He found an American missionary at Macassar, whom they had detained, and some Germans, who were vainly entreating to be allowed to proceed to Borneo; and his efforts met only with the most baffling, passive, but systematic denial.
It was reserved for the enterprise and prudence of Sir James Brooke to open a way in this quarter.
The health of the Gardiner family had been much injured by their residence in those lovely but unwholesome countries, but the voyage to Capetown restored it; and immediately after they sailed again for South America, where the Captain had heard of an Indian tribe in the passes of the Cordilleras, who seemed more possible of access.

Here again he was baffled in his dealings with the local government by the suspicions of the priests, and never could obtain the means of penetrating beyond the city of San Carlos, so that he decided at last to repair to the Falkland Islands, and make an endeavour thence to reach the people of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, where no hostile Church should put stumbling-blocks in his way.
A doleful region he found those Falkland Isles, covered only with their peculiar grass and short heather, and without a tree.

A little wooden cottage, brought from Valparaiso, sheltered the much-enduring Mrs.
Gardiner and the two children, while the Captain looked out for a vessel to take him to Patagonia; but he found that no one ever went there, and the whalers who made these dismal islands their station did not wish to go out of their course.

Captain Gardiner offered 200_l._, the probable value of a whole whale, as the price of his passage; but the skippers told him that, though they would willingly take him anywhere for nothing, they could not go out of their course.
To seek the most hopeless and uncultivated was always this good man's object.

The Falkland Isles were dreary enough, but they were a paradise compared to the desolate fag-end of the American world,--a cluster of barren rocks, intersected by arms of the sea, which divide them into numerous islets, the larger ones bearing stunted forests of beech and birch, on the skirts of hills covered with perpetual snow, and sending down blue glaciers to the water's edge.