The News, Culture and Practice of Sailing woodenboats
in Australia, New Zealand & The South Pacific.

HISTORY Mark Chew HISTORY Mark Chew

Magistrate Wickham at Moreton Bay – Master of all he Surveyed

Wickham and Anne took up residence at Newstead House along with three Galapagos tortoises called “Tom”, “Dick” and “Harry” (later re-named “Harriet”) which Charles Darwin gave Wickham on his second voyage on the Beagle. Upon Wickham’s 1860 departure from the District, Harriet lived in the Brisbane Botanic Gardens, and much later Australia Zoo, for another 150 years.

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HISTORY Mark Chew HISTORY Mark Chew

Magistrate Wickham before Moreton Bay – the Beagle and the Tortoise

It is one thing for modern day master mariner travelling through Patagonia or the South Tasman Sea – in a modern one hundred thousand tonne plus cruise or commercial ship, viewing from enclosed bridge – to navigate and marvel at the ferocity of a Southern Ocean gale. It is quite another thing to command from an open deck a ninety  foot long two hundred tonne timber hulk, tasked with the safety of the vessel and sixty crew.

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HISTORY Mark Chew HISTORY Mark Chew

Inside an expedition to locate the Beagle’s lost anchors

Entering a maze of muddy islands, the mouth of the Victoria is a vast delta within the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf that does not easily explain itself to mariners. We are in the 65-foot Island Explorer, decked out for group fishing tours but now temporarily repurposed in an attempt to locate two anchors that were cut free from the Beagle at a point on the river named Holdfast Reach 180 years earlier.

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