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Christopher Lethbridge of Launceston, Cornwall. She accompanied her husband to Australia, settling in Sydney
during the years of King’s surveys.
Governor Macquarie authorised the purchase for 2 000 Pounds of the near-new, teak-built cutter Mermaid.
By the sea-going standards of the time she was tiny, displacing only 92 tonnes, 17 metres long, broad-beamed,
but rather too sharp in the bottom, thought King, to be run aground easily for repair. Into her King crammed
19 men, his water spaniel and stores for nine months, leaving Sydney on 22 December for King George’s Sound
and North West Cape, where the survey began. From February until June 1818, the expedition surveyed the coast
as far as Van Diemen’s Gulf, making frequent contact with Aborigines and Macassan trepangers.
In June, Mermaid visited Timor and then returned to Sydney the way she had come, arriving on 29 July.
Next December and January, King surveyed the recently discovered Macquarie Harbour (Tasmania). In May 1819,
Mermaid left Sydney for Torres Strait. King went on to survey the coast between Cape Wessel and Admiralty Gulf,
returning to Sydney on 12 January 1820.
There Mermaid was careened, recoppered, caulked and sunk for several days to rid her of rats and cockroaches
which, according to King, infested the ship, destroying the dry stores, gnawing holes in the water casks and even
eating the musket cartridges. Mermaid left for her third voyage to the north on 14 June 1820. The rats reappeared
before she sailed and the cockroaches soon after. At least, reflected King, they were not so bad for a few months.
The ship grounded near Bowen causing considerable damage; but King refloated her, went on to survey the
northwest coast between Admiralty Gulf and Brunswick Sound and returned to Sydney on 9 December 1820.
On 26 May 1821, King left for his fourth and final survey of the north Australian coast in Bathurst, 187 tonnes,
which carried a complement of 13—and a 16-year-old girl, Sarah Chambers, who stowed away for love of the
bos’n. All we hear of her from King is that she ‘in a very short time heartily repented of her imprudence and would
gladly have been relanded’. Bathurst passed through Torres Strait, visited Mauritius for refreshment, resumed the
survey of the west coast and arrived back in Sydney in April 1822. There King learned that he had been promoted
Commander on 27 July 1821. He received orders to return to England with his ship, embarked his wife, who bore
him a son off the Cape of Good Hope and arrived in April 1823.
King’s Australian surveys gave him lasting recognition as one of Britain’s leading hydrographers. A modern
hydrographer, G C Ingleton, judges him to be ‘the greatest of the early Australian marine surveyors’. He brought
new standards of accuracy to the Australian survey. When he left it he had named and proved the insularity of
Bathurst and Melville islands, had sailed down the strait between them, soon to be the site of the first British
settlement in north Australia (Fort Dundas, 1824), had found and charted the future settlement sites of Raffles Bay
and Port Essington and had discovered and explored the East, South and West Alligator rivers. He added greatly to
knowledge of the whole north-west coast of Australia and was the first known non-Aboriginal to sight Port Darwin,
recorded only as ‘a deep opening... of a river-like appearance’ as he passed it by on 28 August 1819.
King’s survey skills were matched by fine seamanship and the qualities of a leader. Australia’s northwestern
coasts, dangerous to modern vessels, were far more so to the clumsy Mermaid and Bathurst, propelled by wind
alone and unable to beat against a strong breeze. They sailed off low shores, backed by mangrove swamp or
desert sand and bare rock, fringed by a maze of shoals, islands, reefs and coral niggerheads where vast tides race
at speeds beyond the power of sail to stem. King used them with skill and kept his head when they sent his ship
out of control. ‘The vessel was at times unmanageable, from the violent whirlpools through which we passed, and
was more than once whirled completely round upon her keel,’ he wrote of Bathurst, ‘but our former experience...
prepared us... and the yards were... quickly braced around.’ Time and again, great seamanship—and a dash of
luck—preserved them.
As King noted in his usual restrained fashion, Mermaid ‘afforded neither comfort or convenience of any
description’. Her captain possessed—and needed—high personal qualities; devotion to duty, foresight and
organisational ability, humanitarianism and a personality that allowed him to lead by example. Thrown together with
his officers, Roe and Bedwell, for six gruelling years, he held their regard and they his. Botanist Allan Cunningham
shipped on all four voyages, became King’s close friend and remained so for the rest of his life. King knew and
appreciated the personal qualities of his seamen and supervised their diet and cleanliness with care. Without a
surgeon on board for two years, he doctored the men himself, noting ruefully their fear at his lack of medical skills
and confessing that the matter worried him so much that ‘on some occasions I thought of little else’. But his ships
had a remarkably good health record for the time: two deaths in six years. He used the lash most sparingly and his
quiet sense of humour helped to ease trying situations.
Apart from dutifully collecting Aboriginal words, King showed more inclination to avoid than to fraternise
with the black inhabitants of the north. Though his patience began to wear thin on his fourth voyage he consistently
restrained his men, even allowing tribesmen to carry off the precious theodolite tripod rather than fire on them to
recover it.
On his return to England, King prepared his charts under the supervision of Sir W E Parry, Hurd’s successor,
and advised the government on settlement sites in the north commending, particularly, Port Essington. In 1826,
he published in London his two-volume Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia,
partly illustrated by his own sketches. From 1826, he commanded HMS Adventure, with HMS Beagle as consort,
in notable surveys of the South American coast, being promoted to Captain before returning to England in poor
health in October 1830. The Royal Society and the Linnean Society welcomed him to membership; but in 1832,
King went on to half-pay and sailed for Sydney to take up family lands in New South Wales. He became a large
landholder, commissioner for 10 years of the giant Australian Agricultural Company, member of the New South
Wales Legislative Council and founder of a notable Australian family.