The idea for Wesleydale came from exhaustion. Samuel Leigh, a Wesleyan Missionary Society preacher working in New South Wales since 1815, was breaking down physically by 1818. His friend Samuel Marsden, the Anglican clergyman who had established New Zealand's first Christian mission at Oihi Bay in the Bay of Islands on Christmas Day 1814, suggested a restorative voyage across the Tasman. What Leigh found in New Zealand was not rest but purpose. He returned to England in 1820 and spent the next year touring cities to raise funds and convince the Wesleyan conference to authorize a permanent mission. Appointed as the Wesleyan Missionary to New Zealand, Leigh sailed back to the Bay of Islands in February 1822 aboard Marsden's ship The Active, carrying supplies for a station that did not yet exist.

Leigh waited sixteen months at the Anglican station, learning Maori, until colleague William White arrived in May 1823. Together they spent a month searching for the right site -- by boat along the coast, on foot through the interior. On 11 June 1823 they chose a hillside twelve miles inland from Whangaroa Harbour, beside the Kaeo River, where the village of Kaeo stands today. Reinforcements arrived in August: Nathaniel Turner, newly ordained and newly married, with his wife Anne, their infant daughter, and lay preacher John Hobbs. It took them three days of overland trekking to find the mission. When they arrived, Leigh was gravely ill. Marsden persuaded him to return to Sydney for treatment, and within days the mission's founder was gone. The community he left behind consisted of Turner, Anne and their baby, a nanny named Miss Davies, White, Hobbs, Navy veteran James Stack, and servant Luke Wade.

For a time, the mission worked. By June 1824 the missionaries had built rough chapels in nearby villages -- the first Wesleyan churches in New Zealand. Turner preached to congregations that swelled past two hundred. Children attended school, up to twenty at a time. But Wesleydale sat in the territory of the Ngati Uru people, and the son of their chief was Te Ara -- the same man whose flogging aboard the Boyd in 1809 had triggered the massacre of up to 70 Europeans at Whangaroa Harbour. Te Ara, known to the missionaries as George, had become chief himself after his father's death, and he treated the mission as a source of supplies to be taken rather than traded for. His brother Te Puhi was more directly violent: in March 1825 he attacked Turner, knocking him unconscious. Turner evacuated Anne and the children to the Anglican mission at Kerikeri, an eight-hour walk to the south. She returned weeks later when Te Ara died and the prospect of calm seemed plausible. It was not.

The force that ultimately destroyed Wesleydale was not hostility toward the missionaries but warfare between Maori peoples. Hongi Hika, the powerful Ngapuhi rangatira from Waimate -- 26 kilometres to the south -- moved into the Whangaroa region in 1826, asserting his father's territorial claims and wielding European muskets that gave him overwhelming advantage in the ongoing Musket Wars. He valued the European missionaries and intended to protect them. But on 9 January 1827, some of his own warriors disobeyed his orders and ransacked the mission's outhouses, threatening to return the next day. They did. By dawn on 10 January, they had broken into the tool house, the store rooms, and the main building. The missionaries had no choice but to run. Turner, Anne, and their three surviving children -- the eldest three years old, the youngest one month -- set off with the nanny, Hobbs, Wade and his wife, and seven Ngati Uru children who had stayed loyal to the mission. Sixteen people walked twenty miles through Northland bush to the Anglican station at Kerikeri, arriving at seven in the evening. Days later, word came that Wesleydale had been burned completely: buildings, cattle, wheat stores, everything. The mission party left New Zealand on 28 January 1827, less than four years after its founding.

The failure of Wesleydale did not end Wesleyan ambitions in New Zealand. In 1828, Hobbs and Stack established the Mangungu Mission at Hokianga Harbour on the Northland peninsula's western coast -- a second attempt that succeeded where the first had not. The Turners were sent to Tonga but returned to New Zealand in 1836, when Nathaniel made his pilgrimage back to the Kaeo hillside. The broken bricks and disturbed grave he found there became, in missionary literature, an image of sacrifice and perseverance. Today the village of Kaeo occupies the site. There is no monument to the mission that stood there for three and a half years, no marker for the infant buried in soil that strangers later violated. The Kaeo River still runs past the hillside where Leigh and White chose to build, where Turner preached to hundreds, where Anne gave birth and buried a child, and where warriors who had nothing against missionaries specifically destroyed everything they had made.