Shortly after he was invalided home, and as soon as he was fit for employment he offered himself to the London Missionary Society, begging them to send him to the neglected Indians of South America; but this did not suit their plans, and his ardour was slackened by the more common affairs of life.

He fell in love and married a young lady named Julia Reade, and his only voyage was in his naval, not his missionary capacity.

But his wife's health was exceedingly frail, and after eleven years of marriage she died, leaving four children, a fifth having preceded her to the grave.

Beside her death-bed Allen Gardiner made a solemn dedication of himself to act as a pioneer in one or other of the most neglected parts of the earth, not so much to establish missions himself as to reconnoitre the ground and prepare the way for their establishment.
Africa was the country to which his attention was first called.

His wife died in May 1834, and the 24th of August was the last Sunday he spent in England, at Calbourne, the native parish of Charles Simeon.