The most outstanding fact about Mary Ann Yates is that she gave birth to 17 children. Only 10 of them survived to adulthood but it gives Mrs Cargill something of a heroic cast when we consider her role as wife to Captain Cargill and mother of his children. Mary Ann was the daughter of an English naval officer and a London actress. She was born in London in 1790. Her mother remarried after her father was murdered by robbers. Mary Ann’s stepfather was an army officer and the family travelled with him to Portugal when his regiment was posted there during the Peninsula war against Napoleon’s forces. There she met William Cargill who was in the same regiment and they married in Portugal in 1813. Their early married life was set against this background of active military service.
Once Cargill retired from the army in 1820, the family’s fortunes were rather uncertain and William went from one career to another, looking for some means to support his large family. The Otago settlement scheme was in part embraced by him so heartily because it offered perhaps his last chance to secure a sufficiently remunerative post.
Mrs Cargill remains a somewhat shadowy figure behind her husband in Otago. Nonetheless, as one of the few older women in the early settlement she played a vital role in supporting not only her husband and children, but also the young mothers and wives who looked to her for advice and as an example. She was, wrote Cargill’s biographer, ‘an amiable person, loved by all who knew her, and remembered most in early Otago for her abilities as gardener, and her hospitality as a hostess.’[Tom Brooking, And Captain of Their Souls, p19]
She survived her husband by just over a decade, dying in Dunedin on 25 October 1871 aged 81. The esteem in which she was held by her fellow settlers is clear in this obituary published by the Otago Daily Times:
‘She closed a long and chequered life surrounded by those who loved and honoured her, and was spared to see the germ of settlement planted by her husband spring up into vigorous growth. By her death one more of the links of the chain that connects us with the early days of the settlement – links that of late have become much fewer – has been severed. Still, her memory remains, and the remembrance of the spirit with which she encountered and overcame the many trials and discomforts that the pioneers of settlement must always meet with, as well as of her kind and genial nature, which age was unable to dim, will not soon fade from our midst.’ [Otago Daily Times 31 October 1871]
Mrs Mary Ann Cargill (née Yates)