Australian Dictionary of Biography

Owen Stanley, n.d.

National Portrait Gallery (UK)

Owen Stanley (1811-1850), naval officer, was born on 13 June 1811, the eldest son of Edward Stanley, bishop of Norwich, and Catherine, daughter of Rev. Oswald Leicester, rector of Stoke, Shropshire, England. His brother was dean of Westminster and his uncle Lord Stanley of Alderley. Owen entered the Royal Naval College at 15 and after training shipped as a volunteer in the frigate Druid in January 1826. Two months later he became midshipman in the Ganges and spent the next four years on the coast of South America, serving chiefly in small ships on surveying work; in 1830 he was employed under Phillip Parker King in the sloop Adventure on a survey of the Straits of Magellan. He passed his examination for promotion to lieutenant in June 1830, returned to England five months later, and next May was commissioned lieutenant while serving in the Belvidera with the Mediterranean Squadron. For five years on this station he again served in small ships on surveying work, this time in the Greek archipelago. He then joined the Arctic expedition which left the Orkneys in June 1836, sailing in the Terror and having charge of astronomical and magnetic observations during the voyage towards the North Pole.

As a lieutenant at 26 he received his first independent command, the brig Britomart, in which he sailed in 1838 for the East Indies Station and Australasian waters, chiefly on surveying work. When the expedition to establish a northern colony at Port Essington sailed in September 1838, the Britomart accompanied it, Stanley being made a magistrate and a commissioner of crown lands for the purpose. He visited the new colony again in 1841, and described the settlement in November as 'all well, and on the best possible terms with the Natives', and its commandant, Captain John Macarthur, as the victim of official incompetence and naval interference. Stanley was not solely engaged upon surveying work, however, for his duties took him in 1840 to New Zealand where, under the orders of Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson, he was sent in July to the Banks Peninsula where French emigrants were expected to form a settlement upon land bought by Captain Langlois from the Maoris of Akaroa. Stanley, taking with him a police magistrate to station there, preceded the French arrival and succeeded in establishing good relations with the French commandant, Lavaud, who saluted the British flag. For his behaviour in a delicate situation Stanley was highly commended by the Admiralty, having already been promoted commander in April 1839.

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.

Stanley's achievement was principally scientific. Made a fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society for his surveying and observation work, he charted considerable sections of the north-east Australian coast, made a track of the Arafura Sea, and charted the channels and islands of south-east New Guinea. He was admired as a careful and competent seaman by MacGillivray and was a warm friend of Sir John Franklin, but he was condemned by Huxley for cowardice because of his reluctance to land on New Guinea shores for fear of conflict with the natives; however, Huxley was angry not to be able to collect specimens ashore and made no allowance for the disease with which Stanley was then afflicted. His work is commemorated in the name of the Owen Stanley Range in New Guinea.