wrote the happy
father, "were the great Head of the Church to make him a useful Methodist
preacher." As a matter of fact, David—as he was christened at Hobart where
the "Haidee" landed on 29th August—became a policeman in the Indian service,
dying at Mirzapur on 22nd January 1884.
While staying at Hobart, Cargill preached on several occasions at Melville
Street Chapel, the oldest Methodist chapel in the town, a valedictory service
to him being held there on 14th December 1842. According to the "Sydney Sun"
(20th October 1920) he preached at one of these services a "terrible long
sermon", after which he announced "We will sing only the first verse and
the last". At which a stern voice responded: "No, we won’t. You have charge
of the pulpit, but I have charge of the choir." This was from Mr Chapman,
the leader of the choir, and at his signal the choir rose and sang the hymn
from beginning to end.
Cargill set foot once again in Vavou on 21st February 1843. On 29th March
he preached twice in Tonguese and once in English. Within a month he was
dead, succumbing to smallpox on 25th April.
Cargill’s story does not end here, for his work has been carried on variously
by his descendants. How interested he would have been in the services of two
of his great-grandsons during the Great War in Baghdad and the Holy Land, and
in the fact that his daughter Mary, who was born in Fiji, married a Free
Church minister, the Rev, W.E.Wilkie Brown (she died in Inverness only a few
years ago) and that one of her sons and a daughter are missionaries in India,
and that a grandson was present at the capture of Jerusalem.
Cargill’s son David (1842-1884) of the Indian Police married as his second
wife a niece of the great John Nicholson. One of his grandsons, William
Macandrew Marshall of the 37th Dogras, was such a brilliant Arabic scholar
that he was selected by General Maude to read his proclamation at the entry
into Baghdad. He was afterwards appointed political agent at Nijif, the
shrine of Ali the great Shiah saint, where he was assassinated by a fanatic,
while his brother Douglas of the Lancashire Fusiliers fell at Gallipoli in
1915. I may say that Cargill’s descendants are inclined to trace their
linguistic faculty, which is of a high order, to their missionary ancestor.
Another of Cargill’s great-grandsons, and a cousin of these officers,
Major C.R.S.Pitman D.S.O., served at GHQ at Carmel. His father, Mr. Charles
Edward Pitman C.I.E. of Torquay who married Lucy Maude Cargill, was formerly
Director-General of Indian Telegraphs and served in the Kabul-Kandahar force.
He has recently written a history of the Pitman family, who have intermarried
with the Gordons of Newtimber, descendants of the Gordons of Braco, Banff.
Altogether David Cargill had no reason to be disappointed with his descendants.
He and they are all worth remembering in the journal of this university.
(J. Malcolm Bulloch, June, 1921.)