SECOND SINGAPORES
The Royal Geographical Society – or the Geographical Society as it was then known – was founded in 1830. Its first meeting was held at the Raleigh Club in St James's, and on the suggestion of Francis Beaufort was chaired by John Barrow – ‘there could not be a more desirable person to preside over the resolutions’,1 cheered William Jerdan, editor of the Literary Gazette.
In his autobiography Barrow distances himself from the Society's foundation, claiming the idea was suggested by the auctioneer William Sotheby. It was in fact presaged by the foundation of the Raleigh Club on the instigation of one Sir Arthur de Capell Brooke, an army captain who had travelled widely and wanted a club where he could eat exotic food – Dead Sea bread, Lapland venison, Mexican ham and the like. Barrow was a founding member. The Raleigh Club's practical extension was mooted by a member of the Asiatic Society in a letter to the Literary Gazette on 24 May 1828. ‘From the egg thus dropt,’ wrote Jerdan, ‘the Royal Geographical Society was hatched.’2
For all his avowed disinterest, Barrow must have been delighted to chair proceedings. The presidency of the Royal Society was socially beyond him, and anyway it did not recognize geography as a science. In the Geographical Society, however, he had a new pressure group for his ambitions. On the same day that the Asiatic Society man's letter appeared in the Gazette Barrow suggested two proposals to the members of the Raleigh Club. His first was ‘That a society was needed whose sole object should be the promotion and diffusion of that most important and entertaining branch of knowledge – geography; and that a useful Society might therefore be formed, under the name of THE GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON.’3 His second was that the Society should do everything in its power to facilitate the voyages of any explorers who came forward with good ideas as to how that branch might be extended.
It took two years of regular meetings, at Barrow's Admiralty rooms, before the Geographical Society was officially launched on 16 July 1830. Its membership was taken from the Raleigh Club and the African Association; its President was Viscount Goderich (the new Colonial Secretary); and its four Vice-Presidents included Sir John Franklin and Barrow. Almost every other official was from the Admiralty. John Barrow, of course, was the Chairman. In one smooth move Barrow had put himself in a position to control every exploratory venture which left Britain. Whether through the Admiralty, the Royal Society or the Geographical Society, he was in command.
The Chairman did not have a light touch. One member complained that he ‘could not submit to the harsh dictatorial language of Barrow’.4 And at one point the Secretary, one of Barrow's naval mouthpieces, was charged with ‘intentionally and systematically duping and misleading the Council, with mis-stating and mystifying their proceedings in the Minute Book, with sacrificing the interests of the Society to particular objects, and in general with misconduct’.5
But Barrow did have a number of ideas to put forward. His first speech started off quietly with one of his better suggestions: that the Society produce ‘road-books for different countries, gazetteers, geographical and statistical tables and all such matters as are of general utility’6 – travel guides of the kind that John Murray would later publish to great acclaim. But then Barrow gathered steam. ‘It would seem desirable,’ he said, ‘to collect and distribute information regarding New Holland, or as it is now more generally called, Australia. Hitherto a country as large as Europe has been presented on our maps as a blank. Yet, as this extensive territory will, in all probability, in process of time, support a numerous population, the progeny of Britons, and may be the means of spreading the English language, laws and institutions over a great part of the Eastern Archipelago, it is presumed that every accession to our knowledge of its geographical features will be acceptable to the Society.’7
To their credit, the members resisted Barrow's steamrollering. They preferred less partisan ideals such as the creation of a £50 Gold Medal for exploration, the first of which was awarded in 1832 to Richard Lander (Barrow's annoyance can only be imagined) but was received by his brother John, Richard having already sailed to his doom. As for Australia, the members could not countenance it, having heard only a year previously how Barrow's last stab at the continent had come to an ignominious end.
Back in 1824 Barrow had been diverted from his Arctic voyages to address the problem of Australia. He had envisaged a settlement on its north coast which would come to be ‘a second Singapore’.8 He chose Melville Island, near present-day Port Darwin, whose existence had been reported recently in glowing terms by one Captain Bremer. Barrow's advice was forthright. ‘We ought not, in sound policy, to hesitate a moment in forming a settlement on the northern part of New Holland … when it is considered how anxiously the Dutch are exerting themselves to re-establish their dominion, and with it their pernicious and narrow system of exclusion in the Eastern Archipelago.’9 By which was meant that Britain should get in there and operate its own system of exclusion.
Melville Island was duly settled by Captain Bremer with fifty-one soldiers and forty-four convicts. ‘There never was a more promising spot,’ wrote Barrow, ‘in a naval, commercial and agricultural point of view … I have no doubt that, in a commercial view, it will become another Singapore.’10 Alas, it never did. Not only did it fail to attract any trade – being on the route to and from nowhere except itself, it is hard to see how it could have done – but it was expensive to maintain, all its supplies having to be transported 2,000 miles from Sydney. The scheme was abandoned in 1829, to the secret relief of the First Secretary. ‘I always considered the establishment as very doubtful policy,’ wrote Croker, ‘and the circumstances stated by General Darling [the Governor of New South Wales] leave no doubt of the complete inutility of these embryo colonists for the purpose for which they were (in my private opinion, inadvertently) undertaken.’11
If he had not chosen the right place for a second Singapore, Barrow was at least right to suggest further stock be taken of Australia, which was being treated in an appallingly cavalier fashion. Despite a perverse view that having been circumnavigated by a Briton Australia therefore belonged to Britain, Britain seemed to have no interest in the continent. Only a small portion of the south-east had been colonized, and that mainly by convicts who arrived at the rate of 3,000 per year. The rest of Australia was consigned to the geographical attic. So disinterested was the mother country that it could not even supply an independent religious hierarchy. Until a late date Australia belonged to the diocese of Calcutta. Given these circumstances, there was no reason at all why France or Holland, both of whom had a major presence in the Far East, should not occupy stretches of Australia's as yet largely unexplored coastline. As ever, in Barrow's estimation, the foreigner must be thwarted.
It was this that kept his interest in Australia burning. And there was another reason, too: in the same year that Melville Island was closed down his friend and favourite, Parry, had left England to become Commissioner for the Australian Agricultural Company. This massive but creaky concern had been founded in 1824 with a million-acre grant of land north of Sydney and £1,000,000 of share capital. Its aim was to turn Australia into a vast sheep and cattle ranch – which to an extent it did. But it had yet to pay its investors a dividend and it needed a commissioner to tell it what was going wrong.
It was at times like these that being an explorer paid off. Franklin and Parry had just been knighted, had both been to Oxford to receive honorary degrees and, although it had been a few years since either had hit the headlines, to hear verses sung in their praise. One typical example ran:
But fairer England greet the wanderer now,
Unfaded laurels shade her Parry's brow;
And on the proud memorials of her fame
Lives, linked with deathless glory Franklin's name.12
Companies then, as now, wanted to be associated with famous names. The Australian Agricultural Company offered the commissionership first to Franklin and then to Parry. Both refused, on the grounds that taking the job would mean relinquishing their Admiralty pay, thus severing a reliable source of income. However, when the post was offered to Parry again, he reconsidered. The money was good, at £2,000 per annum plus an annuity of £300 for life, and a visit to Lord Melville secured the promise that he would continue to receive half-pay from the Admiralty. Moreover, he was sick of the Hydrographical Department. Even if Croker had not been obstructing his every move he would still have been tired of sitting at a desk sorting maps. It was almost as bad as Arctic service. ‘I am losing both health and money,’ he told his brother. ‘This will not do.’13 His wife agreed: ‘He … generally comes home quite tired and worried, only fit to lie on the sofa and be made much of.’14
Parry decided to accept and, at the end of May 1829, handed his position over to Francis Beaufort. The relief on both sides was palpable. One Captain Owen, an officer who had done outstanding work in surveying the West African coast, sent a note of congratulation to Beaufort: ‘I had some complaints against Parry on which I wrote to him … but I think he was always playing another game than Hydrography.’15
Parry's game was no more Australian than it had been hydrographical. He served his four-year term dutifully but innocuously, with his wife Isabella and a growing number of children (one of whom was conceived on the journey out). His main achievement was to tell his employers that they were wasting their time.
I unreservedly state it as my opinion, 1st That from £50,000 to £100,000 of the Company's Capital has been unprofitably expended …
2nd That all the Profit which the Company can reasonably expect to realize, is a moderate but remunerating Interest upon that portion of their Capital which has been profitably expended, or is now profitably expending.
3rd That for that Portion of their Capital I do not, under the present depressed tho’ certainly improving circumstances of the Colony, and especially with the present doubt as to sufficient Markets for the produce, venture to anticipate an adequate Return for at least the next two years.16
Sure enough, in 1834, two years after Parry wrote that judgement, and ten years after the investors put in their money, the company paid its first dividend. The experience had been enough to turn Parry grey and to reduce Isabella to a weight less than half her husband's sixteen stone. They left joyfully in March 1834 aboard ‘the most uneasy sieve I ever sailed in’,17 with a menagerie of one cow, a kangaroo, an opossum, five sugar squirrels, two diamond birds and seven parrots.
Barrow had kept a keen eye on his ageing prodigy's progress, and the country in which he progressed. He was still worried that France or Holland might snatch Australia from Britain. In 1837 he heartily supported a project to colonize Port Essington, a few miles east of Melville Island. It was vital, he wrote, ‘that the whole of this great continent should be held under one undivided power, and that Great Britain, which first planted colonies upon its shore, should be that power; and that, to keep it in secure possession, she ought to draw a ring-fence round its whole coast’.18
So off went Captain Bremer once again, to make a second settlement in north Australia. As before, he wrote glowingly of the region's attractions. And as before the region failed to live up to expectations. Port Essington became a byword for discomfort. T. H. Huxley, Aldous Huxley's grandfather, visited the place and condemned it as ‘the most useless, miserable, ill-managed hole in Her Majesty's dominions’.19 He declared that it was worth ‘all the abuse that has ever been heaped upon it. It is fit for neither man nor beast. Day and night there is the same fearful damp depressing heat, producing unconquerable languor and rendering the unhappy resident a prey to ennui and cold brandy and water … Port Essington is worse than a ship, and it is no small comfort to know that this is possible.’20
An official from the Colonial Office put it in more gentle terms. ‘The fact is, that this was a favourite scheme of Sir John Barrow's and that in the original eagerness to accomplish it, all financial difficulties were set aside.’21 Port Essington was closed down in 1849, one year after Barrow's death.
Barrow was not greatly troubled by the failures. They had seen the foreigner off at any rate. ‘Happily,’ he wrote in 1843, ‘the French are quartering themselves on a different part of the globe and may be satisfied with the larger [i.e. smaller] scope which the Pacific will afford them.’22
Fascinating as Australia and the Pacific might have been, they were never of more than secondary interest to Barrow. Granted, it had been he who had proposed the exploration of New Holland to the Royal Geographical Society in 1830. However, his heart had never been in it. What he would like to have proposed was another stab at the North-West Passage. In this he had been thwarted both by budgets and the forestalment of John Ross and his sputtering little steam ship. But as 1830 turned into 1831, with no news of Ross from either the Pacific or the Atlantic, a faint glimmer of hope formed in Barrow's mind. It would be wrong to say he wished his old enemy dead. With every passing season, though, Ross's demise seemed ever more certain.