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EARL, GEORGE SAMUEL WINDSOR (1813–1865), promoter of the settlement of northern Australia, was
born on 10 February 1813 at Hampstead, London, the second son of Percy Earl, an East India Company captain
of naval background, and Elisabeth Sharpe, who had inherited a house on the edge of the Heath. Percy died in
June 1827 and in November of that year George, then aged fourteen, sailed to India as a Midshipman on the
East Indiaman Lady Holland. He remained in the company’s service until March 1829 and in August of that
year indentured himself for seven years in return for a passage to the new Swan River settlement in Western
Australia. He arrived at Fremantle on Egyptian on 13 February 1830 with capital inherited from his father and
some sheep, but the land allocated to him by Governor Stirling at South Perth was unsuitable and by the end of
the year he had moved south to the new settlement of Augusta, about 230 kilometres south, where he subsequently
gained employment as clerk to the Resident, Captain William Molloy. His brother, Percy William, also arrived in
Fremantle some time in 1830 but left for the eastern colonies on 8 January 1831. George was given two allotments
of land at Augusta but did not develop them and he seems to have given up the idea of farming. In February 1832,
when the settlement was suffering from a serious lack of provisions, he undertook the 320-kilometre voyage to
Fremantle in an open boat to obtain assistance from the government.
He does not seem to have returned to Augusta, and on 5 August 1832 he sailed in the brig Monkey for Batavia,
serving under Captain Walter Pace and with a Javanese and Chinese crew. It was on this voyage that he began to
make a serious study of the Malay language, subsequently becoming proficient in a number of dialects including
Bajau. From September 1832 he served successively as chief officer of Mercury of Batavia, Reliance of Singapore
and Catherina Cornelia of Batavia, and in March 1834 took command of the brig Stamford of Singapore on
a trading voyage to west Borneo. Landing at Singkawang in spite of the Dutch embargo on trade, he received
an excellent price for his cargo of opium, iron and tea and visited the Chinese gold-mining settlements in the
Montrado area. On his return he was asked to make another voyage, this time to northern Australia to collect
trepang and turtle shell, but declined on the grounds that it would be of little use without the establishment there
of a permanent British settlement.
In 1835 he returned to England where he soon got wind of a scheme for such a settlement. Earl became an
energetic publicist for the proposal, emphasising the potential for trade with the eastern part of what was then
called the Indian Archipelago and the resources of northern Australia itself, which he described glowingly in his
pamphlet Capabilities of the North Coast of New Holland (1836). His commercial arguments were seized upon
by John Barrow of the Admiralty to justify the strategic purpose of establishing a garrison at Port Essington
on the Cobourg Peninsula, and in 1837, Earl was appointed linguist and draughtsman with the North Australia
Expedition under Captain Sir Gordon Bremer who had urged his appointment on Barrow’s advice. His skills
as a navigator and hydrographer had recommended him and the publication of Sailing Directions for the Arafura
Sea and a major work, The Eastern Seas, in 1837 meant that he was now an established authority on that part of
the world. The Eastern Seas provided the main inspiration for James (later Rajah) Brooke’s Proposed Exploring
Expedition to the Asiatic Archipelago (1838), which foreshadowed his acquisition of Sarawak in Borneo. On the
voyage out to Australia, Earl busied himself in translating the Dutch captain D H Kolff’s account of the Moluccas
and the southern coast of New Guinea. This came to his notice because of the information it contained about the
fate of Lady Nelson and Stedcombe, which had been despatched from the Melville Island settlement for supplies
and failed to return.
The expedition arrived at Port Essington on 27 October 1838 after calling at Adelaide and Sydney. Earl in
fact had opposed the choice of the site in a memorandum to the Colonial Office, pointing out that while it was a
gathering place for Macassan trepangers after the outward voyage, its shores were shallow and European vessels
would not always find it easy to enter or leave the bay. He had recommended Barker’s Bay in Bowen’s Strait
and marshalled good arguments in its support but the Admiralty preferred the advice of Captain P P King and
Major J Campbell who had been commandant at Melville Island.
During the first two years Earl visited the Aru and Serawatti islands, Portuguese Timor and Singapore to secure
fresh provisions for the settlement and was responsible for the introduction of bananas and buffalo. In Singapore
he had close links with the d’Almeida family of Portuguese merchants and it was probably through his influence
that they purchased land at Port Essington with a view to using it as a base for their trading operations in the eastern
islands. Earl was also anxious to encourage Macassans and Chinese to settle at Port Essington and while opposing
the use of convicts in the north he advocated the importation of labour from the neighbouring islands. He also
made efforts to befriend the Aborigines of the area in order to learn of its resources but was unable to learn much
of their language because of their insistent use of Macassan pidgin.
According to Earl, his main responsibility was to collect information ‘which might prove useful to the colonists
in the event of the settlement being thrown open to private enterprise by the sale of Crown Lands’ but the British
and New South Wales governments were in no hurry to promote the commercial development of Port Essington
and this may hell) to explain his absence from the settlement from August 1843 until April 1844, when he visited
Sydney and other parts of Australia. During 1843 he supplied the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners
with information about Port Essington, some of which was published in its report of that year, and he must have
known that it would be abandoned before too long. However, he was also suffering from malaria, which had
afflicted the settlement and continued to plague him for the rest of his life. In 1844 he was appointed police