Letter to the Rt. Hon. Wm. Ewart Gladstone, M.P. Secretary of State of the Colonies, on the Extension of Steam Navigation from Singapore to Port Jackson, Australia
London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1846. Octavo, recent faux quarter calf, 56 pp. (last blank), folding map. Title page is browned and thumbed, otherwise an acceptable copy. A scarce pamphlet concerning the extension of steam navigation from Singapore to the Australian colonies, reflecting the enthusiasm for northern Australian settlement then popular in the 1840's.
The author, Thomas Waghorn, had an underwhelming naval career and served as a Bengal pilot before launching himself as a public proponent of steam navigation between India and Britain. Steam navigation from India, and even further afield to the Australian colonies, was then a novel prospect filled with potential gain. Although Waghorn had a skill for keeping himself in the papers, he was self-delusional and lived in a fantasy world. Prone to violent fits of temper, he pestered politicians and statesmen for the better part of two decades with wild and fanciful schemes.
Unsurprisingly, Waghorn was a prolific pamphleteer, and this is one such example of raising public interest in his schemes. There is another edition of this pamphlet printed by George Mann and James Ridgway, and all are rare.
The contents are disparate and chaotic, but basically a scheme is proposed for a steam navigation route from Singapore to Java, then to Port Essington, followed by Wednesday Island (north of Cape York) and finally to Port Jackson.
Port Essington was a failed colonial outpost in remote northernmost Australia, settled in 1838 and abandoned in 1849. Opening the tropical north, then a vast and largely unknown wilderness, was an obsession of the 1840's and played into Waghorn's agenda of fund raising and self promotion. He refers to the straggling malarial outpost as a second Singapore, celebrates the merits of its position and announces that the settlement of northern Australia will be far more rapid than expected. Credibility to these claims is garnered from more sober published accounts, such as the survey of northern Australia by John Lort Stokes in H.M.S. Beagle from 1837-1843.
The booklet touches on many other schemes, from raising Australian horses for India, to an entire sub-chapter of six pages on cast iron lighthouses. While there is no substance to any of it, the fact that a man so clearly filled with 'extraordinary ideas and gross ignorance' (ODB) was able to captivate public attention for so many years is extraordinary. Waghorn's fantasies engaged the frenetic (and often fanciful) nature of colonial speculation in the mid-nineteenth century Britain.
The booklet is rare, and this is the Ingleton copy with his pencilled sale note $100 on the front endpaper (when sold by Angus and Robertson in the seventies). Institutional copies are likewise scarce, and we have been able to locate copies only at the State Library of New South Wales, and the National Library in Canberra. Ferguson 4431. Item #3721
Price (AUD): $850.00