BOATS MARITIME AUSTRALIANA EXPLORATION

Includes “The Queensland Coast” pp. 3 – 36.

302 p. : ill., port. ; 22 cm.  #060822

Somerville, Boyle T., 1863-1936.  |  Hydrographic surveying — Queensland.  |  Hydrographic surveying — Pacific Area.  |  Surveyors, Marine — Biography.

(Note: ex-library, but very sound, tight and complete. Usual library markings. No dustjacket.) Quite SCARCE.

Vice Admiral Henry Boyle Townshend Somerville, CMG, generally known as Boyle Somerville, was an Irishman who served in the Royal Navy. He was a maritime author, as well as publishing on ethnography and archaeology. He was shot dead by the IRA.

As a lieutenant, Somerville worked on the surveys of the Queensland coast and the New Hebrides, now Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, (HMS Dart, 1890–91).^[5] While in Vanuata he carried out ethnographical work, which was published in 1894.^[6][7] In 1893-4 he was surveying in the South Pacific with HMS Penguin. Sounding in the Kermadec Trench between New Zealand and Tonga, they found a depth of 5,155 fathoms (9,427 m), the greatest ocean depth ever found up to that time.^[8] They then surveyed New Georgia in the Solomon Islands, also with Penguin, and Somerville published an account of the islands and its peoples.^[9] He built a significant collection of ethnographic artefacts from the Solomon Islands which is now in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. The collection includes personal ornaments, canoe carvings and some of the tools used to make them, and fishing implements.^[10] Henry Balfour, curator of the museum, wrote an article in 1905 discussing bird and human designs in the Solomon Islands, making use of material collected by Somerville.^[1] In 1895, working on the survey of Tonga, also on Penguin, Somerville took the opportunity to visit Niuafo’ou, and published an early description of the island.^[11]