Published Resources Details
Book Section
- Title
- Stanley, Owen (1811-1850), naval officer
- In
- Australian dictionary of biography, volume 2: 1788 - 1850 I-Z
- Imprint
- Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1967, pp. 470-471
- Url
- http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A020436b.htm
- Format
- Description
Published online in 2006
- Abstract
Quote: "In 1841 Stanley was at Singapore on his way to the fighting in Burma and thence returned to England, where in 1844 be achieved post rank as captain and two years later received command of another surveying ship, Rattlesnake, destined for the East Indies Station. In December 1846 he was ordered from England to Australia to survey the region of Hervey Bay in a new project for establishing a colony in that part of North Australia. This plan was abandoned, but Stanley sailed from England, taking with him the naturalists, Thomas Huxley and John MacGillivray, under orders to survey New Guinea waters. November 1847 found him on the Australian coast at Port Curtis, surveying the harbour which he thought a very good anchorage, before setting out in the next year northward to New Guinea. In June 1848 he offered protection and assistance to the ship which carried Edmund Kennedy's expedition to Cape York and then proceeded to the Louisiade Islands off south-east New Guinea to make a survey of the archipelago. Upon this mission which lasted throughout 1849 he contracted an illness of which he died in Sydney in March 1850."