The Rev. Thomas Gowles, well known in Colonial circles where the Truth is
valued, as "the Boanerges of the Pacific," departed this life at Hackney
Wick, on the 6th of March, 1885. The Laodiceans in our midst have
ventured to affirm that the world at large has been a more restful place
since Mr. Gowles was taken from his corner of the vineyard. The
Boanerges of the Pacific was, indeed, one of those rarely-gifted souls,
souls like a Luther or a Knox, who can tolerate no contradiction, and
will palter with no compromise, where the Truth is concerned. Papists,
Puseyites, Presbyterians, and Pagans alike, found in Mr. Gowles an
opponent whose convictions were firm as a rock, and whose method of
proclaiming the Truth was as the sound of a trumpet. Examples of his
singular courage and daring in the work of the ministry abound in the
following narrative. Born and brought up in the Bungletonian communion,
himself collaterally connected, by a sister's marriage, with Jedediah
Bungleton, the revered founder of the Very Particular People, Gowles was
inaccessible to the scepticism of the age.
His youth, it is true, had been stormy, like that of many a brand
afterwards promoted to being a vessel. His worldly education was of the
most elementary and indeed eleemosynary description, consequently he
despised secular learning, and science "falsely so called." It is
recorded of him that he had almost a distaste for those difficult
chapters of the Epistles in which St. Paul mentions by name his Greek
friends and converts. In a controversy with an Oxford scholar, conducted
in the open air, under the Martyrs' Memorial in that centre of careless
professors, Gowles had spoken of "Nicodemus," "Eubulus," and "Stephanas."
His unmannerly antagonist jeering at these slips of pronunciation, Gowles
uttered his celebrated and crushing retort, "Did Paul know Greek?" The
young man, his opponent, went away, silenced if not convinced.
Such a man was the Rev. Thomas Gowles in his home ministry. Circumstances
called him to that wider field of usefulness, the Pacific, in which so
many millions of our dusky brethren either worship owls, butterflies,
sharks, and lizards, or are led away captive by the seductive pomps of
the Scarlet Woman, or lapse languidly into the lap of a bloated and
Erastian establishment, ignorant of the Truth as possessed by our
community. Against all these forms of soul-destroying error the Rev.
Thomas Gowles thundered nobly, "passing," as an admirer said, "like an
evangelical cyclone, from the New Hebrides to the Aleutian Islands." It
was during one of his missionary voyages, in a labour vessel, the
Blackbird, that the following singular events occurred, events which Mr.
Gowles faithfully recorded, as will be seen, in his missionary narrative.
We omit, as of purely secular interest, the description of the storm
which wrecked the Blackbird, the account of the destruction of the
steamer with all hands (not, let us try to hope, with all souls) on
board, and everything that transpired till Mr. Gowles found himself
alone, the sole survivor, and bestriding the mast in the midst of a
tempestuous sea. What follows is from the record kept on pieces of skin,
shards of pottery, plates of metal, papyrus leaves, and other strange
substitutes for paper, used by Mr. Gowles during his captivity.