Alexander Smith RN (1812-1872): Antarctic explorer and goldfields commissioner

• Main Author: Ramsland, John
• Other Authors: The University of Newcastle. Faculty of Education & Arts, School of Humanities and Social Science
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Australian Association for Maritime History 2013
• Subjects: Alexander Smith; Royal Navy; Victorian gold rush; Colonial history; Antarctic; Goldfields; The Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1304110

This article explores the multifaceted naval career of Alexander John Smith who joined the Royal Navy in 1826 and gradually rose through the ranks to become a commissioned officer. Childhood, family and location influences are considered to show how he made such a career choice. The narrative aspects of this study outline his professional and personal life until his death at the age of fifty-nine in 1872 in the colony of Victoria. Emphasis is placed on his shipwreck experience while first assigned to the Navy’s South American Station; his eventual selection, personal observations and experiences as first mate aboard HMS Erebus during the famed James Clark Ross Antarctic Expedition of 1839-1841,1 and his subsequent career as a Goldfields Commissioner at Castlemaine after his resignation from the Navy. Here his extensive naval sea experiences stood him in good stead, especially in the administrative leadership and control of unruly diggers on the goldfields (rather like the rough-and-ready turbulence of ordinary seamen who required strict direction). His naval training and experience at sea helped to shape his personality, character and attitude – he was profoundly a man of the Empire. His contributions to the infant colonies of Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land) and Victoria are touched upon. The wider context of English social class conventions, the Antarctic environment and land locations for a sailor of the Royal Navy in Hobart, Tasmania and Castlemaine, Victoria, are etched into the background of an extraordinary, but historically neglected life. This study is based on the Mitchell Collection of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney and the La Trobe Library in Melbourne, drawing from a number of nineteenth and twentieth century key printed and manuscript sources on Antarctic exploration and the Victorian gold rushes. Extensive use has been made of Alexander John Smith’s extant correspondence between 1830 and 1872, less than a month before his death. Smith reflected on his experiences during his sea voyages and his time on the gold fields in letters sent to members of his family in England between 1830 and 1872 (now held in a private collection of a descendent). These letters bring to life the adventure into the Antarctic in the extreme dangers of the pack ice and his insightful eye-witness accounts of the colourful gold rushes of the 1850s where he witnessed the temporary miners’ camps becoming a township. On the way there, he provides a rare contemporary picture of day-to-day life in and out of the Castlemaine Commissioners Camp.