The Famous Tay Whale Dundee city centre. Paul Godfrey described McGonagall on the strength of the "Tay Whale" and other verse as "the worst poet in the English language". Hugh MacDiarmid wrote of the "Tay Whale" that "what this [the verses about John Wood and the Tay Whale] amounts to, of course, is simply what quite uneducated and stupid people—the two adjectives by no means necessarily go together, for many uneducated people have great vitality and a raciness of utterance altogether lacking here—would produce if asked to recount something they had read in a newspaper." MacDiarmid continued that "in their retailings of, or comments
John Tay stop at Tahiti to pick up John I. Tay, then continue to Pitcairn Island where Cudney could perform the promised baptisms. However, the "Phoebe Chapman" was lost at sea without trace, and John Tay returned from Tahiti to the US. The General Conference eventually paid for a ship to be built for missionary expeditions in the South Pacific. After a fund raising campaign, the schooner "Pitcairn" was purchased for US $12,000 in 1890. The "Pitcairn" reached Pitcairn Island on 25 November 1890 bringing Tay and his wife with the elders Gates and Read and their wives. On 26 November 1890