REEF SURVEYS OF THE RATTLESNAKE: 1847–1850

Under command of Captain Owen Stanley (1811–50) the Rattlesnake sailed from Plymouth on 11 December 1846 to continue the survey of Reef and New Guinea waters begun by the Fly and the Bramble. Aboard was John MacGillivray, on his second tour of duty, this time as official naturalist. He was accompanied as assistant surgeon by the 21-year-old and totally inexperienced Thomas Henry Huxley, who recorded that he had prepared a program of studying the ‘corallines’ and other marine species. Due to the untimely death of Captain Stanley in 1850 from some unidentified tropical illness contracted during the third northern cruise of 1849–50, MacGillivray later also assumed the task of writing the official report, Narrative of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake. In addition, the artist, Oswald Walters Brierly (1817–94), kept extensive observations in a series of diaries which enable further reconstruction of the voyage.

On 11 October 1847 Stanley sailed with the Bramble to improve the survey of the inner route through the northern Great Barrier Reef and find other reliable openings besides Raine Island. The first landing was to examine and report on Port Curtis (modern Gladstone) where a party of eighty-eight had attempted to found a new colony of ‘North Australia’ in January 1847 but had been forced to abandon the enterprise after a few months.