Reverend Samuel Marsden sends the first commercial…
December 1811 CE
The son of a Wesleyan blacksmith turned farmer in Farsley, near Pudsey, Yorkshire in England, where he attended the village school, he spent some years assisting his father on the farm.
In his early twenties, his reputation as a lay preacher drew the attention of the evangelical Elland Society, which sought to train poor men for the ministry of the Church of England.
With a scholarship from the Elland Society he went Hull Grammar School where he was associated with Joseph Milner and the reformist William Wilberforce, and after two years, he matriculated, when twenty-five, at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
He abandoned his degree to respond to the call of the evangelical leader Charles Simeon for service in overseas missions.
Marsden was offered the position of second chaplain to the Reverend Richard Johnson's ministry to the Colony of New South Wales on 1 January 1793.
He married Elizabeth Fristan at Holy Trinity, Hull on 21 April 1793. The following month he was ordained as a priest by William Buller, the Bishop of Exeter.[4]
Marsden traveled by convict ship, William to Australia, his first child Anne being born en route.
He arrived in the colony on March 2, 1794, and set up house in Parramatta, fifteen miles (twenty-dour kilometers) outside the main Port Jackson settlement.
In 1800 Marsden succeeded Johnson and becomes the senior Church of England chaplain in New South Wales; he will keep this post until his death.
Marsden has been given grants of land by the colonial government and bought more of his own, which are worked with convict labor, a common practice in Australia at this time.
By 1807 he owned three thousand acres (twelve square kilometers) of land.
He returned to England that year to report on the state of the colony to the government, and to solicit further assistance of clergy and schoolmasters.
He has concentrated on the development of strong heavy-framed sheep such as the Suffolk sheep breed, which have a more immediate value in the colony than the fine-fleeced Spanish merinos imported by John Macarthur.
In 1809, Marsden was the first to ship wool to England from Australia for commercial use; this had been made into cloth by Messrs W. & J. Thompson, at Rawdon, West Yorkshire, and so impressed George III that he was given a present of Merino sheep from the Windsor stud.
Four years later more than four thousand pounds (1814 kg) of his wool was sold in England. Marsden was an important promoter of the wool staple, even though his contribution to technology, breeding and marketing was far eclipsed by that of Macarthur.
He is believed to have later introduced sheep to New Zealand, where he will develop a somewhat gentler reputation than in Australia.
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