Christians are wont to sentimentalise over Samuel Marsden as New Zealand’s first Christian. Nineteenth-century accounts loved to portray him as the Augustine of South Britain. As Augustine was hailed as the man who brought Christianity to the Anglo-Saxons in 597 CE, so Marsden was mythologised in the same way. This is problematic for two reasons. First, Marsden was a thoroughly unlikeable man, making it hard to sentimentalise his memory convincingly. We’ve become used to charges of racism and misogyny and could perhaps account for them as normal for people at the time. But theft, forgery and gun-running are harder to contextualise. And secondly, the simple fact that Marsden was no more New Zealand’s first Christian than Augustine had been in England. The first Christians to set foot on New Zealand soil were probably whalers in the later eighteenth century, men not known for their grace or piety. Marsden was not even the first known ordained Christian in New Zealand. That honour goes to Thomas Fyshe Palmer, a Scottish former Unitarian minister. Why Christians are happy to let Palmer’s memory wither will quickly become apparent.

While Samuel Marsden was an establishment Anglican, Thomas Fyshe Palmer (1747-1802), was a religious radical who was deported to Botany Bay for his political views. Rev. Thomas Fyshe Palmer was a graduate of Queens’ College, Cambridge, whose beliefs became increasingly radical in the 1780s. He became disenchanted with the Church of England and defected to the Unitarian Church, inspired by the radical theology of Joseph Priestley. Even church historians are willing to acknowledge that the Church of England in the eighteenth century was lax, despotic and corrupt. (Lecky, Vol. I, pp 10-11) Today, moving today from an Anglican to a Unitarian church would provoke little excitement but in the eighteenth century it was a large step, one fraught with risk. The 1790s, in particular, was a dangerous time to be radical in Britain. The government, in its long contest with France, led at first by revolutionaries who had executed their king, and then by Napoleon, the ‘Corsican ogre’, was in a constant state of fear about popular unrest reaching British shore. In this febrile climate, some important civil liberties were withdrawn and people arrested on trumped up charges. The most notable departure from civil liberties was the withdrawal in 1794 and again in 1798 of habeus corpus, the legal requirement to be formally told of the charges one is facing. Loyalist mobs were incited to attack the homes of radicals, as Joseph Priestley found to his cost in 1791 when his home in Birmingham was ransacked and his library scattered around the neighbouring streets. Thomas Paine was regularly burned in effigy and branded a dangerous atheist. Britain’s loss was America’s gain as both Priestley and Paine spent their last years in the United States. But Thomas Fyshe Palmer’s fate was even more severe and it was this, even more than the vandalism of his home, that convinced Priestley he needed to leave Britain.
 
So what was it about Unitarianism in the eighteenth century that was so radical? The core insight of Unitarianism is that the Trinity is a nonsense. The Trinity is a formal piece of Christian theology, formalised at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, that Jesus was fully human and fully divine, mediated via the Holy Ghost. This meant a triune God, but Unitarians said there was one God only. In Priestley’s words, once we ‘give up the idea of Christ having been the maker of the world, and content ourselves with supposing him to have been a being of a much more limited capacity, why may we not be satisfied with supposing him a mere man?’ (Priestley, p 49)

This question had far-reaching, and dangerous, consequences. If the power of Jesus lay with his message and example, then we are bound to follow what he preached. And for Priestley, the message of Jesus was of suspicion toward authority and respect for the rights of the people. The state, Priestley argued, is there for the people, not the other way round. This was a radical and dangerous thing to say in the eighteenth century. And it got worse. Priestley also argued that the state and religion should be kept apart. Men like Thomas Fyshe Palmer flocked to this exciting new standard.

The government of the day was well aware of the danger Paine and Priestley posed to their enjoyment of power, and their appeal to men like Palmer. After the departure of Priestley to America the government embarked on a series of actions against any opposition, real or imagined, to the war against the French and the import of revolutionary views. What got Palmer into trouble was his Address to the People, a protest at the very restricted Scottish franchise. Palmer was living in Dundee at the time was involved in a group known as the Friends of Liberty. At a meeting in June 1793 Palmer was handed a document outlining the group’s claims and asked to improve its readability and clarity. With Palmer’s revision the document became a general complaint against the heavy wartime taxation without representation (a familiar theme since the American war of independence) and a call for a broader suffrage and fixed parliamentary terms. The document was printed in July and Palmer was charged the following month with sedition. He was accused of using Jacobin language to address their concerns. Once Palmer and the others were safely at her majesty’s pleasure, the Friends of Liberty was, along with many other similar organisations, shut down in December. Palmer and some other men tried elsewhere became known collectively as the Scottish martyrs. The others were William Skirving, Maurice Margarot, Thomas Muir and Joseph Gerrald. By February 1794 the Scottish martyrs were on their way to Botany Bay.

Palmer’s trial and that of Thomas Muir, was before an openly hostile judge and a packed jury. The judge, Robert McQueen, Lord Braxfield, had a grim reputation as the ‘Judge Jeffreys of Scotland’. Judge Jeffreys (1645-1689) was a notoriously harsh and corrupt judge in the England of Charles II and James II who ended up dying in the Tower of London, not as punishment for his crimes, but for having backed the wrong side in the Glorious Revolution against James II. In a statement before passing sentence, Braxfield declared as a simple statement of fact that “the British constitution is the best that EVER was since the creation of the world, and it is not possible to make it better.” (Uglow, pp 68-9) For Palmer, who was advocating reform to that constitution, the verdict could only be guilty. To no-one’s surprise all were duly found guilty and transported to Botany Bay. Lord Braxfield’s persecution of Palmer and the others was warmly supported by William Pitt, the prime minister, in a speech to the House of Commons in March 1794.

Palmer was sentenced to seven years penal servitude in Australia, of which he served five years. On voyage out to Botany Bay aboard the Surprize, Palmer and Skirving were accused of participating in a plot to kill the captain and take control of the ship. The accusation was made by William Baker, an English loyalist who detested the Scottish martyrs, but there is some suspicion that Baker was aided by gossip from Maurice Margarot. Other accounts speculate it was an organised attempt to discredit the martyrs before their arrival in Australia to ensure harsher terms of incarceration. Either way no further action was taken, but Palmer remained estranged from Margarot for the rest of his life. Palmer and the other Scottish martyrs arrived in Botany Bay in October 1795. Incarceration in Australia in 1790s did not always mean imprisonment. Australia was sufficiently remote to be considered imprisonment enough. In fact, Palmer operated fairly freely in Australia, including building a boat to trade with Norfolk Island. He ended his period of incarceration a relatively prosperous man. Things looked good.

With the money earned from his trading activities in Australia, Palmer leased a Spanish ship that had been seized as a war prize and set sail for New Zealand in the hope of some lucrative trading opportunities, most notably a consignment of spars. Remember at this time that New Zealand was administered from New South Wales. He sailed first to Dusky Sound, and then to Coromandel with the intention at both places to establish a depot from which he could purchase timber for sale back in Australia. The demand in Australia for timber for ship-building and construction was enormous. But so were the import duties and the difficulties of establishing sound commercial relations with the Maori, who had little reason to trust the Europeans they had dealt with so far. These were the circumstances when the first ordained Christian landed on New Zealand soil.

The last months of Palmer’s life was a catalogue of bad luck. His trading trip to New Zealand was not successful and subsequent trips to Tonga and Fiji were similarly bereft. On his way home a storm forced his ship to land on the Spanish held island of Guguan, despite Britain and Spain being at war at the time. The entire crew, including Palmer, was interned as prisoners of war. During his captivity, he contracted dysentery and died on 2 June 1802, aged about 55.

Of the Scottish martyrs Maurice Margarot was the only one to return to England. He died in 1815, largely shunned by fellow radicals who distrusted his disloyalty aboard the Surprize in 1794. Gerrald died of tuberculosis six months after landing at Botany Bay and Skirving died of dysentery soon after at Port Jackson. Thomas Muir had escaped from Australia only to die in France in 1799 after an adventure-packed return voyage. A monument to the Scottish martyrs still stands in Edinburgh today.

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