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magistrate and Commissioner of Crown Lands at Port Essington but left there in November due to recurring bouts
of fever and arrived in London on sick leave in April 1845.
During the next 12 months he completed and published Enterprise in Tropical Australia (1846) and read a paper
to the Royal Geographical Society ‘On the Aboriginal Tribes of the Northern Coast of Australia’. On 4 May 1846
he married sixteen years old Clara Siborne, daughter of Captain Siborne of the Royal Military Asylum, and toward
the end of that year they sailed for Sydney to settle the affairs of his brother and his wife who had been drowned
in a shipwreck en route to Port Essington in April. Their first and possibly only child was born in Sydney and in
December 1847 they sailed to Hong Kong and thence to Singapore, arriving on 14 February 1848. There Earl
collected information about plants of economic importance, particularly cotton, sugar cane and pearl sago, which
he thought might be suitable for cultivation in northern Australia, and continued to investigate the possibilities of
trade with the eastern islands. Through the columns of J R Logan’s Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern
Asia he promoted cotton cultivation and steam communication between Singapore and Sydney via Port Essington
and Torres Strait as well as collating the ethnographic information on Papuans and other groups, which he had been
collecting over the years.
During this time he continued to be paid by the British government for his positions at Port Essington but the
official decision in June 1849 to terminate the settlement meant that he was obliged to find other employment.
In September of that year he joined Logan’s firm to work as a law agent and advocate in the courts of the Straits
Settlements and continued to write for Logan’s Journal. In September 1852 he went to England with his family,
once more in poor health, and wrote his major ethnographic work, The Native Races of the Indian Archipelago:
Papuans (1853). Two years later he sailed for Sydney with his wife, probably with the intention of settling there,
and was employed as agent for a quartz-crushing machine used in gold mining. After five months, however, they
returned to Singapore where he set up in his own right as law agent and advocate. In June 1857 he was appointed
magistrate and in late 1858 became third Assistant Resident Councillor for the colony. In February 1859 he took
the place of Thomas Braddell as senior Assistant Resident Councillor in Penang for a year before moving to a
similar position in Province Wellesley on the mainland.
In early 1864 he sailed for Australia with his wife and daughter to improve his health and during a visit to
Adelaide in February was largely responsible for the South Australian government’s decision to make Adam Bay
in Van Diemen’s Gulf the site of first settlement for its newly acquired Northern Territory. In the previous
year Earl had published his Handbook for Colonists in Tropical Australia and this, together with a persuasive
memorandum to the government and his personal presence, turned the government’s attention away from the
Victoria River that had hitherto been the focus of interest. It is not clear whether Earl purchased Northern Territory
land orders but it would seem likely that he did.
Returning to Penang, he served as acting police magistrate from 1 January 1865 until June, when he resumed
his official position in Province Wellesley. On 5 August he was granted permission to visit Europe for medical
reasons and died at sea on or about 9 August, two days out of Penang, leaving an estate worth only 5 000 Straits
Dollars. It is not clear what happened to Clara Earl but their only surviving child, Elisabeth, had married a wealthy
Anglo-Irish merchant, William Alt, in Adelaide in 1804 and lived in Nagasaki, Japan, for seven years before
retiring to Woburn Park in Surrey, England.
In addition to his skills as a navigator and hydrographer, Earl was a gifted linguist and a competent ethnographer
and journalist. He can almost certainly be credited with originating the terms ‘Indonesia’ and ‘Malaysia’ which did
not come into common parlance until the second half of this century. He also had a good knowledge of economic
botany and techniques for fishing, which he wanted to see introduced in northern Australia. He publicised the
significance of steam navigation and the electric telegraph for the archipelago and northern Australia at an early
stage and never abandoned the idea that a settlement there could become a ‘second Singapore’. An imperialist
in the tradition of Alexander Dalrymple and Thomas Stamford Raffles, his experience and imagination linked
the Australasian colonies with island South-east Asia in a unique way. At the same time, it has to be said that
his inexhaustible enthusiasm may have obscured his judgement in practical matters. His support for Adam Bay
was not based on first-hand knowledge and his emphasis on ‘salubriousness’ (freedom from malaria) as the
principal criterion for the selection of a northern capital was partly responsible for the Escape Cliffs fiasco. He also
miscalculated the population of eastern Indonesia, the volume of trade that it generated and the influence of the
Dutch establishment there.
A descendant, Lord Ferrier, holds a photographic portrait of Earl and there are copies in the National Portrait
Gallery, London, and the Mitchell Library. A complete list of Earl’s published works can be found in Gibson-Hill
(1959) but there is as yet no list of his manuscripts, some of which are held by the Royal Geographical Society.
P G Spillett, Forsaken Settlement, 1972; C A Gibson-Hill, ‘George Samuel Windsor Earl’, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal
Asiatic Society, vol 32, pt 1, 1959; C M Turnbull, Introduction to the OUP reprint of G W Earl, The Eastern Seas, or Voyages and Adventures
in the Indian Archipelago, in 1832–33–34; R Jones, ‘Out of the Shadows: George Windsor Earl in Western Australia’, unpublished paper;
R H W Reece, ‘George Windsor Earl and the Indian Archipelago’, The Push from the Bush, no 12, 1982; D Chaput, ‘George Samuel Windsor
Earl: Ethnologist as Hawker’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol 70, pt 1, 1984; ‘Some Memories of Elisabeth Christiana
Fernhill Alt (nee Earl) dictated to one of her daughters. Also six chapters written by herself. Biographical Notes arranged by the same daughter.
And notes on the Siborne Family by Lt Col K Henderson, DSO’, NLA MS 413; RGS (London) Archives; G W Earl papers, 1830–65, Mitchell
Library MS A7129; Earl family papers in the possession of Mr Brian Johnston, London (microfilm copy in Mitchell Library, FM4/1553).
BOB REECE, Vol 1.